Podcasts about Gemini

Identifying AI-generated content is getting harder, even for the experts. Do the rest of us stand a chance? In the final installment of Tech News Briefing's three-part series, "AI and the Blurring of Reality," WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen sits down with digital forensics and photo experts to find out why spotting deepfakes is so difficult and get practical advice for scrutinizing the images and videos in our feeds. Further Listening: When AI Grandmas Go Viral, What Even Is Reality Anymore? AI Is Fueling a New Kind of Political Propaganda Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A massive new review pooling 113 clinical trials and almost 8,000 people just weighed in on whether collagen supplements actually work, and Chalene Johnson breaks down what the research really found for skin, joints, and muscle, tied to the estrogen drop behind midlife skin changes. Then, the TikTok story making people inspect their own kitchens: a Ninja CREAMi owner found maggots breeding inside her machine's lid, and Chalene explains why the appliance is so hard to clean (and how to keep yours safe). Plus, an update on the legal fight over nonstop jackhammer noise at her Miami Beach penthouse. Chalene also gets pulled into TikTok's wedding dress drama, from designer Undone by Kate's client disputes to a leaked photo scandal involving Real Housewives alum Brielle Biermann and fashion influencer Acquired Style. She closes with a warning about sites like Consumer Reports blocking AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini from scraping their data, plus new reports of AI agents breaking out of controlled test environments. Topics discussed: collagen study, Science Daily, estrogen, Ninja CREAMi, Undone by Kate, Brielle Biermann, Kim Zolciak, Don't Be Tardy for the Party, Real Housewives of Atlanta, Acquired Style, Shay Sullivan, Consumer Reports, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Clancy murders. Join Chalene on Patreon her private podcast to hear all the details on the Penthouse Drama

Have you seen Instagram's new logo? Meta debuted it right before we started recording, so of course David and Nilay needed to talk about it. Then, the hosts turn to Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word missive on the future of AI, and the problem with his idea that giving AI to everyone will fix everything. After that, it's time for Claude watermarks, Spotify AI personas, Brendan Carr, Flock, and much more. Further reading: ⁠This is Instagram's new logo | The Verge⁠ ⁠The Pepsi Universe PDF ⁠The Future is for Everyone⁠ ⁠Four takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg's massive AI manifesto ⁠ ⁠Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live ⁠ ⁠https://www.meta.com/design-at-meta/blog/⁠ ⁠Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images ⁠ ⁠‘If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in.' ⁠ ⁠Spotify says it won't recommend music from ‘AI Personas' ⁠ ⁠Apple could help you prove your iPhone photos aren't deepfakes | The Verge⁠ ⁠Guitar company D'Addario admits that AI music was used in a promotional video | The Verge⁠ ⁠Fender's CEO seems to think your bandmates are just analog AI | The Verge⁠ ⁠Suno Unveils Download Song Caps for Free, Paid Tiers⁠ ⁠Brendan Carr is one firing away from an unchecked FCC⁠ ⁠YouTube is making it harder to earn money on YouTube ⁠ ⁠Flock CEO: ‘We got this one wrong' ⁠ ⁠The first rival Android app store just arrived in the US Play Store ⁠ ⁠ChatGPT and Gemini both just passed 1 billion users ⁠ ⁠The sub-$100 phone market is disappearing. ⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome and Parental Leave Announcement 00:43 Instagram Redesigns Their Logo  01:04 Why Companies Change Logos 03:37 Meta Design Blog Quotes 07:22 The 2008 Pepsi Universe Presentation 09:41 Blanding  10:37 Zuck's AI Manifesto  13:29 Collective Action Problems 18:49 Superintelligence for All 20:57 Cybersecurity and AI Risks 22:22 China Chips and Distillation 27:48 Write the Law Challenge 32:30 Claude Text Watermarking 35:33 How The Watermark Works 39:34 Limits And Evasion Risks 41:54 Apple Marks Real Photos 46:03 Provenance Standards Fail 46:58 AI Music Backlash 49:39 Fender CEO AI Scandal 53:08 Where AI Fits In Music 59:13 Twitch Opt Out Training 01:01:35 The Lightning Round 01:02:55 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:04:55 Bans Don't Work 01:05:56 Made in America Assembly 01:10:19 Gemini Claims a Billion Users 01:15:40 YouTube Partner Paywall 01:20:56 RAMageddon Cheap Phones 01:23:52 Flock Camera Backlash 01:27:19 Goodbyes and Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podcasting 2.0 August 14th 2026 Episode 267 - "Chocolove" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - THE SPOTIFY "SKIP AHEAD" BUTTON — THE BIG ONE What it is: Spotify is testing a button that appears on the playback screen the moment it thinks you'd want to skip — an intro, a sponsorship message, or an entire ad break. It is bigger than everything else on screen. One tap drops you at the end of the break, back in the show. Premium subscribers only, selected markets including US and UK, and only when the app is in the foreground. Who broke it: James Cridland at Pod News, 4 August 2026 — an exclusive. Spotify never announced it. Semafor and most of the trade press picked it up afterwards; Cridland noted on air this week that some of them ran it without credit. The number that makes it different from a skip button: Cridland's arithmetic — skipping a typical ad break by hand is nine presses of the 15-second button, plus a correction tap when you overshoot. Skip Ahead is one. "Some people have said, oh, but you've been able to skip for years and this is no different. But a button that only appears when it's stuff that Spotify thinks you should be skipping is a start." It skips other people's money: the button fires on third-party ads — Acast, Odyssey, the New York Times — and on ads inside Spotify's own shows. It even skipped Search Engine's read for its own paid tier, PJ Vogt pitching Incognito Mode. One half of Spotify sells advertisers reach; the other half hands listeners a button to leave. Spotify's answer, and the trapdoor in it: Spotify told Cridland it is "not affecting ad delivery." True only if delivery means to the device. Cridland: "If ad delivery is to the listener's ear, which is actually what people are paying for..." — the download still counts, the ad still gets billed, the human never hears it. Spotify's other defence: the button merely shows where other listeners already skip. Cridland: "I'm not entirely sold on that, but if that's what Spotify say, I mean they wouldn't lie."

Discover what successful women should know beyond their financial advisor, why having an advisor and being financially educated are two very different things, and why successful women need both. You'll learn about some of the limitations financial firms may face, why certain investment opportunities may never be brought to your attention, and how becoming more knowledgeable can help you ask better questions, uncover new possibilities, and take a more active role in creating your financial future and becoming the CEO of your wealth. Are you on track for financial freedom...or not? Financial freedom is a combination of money, compounding and time (my McT Formula). How well you invest can make the biggest difference to your financial freedom and lifestyle. If you invested well for the long-term, what a difference it would make because the difference between investing $100k and earning 5 percent or 10 percent on your money over 30 years, is the difference between it growing to $432,194 or $1,744,940, an increase of over $1.3 million dollars. Your compounding rate, and how well you invest, matters!  INVESTING IS WHAT THE BE WEALTHY & SMART VIP EXPERIENCE IS ALL ABOUT - Invest in digital assets and stock ETFs for potential high compounding rates - Receive an Asset Allocation model with ticker symbols and what % to invest -Monthly LIVE investment webinars with Linda 10 months per year, with Q & A -Private VIP Facebook group with daily community interaction -Weekly investment commentary -Extra educational wealth classes available -Pay once, have lifetime access! NO recurring membership fees. -US and foreign investors are welcome -No minimum $ amount to invest -Tech Team available for digital assets (for hire per hour) For a limited time, enjoy a 50% savings on my private investing group, the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Pay once and enjoy lifetime access without any additional recurring fees. Pay once and you're done! Invest with our successful community for years to come. Enter "SAVE50" to save 50% here: http://tinyurl.com/InvestingVIP Or set up a complimentary conversation to answer your questions about the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Request an appointment to talk with Linda here: https://tinyurl.com/TalkWithLinda (yes, you talk to Linda!). SUBSCRIBE TO BE WEALTHY & SMART Click Here to Subscribe Via iTunes Click Here to Subscribe Via Stitcher on an Android Device Click Here to Subscribe Via RSS Feed LINDA'S WEALTH BOOKS 1. Get my book, "3 Steps to Quantum Wealth: The Wealth Heiress' Guide to Financial Freedom by Investing in Cryptocurrencies". 2. Get my book, "You're Already a Wealth Heiress, Now Think and Act Like One: 6 Practical Steps to Make It a Reality Now!" Men love it too! After all, you are Wealth Heirs. :) International buyers (if you live outside of the US) get my book here. WANT MORE FROM LINDA? Check out her programs. Join her on Instagram. WEALTH LIBRARY OF PODCASTS Listen to the full wealth library of podcasts from the beginning.  SPECIAL DEALS #Ad Apply for a Gemini credit card and get FREE XRP back (or any crypto you choose) when you use the card. Charge $3000 in first 90 days and earn $200 in crypto rewards when you use this link to apply and are approved: https://tinyurl.com/geminixrp This is a credit card, NOT a debit card. There are great rewards. Set your choice to EARN FREE XRP! #Ad Protect yourself online with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Get 3 MONTHS FREE when you sign up for a NORD VPN plan here.  #Ad To safely and securely store crypto, I recommend using a Tangem wallet. Get a 10% discount when you purchase here. #Ad If you are looking to simplify your crypto tax reporting, use Koinly. It is highly recommended and so easy for tax reporting. You can save $20, click here. Be Wealthy & Smart,™ is a personal finance show with self-made millionaire Linda P. Jones, America's Wealth Mentor.™ Learn simple steps that make a big difference to your financial freedom.  (This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission. There is no additional cost to you.)  

ChatGPT can do what now?

A.M. Edition for Aug. 13. A Journal investigation finds that thousands of North Korean operatives have landed jobs at American companies and are funneling millions of dollars back to the regime. Plus, big businesses like Apple and FedEx start reeling in hundreds of millions in tariff refunds. And the WSJ's Stu Woo details how American chatbots are towing Beijing's party line. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anthropic's investors talked up a $2T+ October IPO, even as data showed Fable 5 barely selling. Google cut prices on Gemini 3.7 Flash, OpenAI previewed a 14× faster tier, Trump enlisted private hackers, and Twitch fed Amazon's AI. Links Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash targets coding and agents with a 50% introductory price cut (VentureBeat) OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second (9to5Mac) President Trump signs a memo letting the US government partner with private companies to conduct cyberattacks abroad against criminal groups targeting Americans (Bloomberg) Sources: Anthropic's investors expect it to float at a $2T+ valuation in an October IPO and to hit $100B to $120B in annualized revenue by the end of 2026 (Financial Times) Ramp data: Fable 5 drew just 6% of Anthropic's API tokens in its first month and 75% of GPT-5.6 Sol's model revenue, suggesting corporate willingness to pay for frontier AI has hit a ceiling (The Decoder) Databricks closed a $5B funding round at a $190B valuation, six months after raising $5B at a $134B valuation, and says it has crossed $7B in revenue run rate (CNBC) Twitch says it intends to use videos streamed on its platform to help train Amazon's generative AI content models and adds a setting for creators to opt out (TechCrunch) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Build your AI knowledge base (template + kit): https://clickhubspot.com/fhfs Ep. 444 Stop outsourcing your intelligence to AI assistants—build your own personal intelligence layer instead! Kieran dives into how to construct your own marketing intelligence layer that you can plug into any AI assistant for a serious competitive edge. Learn how to capture and structure career learnings, keep your intelligence portable and up-to-date, and turn your unique insights into the biggest differentiator in the age of AI. Mentions Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow https://www.hubspot.com/loop-marketing-book ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/ Claude https://claude.ai/ Gemini https://gemini.google.com/ Obsidian https://obsidian.md/ Get our guide to build your own Custom GPT: https://clickhubspot.com/customgpt Resource [Free] Steal our favorite AI Prompts featured on the show! Grab them here: https://clickhubspot.com/aip We're on Social Media! Follow us for everyday marketing wisdom straight to your feed YouTube: ​​https://www.youtube.com/@matgpod Twitter: https://twitter.com/matgpod  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marketingatg  Thank you for tuning into Marketing Against The Grain! Don't forget to hit subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts (so you never miss an episode)! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-against-the-grain/id1616700934   We really appreciate your support. Host Links: Kipp Bodnar, https://twitter.com/kippbodnar   Kieran Flanagan, https://twitter.com/searchbrat  ‘Marketing Against The Grain' is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by Hubspot Media // Produced by Darren Clarke.

