Transcript of Google Ate Reddit, Fanta Got Booed, and Why Skills Beat More Bots

What is up guys, and welcome back to the show. Today's going to be something a little different from our normal programming. For the last year or so, I've pretty much done nothing but interviews on this podcast, and I always loved doing the solo episodes where we either break down a topic or a concept, or we bring up some news stories or trends that we're seeing. We break them down, we discuss them. I enjoy it because I'm a massive consumer of information. I also believe that there's some unique perspective that I have to provide you based on my experience kind of living, you know, both in the media world and hustling as an entrepreneur and being inside a larger organization working as a chief marketing officer. There is a lot of perspective that I can provide, and I think that Hopefully what I can do is open your eyes up to some of the things that are going on in the world, some of the concepts, trends that you can start to get ahead of, ways to position yourself both personally and professionally in order to succeed in what is only becoming a more chaotic world.

Uh, that being said, if you enjoy these episodes, I would love your feedback on 'em. The best way to do that is on the YouTube channel. So even if you're listening on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts, if you just go down in the description, I'll have a link to the actual YouTube video of this episode. This will be the case for all the solo episodes. It's also the case for all the interview shows as well. And I'd love your feedback. One, do you like these solo episodes after you've listened to it? Two, if you have any comments, thoughts, concerns, reframes, things that you think we got wrong, you just want to share your opinion, YouTube is the best place to do that. Because it collects everything in one place. I can come back in, I can answer those questions, I can pull them out, and I can even pull those questions or thoughts or ideas that you have into future shows and we can discuss them as a group. If you enjoy this format as well, I may also occasionally bring in people to kind of work through these stories and work through these ideas and do that as well.

I think that could be fun. There's a lot of growth here in the solo episodes, but I just enjoy doing this podcast so much. There's so much craziness going on in the world, and if I can help straighten a few things out or at least give you a different or dynamic way of thinking about the things that are impacting your life and your business, that's, that's why I do the podcast to begin with. And I just enjoy thinking through and sharing these ideas. If this is your first time here or you haven't left a review, if you haven't subscribed to the show, wherever you listen or watch, I would really appreciate it. I know that every podcaster asks for, you know, ratings, reviews, likes, subscribes, and it can get a little like, feel a little icky sometimes. At the, at the same point, like it really does impact our business as podcasters and as, you know, media people in so much as it drastically impacts the algorithm. So you leaving a comment on YouTube, you liking a video on YouTube, you know, uh, Resharing or subscribing to a podcast, it means so much to me because it does help us move farther into the algorithm and attract new audience members, get in front of new sets of eyeballs, and ultimately grow our community, which in turn helps me go out and get bigger, badder guests, people who have done even larger things in their life.

Um, that, you know, sometimes they do, they look at numbers and, you know, we're doing great. We're doing more than 200,000 downloads a month. I love that. I appreciate every single one of you that listens to this show. And I just want to continue to grow the show. I want to continue having big conversations. I want to continue having conversations that add value to your life. So, uh, I won't do this dry try before all the solo episodes moving forward, but I did want to just put in front of you that I'm excited to bring back this format. Um, you know, we'll have one solo episode a week packaged around 2 interviews. So we're going to be going to a 3-show-a-week format. And, um, I don't know, we'll get into the stories. You let me know what you think about the format, uh, any adjustments you think we should make, et cetera. Um, but like all things, you have to start somewhere. So today is day one. All right, let's run through the stories that we're going to hit real quick. So, uh, first story, uh, Reddit loses 29% of their market cap as Google AI answers absolutely destroyed their traffic.

There's a lot of conversation around what SEO looks like, what AI is doing to us, uh, in our business from the standpoint of marketing, right? I mean, SEO has been a large part of marketing for all businesses, especially small and local businesses for almost 2 decades now. And AI is having a drastic impact on how that works, and we're gonna break that down. Companies are starting to roll back their AI implementations, or at least pause or slow their AI implementations. Some very large companies have come out with public announcements about that, including Meta. We're gonna talk about the impacts there. I'm gonna break down, you know, I don't know if you guys have been following along, but I started a sports car business with my 12-year-old son, and my 10-year-old son is now started to work on the business as well. Uh, he's more into Pokémon. Um, I don't really know much about Pokémon, but, you know, I'm working with him to, to help build that side of the business as well. And we're using GrokBot to run almost the entire business, except for literally physically scanning the cards, packaging up and putting them in the mail, and ripping packs and stuff.

Everything else is done with GrokBot. And the business is absolutely humming. We have more than 1,500, maybe 1,600 listings on eBay now. Um, our first month was September. We did more than $1,000. in sales our very first month. So what I want to do with these shows is each week I want to share something that I've learned in using, you know, AI agents in particular, not just like standard AI chats, but AI agents in particular to help grow an aspect of my business that you can apply to yours. And I use these across the spectrum. So I use an AI agent team for this podcast. I use an AI agent team for my personal life, and I have another AI agent team that I use for the work at PFS Global. So I've learned a tremendous amount and the best place to follow along, if you're into this kind of stuff, if you're, if you're the best place to follow along is actually X. So I'll have a link to my X account in the description. If you're on X, just go to @rhanley. That's my handle on X. But every day I'm posting something that I've learned through those various teams with GrokBot, how we solved the problem, how we optimized our usage, how we, you know, got access to certain systems or certain workflows.

Um, so if you're interested in that and you want the day-to-day, follow along on X. I post every single day there about that. Um, but I want to break down some things, particularly why we are over-indexing on bots at the detriment of using skills. And I'll explain more about what that means. But this is, this is an absolute superpower hack that if you can integrate into your AI agent usage will drastically improve the accuracy and quality of your results. 4th thing we're gonna hit today, Trump moves to replace AI with superintelligence. This one we're not gonna spend a ton of time on because I know some of you get weird about Trump. It's not so much about Trump as it is the idea of moving away from the term AI and artificial intelligence, the implications of that, I can speak, as well as why superintelligence and why this term AI needs to be rebranded. We're going to go talk about Fanta had a 100% AI-generated Halloween ad that got destroyed. We're going to talk about how recent research just came out that I think it's more than 98% of Harvard professors are registered Democrats. Not that— take Democrat, Republican out of it.

What we really— what I really want to focus on with this story is understanding the bias of the resources that we use. And that goes for all aspects from both sides of the aisle, blue, red, black, white, purple, up, down, left, you know what? It doesn't really matter, right? I think it's important in today's day and age more than ever that we are mindful of the bias of the resource that we are getting information from. And I want to talk about what that means. Fun story, and I'll probably have one of these in every time. You guys know I love ancient civilizations. Aliens, conspiracy theories. It's just like you know porn for my brain. I guess there's actual porn for your brain, but this is more like mental porn, intellectual porn. I guess you could say, and they think they found Noah's Ark in Turkey, and by all accounts, there's a there there. Something's there. What that something is, I don't think they know whether it's Noah's Ark or it's just an ancient. city structure or megalithic structure. They don't know. But there are a lot of signs that potentially they have found the Ark that is referenced in the Bible, which I think is just very interesting on a whole bunch of levels.

And lastly, I want to talk about a mental health thing. This is the male loneliness epidemic and how there are a tremendous number of influencers, and let's put influencers in quotation marks here, out on the internet that are advocating for male isolation, that as men we should be isolating ourselves and it should be all— everything should be on us and it's, you know, us against the world. And I think there is nuanced value in that take, but it's very misguided and taken at face value could be incredibly harmful, especially if you're like me and you have young boys. You know, I have a soon-to-be 13, soon-to-be 11-year-old. That, you know, they're, they're seeing these things, they're hearing these things, you know, from their, you know, whether they're watching a YouTube video or they're following some, some kid that does tricks or pranks or whatever they're watching, right? They're getting some of this leaking into their, into their brain. And I think it's very important that we start to have conversations, particularly with young boys, about what it means to be a man, because for the last decade or so, that has been chipped away at in a way that I don't think is productive or helpful.

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right, friends, our, uh, our first story on the block here is Reddit loses 29.22% of its, uh, share price. Uh, this was Friday, October 30th, as Google AI Answers cuts into the traffic. It's the worst day since they went public in 2024. Um, this is, let's see, uh, Q3 revenue was $895 million, up 53% year over year, which beat, which beat all estimates. However, uh, uh, Q4 sales guide of $1 billion to $1.3 billion came under the $1.5 billion estimate that, um, market analysts had. Again, remember that all this stuff is guessing and games to a certain extent when you're looking at market analyst projections and missing or not. Um, the interesting part here is, you know, I'm going to read that again. Q3 revenue. 895 million was up 53% year over year, yet Reddit's shares dropped almost 30%, 29.22%. So why did this happen? And the issue, and this comes from Reddit's shareholder letter, was in October, search traffic dropped more by a million referrals per week on average. That is an enormous number, right? And if that continues, the daily uniques could fall by, you know, Low double-digit percentage in Q4, right? So, so that's the major issue that, that I think investors are looking at, uh, for the hit on their share price is, you know, the business is growing, which is a good thing from a revenue perspective.

But I think being that a site like Reddit is, relies heavily on search traffic for its volume, for its, for creating new users, uh, for getting recurring users back to the site. If Google isn't showing their links, if Google isn't referring them, if Google is bypassing that by indexing their site and pulling out answers into the Google answer box, that AI box that now pops up at the top of most Google search results, um, particularly if you have AI turned on, Reddit becomes less useful. Um, now granted, if you are a big Reddit user, if you enjoy that platform, if you enjoy the conversations and the community board nature of it, It's kind of a bastion of a different year of the internet, right? I mean, 15, 20 years ago, message boards and message-related kind of chat knowledge bases like Quora and other platforms were incredibly popular and were some of the fastest-growing platforms on the internet. In a world where Google doesn't refer them traffic, how much value do they have? In a world where users are more likely to go to ChatGPT and have a conversation with ChatGPT about a topic topic versus going to Reddit and having a conversation with a bunch of people that they may or may not know.

What does that look like? Right? It certainly isn't going to help propel Reddit forward. So here's the part that— or wait, wait, I just want to read. Let's see. Okay. CEO Steve Hoffman blamed AI's— Overviews and AI mode said Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet. And here's the part That I find intriguing about all of this. So the answer that Reddit is now internally testing is to require logins to see all content. So essentially, they're going to remove the ability for bots to index Reddit and require logged-in users. I think that is a death stroke for a platform like Reddit, and from a growth perspective, right? If they're a private company, I think they would do fine. I think Reddit as a public company, which needs to see growth in order order to maintain their share price, uh, in order to maintain momentum in their stock, uh, for executives to continue to have their jobs, uh, they need to grow the business. And I don't, I don't believe that requiring a login, uh, to get in, um, and see the content right now, if you guys aren't users of Reddit, uh, it's a message board style site.

And you can see the conversations and the content for the most part in most, uh, Reddit boards. Without being logged in. You can't comment, you can't interact, you can't like, uh, you can't share anything, but you can view. Uh, if Reddit goes to full login, what will happen is now in order to see any of that, right, you have to log in. It'll be more like LinkedIn where, you know, that, that content on LinkedIn, for the most part, the only way you can see it is if you're a logged in user. Now, the difference between a Reddit and a LinkedIn to me is that Reddit is a very niche, these message boards are very niche focused. So you're going to continue, Reddit's going to continue to have the users who love Reddit, who have these niche or bespoke interests that they like to go nerdy deep dives on and communities that they participate in all the time. Those people will continue to be there. But how do they attract new people like me? I'm not a heavy Reddit user. The only time I ever go to Reddit is when Um, you know, essentially I find it in a Google search result and maybe there's an answer to a question that I have that someone has already posed on Reddit and there's a conversation about it and it can be valuable in that way, but I'm not logging into Reddit and doing searches for that, right?

That's an extra step. It's an extra platform, right? If I need that information, most likely I'm just going to go to, you know, a ChatGPT or some other AI or Google search, um, if it's something that I need. So, I think what we have to be careful about here, uh, as businesses. So what's the, what's the business lesson? What's the takeaway from, um, from this, right? It's that, you know, even a growing profitable business can be crushed if they're over-reliant on one stream for audience, right? Owned audience versus rented audience. This is a conversation that has been out in the ecosystem ever since kind of internet marketing was first invented and it became inbound marketing and then content marketing and then social media marketing and It always comes down to this conversation of owned audience versus rented audience. So what are, what's the distinction between those 2? A rented audience is going to be, uh, your Instagram page. So if you have 20,000 followers on Instagram and, uh, that fuels your business, right? You have a good community, people DM you, they buy from you, they, you know, purchase your services, whatever you sell, you know, et cetera.

Uh, That's a rented audience. Instagram could change their algorithm tomorrow. Instagram could wipe your account. They could ban you. They could, you know, just think about, you know, all the scientists who had adverse opinions to the way COVID was handled that were just banned from these platforms. Their voice was just no longer heard. And if that's your primary mechanism for communicating with your audience, with your prospects and your clients, that creates a major issue inside your business. So what the advice that I would give, the learnings that I take from this and what I want to advocate to you is it is incredibly important if you're looking to grow your business to be on the platforms that your customers are on, but as quickly and with as much value as possible, we have to be getting our customers off of these platforms that we rent their attention. Think LinkedIn, think social media. media platforms. Think, uh, you know, in, in the world of, uh, Badass Breaks, the sports card company that my son and my sons and I created, right? Like, like there's a platform called Whatnot where they do live selling. It's actually a really fun and engaging way of, of both purchasing things and of, uh, of selling things.

But that's a rented audience. I don't own those contacts. I don't own those relationships. I may have followers there. I may have people that show up to our shows over and over again. But if Whatnot changes their algorithm or Whatnot decides that, you know, I do something wrong or, you know, I get, you know, I send too many shipments out late. They can throttle your account or ban your account completely. And now that stream is gone, right? So what is an owned audience? An owned audience is really going to be one of two things. You have their cell phone number to text message them, or you have their email address to email them, right? Or maybe their address if you do physical mailings, right? So, so physical mailing address, email address, cell phone number for text messages. Those are the 3 data points that we want to have for as many of our customers as possible with permission to text message, with permission to email and permission to mail, right? So if we have permission to contact them in those 3 methods, we own those audiences. No one can take those away, right? No one can take away my list of, um, uh, text message buyers.