One of the biggest problems with healthcare isn't a lack of data, but the fact that none of it is connected. We have lab results, wearables, environmental exposures, sleep scores, and medical records scattered in different places. Yet we're often left without a clear picture of what all that information actually means for our health. I sat down with Nasim Afsar to explore how artificial intelligence could help us bring those pieces together. We talked about using tools like Claude and Gemini for health questions, the limitations of today's AI models, privacy concerns, and why relying too heavily on numbers can disconnect you from what your body is telling you. We also look at where healthcare is headed, from continuous monitoring and predictive analytics to personalized prevention before symptoms become bigger problems. You'll hear about how to filter through biohacking noise, make smarter decisions with your health data, and use technology without letting it replace your own judgment.   "Large language models have access to a wealth of information that can help you better understand what your information says, and potentially brainstorm about what else could be going on." ~ Nasim Afsar   In This Episode: - The pillars of intelligent health - Using AI to analyze complex health symptoms - Best LLMs and wearables for health data - Avoiding health optimization overload - Monitoring and consolidating data for health intelligence - Bias in AI recommendations - How algorithms shape health information - Three steps to take charge of your health - AI health tools and where to get Nasim's book   Products & Resources Mentioned: Nasim Afsar's Book, Intelligent Health: A resource built to unify data, harness AI, and empower people to thrive. Get it at https://www.nasimafsarmd.com/book  Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil: Try a full-size $39 bottle for just $1 to cover shipping at https://getfreshwendy.com   Puori Grass-Fed PW1 Whey Protein: Use code WENDY20 to save up to 32% off your order and get a free shaker worth $25 at https://puori.com/wendy20  Tru Energy Skincare Bio Adaptive Hydration Oil: Try the oil and save up to $197 at trytruenergy.com/wendy5  Heavy Metals Quiz: Check your toxicity score and receive a free video series on how to detox your body. Take the quiz at https://heavymetalsquiz.com    About Nasim Afsar: Nasim Afsar, MD, MBA, is a visionary healthcare executive dedicated to transforming health and care across the globe. As the former SVP and Chief Health Officer at Oracle, Dr. Afsar led multiple business units, including the Health Transformation Office, where she partnered with delivery systems globally to advance clinical outcomes and operational excellence. She spearheaded Product Strategy, building a robust operational go-to-market framework and leading Global Market Strategy and Entry. Additionally, she established a dynamic marketplace for Third-Party Partnerships. She founded and chaired the Oracle Health AI in Healthcare, Retail in Healthcare, and Payers Steering Committees, driving transformative innovation for customers. At UCLA Health, she served as Associate Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer. You can learn more about her work at https://www.nasimafsarmd.com/    Disclaimer The Myers Detox Podcast was created and hosted by Dr. Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from using the information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests' qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.

This is your daily horoscope for Saturday, August 15, and the most important aspects of the day:Mercury in Leo conjunct Jupiter in Leo (4am PT)Moon enters Libra (7am PT)Moon in Libra square Mars in Cancer (12:30pm PT)Moon in Libra trine Pluto in Aquarius (2pm PT)Moon in Libra opposite Neptune in Aries (2:30pm PT)Moon in Libra trine Uranus in Gemini (5pm PT)Unlock More MagicGrimoire: Become a Better Witch in 12 WeeksBook a Reading with StephanieAccess Personalized Horoscopes + Join Stephanie's PatreonMake a DifferenceJustice for Nolan Wells: Send Support to His FamilySupport Karmelo Anthony I Message Him or Donate (SID #: 21558442; Facility: TDCJ - PACK)Sign the Petition + Demand Clemency for Jeffery Lee I Call Gov. Ivey + Demand Clemency 334-242-7100Justice for Cyrus Carmack-BeltonSupport the Free Alabama Movement

В этом выпуске: рисуем векторных котов и трехмерные шестерни в Gemini, режем алюминий Dremel’ем, осваиваем терминал Kitty и часы Pebble Time 2, поднимаем локального LLM-агента сравнимого с Клодом 4.6, а также обсуждаем темы слушателей. Шоуноты: [00:00:00] Чему мы научились Announcing Cloudflare Wallets: The programmable wallet for the agentic Internet | Cloudflare Blog paulmcauley/klassy: Klassy offers… Читать далее →

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down NVIDIA’s case for world action models, the shift that swaps a robot’s picture-describing backbone for one trained to predict what happens next. He also covers Perseverance closing in on the off-world driving record, a derelict SpaceX rocket stage hitting the Moon, and Anthropic’s rework of Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards. Finally, he digs into Gemini Omni, Google’s undisclosed trip-planning rankings, the Danube’s record low, and iFixit’s call for Apple to unlock the iPad bootloader. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. Wildfires in Eastern Oregon made for a rough week of heavy smoke, and a local building burned down, which he calls a real tragedy. Meanwhile, his work at Blubrry has centered on PowerPress fixes, where reproducing customer-reported bugs remains the biggest headache. Support tickets rarely carry enough detail, and the errors themselves are often too vague to diagnose. Consequently, he is leaning toward a stronger logging and error layer, and he asks experienced developers to share what actually works for them. Beyond VLAs: NVIDIA’s Case for World Action Models The featured story comes from NVIDIA’s developer blog, and it answers a question sitting underneath this year’s robot news. Why do robot arms fall apart the moment anything changes? Move a cup six inches, swap its shape, or change the lighting, and a policy that worked perfectly in training fails. The answer, according to NVIDIA, is not the robot but the model underneath it. For the last few years, the dominant approach has been the vision-language-action model, or VLA, built on an AI that originally learned to describe pictures. Consequently, it recognizes a banana it has never seen, in a kitchen it has never seen, yet it has no idea what that banana will do next. As the article puts it, such a model “does not learn what happens to a mug when the gripper closes, how a towel folds, where an object lands when released.” Because the physics never arrives with the model, every scrap of it has to come out of hand-recorded demonstrations. The proposed fix swaps the foundation entirely. Instead of building on a model that learned to caption images, a world action model builds on one trained to predict how video continues, so the physics is already paid for. Notably, these models output an action and a prediction of what the robot’s cameras will see, in the same pass. Cochrane likens it to forethought, imagining your own motion as you make it. NVIDIA’s implementation is Cosmos 3, pretrained on roughly 767 million images and 348 million videos of real-world dynamics. It ships in 4, 16, and 64 billion parameter sizes named Edge, Nano, and Super, and it runs in real time on a Jetson Thor board bolted to the robot itself. Cochrane recalls his dad owning one of those Jetson boards, and he asks anyone working in robotics to explain how the throughput figures fit together. However, he closes on an open question: where did 348 million videos actually come from? For deeper detail, he points listeners to the source article and to NVIDIA researcher Jim Fan. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Perseverance Closes In on the Off-World Driving Record Ars Technica reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover is about to take the record for most distance driven on another world. The mark sits at roughly 28 miles, set by NASA’s own Opportunity rover across more than fourteen years before it went quiet in 2018. As Cochrane works out on air, that averages about two miles a year. Perseverance will pass it in roughly five years instead. The difference is a navigation system called AutoNav. Since a radio signal takes several minutes to reach Mars, earlier rovers crept along pre-plotted routes and stopped every half meter to think. Perseverance carries a second computer dedicated to processing what its cameras see, so it plans while the wheels keep turning. Consequently, about ninety percent of its driving is autonomous, against roughly ten percent for Curiosity, and it averages around 110 meters an hour rather than 15 to 18. Cochrane notes researchers finding the rover at planned sites days ahead of schedule, and he wonders aloud whether world action models might drive the next one. A SpaceX Rocket Stage Slammed Into the Moon Next, Smithsonian Magazine covered the Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5. That stage flew back in January 2025, carrying Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience landers, and it was never meant to end up there. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman says a mixture of solar activity and gravity nudged the derelict onto a lunar path after nineteen months adrift. Four tonnes of dead hardware arrived at about 5,400 miles per hour. Nobody watched it happen, and the reason is a nice bit of physics. It struck sunlit ground near a crater called Einstein, and no impact flash has ever been detected on the lit part of the Moon. However, the instruments caught the aftermath. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter imaged a dark new mark, while the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope picked up sodium and lithium in the plume, the lithium possibly shed by the rocket itself. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell quipped that he has “Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon,” while planetary scientist Hannah Sargeant warns against making a habit of it. Cochrane points out the Apollo landing sites are still sitting up there. Anthropic Reworks Claude Fable 5’s Biology Safeguards Anthropic published a post on how Claude Fable 5 handles biology questions, and the bind is genuine. Biology is the textbook dual-use problem, since the knowledge behind reading your own lab results also helps someone build a weapon. Rather than refusing outright, a classifier watches for risky requests and quietly reroutes them to Claude Opus 5, a capable model without Fable 5’s biological depth. Anthropic calls that mechanism a fallback. The trouble was how often it fired on people doing nothing wrong. This update cut biology-related fallbacks by roughly 85 percent in Anthropic’s own testing, with expected overall drops of 67 percent on Claude.ai and 55 percent on Cowork. Genuinely dual-use territory still trips it, and Anthropic names virology, toxicology, and molecular design. Cochrane hit the old behavior himself and found it irritating, so he welcomes the refinement. Even so, he would rather see a false positive than a model helping someone produce a virus. Five Builders Put Gemini Omni Through Its Paces Google highlighted five builders working with Gemini Omni. Omni is a model rather than an app, and it generates video from text, images, other video, or audio, while also editing footage you already have. Google claims it “combines an intuitive understanding of physics with Gemini’s real-world knowledge,” citing gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics. As Cochrane observes, that is the same bet NVIDIA is making with robots, only pointed at video generation instead. He also flags a naming collision worth knowing about. NVIDIA calls its architecture an omni-model while Google’s product is simply Omni, two different things landing in the same week. Additionally, he encourages listeners to watch the demos, though he still senses a disconnect in AI-generated video and concedes that knowing its origin may color the impression. Gemini Wants to Plan Your Vacation Another Gemini piece, a how-to on trip planning, drew Cochrane’s sharpest take of the night. Gemini plugs straight into Google Maps, Flights, and Hotels, pulling live locations, reviews, and prices to build an itinerary. Switch on a feature called Personal Intelligence, and it reads across your Google apps, turning a messy trip-planning email chain into a clean master plan. Clever, but he calls it extremely concerning. Once these become services, he expects partnerships to quietly push particular hotels, restaurants, resorts, and destinations onto users. Notably, Google’s post never explains how any of it gets ranked, and the words sponsored, ad, affiliate, commission, and paid never appear once. There is no disclosure of a commercial arrangement, and no denial of one either. Meanwhile the post hands readers off to Viator to book tours without describing that relationship at all. Cochrane suspects the real effect shows up slowly, in the shape of small businesses continuing to disappear. The Senate Blocks a Rule on Who Controls Research Money Science reports that the Senate passed a temporary spending bill in the early hours of Saturday the 8th. The Senate’s version carries a one-paragraph rider the House version lacks, and that rider stops the White House Office of Management and Budget from finalizing a set of proposed rules. OMB builds the president’s budget, clears agency regulations, and controls how approved money actually reaches agencies. The bill itself is a stopgap, which prevents a shutdown without settling anything. The rules reach every organization that takes federal money, a pot of roughly $1.1 trillion across 41 agencies, about $150 billion of it research grants. They would let political appointees second-guess which grants get funded, allow awarded grants to be pulled when the work does not match presidential priorities, and put several countries off limits for research partnerships, China first among them. Senator Susan Collins pushed the block through after telling OMB director Russell Vought the proposal was deeply flawed, noting nearly 500,000 public comments, the vast majority opposed. However, the 90-6 vote is not law. Both chambers are on recess. Vought reportedly said the rule would not have been finalized before December anyway, and the block only lasts as long as the stopgap, which expires December 11. The Danube Falls to a Record Low ESA published a pair of Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images showing the same bend of the Danube, 45 kilometers upstream of Budapest, photographed a year apart. Cochrane calls the before-and-after shocking, going from green to brown completely. Wire reports put the Budapest gauge near 10 centimeters at the start of the month, about four inches of water, against a previous record of 33 centimeters set in 2018. The knock-on effects arrived fast. Budapest ran short on both power and drinking water, while the shrinking flow concentrated pollution in what remained. Romania hit record lows on its own stretch as well. Cochrane hopes the recovery is already underway. What a Heatwave Actually Does to the Power Grid That river story runs directly into a Carbon Brief factcheck. Nuclear plants cool themselves with river water, so when the Danube dropped, plants in Hungary and Romania throttled back and pulled roughly 2.5 gigawatts off the grid. Romania declared a state of alert in its energy sector, and its navy reportedly used explosives to steer more water toward a plant intake. Carbon Brief then walked through what heatwaves do to each way of making electricity. Nuclear loses efficiency when the cooling water is already warm, though its shutdowns are mostly regulatory rather than mechanical. Gas turbines pull in less air because hot air is thinner, costing capacity. Wind falls off hardest, since a heatwave is a big stalled dome of high pressure and nearly still air. Solar is the surprise: cells genuinely do get less efficient as they heat up, yet total output climbs anyway, with UK solar up 46 percent during a four-day June heatwave against the week before. Butterflies Are on the Move Everywhere A new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution covered 1,758 butterfly species, roughly one in ten of every species we have named. The team pulled 6,182 records from 105 countries, reading non-English research alongside 68 expert write-ups. Four out of five species pushed into new territory, and about 79 percent of the logged shifts traced back to climate change and extreme weather. Separately, 27 percent saw their range shrink somewhere, and 22 percent moved up or down a mountain slope chasing cooler air. That sounds like good news, and it really is not. Expansion means a boundary moved, not that butterflies are thriving, since a species can push its northern edge forward while its southern edge quietly collapses. Lead author Shawan Chowdhury says the shifts turn up on every continent where butterflies occur. Additionally, monitoring gaps leave Central Africa, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and the Amazon Basin barely counted at all. Cochrane recalls hearing years ago that butterflies were disappearing in Hawaii, and he invites listeners spotting unfamiliar species locally to contribute what they see. Primates Make Friends Across Species Cochrane called this one a fun find. A study in the journal Primates, led by Cyril Grueter at Oxford, gathered 427 documented cases going back to the 1970s across 88 primate species and 127 partner species. Play and grooming dominated at 139 and 136 cases, alongside carrying, huddling, food sharing, and even adoption. Primates usually started the interactions themselves, with juveniles playing most, adult females handling grooming and caregiving, and adult males least likely to join in. The examples are remarkable. Japanese macaques on the island of Yakushima groom sika deer and climb on their backs, a silverback gorilla cradled a tiny wild bushbaby, and wild capuchins in Brazil adopted an infant marmoset in a bond that held for weeks. However, Grueter rejects the pet-keeping headline and prefers the hedged term proto-pet keeping. The actual claim is smaller and more interesting: curiosity, tolerance, caregiving, and play have roots running far deeper than humans do. iFixit Tells Apple to Unlock the iPad Finally, an opinion piece from Charlie Sorrel at iFixit struck a chord. This fall, iPadOS 27 drops support for a batch of older iPads, including the 8th-generation iPad, the third-generation Air, the fifth-generation mini, and the first-generation iPad Pros. Cochrane owns one of those Pros and reports it still works fine. Those devices will not break, but they stop getting OS and security updates until apps abandon them and the battery gives out. The obvious second life is Linux, except the bootloader stays locked. Apple’s iBoot will not load anything else, unlike a Mac, a PC, or most Android phones. Sorrel argues it “should be a user choice, not a vendor choice,” and Cochrane agrees flatly. You own the device, so why does Apple decide what runs on it? He compares the situation to jailbreaking, and he suspects most consumers have never pushed back simply because it never occurs to them. Nevertheless, he hopes an unlock eventually breathes new life into hardware that still works perfectly well. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email geeknews@gmail.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, and he signs off wishing listeners a wonderful evening. The post The Robot That Imagines First #1872 appeared first on Geek News Central.

For years, reviews played a fairly predictable role in growing a tax or accounting firm.A prospect found your firm. Visited your website. Checked your reviews. And then decided whether to call.AI is beginning to rewrite that sequence.Today, prospects can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or another AI assistant a much more valuable question:“Which accounting firm should I hire—and why?”That means discovery and due diligence are starting to happen inside the same conversation.Your reviews are no longer just something prospects read after they discover your firm. They are becoming part of the digital evidence that can help search engines, AI systems, and prospective clients understand who you serve, what you are good at, how clients experience working with you, and whether your firm deserves to be recommended.In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant, Lee Reams II and Rebekah Barton explore the new ROI of reviews—and why reputation is becoming an increasingly important part of your search strategy.They explain why ten detailed, authentic client stories may communicate far more about a firm than ten generic five-star reviews; why review generation should become an ongoing “reputation heartbeat” instead of an occasional campaign; and why firms may need to rethink traditional marketing measurements built around clicks, traffic, and rankings.The bigger shift is simple:Stop optimizing only to get the click. Start building a firm that is easy to understand, easy to trust, and easy to recommend.Because your clients may already know how good your firm is.The market—and increasingly AI—only knows the evidence it can see.See How Recommendable Your Firm IsIf your ideal client asked AI today to recommend the perfect accounting firm for them, would your firm make the shortlist?Find out.Get your free Recommendability Report:https://recommendability.countingworks.appSee where your firm is strong, where your digital evidence may be creating gaps, and what you can improve to become easier for humans—and AI—to understand, trust, and recommend.

En este episodio de El Brieff para este jueves revisamos la detención de un exfuncionario de Campeche por un presunto esquema de peculado, el nuevo criterio de la Suprema Corte sobre bloqueos de cuentas de la UIF y el hallazgo de huachicol en Nuevo León. También contamos por qué Karoline Leavitt dejará la Casa Blanca, cómo un eclipse total paralizó parte de Europa y por qué ICE quiere comprar guantes eléctricos. Además: la demanda contra Trump por vender acceso anticipado a sus publicaciones, la compra de los Lakers por Bob Iger y Joshua Kushner, el hito de mil millones de usuarios de Gemini y la filtración de un prototipo del control Xbox Elite Series 3.Este episodio de El Brieff es presentado por STRTGY. Gracias por ayudarnos a llevarte las noticias que necesitas para comenzar informado el día.Si quieres descubrir dónde tu empresa está perdiendo dinero o dejando oportunidades sin aprovechar, agenda un diagnóstico con STRTGY. Escríbeles a arturo@strtgy.ai o por WhatsApp al +52 81 3232 2698.Recibe gratis nuestro newsletter con las noticias más importantes del día.Si te interesa una mención en El Brieff, escríbenos a arturo@strtgy.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailMeta and NVIDIA are turning up the heat in the open-weight AI race, while Anthropic is taking a very different approach by watermarking Claude-generated content. Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias unpack what these moves mean for associations, from choosing models and inference providers to avoiding lock-in at the agent harness layer. They also explore why AI models are becoming increasingly commoditized, where proprietary models may still have an edge, and why Claude's new watermarking strategy probably isn't a foolproof solution for detecting AI-generated work. Plus, Amith shares lessons from Blue Cypress's latest AI hackathon, including how associations can use focused offsites to accelerate adoption and generate new ideas, and the hosts discuss a more productive approach to AI-generated submissions: using AI to evaluate quality, relevance, and originality rather than trying to ban it outright. 

A.M. Edition for Aug. 12. Centrist David Crowley scores an electoral upset in Wisconsin, narrowly defeating Democratic socialist Francesca Hong in a race to secure the Democratic nomination for governor. WSJ's Damian Paletta says Crowley's victory could mark a turning point for progressives. Plus, New York City launches a sweeping investigation into four prediction markets – probing Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase and Gemini Titan for alleged deceptive marketing practices and the targeting of minors. And could one of Hollywood's oldest studios be relocating from Tinseltown to Music City? Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cacao Blisshttps://TryCacaoBliss.com/Todd This hot drink DOUBLED stem cells in 30 day study (Green tea vs Hot Cacao vs Coffee). Boost anti-aging stem cells for heart health, blood pressure, longevity with Cacao Bliss. Angel Studioshttps://Angel.com/ToddBecome an Angel Guild member to watch Charlie Kirk: American Martyr and help bring more stories of faith, courage, and convocation to audiences around the world.  Absolute Ministrieshttps://AbsoluteMinistries.org/ToddYour gift helps people overcome addiction, find hope and purpose, and experience lasting change through a Christ-centered system of care. Together, we can support sustainable transformation that goes far beyond temporary sobriety. Alan's Soaphttps://AlansArtisanSoaps.com/Todd The legacy continues for Ian and Alan with Alan's Artisan Soaps “John's Favorites” bundle.  Get one bar of each of John's favorites for only $28.99. Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comBe confident in your portfolio with Bulwark! Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review. Go to KnowYourRiskPodcast.com today. Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com Get the new limited release, The Sisterhood, created to honor the extraordinary women behind the heroes. Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at: The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple Podcasts The Todd Herman Show | Podcast on Spotify  WATCH and SUBSCRIBE at:  Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeMiscarriages in Tony Fauci's TextsMiscarriages in Tony Fauci's Texts // Google's Gemini defends the lie that “trans-'women' are women.” // A Word Appears ONCE in the Bible, it Proves Christians Can Drift Into Hell

It's what's inside that counts. And with the new Pixels, that's Gemini. Also, somebody tried to phish everyone using WiFi on a Delta flight.Starring Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane.Links to stories discussed in this episode can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 312, Amanda Perez came out to the ranch and she and Snow Tha Product recorded after two days of hanging out and working on music. They talked about Henny vs tequila, touring and dating with a partner, Amanda's torn ACL and the knee replacement she keeps putting off, Snow's vocal cord surgery she keeps putting off too, shaving their heads and hair holding energy, spirit guides and angel numbers, flies as bad energy, the haunted hotel in San Antonio and the dream Amanda had after, the ghost in her garage, fans who say weird stuff and fans who grab, promoters and ticketing companies eating off artists, tour riders and Madonna's brand new toilet seat at every venue, airport meltdowns and almost missing a flight to Mexico City, Bernedoodles and hairless cats, zodiac signs and an astrology book that called every relationship she'd been in, how hard it is to write sad songs when you're finally happy, fans asking for money, and Amanda losing both her parents and raising her six year old different than she came up. Watch on YouTube and catch the livestreamed podcast every Tuesday at 6pm Pacific to join the chat. Find all episodes at everynightnights.com.Join the BCC everynightnights chat→ http://www.everynightnights.chat   / @snowthaproduct    / snowthaproduct    / snowthaproduct  

Plus: European vibe-coding startup Lovable notches $13 billion valuation. And rust-powered battery maker Form Energy raises $750 million to boost manufacturing. Danny Lewis hosts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Discover what the latest inflation numbers changed. The latest inflation report could have important implications for interest rates, the economy, and your investments as the Federal Reserve approaches its September meeting. In this episode, you'll discover what the new inflation data may be signaling, why Fed officials remain divided, how the weakening job market could influence their decision, and which risks could still change the outlook. You'll also learn what to watch in the weeks ahead and why the direction of inflation and interest rates could create an important shift in the investment landscape. Are you on track for financial freedom...or not? Financial freedom is a combination of money, compounding and time (my McT Formula). How well you invest can make the biggest difference to your financial freedom and lifestyle. If you invested well for the long-term, what a difference it would make because the difference between investing $100k and earning 5 percent or 10 percent on your money over 30 years, is the difference between it growing to $432,194 or $1,744,940, an increase of over $1.3 million dollars. Your compounding rate, and how well you invest, matters!  INVESTING IS WHAT THE BE WEALTHY & SMART VIP EXPERIENCE IS ALL ABOUT - Invest in digital assets and stock ETFs for potential high compounding rates - Receive an Asset Allocation model with ticker symbols and what % to invest -Monthly LIVE investment webinars with Linda 10 months per year, with Q & A -Private VIP Facebook group with daily community interaction -Weekly investment commentary -Extra educational wealth classes available -Pay once, have lifetime access! NO recurring membership fees. -US and foreign investors are welcome -No minimum $ amount to invest -Tech Team available for digital assets (for hire per hour) For a limited time, enjoy a 50% savings on my private investing group, the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Pay once and enjoy lifetime access without any additional recurring fees. Pay once and you're done! Invest with our successful community for years to come. Enter "SAVE50" to save 50% here: http://tinyurl.com/InvestingVIP Or set up a complimentary conversation to answer your questions about the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Request an appointment to talk with Linda here: https://tinyurl.com/TalkWithLinda (yes, you talk to Linda!). SUBSCRIBE TO BE WEALTHY & SMART Click Here to Subscribe Via iTunes Click Here to Subscribe Via Stitcher on an Android Device Click Here to Subscribe Via RSS Feed LINDA'S WEALTH BOOKS 1. Get my book, "3 Steps to Quantum Wealth: The Wealth Heiress' Guide to Financial Freedom by Investing in Cryptocurrencies". 2. Get my book, "You're Already a Wealth Heiress, Now Think and Act Like One: 6 Practical Steps to Make It a Reality Now!" Men love it too! After all, you are Wealth Heirs. :) International buyers (if you live outside of the US) get my book here. WANT MORE FROM LINDA? Check out her programs. Join her on Instagram. WEALTH LIBRARY OF PODCASTS Listen to the full wealth library of podcasts from the beginning.  SPECIAL DEALS #Ad Apply for a Gemini credit card and get FREE XRP back (or any crypto you choose) when you use the card. Charge $3000 in first 90 days and earn $200 in crypto rewards when you use this link to apply and are approved: https://tinyurl.com/geminixrp This is a credit card, NOT a debit card. There are great rewards. Set your choice to EARN FREE XRP! #Ad Protect yourself online with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Get 3 MONTHS FREE when you sign up for a NORD VPN plan here.  #Ad To safely and securely store crypto, I recommend using a Tangem wallet. Get a 10% discount when you purchase here. #Ad If you are looking to simplify your crypto tax reporting, use Koinly. It is highly recommended and so easy for tax reporting. You can save $20, click here. Be Wealthy & Smart,™ is a personal finance show with self-made millionaire Linda P. Jones, America's Wealth Mentor.™ Learn simple steps that make a big difference to your financial freedom.  (This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission. There is no additional cost to you.)  