No one can take away my list, my email list, right? If I, if for some reason, uh, an email marketing platform, you know, changes its rules or they make a mistake and deliverability goes way down, I can extract that email list, upload it to another email marketing platform, and I'm right back back in business where in social media, that just simply isn't the case. It isn't the case on these platforms where you do not own that audience. And in the case of Reddit, what we are seeing is that investors are particularly aware of the fact that single channel streams of audience and prospect generation, demand generation are major landmines in a business. So guys, as quickly as you possibly can, look and find ways to get your customers off of these platforms into owned audience channels. I'm still an enormous believer in newsletters. They have to be done right. Sending out a valueless, just, you know, hey, here's a, here's an email to stay in front of you. That doesn't have any value, right? So you gotta have a good newsletter. Sending out text messages, there needs to be value to it. But, um, guys, we've got to get to owned audience as fast as possible because we have absolutely no idea what AI is going to do to all of this.

AI, you know, that being said, AI is still a top investment priority for them. They are scaling back. And company Cloudera, 89% of organizations have scaled back or redesigned AI plans over token costs this year. Only 23% AI, only 23% of those organizations reported that AI generates more value than it costs. So why does this matter? Well, first, It's a major doomer article, right? And as you guys have heard me say on this show many times, I am not an AI doomer. I'm a huge AI optimist. That doesn't mean I'm naive to the fact that things are going to change. And there are going to be some things about AI that impact my business in a way that I don't particularly care for or would rather didn't happen. I'm just assuming that's going to be the case. At the same time, uh, done properly with the right timelines, with the right implementation structure, right implementation plan. Um, AI is just such a freaking boom. I mean, guys, I started a sports car business with my son in July, right? That is, that I could not have started without AI. It wouldn't have been possible. I would have no time to get this done because you're probably saying, Ryan, you have a, you've, you're a, you're, you know, head of marketing for, uh, an accounting firm.

You run this podcast. How the heck are you doing a sports car business with your kids? It would not be possible without AI. That's not to say we haven't made mistakes, right? Mistakes are going to happen with AI just like they happen with humans. And this is one of the key parts that I want to pull out in this story is one of the things I am seeing, one of the major mistakes that I am seeing in AI rollouts. And for the record, if you're not in the insurance industry, the vast majority of my experience in hands-on AI implementations have been done inside the insurance industry. So for whatever that's worth, that's what it is. That being said, it is It is an incredibly dynamic industry and has many unique challenges from a data and technology perspective. So it's not like implementing AI into insurance organizations is easy. It's not. So if you are working in the insurance industry and you are struggling with AI implementation, guys, know it is not easy. And I would actually put the insurance industry towards the top of the list of difficulty in terms of AI implementation. We have regulations that we have to follow.

We have disparate systems. We have antiquated technology, we have disparate data, many different data import sources with all different qualities of data that they deliver back to us. It is very dynamic and very challenging. That being said, the problem that I see and really the crux of it is this idea that somewhere in the rollout of AI, and I think part of this is because AI has hit us so fast, like never before in history have we been, we've we've been given a technology that is so incredibly powerful in such a short amount of time. So what I see happening is, oh, an AI agent can fix this, throw an agent at it, go. And then we just expect the agent to understand what we want, or we give it some 2-sentence prompt and expect the agent to figure out like what we need it to do and to be accurate. That is not the way this stuff works. And I am not saying that we should, uh, humanize AI and, and, and, you know, force form deep, you know, relationships with these things like they're humans. But when we think about building out an AI team, or we think about using AI inside our organization, we have to think about AI agents as human beings, and we have to apply the same level of scrutiny and, uh, um, grace to AI agents that we would apply to humans.

So, So what do I mean by grace? By grace, I mean, the AI agent is going to make mistakes. It's going to make mistakes. Like the idea, the bar that somehow we can hire an employee at $100,000 a year, right? Like a nice middle manager with some experience and, you know, maybe, and they make a mistake and we're like, oh, that happens. You're learning. And then we, we purchase an, an AI agent, uh, on whatever platform for $20 a month. And if it makes one mistake, we're like, Like AI sucks, it doesn't work. This is terrible. We can't use this. You have to train the AI just like you have to train an employee. And what I see happening is these massive rollouts to enormous workflows with little to no context, with little to no implementation, with little to no thought to how do you track errors? How do you fix errors? How do you log repeatable tasks? What gets done by scripting? What should be done by the agent? What should be done on a recurring routine? You know, what is the agent's role? When do we roll out a secondary bot for a specific skill or task?

And, you know, this, this idea that somehow a single agent is going to, in an all-encompassing manner, handle all of the work in your business is just absolutely bananas. And it won't work. And it's, and it's never going to work because that's just not how these things operate. The more specific and consistent you can be with tasks with a singular agent, the better. And this is why. I am just absolutely a huge advocate of Grokbot. Now, Grokbot may not be the answer forever. Uh, I advocate for it because I think by and far for ecosystems of work, and I'll explain what I mean by that, there is no better tool in the marketplace for an individual activity like writing a newsletter, a project folder inside of Claude or ChatGPT or Manus or whatever you, you know, I, I got like Kimmy K3, uh, the new model Kimmy K3. 3.1 Pro is bananas, uh, and cheap as hell. But those, those types of tools are fantastic for, hey, I want to put some samples of my work in there and I want to build a, a tone and voice document and I want to consistently create newsletters.

Awesome. Great. But if you want an ecosystem that is tracking, okay, someone filled out my form and then when they fill out my form, I want to round robin email to the next salesperson. I want that, uh, prospect also added to our newsletter list. I want that prospect tagged properly in our CRM. And now you have these multiple functions with decisions built in. One agent is going to struggle to do all of that work, right? So we want to, what we want to say is which types of work are so specialized that they can be broken down into a multi-agent system. So again, I'm just going to use, uh, Badass Breaks. And if you want to check out what we're doing at Badass Breaks, if you're into sports cards or you're into collecting cards, you know, go to badassbreaks.shop. You can also check out our eBay store. Uh, I post a lot on Instagram, uh, as well. So check out our Instagram page. I'll have links to that stuff if you're interested. Um, I use this as an example because what the sports car business has really become for me is a testing ground for, uh, what I want to roll out in, um, in the other aspects of my life.

So for this podcast, for PFS, for some of the, um, agencies that I do some consulting work with, right? Like, I want to, I use badass brakes in the work that we do there, uh, so that, you know, what's the worst that can happen? I, uh, mislist a card and have to refund someone their money, or we sell a card that should have been listed for $50 for $3, which has happened, right? So you want to talk about errors, right? In a, in a business with very thin margins where inventory is expensive, uh, relative to sale price. If I have a card that's worth $50 and it gets mislisted for $3.99 and someone buys it on eBay, I can't go, oh no, no, no, wait, I'm sorry. I can't sell you that card because Because, you know, you bought it for, you know, $47 or $46 less than you should have, I gotta eat that. And that has actually happened multiple times. And it was those errors that ultimately led me to better understand the process and then iteratively fix the process over time. So what does that look like? Well, I have, uh, one, uh, manager bot called Badass.

And, you know, that's the manager, kind of chief of staff of the Badass Breaks department inside of my GrokBot ecosystem. Underneath him, I have a bot that just runs the card scanner and feeder. So that lives, that, that bot operates the scanner. It under, it creates the folders. It understands how to track everything, understands how to properly tag and label and make sure that sets and batches of scans are properly listed. And that is its entire job. Once a scan is done, it takes that information. It passes it off to another bot called Sortie. Sortie then goes and says, what is this card? It reads the card front and back. It goes and looks. For what are we looking at here? Like, let's see, yesterday I sold a Jalen Hurts. He's the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles. Green parallel from the Topps Holiday Series that was numbered 67 out of 99. So this is a special insert. It was about, I think it was purchased for like, I think the purchase price was like $14.99. Right. So Sortie's job is to figure out what is this card exactly? Is it numbered? Is it an auto?