Google's Pixel event dominated, with the Pixel 11 line, a $1,899 Pro Fold, and a $399 Watch 5 packed with Gemini and health trends. SpaceXAI closed the day out by dropping Grok 4.6, which it says matches GPT-5.6 Sol. Links Google unveils the $899+ Pixel 11, $1,099+ 11 Pro, and $1,299+ 11 Pro XL, with a Tensor G6, new Gemini features, Magic Capture to pick the best frames, and more (TechCrunch) Google unveils the $1,899+ Pixel 11 Pro Fold, with a stronger hinge, inner and outer displays that are 20% brighter, Tensor G6 chip, and an updated 48MP camera (Engadget) Google unveils the $399 Pixel Watch 5 with a satin pyrite case finish, offline Gemini, proactive AI suggestions, better GPS maps, and insulin resistance trends (The Verge) SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.6, saying it matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and prices it at $2/1M input and $6/1M output tokens (SpaceXAI) Grok 4.6 is built for long-running agents, coding, and knowledge work, beating Grok 4.5 on CursorBench, FrontierCode, APEX-Agents, and Terminal-Bench, out today via Cursor, OpenRouter, and Vercel (9to5Mac) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Scheduled tasks are a secret weapon. ⚔️How secret? They can actually be hard to find and there's not a lot of info out there on how to use them. lolz. But for many, they can be the stepping stone to the fully autonomous desktop worker. Because for many users who may only be able (or comfortable) to access AI on the web, scheduled tasks provide that proactive, work-done-for-you vibe that AI agents delivered. But how does it work in Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude? And what's worth scheduling and automating? We put AI to work on this Wednesday and find out. Scheduling AI: how to easily make AI work for you in Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT -- An Everyday AI Chat with Jordan WilsonNewsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageToday's Episode on LinkedIn: Thoughts on this? Join the convo on LinkedIn and connect with other AI leaders.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:Introduction to Scheduling Tasks in AIGoogle Gemini Scheduled Actions OverviewChatGPT Scheduled Tasks Features & HacksChatGPT Work Mode and Virtual BrowserClaude Scheduled Tasks vs. Routines ComparisonUsing API Triggers with Claude Code RoutinesReal-World AI Dashboard Scheduling TestDetailed Results: Gemini vs. Claude vs. ChatGPTKey Takeaways for Best Automated SchedulingPractical Use Cases for Scheduling AI TasksTimestamps:00:00 Using scheduled tasks effectively06:00 Adopting AI for productivity06:51 Discussing main AI platforms12:45 Scheduling tasks with ChatGPT14:38 Work mode and virtual browsing17:58 Creating and Editing Scheduled Tasks22:47 Using Claude's cloud routines26:59 Creating interactive stock visuals27:51 Tracking AI company stock trends31:58 Reviewing AI stock tracking tool35:35 Improving user interface and experience39:23 ChatGPT's unique scheduling features41:49 Using APIs in Claude routines44:45 Dashboard automation and triage setupKeywords: AI scheduling, scheduling AI, scheduled tasks, scheduled actions, proactive agentic workflow, agentic adoption, agent built workflow, Google Gemini, Gemini scheduled actions, Gemini connectors, Gemini canvas mode, ChatGPT scheduling, ChatGPT scheduled tasks, ChatGPT work mode, ChatGPT projects, ChatGPT memory, ChatGPT sites, agentic app actions, model selector, reasoning level, app automation, connectors and skills, OpenAI, Claude scheduling, Claude scheduled tasks, Claude routines, Claude code, Claude co work, Claude home, Claude API token, Zapier integration, trigger-based automation, custom dashboards, triage dashboard, interactive visual, stock price dashboard, news summarization, personalized automation, user interface changes, web interfaces, desktop agents, repetitive tasks automation, business process automation, workflow optimization, productivity AI tools, AI-powered research, CRM integration, KPI trackingSend Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Ready for ROI on GenAI? Go to youreverydayai.com/partner 

Microsoft's AI investments reveal a bizarre financial loop where billions pour into infrastructure, yet profits remain elusive. The hosts break down why the industry's most hyped tech might just be a high-stakes game of circular accounting. Plus, a developer has resurrected Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a to run natively on Windows 11! Lastly, Stardock's latest utility replaces Alt + Tab for $7.99. Windows 25H2: new touchpad gestures, Windows Hello ESS improvements, Widgets improvements, Windows Search improvements, more 26H1: Windows Update calendar-based pausing, Picture Password EOL, Point in time restore, multi-camera support, user folder customization in Setup, etc. Over 420 bug fixes, but that's over 200 less than last month Follow-up on Microsoft's AI spending. It's much worse than we knew - And also much worse than we know now Yes, Microsoft Edge is going all-in on Manifest V3 Proton Drive - Now with a CLI and business features, and it's coming soon to Linux A developer ported Word for Windows 1.1 to x64 AI Gemini now has one billion users. But how many pay? - Plus the new Pixel phones are one step sideways, one step back OpenAI brings ChatGPT to Linux (!) Xbox and gaming A new Xbox Elite Series 3 controller leak shows it will have a mini display Microsoft tests new console features with Xbox Insiders Id Software brings a new episode to Quake to mark 30th anniversary! Minecraft is coming to Switch 2 Here comes GTA VI A Valve partner was hacked, Steam Machine customers warned Nintendo revenues decline 9.5 percent to ¥518 billion Tips and picks Tip of the week: View Git status directly in File Explorer App pick of the week: AltTabby RunAs Radio this week: The Content Management System Landscape with Matt Garrepy Brown liquor pick of the week: Sideshow Lincoln Straight Bottled-in-Bond Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: helixsleep.com/windows cirasync.com/Windows cachefly.com/twit

Grok Bot packages persistent computers, coordinated agent teams, workflow learning, and computer use into a remarkably simple interface. NLW explores why it could finally unlock widespread AI-agent adoption—and the cost, reliability, and trust issues that could hold it back. In the headlines: Anthropic's controversial text watermarks, Gemini hits one billion users, and Nvidia reshapes data-center financing.AIDB's AI Summer Adventure: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://summeradventure.ai/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brought to you by:KPMG – Research from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin shows the highest-impact AI users treat AI like a reasoning partner — and those skills can be taught at scale. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://kpmg.com/us/Sophisticated⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hyperagent - Hire a fleet of always-on agents. New users get $1,000 in inference. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hyperagent.com/aidailybrief⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rackspace Technology- One accountable partner to build, operate and run your full enterprise AI stack ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.rackspace.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Section - Section turns AI investment into workforce transformation and ROI - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.sectionai.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Blitzy - Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blitzy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.assemblyai.com/brief⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://robotsandpencils.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://pod.link/1680633614⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Our Newsletter is BACK: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai

Stop burning thousands of dollars on dead-end Facebook ads and Google marketing—the search landscape has permanently shifted, and the playing field is officially leveled! In this episode of The Note Closers Show, host Scott Carson breaks down how note buyers and real estate investors can dominate their target markets and rank as the #1 recommended investor using modern AI search tools. The days of prospects wading through ten blue links on Google are over. Today, sellers, lenders, and capital partners are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini directly for recommendations—and if you aren't providing machine-readable, factual content, you don't even exist in their search results. Whether you have closed zero deals or a hundred, Scott outlines a step-by-step strategy to optimize your digital footprint, leverage free high-authority blogging platforms, and repurpose your deal case studies into local "AI juice" that brings off-market deals and private capital straight to your inbox. Key Topics Covered:The Evolution of Search: Why traditional paid ads cratered and why AI answer engines now give direct, single-name recommendations instead of list links. Building Machine-Readable Trust: How to optimize your LinkedIn profile, About.me, and neutral third-party review sources so AI engines cite you as an authority. The Micro & Macro Blogging Strategy: How to use AI to generate city- and state-specific articles for your top 3 to 5 target markets on Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn. Leveraging Chamber of Commerce Directories: A growth-hack tactic to build high-authority backlinks and local credibility by highlighting local real estate vendors. Repurposing Audio & Video Content: How transcribing a simple 10-minute video case study creates multiple unique blogs and boosts your visibility fourfold. Optimizing Media & Video Length: Why YouTube pushes videos over 8 minutes and how proper image file naming drives extra search traffic. Don't let your competitors capture the top AI search spots while your experience sits on the sidelines. Take action, optimize your content workflow, and turn AI search into your primary deal-flow engine! If you want to discuss your note investing strategy or need help navigating your next deal, book a call directly at talkwithscottcarson.com. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with another investor looking to scale!Watch the Original Video of this Episode HERE!Book a Call With Scott HERE!Sign up for the next FREE One-Day Note Class HERE!Sign up for the WCN Membership HERE!Sign up for the next Note Buying For Dummies Workshop HERE!Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Here's How »Join the Note Closers Show community today:WeCloseNotes.comThe Note Closers Show FacebookThe Note Closers Show TwitterScott Carson LinkedInThe Note Closers Show YouTubeThe Note Closers Show VimeoThe Note Closers Show InstagramWe Close Notes Pinterest

Sheldon Poon, Founder of Drive Marketing, helps established brands go from Wholesale to D2C through performance-driven advertising grounded in data, technology, and human expertise. He is driven to build a company that reflects his values—one where people enjoy their work, have flexibility and autonomy, and continuously learn from and teach one another. In this conversation, Sheldon introduces The A.I.D.A. Framework—Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. He explains how businesses can eliminate friction across the customer journey, use clean data to improve AI-powered campaigns, and balance automation with human strategy. Sheldon also discusses why genuine relationships are driving B2B growth, how AI is reshaping internships and early-career development, and how Drive Marketing helps successful wholesale brands build direct customer relationships without jeopardizing their valuable retail partnerships — Go from Wholesale to D2C with Sheldon Poon  Good day, listeners. Today, I have Sheldon Poon as our guest. He’s the Founder of Drive Marketing, a Montreal-based paid ad agency specializing in performance-driven marketing with a heavy emphasis on using data to make informed strategic decisions. Founded in 2013, Drive Marketing positions themselves as a technical-first partner that bridges the gap between business goals and technical execution. So they’re not a creative agency. They are a technical agency improving your ads. Sheldon, welcome to the show.  Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I’m happy to be here. Yeah. Great to have you here. And my first question is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in the business? How are you contributing to human flourishing?  That’s a very big question for a small ad agency.  It is.  Yeah. So when I first started the company, I kind of, like a lot of entrepreneurs, right, it came from me kind of looking at my life and where I was in my career and kind of getting frustrated at what I was seeing with my day-to-day job. So I was in a very, very privileged position. I was able to take a bit of a sabbatical from my day job where they held my position, which was great, because if everything went downhill, I could always just jump back to my job.  And I was like, “You know what? Like, I have an opportunity here. I’ve always wanted to start a business.” But because I had been working for somebody else for almost, at that point, I think like a decade and a half, I had a lot of experience, and I saw a lot of things that I was like, “This is what I don’t want.” So when I started my company, my internal mission and vision was to build the company that I would want to work at, to build the company that is kind of true to myself and my values, and something that I would enjoy going into day to day.Share on X And then what does all that mean? So the company that I wanted to work at, as I started working and hiring people, what I found was I wanted to have flexibility in my schedule. We treat everybody on the team as an adult. Everybody’s responsible for their workload. And as long as they meet their deadlines, I don’t care when you’re clocking in, clocking out. I’m a night owl. I like working till like midnight, 1:00 a.m. I don’t like doing mornings, so I’m often coming into the office late.  A lot of my team are doing the same thing. Some of them are early risers, and they like to leave early to have their afternoon free. So as long as everybody’s more or less—everybody’s on top of their tasks and more or less working during the day so that we can have our interactions and meetings, that’s perfectly fine. Another thing I think that's core to what I wanted to build was that I've always been very passionate about learning and teaching. In another life, I was teaching high school.Share on X  And when I started building the company, one of the things that we made very clear when we’re hiring is that everybody on the team learns because they’re passionate about what we’re doing. And everybody on the team teaches. Even if you’re just an intern coming in, we need to know your perspective because you’ll have a different perspective than me, who’s been doing this for like two decades, where I’m kind of blind to maybe some of the newer stuff that’s happening or some of the stuff that’s like on the ground.  And I want to know when I talk to our interns, when I talk to our juniors, like, “Hey, guys, what are you seeing?” Like, you guys are—you guys are like 20 years younger than me in some cases. Like, I want to know what’s going on with the kids. My personal, like, kind of like personal why of this is that it’s not so much about the end goal. I want to make sure that I enjoy my day-to-day, I enjoy what we do, and I’m not going to pull my hair out going into the office. So, like, I think we built something where everybody on the team is excited to work on stuff because they’re doing the work that they would want to be working on.  They’re learning the stuff that they would want to be learning, and then they get to implement it in a way that is impactful for the company, for the client, for what we’re doing. And my challenge as a leader is to figure out, okay, how do we take that exciting stuff and make it so that it generates money for the company so that we can all continue doing this? Yeah, this is very inspirational. I love it. You’re tapping into people’s curiosity, desire. I like the learning organization idea as well. So do you have a framework for this? Because this podcast is all about frameworks.  Yes.  How can someone create something like that? What are the steps to create it?  So it’s not one framework. Like I said, I’m very passionate about a lot of different topics, and one of the things that’s a personal interest of mine is just business. So, like, looking at business case studies, and from that you start seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s a lot of different frameworks kind of layered on top of each other for various reasons. For the practical ad side, what we do for our clients strategically, there's a framework there that we like to use called AIDA. So attention, interest, desire, action.Share on X  Very standard funnel. The idea is that the reason we like using this is because when you break down the customer journey, this process is just logical. It’s been proven time and time again. If you’re going into Marketing or Business 101, this is one of the first things that you’re going to learn about. Like, what is a funnel? A funnel is, you know, the client’s never heard of you before, and you do something to grab their attention.  Now they’ve heard of you, but that’s not enough. You have to have many touch points, and you have to build interest. So, like, once they’ve heard about you, you got to make sure that it’s a good fit and they’re interested in the pain point or the thing that you’re fixing for them in their lives. And then if you hit them up with that interest message often enough, they’ll start imagining how their life is better with your product or service, and that creates desire. And then once you continue hitting them up at desire, as long as you don’t have any friction between the desire piece and the final call to action, then you’ll get that action at the bottom.  And the thing that people talk about, like, there’s a lot of people that talk about this framework, but I don’t think they’ve studied it properly. Because when you actually look at the history of it, this framework was first introduced in 1898 in a magazine that was talking about ads. This framework arguably predates the term marketing. And when you think about how that framework looks in modern day, it’s changed a lot, right?  When you were running ads in the early 1900s, you could get away with saying whatever the heck you wanted and making whatever wild promises just to get people’s attention. The way that you did it was you maybe had, like, some sort of print or some sort of, like, literally talking to people, getting them to show up to a convention or an expo back in the day, and having those interactions with their audience.  Fast-forward over 100 years, and it looks very different how you grab attention today. Paid ads. People talk about SEO. People talk about viral content. It’s very much changed. What hasn’t changed is the framework. So what that tells us is that human behavior, right? So the framework is based on human psychology: attention, interest, desire. These are all things that are, like, within the human experience. That has not changed. What’s changed is the other end. The technology has changed, so how you implement that.  So the strategy is still the AIDA that we use, right? But our tactics are constantly changing. Now we’re looking at AI. The new thing about ads is that Google just announced that they’ve added an extra option next to PMax, which is the AI option, so that you can actually start showing up in Gemini. So now this has changed our tactics. But our strategy is still based on this human psychology. That's the framework over on kind of the front end.Share on X And then, like I said, we have a bunch of other frameworks. I don’t know how much you want me to get into it, but for hiring, for internal processes, for all sorts of things.  Yeah. No, no, no. I love it. I love the AIDA. It’s been a long time I heard about it, and I love the simplicity of it, and I think it still works. So you mentioned something that really interests me. You said that you grab the attention, interest, building the desire, and as long as there’s no friction in the desire, then you’re going to get—the call to action is going to work. So what do you mean friction, and give me some examples of what it could look like.  So when you’re talking about AIDA and you’re talking about funnels, especially when you’re talking about online, it’s all very, very quick, right? So there’s a couple of terms here. So when you’re at top of funnel, your main thing is—it’s called a funnel because at the top it’s very, very wide in terms of the audience you want to hit up, and you want to try to get out to as many people as possible. So a lot of people, when they’re thinking of marketing, they’re thinking of the top of funnel, whether they realize it or not.  Further down is you’re trying to get a more complex message across. So the practical way to think about it is at the top you’re trying to run ads that’s just very flashy and getting people to stop the scroll. So if they’re on Instagram or something, you literally want them to stop, and you want them to read a quick thing that gets them to click. Once they’ve clicked on it, they’re ending up on a landing page, and that landing page has information that hopefully connects to the audience in a meaningful way, and they’re interested in reading more.  An example of friction would be if you click on an ad that’s purple, and then you end up on a landing page that’s black and white or red. That difference in color, that difference in style creates a friction point that psychologically, it makes the person pause and go, “Wait, did I just end up on the wrong page?” So when you have, like, a very close alignment between each of those levels, it reduces the friction and increases the chances that people will go down.  So the most important friction point that people need to be aware of is, like I just talked about the top of funnel, the opposite end, the bottom of funnel, is where there's the highest intent.Share on X So you can imagine at the top of funnel, because people have never heard of you before, their intention to buy from you is probably very low or very limited because they don’t know you yet. But once you’ve done all that work to get to know them and create a relationship with the brand, you’re at the bottom of funnel, and that point is critical.  You need to make sure that by the time you’ve warmed them up and everything’s ready to go and the target person is very interested in taking that final step, that somebody else doesn’t come and grab them. For example, like, the very real-world example. If you think about some of the biggest marketing companies in the world, so let’s take McDonald’s and Burger King as examples, right? Because everybody knows those brands. If McDonald’s has taken so much effort to be on billboards and be in front of you, and you’ve seen the brand and you know it, and you’re walking down the street and you’re hungry, and then at that moment of intent, as you’re walking around downtown, you’re like, “I could go for a quick burger right now,” and you know that you’re looking for a McDonald’s, but as you’re walking, you come across a Burger King, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s close enough.”  And then you’re going to walk into the Burger King and do the transaction there. Online, what that looks like is when somebody is doing that final search. So let’s say Summit OS is selling T-shirts, and you’ve done a bunch of work and people love the brand and they’re looking for a specific type of T-shirt that you sell, but they can’t remember quite exactly what it is. They’re like, “Oh, I think it was Summit OS something T-shirt.” And then when they type that in, somebody else’s sponsored ad comes up.  Well, now they probably grabbed that traffic that you took all that time to warm up. If you end up on the landing page, when you scroll down to the bottom, okay, I want to buy this T-shirt. I’m happy with everything that I’ve seen, but now you’re asking for an email, you’re asking for, like, a bunch of things. You click on a button, it doesn’t work. Those are extra friction points that prevent a person from taking action. When you’re looking at the entire funnel, you got to make sure that from a technical standpoint, from a user experience standpoint, from a getting-in-front-of-them-in-the-right-moment standpoint, everything hits, especially in this digital economy where everything’s very, very fast.  So anything that goes wrong, anything that creates a question, anything that creates a frustration point or any opportunity for somebody else to come in and grab that traffic at that moment of intent, those are friction points that you want to address and you want to track and you want to find. And you can imagine how there’s a lot of complexity in that. There’s a lot of testing, there’s a lot of work to make sure that that doesn’t happen.  That’s fascinating. Do you have a process for how you do this, how to eliminate frictions?  Yeah. We have a team that does QA and walks through the entire thing and has to do constant testing because what we’ve seen is a lot of other agencies are using AI tools and shortcuts. And lo and behold, a lot of these tools don’t work and they give back false positives, false negatives, and it’s not as good as just taking the time to go through the funnel yourself and make sure everything’s working properly. And it sucks because it’s a lot of work, but that’s how you get the best results, is just by having someone double-check it.  And it’s not to say that we don’t use automation. Like, we use a ton of automation, we use a lot of tools. But the final QA is a lot of the time us and the client going through, like, “Okay, everybody, before we hit go, let’s just all go through this before we spend, like, you know, 10K on this and just make sure that everything’s working properly.”  Yeah. Love it. Love it. So you’re building this ad agency, a technical agency, so you focus on making the flawless experience. What drives growth in your business?  That’s a good question. That’s something that, honestly, we’re struggling with a little bit. So if anybody’s following me on social media, I’ve been doing a short series. I’m probably going to finish it off soon, but it’s called Watch Sheldon Struggle to Grow His Agency. And it’s literally how I’ve been trying to figure out how to crack lead generation for ourselves and our journey through, like, where we were maybe about a year ago to where we are today.  And we’re still trying to answer that question for ourselves in terms of, how do we get more leads and more clients in a very difficult economy, in a very difficult time? And we’re trying to figure that out. And people can look up our case studies. I think we’re quite proud of the work that we’ve been able to do, and having that technical know-how has given us a huge advantage in terms of performance numbers. And that alone, in the past, through my network, was enough to keep us busy because people would just seek me out whenever they had a problem with their technical stack or their ads.  I’d say in the last maybe 18 months or so, like a lot of other agencies, the word-of-mouth stuff has kind of dried up, where people are kind of, like, holding back their spend. We’ve had a bunch of contracts that were put on hold because of the economic situation around the world. Nobody knows what’s going on. Everybody wants to hold back spend. Everybody wants to sit and wait. So even though people are still contacting me, the flow of projects has slowed down because people are more hesitant to pull the trigger and go. It’s also taking longer for us to have these conversations. Because that organic piece kind of slowed down, we’ve been trying to find inorganic pieces.  I’ve been doing more networking. I’ve been trying to figure out building out our own funnel, which we should’ve done years ago. The thing that’s driving growth for us right now is probably the things that are not scalable, right? In the age of AI, when you’re working with a business, you want to be working with a person. Like, nobody wants a partner who’s just a machine. So doing the things that are not scalable means really doing the things that are human, having human interactions, having human conversations, going out for coffee with people, meeting people at conventions and workshops and, you know, like, literally just getting our name out there in a way that is more human and just having real conversations.  And despite all the other testing that we’ve done with the cold emails, with the ads, with this, that, and the other thing, like, that seems to be the thing that’s working the most, is just kind of putting my name out there and saying to people, like, “Hey, if you have a problem, come talk to me. We’re not necessarily going to have a contract together, but hopefully we can have a quick coffee and I can at least get you past a technical hurdle.  I can give you some insight into what you’re struggling with and give you a hand.” And that kind of goodwill has led to more conversations and more contracts and new contracts than anything else that we’ve done. For our clients, because our clients are more direct-to-consumer, so they’re usually bigger brands that are selling a quick product, quick service to the general public. They’re not B2B, they’re B2C. On that front, it’s literally what we just talked about, following the AIDA playbook, making sure the funnel’s good, making sure the ads are firing, making sure the data’s there, and then that’s how we get our crazy numbers, like 12X return on ad spend, you know, 14X return on ad spend.  That’s just following the system and doing the work. So for our clients, we have it under control for their growth. For our own growth, for the B2B side, that’s where I’m realizing that, like, we need to step away from all this AI noise, and people are trying to do these AI BDRs and all these things, and it just doesn’t work because people want to have a real human conversation.  Yeah. No, I totally see the same thing. The easier the automation, the more it just becomes noise.  Exactly. It’s democratized automation, which means that, like, it’s no longer the thing that stands out. You have to do something different.  Yeah. And people are becoming resistant, and they recognize if something is AI-created, and they just tune it out, right?  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.  Yeah. It’s fascinating. How much of your time is actually spent on networking and doing the human things as opposed to running your business?  I’m very fortunate that my team mostly runs the day-to-day at this point, so I’m spending most of my time doing all the other stuff. So, like, trying to do the networking, trying to get our name out there, and then everything else is just admin and paperwork. So in terms of actually running the day-to-day of the company, our head of operations, Brent, does a fantastic job of running the team.  Jack, our head of marketing strategy, does an amazing job of making sure the ads are firing properly. Whenever I get involved in the day-to-day, they get annoyed at me because I’m like, I’m coming in, I don’t know what’s going on, and my hair’s on fire. I’m trying to do X, Y, Z, and then I jump out and I just create chaos. So most of the time they’re telling me, like, “Yeah, listen, go out and talk to people. We don’t want you at the office. We don’t want you doing the work.”  So how fast is your product evolving?  Oh, constantly. I mean, the way that I explain it to people, right? A lot of people right now, especially running ads, right? Because that’s our core product, that’s our core service, is running ads and making sure that we maintain that competitive advantage for our clients. Because of the advent of AI, everything’s constantly changing. Already it was a very technical space because a lot of people seem to think that whether or not your ads do well, they think it’s a creative exercise, and I think it was up until about eight months ago.  But today, I would argue that it’s skewed, and it’s more of a technical exercise. Because these ad platforms are running AI algorithms, the quality of the data that you feed into it now is more important than ever. And like I said, there’s been a lot of changes in the last few months to the point where now it’s no longer about how good your content is. It’s about how good your targeting is, how good the data you’re feeding it is, how good your audience is kind of reacting to it, and then making intelligent tweaks to your content based on the feedback that you’re getting back from the AI.  So these are things that are constantly evolving. Like I said, even though the strategy doesn’t change, the tactics and the technology is a constant change. So the AI thing that I was talking about where Google just released or just opened up the option to do advertising with AI responses, that’s less than, I think, three months old. So that’s the new thing that we’re now testing with our clients to see how is this working, how is this working.  The other thing too is that the way I describe it, a lot of people now—the new thing that we just noticed within the last few months—is that people are saying, like, “Oh, I can just use an AI agent to set up my ads.” But these AI agents are based on large language models, right, the LLMs. And the way that large language models work is that they’re trying to give you a statistically accurate response, which is great for certain things, not so great for other things. So the way I tell people is that if you were to take an LLM, again, which is what most of these agents are based on, you were to graph all the possible responses for accuracy, what you would end up with is a bell curve, right?  And on the bell curve, you have on one end, you have these are all the answers that are definitely wrong. And on the other hand, these are also answers that are, like, they’re novel, but we don’t know how accurate they are. And then in the middle, at the top of the bell curve, right in the middle is the statistical most accurate response that it thinks it can give you. So it’s always going for that statistical middle with these LLMs. So when it’s setting up ads and it’s doing strategy, it’s going for what is most likely the safe result, right?  The least interesting.  It’s the least interesting.  Yeah.  Now, when you’re running ads, right, it’s a race. My background is in software and computer science, so when I’m doing coding and I’m using Claude Code, I want statistical middle. I don’t want it trying new things with my code. I don’t want it to be a bad programmer like a junior, but I don’t want it to be doing stuff that’s so advanced and novel that it’s not tested, it’s going to break. I just want the middle, right?  Engineering middle. But when we’re running ads, it’s a race. And if you’re in the middle of the pack in a race, you’ve lost. So one of our big advantages is that we’re using a lot of AI for automation. We’re using a lot of automation tools to do our day-to-day. But when we’re coming up with a strategy and building out the ads, it’s a human that’s doing that because we want to be at this far end that’s going to be ahead of everybody else. We don’t want to be middle of the pack.  So from that sense, it’s constantly changing to keep on top of these things to figure out what’s new, what’s going on. The ad platforms are changing constantly because, you know, the way that we interact with the internet is changing constantly. So, like, yeah, it’s constant, it’s a constant race.  So, but doesn’t that also bring you back to the creative part?  It does.  How to be creative, maybe not design-wise, but some other way?  It does, but in a way that I think a lot of creative agencies don’t understand. Because a creative agency will focus on the story, and they will focus on, you know, telling a good story, and they are thinking, if I can put it this way, they’re thinking very linearly. So one of the big mistakes that we see, like I talk to a lot of other agency owners, and every once in a while I help consult on the side, just to give them some advice in what they’re doing, what’s working and what’s not.  And one of the things that I see a lot is that a lot of these agencies have not understood how the new PMax campaigns and how the new Advantage+ campaigns work, so they’re working against the AI algorithm. So a lot of these other agencies, they’re more content than they are technical. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to tell a good story from the content, and then what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find the demographic that they think will match with the content. So they’re content first, right?  So what they’re trying to do is, if they’re putting together a story for a product, they then in their heads think, “Okay. Well, I think I need to go for, you know, women living in suburbs that are between this age and this age and this income range and are interested in XYZ thing, and that’s how I’m going to set up the system, and then they’re going to see my ad, and then there should be a connection there.” That’s not how it works anymore. So in that setup, I can see how it’s super important to understand the story and get all that done.  The modern way that we’re doing things that’s different is that when we’re building out our content, we work with the content agency or we work with the marketing team to say, “What is your interest piece that’s going to get people to stop scrolling? What’s the interest piece that’s going to get people to want to read more? How do we build that desire for them? And then give me those in different assets, different pictures, different videos, different texts, different descriptions, different headers.”  What we then do is we take all of that content, and we put it into an asset library on PMax. So what we do is instead of telling PMax to look for XYZ demographic, we don’t tell it to do any of that. We let it go broad, and it does the opposite. What it does is, and of course, this is after the caveat. We’ve already set up the landing pages. We’re collecting all the data. We’ve tested all that. The data modeling is solid, so the entire funnel, all the micro actions, everything, we know that is being fed cleanly into the system, because that’s important. What the system’s then going to do is it’s going to, like, not just A/B test, but it’s going to take every combination that it can think of with all the different assets, with the videos, the text, the this and that and the other thing, and it’s going to start testing all the different combinations quickly.  And mixed in there is all the interest, attention, desire, everything. The algorithm is then going to figure out, based on all the data points that it has on us, it has, like, 57,000 data points, I think, Meta has on us. When a user has this pattern of data, they seem to resonate with this combination of assets. This pattern resonates with this combination. So bit by bit, what it does is it will start creating audiences for you that resonate with different kind of, like, asset packages. And then lo and behold, what we see is that emergent is the attention content all gets grouped together, and now we have an audience that’s ready for attention.  The interest piece, this is all the content that we had flagged for interest. Here’s our interest audience. And then the AI is basically working to figure out for you, not based on anything other than random data points and patterns, what is the audience for you? And then it’ll be able to then say, “Okay, now that we have a pattern to look for, we have, like, another 100,000 people that match this pattern and we can start advertising to them. And that’s the proper way to do it. But the thing that people are uncomfortable with is that it’s a black box. We don’t know what their demographic is. We don’t know where they live on the internet. We don’t know what their interests are. We don’t know any of that. It’s just random data points and math that has created this audience for us. And if you were to extract those people and put two or three of them next to each other, you’d go, like, “I don’t understand why these people have anything in common.”  But somewhere in the data, the data is signaling that they are going to resonate with your content. So this is what I mean. Like, the content is still important, but I think it’s skewed, like, a little bit. I’d say, like, now it’s, like, 60% data and math and 40% content, whereas before, it was much more heavy on the content side.  Very interesting. And this is how your platforms will find the lookalike audience based on your sample audience?  Exactly. Exactly.  Yeah. That’s fascinating. So other than the lead generation, what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business?  Other than that, we’re just having a lot of fun with all these new AI tools. I’m getting a few members of my team working with Claude. A few of us are working with ChatGPT. We’re trying to see, like, what these platforms can do, what are the things it can automate. I think one of the really cool things is now something that used to take, like, weeks to create code around, it can be done in an afternoon.  So it’s like, as soon as we identify a business problem, something that my team has to do, like, you know, three or four times a week that slows us down, now I can tell my devs, like, “Hey, guys, like, this is a business problem that we have. Can you guys just come up with a quick tool to do?” And we can build it, and we can just have it. So we’re trying to experiment more and more with how we can kind of speed up our development process.  And because we’ve been developing for so long, there’s a few things that are kind of like the—a few of the standard ways to run a development team that are now starting to be questioned because these LLMs are getting better and better at taking over some of these mundane tasks, that we’re starting to revisit what is our QA strategy when we’re actually coding. Like, what’s a more important skill set? One of the things I think that we’re trying to navigate right now is what is our hiring process for interns going forward?  So in the past, when we were looking for juniors and interns, the skills that we were looking for was like, what is your ability to figure out the answer to this question, right? Given a complex question, given a complex task, how are you going to be able to figure out how to solve this? Because of the rise of LLMs, finding the answer is no longer as important as asking the smart question. And the challenge that we’re facing right now is that asking a smart question requires critical thinking. A lot of critical thinking requires experience. The best critical thinkers have decades of experience behind them. How do you get that from an 18-year-old who’s coming from school?  They literally have no experience. That’s why they’re coming to us as interns. So we’re trying to figure out, like, okay, how do we square that? And we’re very proud of the internship work that we do. It’s a way for us to give back to the community. We work with a lot of the colleges and universities in town. Like I said, I myself came from having taught high school, and I’m very passionate about education, so I want to do good by that industry, by those students.  But we’re having a bit of a hard time because we don’t want to necessarily disadvantage them, but we’re also trying to figure out how do you find a good critical thinker among kids with no experience. So that’s probably the thing that we’re trying to figure out right now.  Yeah. That is fascinating. And that is a big issue for young people coming up, how to get those internships. Internships are harder to get, and probably this is the main reason for it, because people use technology to replace the inexperienced people.  The bar has definitely gone much higher. And again, we’ve experienced this as well, where, like, we’ll have a task, and we can ask an intern to do it, and they’ll kind of, you know, grudgingly figure it out and do it. But if it’s a critical task that needs to be done, that same exact task can be handed off to an LLM, and it’ll just get it done. Yeah. It won’t be amazing quality the way that, you know, a senior developer will do it, but it’ll be good enough, and it’ll be probably better than what the intern can do.  So if you’re only looking at the task from a purely productive lens, well, I’ll get a better result from the LLM, so then the intern has no purpose. We’re having to reshape the way we think about this, where if we are truly building an internship program, at that point, it’s not about the productivity, it’s about the learning that the intern gets out of it. So it becomes a teaching thing. So we have to be okay with handing off this task to the intern, knowing that an LLM could probably do a better job.  But they need to learn how to do it first so that they can rise above it. And I think what we’re seeing right now is that companies are not mandated to teach. They don’t care about the learning of the intern. They care about the production of the thing. And in the past, it was cheaper to get the intern to do it because there was no other option. But I think companies are realizing, like, well, we can just have the LLM do it, and it’ll be better and faster. Why do we need the interns? And that’s why these opening early positions are not being handed out anymore. The problem with that is that you don’t get senior-level people without training them up as juniors, and we’re giving all of that learning opportunity to machines.  Yeah.  So what does our future look like with that gap? What does the future look like for these kids coming out of school? Like, these are all obviously much bigger questions than my company can ever answer. This is a bigger societal question, but this is what we’re seeing kind of on the front lines, having a very strong internship program. We’re struggling with this idea, like, where is this next generation coming from?  That’s scary. That’s very scary. So who are the ideal clients that, if they listen to this podcast, you want them to contact you? Yeah. So basically, our biggest successes are with brands that are very strong on the wholesale side and are already in retail stores. So a lot of times what happens is you have a company that does an amazing product. They’re already in Walmart, they’re already in Costco, they’re already at Winners, and they have built up a very successful wholesale B2B business. They then launch a Shopify store, and they want to start getting the brands and start building a relationship directly with their consumers.  And then they’re realizing, like, “Oh, this is a different game, and we’re struggling.” And then at that point, it’s easy for us to come in and help because they have a strong offering already. They have a wholesale side that can drive their growth. And our job is to make sure that we start help building out that direct-to-consumer side by making sure that all of the data is mapped out properly. We like working with companies like that because they already have a very good idea of their marketing, why their product is successful.  They know which products are successful and not, so we can skip a lot of the learning part, and we’re just putting a megaphone on their existing brand and their existing offering in the most efficient way possible to make sure that, you know, right away out of the gate, that their D2C business is going to be just as strong as their wholesale business.  Yeah. Oh, that’s fascinating. So essentially, you pick those companies that have a good product already because it’s tested in wholesale channels and the Costcos and Walmarts and the Amazons of the world, and you help them tap directly the consumers through very targeted advertising.  Exactly, exactly. And then once we have that basic foundation set up, then we start doing interesting things like, how do we get the newsletters out? How do we help them get their marketing team to have more of a direct relationship with their end customer? Because when you go to a Costco or you go to a Walmart and you pick up a product, what happens is that the retailer holds the relationship, right?  It’s a way to help them offset that. And it’s kind of a tightrope that we have to walk because we recognize that the relationship with the wholesaler is still key. So whatever we do, we have to be conscious that we’re not going to upset that balance.  Yeah.  And that everybody’s winning, everybody’s making money, everybody’s growing, nobody’s getting upset with one side or the other. So because we’ve had experience working with national brands, we are positioned to understand what that relationship looks like. We know from our client side what it’s like when they’re talking to the Costco rep, what it’s like when they’re talking to the Walmart rep, what those subtle differences are in culture, and what we need to be aware of because, you know, we want to make sure that nothing that we do on our side jeopardizes that relationship.  Yeah. And then the big companies—what they want is they want to commoditize you, and they want to control the relationship, the brand. They want their white-label brand on top of your product. Yeah.  Which is their right. I mean, they’re the retailers. They’re the big guys.  Yeah. If you don’t build your own brand, then you’re going to slip into the white label because you have no leverage over the big, big stores. But if you have a strong brand, you have leverage, and then the whole relationship works better. So it’s very interesting. Okay.  So if people would like to learn about how they can do that, how they can go from wholesale to D2C, and would like to learn about how you can help them, where should they go and how can they contact you?  Yeah, so there’s a lot of information on our website, so drivemarketing.ca, so the Canadian extension. Yeah. And then I think I’m the only Sheldon Poon that’s really active on LinkedIn. I think there’s one other one that’s maybe in Hong Kong somewhere, but that’s not me. He’s, I think, an older guy. So if people look me up on LinkedIn under Sheldon Poon and just message me, I’m pretty active there and I try to answer everybody.  And what I love is helping people out. Even if people have no intention of hiring us, I’m like, “That’s totally fine.” Send me your questions because I like to be able to help and answer and know what people are struggling with because it helps our work. It just gives me an opportunity to have conversations with people.  Awesome. So if you run a brand that has already cracked the wholesale channels, but you want to build your direct-to-consumer, you know, hit up Sheldon on LinkedIn, Sheldon Poon, and have a chat with him. As you can see, he’s a great person to chat with. And if you enjoyed this show, then stay tuned because every week we have a couple of entrepreneurs who are building great companies who come and share their frameworks with you. So Sheldon, thanks for coming and sharing your wisdom, and thanks for listening.  Yeah. Thank you. This was great. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.  Important Links: Sheldon's LinkedIn Sheldon's  website