Is it an insert? Is it a base card? What set is it from? Right? And then, and then Sortie, uh, goes out and figures out what the price is. Or no, Sortie then takes that information and hands it to another bot called Comps, C-O-M-P-S. And then it goes out and looks for comps. It looks at eBay and a couple other marketplaces to figure out what is the range of pricing that this card is going for. And then what Comps does is it has a trigger, it has a, um, a confidence score. So if it is 85% or more confident that it has the right price, it will just list that card automatically. If it is unsure of the price, as in maybe not a lot of those cards have been sold in the past or any, or maybe one card was sold for $6 and one was sold for $20, right? So we don't have a solid, a solid range of what that card should actually be listed for. It then brings that to me, a decision, and then I make, you know, with its recommendations and I make the decision. Once that decision is made, that record is then passed to a bot called Bay, B-A-Y, which then goes into eBay and properly lists the card, uh, live on eBay.

There is another bot called Knot, K-N-O-T, which then goes into Whatnot and publishes the listing on Whatnot. And then all of that information is, is finally passed back to Badass, who verifies it and then marks in a database that I created in Supabase, um, that, that record is complete with all the listing information in it. Okay. Now here's the part that that, uh, so all that is great and makes sense. That's what, 5 different bots, uh, that are handling that autonomously, passing that record from one to the next to make sure that all that is done. I then have a bot called Sherlock, which runs every day or every evening, right? It runs through everything that we've done throughout that day to audit and verify that all the steps were done properly, that none of the bots passed, uh, jumped over any, uh, gates that were in place, that the confidence scores were tracked properly, and that no decisions were made outside of the confidence scores that they were given, et cetera, et cetera. So there's an audit bot. At the very end of that, at the very end of the day, Badass runs a full report for all the bots that says, here were our wins, here were our misses, here were the fixes we had to those misses, and then here's the changes we're going to make to our overall structure, uh, of these bots to make sure that any of those errors aren't made again.

Guys, that is just one small microscopic example of how you properly roll out an AI ecosystem. system. None of these companies are doing it this way, right? They're rolling out these massive AI projects with massive LLMs, with, with, you know, huge numbers of users and a limited number of guardrails. And I know that because I've been part of some of them. So my point in saying all this is you're going to see a lot of headlines like, you know, companies pull back, companies do this, they're reconsidering. Do not take that as, as, as a knock on AI because the issue That AI implementations are having are human issues, not AI issues. Sure. Are there things that AI shouldn't be doing? 100%. Are there things that, are there overextensions on AI's capability that, you know, simply AI can't perform accurately on a regular basis? Yes, that's also true. But AI can be a major driver of growth for you if you are systematically and intelligently implementing these tools into your business. Um, I cannot speak to it enough. And, you know, what I ultimately, what I ultimately believe is going to happen here is there's going to be this pullback, there's going to be analysis, and then ultimately, uh, the level of sophistication that I outlined for you, you know, and what I'm, what I'm doing with Badass Breaks is going to be rolled back out to these big companies and they're going to see massive leaps forward when they do.

All right. Um, all right. Uh, story number 3. So story number 3 is actually, uh, one of the lessons that I learned, uh, another lesson that I learned, you know, running all these Grokbots. And, you know, one of the issues that comes up with Grokbot or with all AI is a consistency of output, a consistency of return, right? So you might put the same prompt in 2 different chats and get 2 different outcomes, right? You get 2 different looks and feels, right? You might say, hey, you know, create this newsletter for me. And the AI produces a perfectly formed newsletter exactly the way you want it. Great. And then you go back in and you put the same information in the next week for that week's newsletter. And it comes out and it looks completely different and you're like, WTF, like, what is wrong with this? This is causing me more problems than it's creating or than it's solving. And, uh, I'm just gonna go back to doing it myself. That's the wrong way to look at this, right? When the AI is born, it has knowledge but not wisdom. When the AI is born, when you implement a new AI agent, it has knowledge but not Our job as users of AI is to instill wisdom upon the AI, not knowledge.

AI has knowledge, right? It can go out and find just about anything that you need, that you want it to find on the internet. It can go out and find it and pull it back. It has access to information that, you know, I guess this is probably obvious, but it has access to information light years beyond what we could ever hold in our heads. And that's the beauty of it. of it, but it is not wise. AI is not wise. We have to make the AI wise. And the best way to make AI wise is through context and creating skills. Now, we're going to address context in a future episode of the show, maybe next week. If you are subscribed to the newsletter, this week there is a deep dive going out around context and creating proper context for your bots. So make sure you subscribe to the newsletter. You can go to newsletter.ryanhanley.com. if you wanna subscribe there or just go to the website, you'll find it. Um, there's places for you to pop your email in all over the place. Um, but today I wanna talk about skills. So one thing that I do for any, um, we'll call it like business ecosystem.

So consider Badass Breaks a business ecosystem. Consider Finding Peak a, a business ecosystem. PFS Global, my work there is a business ecosystem. The first thing I do is I create a GitHub repository. Now, GitHub for the longest time was kind of an inaccessible, nerdy platform for developers. It still is that to a certain extent, but GitHub is built to retain files that run applications, websites, programs, and ultimately should be repositories for your AI. So the very first thing I'll do with a new ecosystem is I will, uh, put, build, just spin up a new GitHub repository. And by GitHub, it's github.com. You go in, um, I think, I think they're like less than $10 a month to have a, a, a pro GitHub account. So it's very inexpensive. And I'll have a GitHub, you know, I'll have the GitHub repository and inside of that, I will have the AI creates skills for the repeatable tasks. So a skill is essentially, think of it as a, um, um, think of it as like a workflow, uh, uh, uh, process that the AI follows to create consistent results. So like for, for the feeder that I was talking about, so running the scanner, there is a skill in the GitHub repository for Badass Breaks.

That reminds the Feeder AI agent of exactly the steps that it needs to go through every single time to properly, uh, turn the scanner on, create the proper folders, get the software, uh, set up and ready to go. Like the full execution of that plan is outlined in the skill. So the AI agent isn't trying to remember or recreate the wheel every time you ask it to do something, which if you are not using skill files is what So if you are getting inconsistent output from your AI agents, the primary reason for that is the agent is essentially relearning what to do every time you tell it to do a thing, even if you've told it to do it over and over and over again. Now, a lot of these platforms like ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini, you know, now have, uh, memory files where they're, they are remembering things, but that is not the same as having a skill file. So a skill file is a .md file, which is really just a Word, a formatted, uh, Uh, uh, text document that is set up for AI agents to easily read it. And what I will do is when I get a process working exactly the way that I want it to work, I will then finish that process with package up everything you've learned, turn it into a skill, and save it in the folder, uh, and then save it into GitHub.