Vacation rental search is changing fast.Organic traffic is declining, AI Overviews are taking up more space in Google, and travelers are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to research where to stay.For property managers, that creates a new challenge: how do you stay visible when the way people search is no longer as straightforward as ranking on page one of Google?In this episode, Alex & Annie are joined by Vanessa Humes, VP of Sales and Marketing at ICND, and Jill McGee, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist, to unpack what this shift means for vacation rental brands and their direct booking strategies.They explore why SEO is still very much alive, how AI is changing the path travelers take before reaching a website, and why the fundamentals of trust, authority, useful content, and strong website structure may matter more than ever.The conversation also looks at what operators should actually be paying attention to as new terms like AEO and GEO enter the marketing vocabulary, whether emerging AI optimization tactics are worth the hype, and how the metrics used to measure digital marketing success may need to evolve along with search.In this episode, we discuss:06:45 - Why declining organic traffic does not mean SEO is losing its value07:33 - How AI is changing the way travelers research and discover vacation rentals26:14 - What SEO, AEO, and GEO mean for vacation rental marketers10:32 - Why trust, reviews, structured data, and strong content still matter36:27 - How property managers can create content with stronger booking intent23:41 - Why AI-driven traffic may be smaller but more qualified29:00 - Which new AI optimization tactics deserve attention and which may be more hype than substance48:20 - How operators should think about search visibility heading into 2027If you are trying to understand where SEO fits in an AI-driven search landscape and what your vacation rental brand should be doing now to stay discoverable, this episode is worth a listen.Connect with Vanessa:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-humes-549b528/ Connect with Jill:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-highsmith-mcgee-940908179/ Connect with ICND:Website: https://bit.ly/3THIq8J LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/intercoastal-net-designs/ Free Resource from ICND:Download ICND's AI Visibility Case Study to learn how vacation rental companies can adapt to AI-driven search.

What's up witches and welcome to August's New Moon, New Book! Gemini and Scorpio dive into Workplace Spells by Marla Brooks, host of ParaX Radio's Stirring the Cauldron, a quick grimoire of spells for on the job. It's the Summer of Spellbooks and this one is another win - press play to find out which spells stood out the most!