So now when I go back into that AI agent and I say, hey, I want to work on this week's newsletter, it's not guessing. guessing at where is the newsletter housed? What does the newsletter look like? What company are we talking about? It immediately goes to that skill file, reads the skill file, and knows, oh, he sends his newsletters out through Beehive. Uh, this is for the Finding Peak brand. Um, here's the 4 sections of every newsletter that he wants to have. Um, here are the graphics for this month's, uh, sponsors of the newsletter. Um, here's the tone and voice that we like to start our first draft with. Uh, here are the recommended sources for sourcing information for stories or research that Ryan could potentially want to do, right? And then create a skill file for every repeatable task that you have. That way the AI is not guessing. These skill files are an absolute superpower, right? And we think about it, think about it in our own business, right? In our own business, we create, you know, entire Loom directories or Google Docs with, with here's how you do this task, right? Like, you know, a new, a new, uh, employee comes into your company and you're like, here's your 5 tasks and here's 5 Google documents that outline exactly how we do them here.

And, you know, what tools to use, what the process looks like. Like we do that for humans, but now we need to do that for our AI agents. And that's what skill files are, guys. So this is really easy. The AI can create them for you. You don't need to be technical to work with GitHub, but I highly, highly recommend that if you're looking for more consistent output and you want to save tokens, right, make sure that once you get a repeatable task dialed in the way you like, that you are having the AI create a skill and then reference that skill while doing that particular task every time you do it again in the future. And then as you make improvements and updates to the process, just tell the AI to update the skill file and then it will know for the next time. This is an absolute unlock. If you have more questions about this kind of stuff, guys, just, just, you know, leave a comment or question in YouTube. You know, make sure if you do click over to YouTube, click that like button. Make sure you subscribe to the channel if you're not already.

Obviously, we talked about that before. That helps me so much. But this idea of using skills is just an absolute unlock. And while it sounds obvious at face value, Almost no one is doing it on a consistent basis. And GitHub is the perfect place to keep these things. Um, we'll talk more about things like instruction files and context windows in the future, but, um, I wanted to start with this idea of skills because if you start building skills into your regular workflows with AI, you're going to see such a drastic increase in accuracy, efficiency, and the quality of the product that it produces that you're going to wonder why you haven't been doing it all along. All right, let's keep rolling on. I hope you guys are having a good time here. Um, remember, any questions, comments that you have, any feedback that you have about the show, just go to YouTube. Link's in the description if you're listening on auto, or if you're watching on, or audio, if you're watching on YouTube, you know, obviously you know what to do. Story 4, Trump moves to replace AI, artificial intelligence, with superintelligence. On October 27th, uh, President Trump posted on Truth Social that in short order, we will be officially banning the term AI, artificial intelligence, and all relevant documents and everything else.

Now, this was picked up by leftist media saying like, oh my God, he can't ban this term. Yeah, he can't ban the term from us using it. He's banning it in the executive branch communications. So executive branch employees are no longer allowed to use AI or artificial intelligence. They have to use superintelligence, right? And, you know, he signed this executive order in September and directing, you know, he can only direct the executive branch, you know, just, he's not banning it from our, from Webster's Dictionary. We all can still use artificial intelligence if we want. Um, you know, and just, you know, just so we're clear, you know, he can't, he's not doing anything that, that like is forcing on us, but he is forcing this on the executive branch of our government, right? There's a couple things here. One, you know, Trump is a master of manipulation and narrative design, whether you like him or you hate him. And I'm sure that there are people who are listening to this that are on both sides of the spectrum. You can't deny that the guy just is an absolute, you know, if there was a Mount Rushmore for manipulation and narrative design, Trump would be on, right?

He just has that ability. That being said, you know, we're all aware that But in some cases he does that for good. In some cases he does it in things that are just absolute bananas that I personally don't understand. But none of those things are why I wanted to talk about this story. The first reason I wanted to talk about this story was the rebranding of artificial intelligence to superintelligence. And there's a couple reasons why this is happening. First, because of AI doomers, the people that are out there, you know, telling everyone that we're going to lose our jobs and the machines are going to take over the world and, you know, we're— no one's going to be able to make any money and AI is going to, you know, destroy the world and we're all going to become, you know, zombies or, you know, just, you know, fat blobs that can't walk around on our own legs like the movie WALL-E, right? Like, those doomers have just torched the term artificial intelligence. And, you know, when there's polling done, and I don't have the number in front of me on the polling, the last time I heard it was something north of like 70% of Americans have a negative impression of artificial intelligence.

Like, artificial intelligence is incredibly important to our lives. Like, you can be a neophyte and want, not want anything to do with artificial intelligence and hate it and not want to use it. And that's all good and fine, but it's It's coming like a freight train, whether you like it or not. And I think, again, my opinion is there is no value in being a doomer. There's only value in figuring out how you live, operate, and thrive in a world in which artificial intelligence is part of almost everything we do, right? Because it's going to happen. Bernie Sanders and AOC can stand out, and even Steve Bannon, if you want to do the right-left thing, are holding rallies banging on artificial intelligence and data centers. Um, you know, the data center thing is mostly misinformation, but, uh, the problem is there's just so much negative talk. So in order for Trump to get the things done that he needs to get done with AI, he had to rebrand the term because as of right now, uh, superintelligence does not have any negative connotations applied to it. And where artificial intelligence feels anti-human, superintelligence feels like, uh, I just became a superhero.

Right? I just got this power that I didn't have before. I get to leverage superintelligence. Humans leverage superintelligence. Artificial intelligence takes things from us. That's so, so he had to rebrand it. And by rebranding it and by making such a big deal out of it, what Trump does know is that he now gets to own the narrative around this new term. Now, whether the term superintelligence takes off or not, I have a feeling that I have a feeling that superintelligence will not become ubiquitous the way that artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous. It gives Trump the ability to talk about the same topic in different ways without the baggage of negativity associated with artificial intelligence. So I think that's, I think that's really, I think it's really interesting and certainly something worth noting and talking about. That the Trump administration sees so much negativity associated with the term artificial intelligence that they felt the need to rebrand and create an entirely new narrative in order to have the conversations that they want to have without getting shouted down by people who are anti-data center, who are anti-AI, who in some cases all the way to climate change crazies who who, you know, don't want data centers, but will go out and play 18 holes, even though, you know, that same golf course uses about 3 times the water on an annual basis than a data center will.

My point being, and what we can learn from this is one, rebranding an idea allows you to reframe the narrative around a certain Topic, so this is something we can do in our own businesses. So now take out Trump and take out artificial intelligence, and let's apply this back to our business. So when you see someone who is a master manipulator, master narrative designer making a move like this, as big and bold and as public as it is, right? There's a lesson to be learned. Whether you you know take out your thoughts and feelings on AI and say, okay, what is a concept that is important to my business, to my industry? industry, to how I make money, to how I live my life that I could potentially rebrand so that I can own the narrative around that topic, right? So, so what would that be, right? I could, uh, thinking about the sports car business, um, it could be something like, you know, the idea of like, uh, um, yeah, I'll give you an example. So, You know, up until a few years ago, there, you know, there was just like good cards, good hits.

You gotta hit, you gotta hit. And then this term of grail came out. You're look— you're searching for grails. You're searching for the holy grail. Buy more boxes of cards, buy more packs, right? Buy mystery packs. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. 'Cause you're looking for a grail. You're looking for that 1 of 1 auto for, you know, Josh Allen auto. worth, you know, $15 grand in a, in a $10 pack of cards. You're looking for a grail. It allowed, right, the sports card industry to create FOMO, create energy, create an aspirational goal that, you know, brings more collectors into the, into the industry because now I'm like, oh my God, like I could go buy a box of cards for $30 at Dick's Sporting Goods and hit a grail. And now all of a sudden, you know, find some card worth thousands of dollars. in it, like, that sounds fun. Like, I want to do that, right? It, it, and oh, I haven't hit a grail recently, or I, I haven't hit a grail card ever. Like, I need to buy more packs, more packs, right? So it allowed them to reframe, right, the conversation around why you need to keep buying more, buy more, buy more, because there are these grail cards out there, right?