The Mates sit down with Kush Bavaria to discuss Sergey Brin's return to Gemini, AI agents escaping containment, bots overtaking human web traffic, China's billion-agent simulations, and compute becoming a tradable asset. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Kush Bavaria is the co-founder and CEO of Ornn, a company building financial infrastructure and markets for AI compute. His work focuses on making compute a tradable commodity and expanding how AI infrastructure is financed. – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding   Get the blueprint for generative media https://goo.gle/startupgenmedia     Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter  Join the Moonshots Mates on Sep 25th for the inaugural Moonshots LIVE. The world's greatest entrepreneurs, builders and creators, working together to build a hopeful and optimistic vision of tomorrow. Seats are limited and application only. Apply at https://www.moonshots.com before seats are sold out. _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Join Salim's 10X Shift Subscribe to Salim's YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack  Spotify Threads Connect with Kush Website X LinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on August 10th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your patients are asking ChatGPT what's wrong with them before they call your office, and getting an answer in seconds. In this episode, Tod Stillson, a board-certified family physician, medical device inventor, and health care entrepreneur, explains how AI chatbots became the new waiting room, and what that means for the doctor who used to be the first call. You will hear why patients turn to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini instead of waiting days for a reply, how AI companies are racing to own the front door of a system that is 20 percent of the economy, and why staying passive hands that ground away. Stillson makes the case that physicians can shape how these tools are governed, through medical advisory roles and digital health committees, so the guidance patients get is accurate. This episode is based on his article "AI chatbots and patient safety need physician design," published on KevinMD. Press play to hear why you are becoming the second opinion, and what you can actually do to stay in the patient journey. Partner with me on the KevinMD platform. With over three million monthly readers and half a million social media followers, I give you direct access to the doctors and patients who matter most. Whether you need a sponsored article, email campaign, video interview, or a spot right here on the podcast, I offer the trusted space your brand deserves to be heard. Let's work together to tell your story. PARTNER WITH KEVINMD → https://kevinmd.com/influencer SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast

Alice Keeler built the Educator AI Assistant — a Google Sheets add-on that collects no data — in two days. In this episode she talks about how she vibe codes with Gemini to create extensions and tools for teachers and the classroom. Vibe coding is all the rage and everyone is talking about it. But how do you actually do it? This conversation goes specifically to Gemini, surfaces the privacy issues we should be concerned about, and casts a vision for what school IT departments are becoming — or might need to become. Alice makes the case that if a district can describe the tool it needs, someone inside that district can build it — and know it is safe, because they made it themselves. She also talks about what it costs to own the thing you built, and the question worth asking about any tool you rely on: is anyone still maintaining it? This was recorded in the middle of last year. The tools have changed and they will keep changing. The principles underneath — how we protect student privacy and help our schools succeed — have not. Full show notes, Alice's free resources, and a Gemini prompt you can use tomorrow: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e966  If you're vibe coding in your classroom, I'd like to hear your story.

Lyn Bryant was brutally stabbed while walking her dog, but months later when the investigation stalled, the killer seemingly came back to the scene to leave another clue.  Now decades later, investigators have DNA, but strict UK legal restrictions may keep this case from being solved, and a killer on the streets.You can contact Devon and Cornwall Police directly by calling 101 or by submitting a report online through the UK's Major Incident Public Portal. If you wish to remain  anonymous, call Crimestoppers UK at 0800 555 111 or visit crimestoppers-uk.org. A reward of up to £20,000 is available for information that leads to an arrest and conviction of the person responsible.Thank you BBC News, CrimeStoppers UK, The West Briton, The Northwich Chronicle, Evening Post, The Dark Curiousities and Crimes That Haunt Us YouTube Channels, Gemini and Wikipedia for information contributing to today's story.Thank you BBC News, CrimeStoppers UK, The West Briton, The Northwich Chronicle, Evening Post, The Dark Curiousities and Crimes That Haunt Us YouTube Channels, Gemini and Wikipedia for information contributing to today's story.Do you have any comments, or a case you'd like to suggest? You'll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation.  It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed.  Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.LordanArts 2026

How does a used car saleswoman go from brand-new to the business to earning more than $225,000 in ONE year? "It's not about selling. It's about solving a problem." – Sady Ahmed In this episode of the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast, Sean V. Bradley sits down with top-performing salesperson Sady Ahmed of Koons Automotive to uncover the mindset, strategies, and customer-first approach behind her rise in automotive sales. "Every customer is different. You gotta be able to mirror them." – Sady Ahmed Sady has built a powerhouse business by dominating one of the toughest opportunities in the dealership: Special Finance and credit-challenged customers. But her success goes far beyond simply selling cars. She's built a system around trust, credit education, personal branding, referrals, repeat business, and turning customers who hear "NO" elsewhere into long-term relationships. "If you don't believe that you're the best, how are you going to get other people to believe that you're the best?" – Sady Ahmed Sean and Sady also explore how today's automotive sales professionals can leverage AI, ChatGPT, community involvement, social media, and smarter follow-up strategies to create more opportunities and separate themselves from the competition. "You want the community to support you, you've got to support the community." – Sean V. Bradley How did Sady build a $225K+ income without chasing a management title? What helped her reach a record-breaking 34 cars in a single month? And what can other salespeople learn from her approach to some of the most challenging customers in automotive? Find out how this used car saleswoman earns over $225K in ONE year and the strategies helping her build a career, customer base, and personal brand that continues to grow. If you're serious about selling more cars, generating more referrals, building your brand, and increasing your income in automotive sales, you need to hear this conversation! Key Takeaways: ✅ Credit Mastery: Understanding and mastering credit intricacies play a crucial role in closing deals with subprime clients. ✅ AI Utilization: Using AI tools like ChatGPT can streamline credit analysis and improve customer experiences by drafting dispute letters or enhancing credit advisories. ✅ Personal Branding: Building a personal brand through social media and community engagement is essential for long-term success in automotive sales. ✅ Partnership Opportunities: Collaborations with credit repair firms can be a strategic method to assist clients with challenging credit profiles. ✅ Client Education: Educating clients about credit improvement methods can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat business.   About Sady Ahmed Sady Ahmed is a top-performing automotive sales consultant specializing in Special Finance at Koons Automotive of Fredericksburg. Since entering the car business in 2019 with no prior automotive experience, she has grown into a consistent 20-car-per-month producer, recently achieving a personal best of 34 vehicles sold in a single month. Known for her honest, relationship-first approach, Sady helps customers navigate challenging credit situations, build stronger financial plans, and find the right path to vehicle ownership. Her success comes from keeping it real, solving problems, and putting long-term customer relationships ahead of simply making a sale.     Unlocking the Potential of Special Finance in the Automotive Industry   Key Takeaways Understanding customer credit intricacies is integral for automotive sales success. Leveraging AI in credit analysis offers enhanced insights for customers with subprime profiles. Personal branding and community engagement are crucial for establishing a successful automotive sales career.   Navigating the Special Finance Ecosystem in Car Sales In the world of automotive sales, special finance remains a challenging but rewarding niche. As the conversation led by Sean V. Bradley with Sadie Ahmed highlights, excelling in this sector involves not just selling cars but mastering the intricacies of credit. Sadie's approach to her work exemplifies the seamless integration of credit counseling within automotive sales, recognizing the importance of being "on their side" for customers with subprime credit scores. Sadie's dedication to special finance stems from her genuine desire to assist people, particularly those deemed 'at risk' or subprime. "I just like helping people. So I feel like when I have a customer that comes to me and they are in that weird spot of like a 550 to a 650, that can change overnight," she asserts. For Sadie, automotive sales are less about pitching a sale and more about "solving a problem," a notion that echoes throughout the interview. This empathetic approach transforms what could be a high-pressure sales interaction into a supportive experience for her clients, setting a standard for the industry. Harnessing AI for Enhanced Credit Analysis in Automotive Sales Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing how dealerships manage special finance operations. Sean Bradley emphasizes the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT in scrutinizing credit reports to advise clients effectively. "You can use, whether it's Claude or it's Google, Gemini or Chat GPT, or if your dealership has its own internal knowledge base, you could actually help Yourself and the prospect by using AI to analyze the credit bureau," Bradley affirms. The integration of AI doesn't stop at just analyzing credit. Sadie elaborates: "I've been doing this for about seven years. So I've learned what banks are looking for…and I've learned the nuances of how to get banks to overlook certain red flags if I can provide just the right context." With AI, sales professionals like Sadie can automate parts of the credit advice process, enhancing their ability to serve clients efficiently and improving the overall customer experience. In a competitive industry where the minutiae of financial history can make or break a sale, leveraging AI for credit analysis is a game-changer. It empowers car sales professionals to not only meet but exceed client expectations by providing insightful and actionable credit advice. Building a Personal Brand for Long-term Success in Automotive Sales Personal branding emerges as a powerful driver for success. Sadie Ahmed's journey evidences the power of building a personal brand rooted in reliability and expertise. Her mantra, "You incorporated," underlines the importance of self-belief and self-promotion. By leveraging social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, Sadie creates a persistent presence, ensuring she remains top-of-mind for potential car buyers. Beyond digital interactions, Sadie highlights the value of community involvement. "I do sponsor a bunch of local events. I've sponsored some golf tournaments, base local baseball teams…," she shares, demonstrating her commitment to establishing relationships and goodwill within her community. This extends her brand's reach and cements her reputation as a trusted advisor, not just a salesperson. The world of automotive sales demands adaptability and innovative thinking. As Sadie Ahmed showcases, blending effective customer credit management with a robust personal brand paves the way for sustainable success. This approach, underscored by strategic engagement with global tech advancements such as AI, keeps industry professionals ahead of the curve. Ultimately, embracing a comprehensive understanding of client financial situations and utilizing technology not only transforms the customer experience but also empowers sales professionals to thrive in an ever-evolving market landscape.       Resources + Our Proud Sponsors:   ➼ Podium: The AI Platform Powering the Modern Dealership. From instant lead response to seamless test drive scheduling, Podium's AI Employee Jerry works 24/7 to turn every lead into a conversion, so your team can focus on closing. Trusted by thousands of dealerships nationwide and proudly featured on the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast. Learn how Podium can help you sell more cars, book more service appointments, and grow your dealership. Discover how Podium's innovative AI technology can unlock unparalleled efficiency and drive your dealership's sales to new heights. Visit www.podium.com/mcs to learn more!   ➼ The Millionaire Car Salesman Facebook Group: Join the #1 Automotive Sales Mastermind Facebook Group with over 29,000 automotive professionals worldwide. The Millionaire Car Salesman Facebook Group is the go-to community for car salespeople, BDC agents, sales managers, general managers, and dealer principals looking to increase performance, income, and leadership skills. Inside the group, members collaborate daily on automotive sales strategies, lead handling, phone scripts, closing techniques, CRM best practices, dealership leadership, and accountability systems. Learn directly from top automotive trainers, industry mentors, and high-performing sales leaders who are actively winning in today's market. If you're serious about growing your automotive career, increasing car sales, and building long-term success, join The Millionaire Car Salesman Facebook Group today! ➼ Dealer Synergy: Dealer Synergy is the automotive industry's #1 Sales Training, Consulting, and Accountability Firm, with over 20 years of proven dealership success nationwide. We specialize in helping car dealerships increase sales, improve processes, and build high-performing Sales, Internet, and BDC departments from the ground up. Our expertise includes automotive phone scripts, rebuttals, CRM action plans, lead handling strategies, BDC workflows, Internet sales processes, management training, and accountability systems. Dealer Synergy partners directly with dealership leadership to align people, process, and technology, ensuring consistent results and scalable growth. From independent dealers to large dealer groups and OEM partnerships, Dealer Synergy delivers measurable performance improvements, stronger teams, and sustainable profitability. ➼ Bradley On Demand: Bradley On Demand is the automotive industry's most advanced interactive training, tracking, testing, and certification platform for car dealerships — built to develop top-performing teams across Sales, Internet Sales, BDC, CRM, Phone Skills, Leadership, and Management. In addition to LIVE virtual automotive training classes and a library of 9,000+ on-demand dealership training modules, Bradley On Demand now includes AI Phone Roleplaying and Coaching to help salespeople and BDC agents practice real dealership conversations before they ever get on the phone with customers. This AI-powered roleplay technology strengthens phone scripts, objection handling, appointment setting, lead follow-up, and closing skills, while providing measurable coaching feedback for continuous improvement. Bradley On Demand empowers dealerships to train faster, coach smarter, improve call performance, increase closing ratios, and sell more cars more profitably — all through structured, trackable, modern automotive training.