They completely rechanged the narrative around buying packs because up until that point, and there still is inside that industry, and I'm just getting to know it. I've only been in the industry for a few, few months now. But like, you know, there's this idea that like ripping packs is for losers, right? Oh, if you rip packs, you're never gonna get your money back. But not if there's a grail card in there. Oh, oh, oh, but there's a grail card in there. What if there's a grail card in that box that could change your whole, that could change your whole outcome? One card could pay for every pack of cards you bought over the last 3 months. There's a grail in there, right? So what is that in your industry? How do you reframe something that may have a negative connotation or a neutral connotation so that you can one, control the narrative and to drive the outcomes that you actually want. Incredibly important idea. We're seeing Trump try to do it with AI and superintelligence. But ultimately, in all these stories, regardless of who you agree with, who you don't, politics or whatever, take that out of it.

The lesson here from what the Trump administration is doing is that rebranding ideas allows you to own and reframe the narrative around concepts to your benefit, which is an incredibly powerful tactic in marketing and manipulation and narrative design. All right, let's move on. Story 5, Fanta. We're gonna go through this one quickly because I'll, let's pop the video in real quick. You can get a quick look at the video right here. And what you can see on screen is that, you know, this video was entirely created with AI, right? So it's Fanta's Haunted Universe Halloween Halloween campaign. It was built by the AI studio called Grail. That's a coincidence. And it was meant to help Fanta claim Halloween. Fanta, the soft drink, orange soda, grape soda, they wanted to claim Halloween, right? The way Coke owns Christmas. That was their, the whole idea was Coca-Cola owns Christmas. Fanta wanted to own Halloween. Well, this thing hits and the internet goes nuts because they put a ton of money behind this campaign and the video is kind of weird and janky and like, just, I hate using the term AI slop because I feel like it gets thrown around and misused way too much, but oh my God, it's just bad.

And it just got slaughtered, right? Fanta's global VP of marketing, Abraham Khan, you know, some people think you press a few buttons and the Fanta universe pops up. It's taken us over a year and a half to put this AI ecosystem together, which is also bananas in my opinion, and just a testament to why AI doesn't work well in large organizations because AI and bureaucracy don't really go very well together. But, you know, essentially what happened here is Fanta tested this and the testing scores came out really well. So using this testing service called Zappy, they found that 35% of people that the testing audience loved the video, which was above the norm of 27%. 7%. But when released to the public, the dislike score was 7%, where the norm is only 2%, right? So the idea here is, one, you never know what— you got to get stuff out in the world, right? You can— testing is great. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for testing, but you got to test in public because people pay with their feet and people pay with their wallets, right? So if you have a physical location or physical-oriented business, people pay with their feet.

They either show up or they don't. If you have a business that sells things, which all of us does, people pay with their wallets. So the idea here is, and we're going to see this and how it works out, is if Fanta's, you know, actually produced more revenue because of this campaign. But there's definitely been a huge pushback because when this was actually released to the public, it just got slaughtered because it honestly, it feels lazy to me. It looks lazy. Even the AI production looks like cheesy, corny AI production that I could have put together in like an And the guys, I use AI to create content all the time. I think you should too. However, that content can't lose its soul. Like, I still read and edit every piece of content that comes out, right? There's no content that I'm creating that just is set it and forget it, and I'm not looking at what goes out because what you put out is what you believe. So even if AI writes the whole thing and you hit publish and you never look at it, Do you believe that? So know what you're putting out, right?

And, and, and don't be lazy about it. Make sure it has a soul. There are a million ways they could have done this using AI and, and used AI to create epic scenes and dynamic transitions and cool characters. They could have done all that, right? There's plenty of animated, uh, uh, commercials and, and ads that go out on the internet and out on TV, et cetera. However, it can't be lazy. Lazy, right? It can't be lazy. And unfortunately for Fanta, this was a very lazy video. I have a feeling that a big part of it was bureaucracy and a committee. It looks like a committee made it. It just looks like this Frankenstein-together piece of crap. Taste matters. Like, the one thing about AI is it doesn't have taste. It can tell you tactically or technically that something works or looks okay. But at the end of the day, like, you got to watch it as a human being and use your taste to know if it's worth posting. So, like, don't outsource your taste. That, that's, that's really the big lesson that I take from this story is it feels to me like Fanta, not sitting in the boardroom, but just reading this story and, and the reactions to it, it very much feels like to me, Fanta outsourced their taste.

Or they made exceptions to their taste to put something out that wasn't good. And when you put something out that isn't good, it's going to get negative feedback, uh, regardless of how it was made or who made it. So never outsource your taste. Outsource production, outsource idea generation, even outsource the first draft. All that stuff is fine. Use AI, et cetera. All that stuff is great. But at the end of the day, when you hit publish on that final project product, your taste matters. You have to like it. You have to believe that this represents your business, your brand in a way that is positive and that, you know, is going to push your business forward. Uh, just like before AI. I mean, I think, you know, they used AI and it came out crappy, but guys, this is no different than it's always been. Like at the end of the day, we've always, taste has always been what what matters. People with great taste, right? They win. People with crappy taste don't win. And AI is not going to change that for you. AI is not going to help you with taste. Your taste is still the defining characteristic of a piece of content, and we don't want to outsource that.

All right, let's move on from that story around to story number 6 of 8 stories that we have here. All right, story number 6. Harvard faculty Nearly all registered Democrats. Chart going around from Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens, a 2021 study of voter registration of 12,372 faculty members at 116 colleges. Overall Democrat to Republican representation ratio, 8.5 to 1. So Basically, in our college ecosystem across the board, unless you are at a, probably a Christian conservative school, the ratio of left-leaning views, Democrats, to right-leaning views, Republicans, is 8.5 to 1, which means that our children, our young adults, are only getting one side of the story. That doesn't mean that that side of the story is wrong, and it doesn't mean that that side of the story is not valuable. I firmly believe that, you know, I wish we could go back to, you know, kind of the, the, the Bill Clinton Democrat days where even when there were disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, seemingly they were all kind of pointing in the same direction and willing to work together. We don't see that in our politics today, which I think is why it's so polarizing and, you know, it's, it's horrible.

Um, and, you know, so I don't want to say like Democrats are wrong and this is terrible and this is why our youth is so messed up. I think the problem is they're only getting one side of the story. And I think this is the problem with so many of us equally on the right side, right? Like my dad, who I love to death, only watches Fox News. So he has a viewpoint on the world that is basically the Fox News talking points. And he will say things to me because I'm registered Republican and tend to skew conservative on today's standards. Like I said, I'm probably more of like a Bill Clinton Democrat, but he'll tell you and I'll be like, Dad, that's just not right. Like, I hear what you're saying. I know that that's the like right-leaning talking point, but like there are like 5 other data points that you need to know to have a realistic and accurate opinion of this topic that you're bringing to me. And, you know, like he, you know, there are some things that as much as I think that she's kind of a loon, there are some things that— some points that AOC has that I actually really agree with.

There are a lot of things that I don't agree with, but there are some things that I agree with. And how would I know that if I didn't pay attention to multiple different channels? And this goes for all aspects of our life, right? If you are in an industry and you only read one industry newsletter, Right? You are only consuming the bias of that one particular newsletter or that one particular information channel, right? So you're not getting the full spectrum of thoughts and opinions and ideas. And in today's world, which is just so incredibly polarized and biased, almost every channel is, right? My recommendation here, my takeaway is one, you know, do I wish that this was more even? Yes. Because I I think the beauty of places like college is that they're supposed to be open environments to have wide-ranging conversations and debates on topics that yield interesting and new and dynamic insights. That would be wonderful. That wasn't my college experience. I mostly just played baseball, drank booze, and tried to graduate. But you look at this and you're like, why is something like socialism taking off? taken hold, right? Which is an absolute bananas idea that, you know, has never worked, will never work.

And if you are religious, is very obviously of the enemy, right? It is one of the most corrosive, corrupt, and disingenuous concepts or philosophies that has ever been introduced into our world. Yet there are intelligent people who I would like to believe are honestly think this is something that our, our country should try, which is insane. Absolutely insane. There's not a single data point to back it up. It is all based on feels. And where is that feels coming from? Right. Well, for better or for worse, and I think if we were more mashed in the middle, much more for the better, but unfortunately being this barbell polarization that we have, I think for the worse, right? The, the left-leaning Democratic side of the argu— argument is often about emotions, about feels. I feel this. Oh, this is the way it makes me feel. This is my lived experience. This is the way I wish the world worked. You know, everyone should, you know, do this and, you know, you know, the government should pay for everything. It's like, okay, that's one viewpoint on the world. What's the counterargument? Right. And it doesn't mean that everyone who hears the counterargument would immediately swing to capitalism and, you know, more conservation and those kind of things.

It doesn't mean that. But what it would do is give people the ability to have to make an honest, independent consideration on each particular topic that matters to them. Okay. Now do that, but for everything in your life, right? For conversations around AI, for conversations around how to hire employees, for conversations around how to be a good father or mother, parent, how to be a good spouse, conversations around insert whatever it is in your life, right? If you're only getting information from singular biased sources, regardless of what that bias is you are not giving yourself a chance to make the best decision for your life. You are operating from a place that could work, but could very also likely not work. And what I want to take from this story again is not good or bad, right or wrong. I think, you know, I don't know what we can do about our college education system. Frankly, I just wish that college students could dispel college debt through bankruptcy. bankruptcy, which is the true testament of our politicians not giving a shit about us, is the fact that college students are coming out with massive amounts of debt, and then the promises of that debt is not paid in terms of salary.

And then they're saddled early in life with debt that is overwhelming, and they can't dispel it via bankruptcy. And all of the loans that these colleges are giving to these young kids whose brains aren't even fully developed are backed by the government, which is the grift, which is why this isn't happening. And therefore, College tuition keeps going up and up. The college I went to, the University of Rochester, when I went there, the year I got there, it was like $27,000 plus. The year I left, it was $31,000. Today it's north of $50,000 to go there as an undergrad. That's crazy. That's crazy. You're going to get a liberal arts degree from the University of Rochester, which nothing against U of R. I mean, it's a great school, but like, you're going to come out with a liberal arts degree and $200,000 in debt. Holy shit. Right? My point in all that, getting back from that diatribe, sorry, is that my hope for you, the listeners of this show, the lesson that we take from these stories, again, I'm not trying to look at these through biased glasses. I just, the lesson of this is our inputs are becoming more and more biased in a barbell fashion, meaning one side or the other, and the other side is wrong.

If we, we, if, if we care to make better long-term decisions in our life, to have a better understanding of what's happening in the world and how we position ourselves and our businesses to be successful and thrive over the long term, we need to start expanding the inputs that we get to encapsulate the majority of the conversation so that we can make our own independent decisions and not just rely on our favorite talking head who's biased in ways that we most likely don't completely understand is telling us to think, myself included. And if you're interested in my biases, leave a question in YouTube. I'm happy to answer them. And if you do have questions that you want on the show, leave 'em on YouTube and I'll pull those questions out. We'll answer 'em in future episodes. All right, last 2 stories real quick. This one I'm going to go super quick through because it's probably not as interesting to all of you as it is to me, but they think they found Noah's Ark. It's in Turkey. At an October 15th symposium in Agri Turkey, Professor Senker Atilla of the Civis— I'm going to butcher this word— CUMHURIET University said his team found a small amount of burnt wood at the Durupınar Formation, which is a formation— we'll throw a picture of it up on the screen— in Turkey that was sent to labs in both Turkey and France for ID and carbon dating.

Okay. The radar has shown that there are corridor-like features and room-like voids inside this formation. And as of right now, only about 20% of it's been— they've only done about 20% of the formation using this type of LiDAR to kind of get a look inside of the ground penetrating radar to get a look inside of this rock formation. And while Professor Attia said the features may be biological, they have to be very cautious because all the initial instincts are that this looks like it could be manmade, right? There's no published data from the labs yet. The wood has not been processed yet. So the reason the wood is important is you cannot carbon-14 date, which is a process in which they can take biological material and date like when it's from. Okay. They can't do that for things like rock. So if we have no idea how old a rock is, if I just hand you a rock, if there's no biological material on it, you know, wood, plants, you know, parts of a living being, they can't tell you exactly how old it is. So the fact they found wood inside of this structure, you know, when they carbon date it, if it comes back, you know, that's That's going to give them a good feel for potentially how old what's inside this structure actually is.

Now, you know, why this matters is because it is, is really the part that, you know, whether you believe this is Noah's Ark, whether you're a Christian or not, you know, depend, you know, there's a lot of different opinions on this. What makes this so interesting to me is that I don't think we have a clue about the history of the human race. I think we are only living in the most recent iteration of the human race. I think that our civilization has been reset over and over and over again. And I first started down this path, I listened to an interview back in the early, mid-2000s, 2000, maybe like 2012. 20— yeah, so not mid-2000s, but like 2012, 2013. Graham Hancock was on Joe Rogan's podcast. And Graham Hancock is really, he's a journalist who first popularized this idea that there have been multiple iterations of our civilization that have been knocked back basically quite literally to the Stone Age because of catastrophe. There is absolutely, there were comet impacts 10,000 years ago. It was called the Younger Dryas or Younger Dryas. driest period that absolutely had a major impact. And I think what we're finding is that so much of our history is lost and that we just simply don't know where we've come from.

And my point in saying that is, you know, one, I'm a firm believer in God and I am very much a Christian and a Catholic. That being said, I think we're relearning a lot of things about what it means to be human, and especially in this highly driven technological age, it is very important for us to have humility for the world around us. Meaning, if it's true that that our civilization has been reset multiple times and that things like the Great Flood and Noah's Ark and other biblical stories, other canons from, you know, ancient religions, ancient philosophies, right? If these things do have levels of accuracy, if there is truth in these stories, my My takeaway is a humility to our place and a gratitude for our existence, and that at any given time, this life can be taken away from us. Uh, our entire world can change, and it's important to audit the anxiety and stress that we feel for things that really don't matter. And while we have to pay the bills and we have to take care of ourselves and, you know, we need to be good, attentive spouses and parents and brothers and sisters and et cetera, sons, daughters, it's those relationships and appreciation for just how an amazing life is and that We are grinding and scratching out our existence on a rock spinning while it circles a sun that circles a black hole that circles the universe in a way that we'll never fully understand, that we have zero control over.

And, you know, when you think about what brings us the most joy at the end of our lives, and there are quite a few books that have been written about, you know, people's regrets at the end of their lives. Yeah. lives, etc., it always comes back to relationships and connection. And I don't know, this story just made me— I don't know how Noah's Ark being found brought me to that, but it was just what came to my mind was like, we just don't understand our history. And, and if, if our, if, if, if our civilization is much older than we believe it to be and has been reset multiple times, what are we doing worrying about getting caught in a red light or, you know, some silly bickering that we have with someone we love over a disagreement. Like, these things are so nonsensical in the grand scheme of what we're doing here every day. And I hope, you know, I try to take as much gratitude as I can. I'm not perfect with it. I get frustrated, anxious, and stressed just like everyone else, but I do try to recalibrate myself as often as I possibly can and just appreciate.

appreciate that life is hard. We're all going through it, and the things that we value the most are the connections and relationships that we have. And I hope that you'll continue to cultivate them. Um, I'm gonna skip this last story on male loneliness. We'll push that to next week. I want to wrap up the show with just a quick story. Uh, I'm gonna pop a picture of me and my son, uh, Colton, on the screen right now. Uh, Colton, uh, just finished his first football season. Uh, he's in 5th grade. He had never played football before. And coming into, uh, this school year, uh, he's going to a new school and, uh, he goes to a private Christian school. And, um, he came to my ex-wife and I and was like, I want to play football this year. And he had mentioned it before, but he was never really serious. But this year he was. And I played football in high school, um, for, uh, You know, you know, I was a pretty decent football player for what I was. I'm not gonna say that, you know, I wasn't a superstar. You know, I made the all-section team and stuff like that and, you know, helped take my team to sectional playoffs.

We lost in the championship my senior year. You know, so I played at a fairly high level for the level that I was at, right? I'm not going D1. I wasn't playing the pros. No. nothing like that. I did have a couple Division II scholarships and Division III scholarships that were on the table. I ended up getting 3 concussions my senior year, which made it so I couldn't play football ever again and why I played baseball in college. But my point is, it, I was very excited and I also got asked to coach the team. So I got to, I got to experience my son's first year as a football player firsthand every day at practice with him, at every game. I was the defensive coordinator and he played outside linebacker. He started— there were 3 tiers, 3 strings, purple, gold, white. And he started on the white team at the bottom and worked his way up to being first man off the bench as an outside linebacker for the, for the first team by the end of the season. His last game, he made 3 tackles. Tackles. Um, I was so incredibly proud of him.

But the reason I was proud of him, um, wasn't just his accomplishments on the field, the things that he did, but there's something about football. Uh, there are other sports, you know, that you could probably put in this— lacrosse or, uh, jiu-jitsu, martial arts, uh, rugby, I'm sure, uh, motorsports, right? Where massive injury is possible on every play, right? Massive injury, like real injuries, real pain, bruises, bleeding, right? Uh, are, are possible on every play. Humility every play, like real humility. Like when you go toe-to-toe with a guy and he knocks you on the ground and you got to pick yourself back up, that's a tough moment. Tough moment for anybody, let alone a 5th grader who's never experienced And you really find out in these moments, particularly in a sport like football, who you are as a person, right? Do you get back up? And that was the first and really primary lesson of this entire season, right? I, I always preach attitude and effort. That's pretty common. But what I said to him was, look, man, in football, you're gonna figure out what's gonna happen. You're made of. The first time you get knocked down, you get lit up and knocked down on the ground and your whole body hurts 'cause you just got rocked.

Some guys get back up and some guys don't. The guys that win in football are the guys that get back up. You might get knocked down again on On the next play, get back up. Just get back up. I said to him, dude, sometimes the win in these sports is just getting back up. Just, just, just, just get back up. Don't let it beat you, right? Okay, that kid's 50 more pounds than you. He's been playing for, since he was 3 years old, right? He knows every move and trick, and he's stronger than you, and he's faster than you, and every time you line up against him, he smokes you. Just get back up and get in line again. Because what you're gonna find out about yourself is that first time you get smoked, you, you just wanna give up. But if you get back up the second time, you're like, ooh, okay, I survived it. The third time you get back up, you got a little more, you know what's coming. You can prepare more. The fourth time, you know how to avoid it. The fifth time, you're rocking him back because now you've Realized what you're capable of, who you are as a person.

And I wanted to share this because he said to me at the end of the season, when we were just kind of talking about, you know, what'd you think, bud? You know, you're just kind of recapping the season as a whole. We ended up going 8-0 and winning our league, by the way, which is really fun too. But he said, Dad, I just kept getting back up. He goes, you were right. You just got to keep getting back up. And I like almost started crying because one, it's always nice when your kids are actually listening to you. But two, I think this is a good lesson for all of us. I think we need to all do more hard shit. I don't mean like grind all day, kill yourself. Like, I'm not talking about that, but just like, what hard thing are you doing? What part of your life is dangerous? Football is dangerous. Even in 5th grade, it's dangerous. You can break a finger, you can break a leg, you can, you know, get your bell rung, you can, you know, break a rib. There are a lot of things that can happen. Like, football is dangerous.

What are you doing in your life that's dangerous? I went rock climbing with a good buddy of mine, Gordon Coyle, a couple years ago. And even though you're strapped in, in and you're harnessed and all this kind of stuff. It's dangerous. You, if you make a mistake, you, you can be in big trouble. And what I learned is, one, I don't want to be a rock climber, but two, I learned I was capable of surviving it and it made me feel stronger. 75 Hard made me feel stronger, right? I went after a deadlift goal in my, in my early 40s, right? Pulling, pulling £465 at age 43. Everybody said, why are you doing that? You're going to hurt your back. And that was 100% true. You're going to hurt your knees. 100% true. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do something hard. And my point is, guys, it's very easy in today's world to to skirt hard for comfort and to make everything about being more comfortable, a more comfortable couch, uh, you know, the top pro plus level of whatever Netflix you watch, the, you know, DoorDashing your food in. Um, you know, just, it's so easy to make everything about comfort.

And my hope for you and my call to action to finish this episode is go find Something hard. Run a marathon, lift weights, join a competitive sports team. I don't care if you're 30, 40, 50, 60. Find something hard. Find something that has an element of danger. It is going to awaken your brain. It is gonna send electricity through your body. It's gonna make you feel alive in ways that comfort never will. Go find something hard. I absolutely love you guys for listening to this podcast. I hope that if you enjoyed it, you'll go leave a comment. On YouTube, like, subscribe. Appreciate you for being here. This is the way, my friends. I'm outta here. Peace. All right, you badasses. Thanks for hanging out with us today. If you got something outta this episode, please share it with somebody who needs it. That's why we do it, to help people, to help them grow. And I want your take too. Ask a question, share an experience. Tell us where you think we got something wrong or we missed a reframe. I, I love those conversations. Hit subscribe or follow if you haven't, and if you're on YouTube, give us a like.

Honestly, that stuff really does help us reach more people. I appreciate you either way. This is the way. Oh, and go out and crush it today.