This is your daily horoscope for Thursday, August 13, and the most important aspects of the day:Moon enters Virgo (3am PT)Moon in Virgo sextile Mars in Cancer (6am PT)Mercury in Leo sextile Venus in Libra (9am PT)Moon in Virgo square Uranus in Gemini (12:30pm PT)Unlock More MagicGrimoire: Become a Better Witch in 12 WeeksBook a Reading with StephanieAccess Personalized Horoscopes + Join Stephanie's PatreonMake a DifferenceJustice for Nolan Wells: Send Support to His FamilySupport Karmelo Anthony I Message Him or Donate (SID #: 21558442; Facility: TDCJ - PACK)Sign the Petition + Demand Clemency for Jeffery Lee I Call Gov. Ivey + Demand Clemency 334-242-7100Justice for Cyrus Carmack-BeltonSupport the Free Alabama Movement

Connect with Early Riders — https://www.earlyriders.com/contactConnect with Onramp — https://onrampbitcoin.com/contact-us/Presented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.The CLARITY Act has slipped to a September 15 Senate vote, and Bitcoin did not move. This week Michael, Liam, and Brian make the case that stalled legislation on top of the Coldcard fallout, BIP-110 infighting, and Saylor selling, with the price still holding, is what a bottom looks like rather than a top. They run through a brutal week for Bitcoin infrastructure: BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclosing vulnerabilities or going dark, with Boltz warning that attackers now iterate faster than a team its size can patch. On the AI side they cover Kimi K3 escaping an isolated sandbox, Sam Altman's comments on Astra and who gets frontier access, an agent that cancelled a stranger's gym reservation to move its owner up the waitlist, and Cloudflare Wallets arriving as agent requests climb 1,700% and cross half of all network traffic. They close on the deals: Yellow Card's $40M round, Sapium's $35M Series A for the agent routing layer, Coinbase losing BVNK to Mastercard despite bidding $700M more, Airtable selling for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak, and what Block's Buzz did during the Coldcard incident.Chapters00:00 - Coldcard update: thefts slow, 2,000 BTC still gone01:00 - BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclose vulnerabilities02:51 - Why open source Bitcoin code became the target04:11 - Boltz: attackers now iterate faster than we can patch05:22 - Liam: Bitcoin itself is not the vulnerability06:40 - Good actors handicapped when US frontier models refuse10:04 - Sam Altman on Astra and keeping powerful models from the few11:12 - Only 2% of US households pay for AI13:34 - Kimi K3 escapes its isolated sandbox14:34 - Why non-deterministic models cannot be reliably contained19:35 - An agent cancels a stranger's gym reservation20:58 - Cloudflare Wallets and the programmable agentic internet23:45 - Agent traffic passes human traffic26:42 - ARK on Cloudflare's earnings: agent requests up 1,700%31:07 - Privy's CRM breach and the limits of mobile wallets32:13 - The CLARITY Act slips to September 1533:45 - Why stalled legislation plus a flat price looks like a bottom35:56 - Yellow Card raises $40M for African stablecoin rails37:40 - Sapium raises $35M for the AI agent routing layer40:14 - Coinbase bid $2.5B for BVNK and lost to Mastercard at $1.8B42:17 - Airtable sells for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak45:32 - The Architecture Problem and where custody goes next47:48 - Why every firm ends up at multi-institution custody49:22 - Buzz, Goose, and how Block moved in hours on Coldcard54:45 - GPU hours as crude oil: an open source AI analogy55:34 - Sergey Brin returns to Gemini, Meta ships Muse CodeIf you found this valuable, please subscribe to Early Riders Insights for access to the best content in the ecosystem weekly: https://www.earlyriders.com/researchKeep up with Michael:https://x.com/MTangumaKeep up with Liam:https://x.com/Lnelson_21Keep up with Brian:https://x.com/BackslashBTC

Google Business Profile is becoming one of the most important assets a garage door company can own, and the competition for local visibility is getting more aggressive. In this episode of Torsion Talk, Ryan explains why GBP is moving to the center of Google Search, AI Overviews, advertising, Maps, and AI-powered recommendations—and what local garage door businesses need to do now to protect their market share.Ryan breaks down why Google Business Profile leads remain some of the highest-quality opportunities in home services, how easily profiles can be suspended, and why understanding both Google's published guidelines and the realities of local search has become essential for business owners.The bigger conversation is about competition. National brands, private equity-backed companies, scammers, and aggressive multi-location operators are expanding their digital footprints quickly. Ryan explains why a local company relying on a single Google Business Profile may eventually struggle to compete against businesses building dozens or even hundreds of local signals across multiple markets.This episode dives into why multi-location strategy is becoming critical for garage door companies that want to grow, how reviews influence trust and AI recommendations, and why generating consistent, detailed customer reviews should become a major priority. Ryan also discusses the growing importance of online “signals”—mentions, awards, press, social media, locations, and personal branding—that help Google and AI platforms connect your company with authority and trust.As ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and other large language models increasingly influence how homeowners choose service providers, being mentioned and trusted across the web may become just as important as traditional backlinks and keyword rankings.Ryan also explains why business owners should begin strengthening their personal brands and connecting those brands to their companies, creating another layer of authority that AI can recognize.If you own a garage door company or home service business, this episode is a wake-up call. Local search is changing, competition is accelerating, and the companies that understand Google Business Profile, multi-location SEO, reviews, reputation, and AI visibility will have a major advantage.The race for local relevance is already underway. The question is whether your company is building its digital footprint fast enough to compete.Find Ryan at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://garagedooru.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aaronoverheaddoors.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://markinuity.com/⁠Check out our sponsors!Sommer USA - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://sommer-usa.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Surewinder - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://surewinder.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stealth Hardware - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://quietmydoor.com/⁠

AI can translate an MRI report into plain English, summarize your test results, and answer a medication question with total confidence. The problem is that confidence is false, and in healthcare, the cost of a bad answer can be huge. I'm Heather Johnston, MD, and I'm living the patient side right now: heart failure that demands consistent cardio, plus a hip injury and other orthopedic issues that make the gym feel like a minefield. After getting vague guidance from real clinicians who were focused on their own “slice,” I tried something different. I uploaded my MRI reports and heart testing into Claude, got a customized routine, and then did the most important step: I asked my physical therapist to sanity-check it before I followed it.From there, I zoom out to how other patients are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for healthcare advice, symptom searches, test interpretation, and insurance questions. I break down what large language models actually are, why the specific model you're talking to matters, and what the latest research says about medical accuracy, user error, and the risk of misleading answers delivered in a polished tone. I also dig into privacy: most chatbots are not covered by HIPAA, which changes the stakes when you share sensitive health information.Then I'm joined by viral TikTok creator Ty Eveland, whose “AI doctor” trolling with baby Tuna is hilarious and deeply instructive. His clips show how bots can miss sarcasm, context, and reality, while still sounding authoritative and confident. I finish up with practical, safer ways to use AI as a patient today, plus what tools like ChatGPT Health may mean for the near future. Subscribe, share this with a friend who asks chatbots for medical advice, and leave a review with your biggest AI-in-healthcare question.

We've spent the last month vibe coding our own corners of the internet. The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes and Hayden Field join David to talk about their use of Gemini, Codex, and Claude Code to build 90s-themed personal websites, vegetable-sharing systems, and photo boards. It wasn't always easy, and we didn't get everything done, but with a little AI and a lot of prompting, we made it work. Further reading: Four takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg's massive AI manifesto | The Verge The first rival Android app store just arrived in the US Play Store | The Verge Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes | The Verge Claude has been having a moment — can it keep it up? | The Verge The vibe-coding AI future is both exciting and terrifying | The Verge Welcome to the personal software revolution | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Discover why markets are hovering near record highs, but several powerful forces could determine what happens next. In this episode, we look at three major catalysts investors should be watching. Are you on track for financial freedom...or not? Financial freedom is a combination of money, compounding and time (my McT Formula). How well you invest can make the biggest difference to your financial freedom and lifestyle. If you invested well for the long-term, what a difference it would make because the difference between investing $100k and earning 5 percent or 10 percent on your money over 30 years, is the difference between it growing to $432,194 or $1,744,940, an increase of over $1.3 million dollars. Your compounding rate, and how well you invest, matters!  INVESTING IS WHAT THE BE WEALTHY & SMART VIP EXPERIENCE IS ALL ABOUT - Invest in digital assets and stock ETFs for potential high compounding rates - Receive an Asset Allocation model with ticker symbols and what % to invest -Monthly LIVE investment webinars with Linda 10 months per year, with Q & A -Private VIP Facebook group with daily community interaction -Weekly investment commentary -Extra educational wealth classes available -Pay once, have lifetime access! NO recurring membership fees. -US and foreign investors are welcome -No minimum $ amount to invest -Tech Team available for digital assets (for hire per hour) For a limited time, enjoy a 50% savings on my private investing group, the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Pay once and enjoy lifetime access without any additional recurring fees. Pay once and you're done! Invest with our successful community for years to come. Enter "SAVE50" to save 50% here: http://tinyurl.com/InvestingVIP Or set up a complimentary conversation to answer your questions about the Be Wealthy & Smart VIP Experience. Request an appointment to talk with Linda here: https://tinyurl.com/TalkWithLinda (yes, you talk to Linda!). SUBSCRIBE TO BE WEALTHY & SMART Click Here to Subscribe Via iTunes Click Here to Subscribe Via Stitcher on an Android Device Click Here to Subscribe Via RSS Feed LINDA'S WEALTH BOOKS 1. Get my book, "3 Steps to Quantum Wealth: The Wealth Heiress' Guide to Financial Freedom by Investing in Cryptocurrencies". 2. Get my book, "You're Already a Wealth Heiress, Now Think and Act Like One: 6 Practical Steps to Make It a Reality Now!" Men love it too! After all, you are Wealth Heirs. :) International buyers (if you live outside of the US) get my book here. WANT MORE FROM LINDA? Check out her programs. Join her on Instagram. WEALTH LIBRARY OF PODCASTS Listen to the full wealth library of podcasts from the beginning.  SPECIAL DEALS #Ad Apply for a Gemini credit card and get FREE XRP back (or any crypto you choose) when you use the card. Charge $3000 in first 90 days and earn $200 in crypto rewards when you use this link to apply and are approved: https://tinyurl.com/geminixrp This is a credit card, NOT a debit card. There are great rewards. Set your choice to EARN FREE XRP! #Ad Protect yourself online with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Get 3 MONTHS FREE when you sign up for a NORD VPN plan here.  #Ad To safely and securely store crypto, I recommend using a Tangem wallet. Get a 10% discount when you purchase here. #Ad If you are looking to simplify your crypto tax reporting, use Koinly. It is highly recommended and so easy for tax reporting. You can save $20, click here. Be Wealthy & Smart,™ is a personal finance show with self-made millionaire Linda P. Jones, America's Wealth Mentor.™ Learn simple steps that make a big difference to your financial freedom.  (This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission. There is no additional cost to you.)  

AI agents crashing.

The eclipses are here, the eclipses are here! The week leading up to this total Leo Solar Eclipse has been very telling. But first: Venus, the goddess of love and money, aspects Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. Mars enters Cancer, where it will stay through September 27th. Mercury gets a change of perception as it connects with Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter. And April answers a listener question about money in the horoscope. Plus: Information overload, moms in SUVs, and where does the money go? We have a lot of transits to unpack, so let's get this show on the road! Read a full transcript of this episode. Have a question you'd like answered on the show? Email April or leave it here! Subscribe to April's mailing list and get a free lunar workbook at each New Moon! Love the show? Make a donation! Timestamps [1:31] Venus trine Pluto (Aug. 10, 11:08 am PDT) at 3°57' Libra and Aquarius; Venus opposed Neptune (Aug. 10, 3:02 pm PDT) at 4°6' Libra and Aries; Venus trine Uranus (Aug. 11, 8:46 pm PDT) at 5°19' Libra and Gemini. Neptune opposes symbol 5 Libra, A man teaching the true inner knowledge. Look closely at what the people we love, and the way we make or spend our money, says about us. Having seen the truth of a situation, it's time to decide what to do about it. [3:34] Mars enters Cancer (Aug. 11, 1:30 am PDT, until Sep. 27). Mars will square Neptune (Aug. 17) and Saturn (Sep. 1), both in Aries. Act on behalf of the things and people closest to your heart, and tackle projects that you've been avoiding. [6:11] Mercury opposes Pluto (Aug. 11, 6:20 pm PDT) at 3°55' Leo-Aquarius. Mercury is on the Sabian symbol 4 Leo, A man formally dressed and a deer with its horns folded. Check out Judith De Haan's essay on this symbol. Mercury trines Neptune (Aug. 11, 8:39 pm PDT) at 4°5' Leo-Aries, on 5 Leo, Rock formations at the edge of a precipice. Mercury sextiles Uranus (Aug. 12, 1:48 pm PDT) at 5°20' Leo-Gemini on 6 Leo, An old-fashioned woman and an up-to-date girl. These are powerful aspects for telling your truth, using the healing power of your words, and channeling brilliant insights. [8:02] Moon Report! The Leo New Moon Solar Eclipse (Aug. 12, 10:37 am PDT) at 20°1' Leo on the Sabian symbol 21 Leo, Chickens intoxicated. Previous eclipses near this degree were on Aug. 11, 2018, with a solar eclipse at 18°42' Leo; on Feb. 11, 2017, a lunar eclipse at 22°28' Leo; and on Feb. 9, 2009, a lunar eclipse at 21 Leo. This is the first eclipse in Leo since Jan. 21, 2019, and the first since Feb. 9, 2009 when the South Node was also in Leo. The downfall of leaders seems relevant to this eclipse. [11:24] Lunar Phase Family Cycle (LPFC). The First Quarter phase (first action point) of this LPFC is on May 12, 2027 at 22°13' Leo. The Full Moon phase (awareness point) is on Feb. 10, 2028 at 21°23' Leo. The Last Quarter phase (last action point) is on Nov. 9, 2028 at 18° Leo. [12:41] Void-of-Course (VOC) Moon periods. The Moon in Cancer squares Saturn in Aries (Aug. 10, 12:30 am PDT). It's VOC for 1 day, 1 hour, 8 minutes, then enters Leo (Aug. 11, 1:38 am PDT). Use this VOC Moon period to develop a new habit of establishing stronger boundaries without bringing emotional meltdowns to the table. [13:45] The Moon conjoins the Sun (Aug. 12, 10:37 am PDT). It will be VOC for 16 hours, 41 minutes, then enters Virgo (Aug. 13, 3:18 am PDT). Use this VOC Moon period to give credit where credit is due. [14:42] The Moon in Virgo squares Uranus in Gemini (Aug. 13, 12:24 pm PDT). It's VOC for 1 day, 18 hours, 56 minutes, then enters Libra (Aug. 15, 7:20 am PDT). Use this VOC Moon period to free yourself from mental stressors by developing inner security that's independent of external circumstances. [15:57] Mercury conjunct Jupiter (Aug. 15, 2026, 4:23 am PDT) at 10°09' Leo on Sabian symbol, 11 Leo, Children on a swing in a huge oak tree. Articulate your beliefs and dreams for the future. [17:36] Listener Tommy asks about money houses in the chart. If anyone is planning on attending the upcoming UAC conference in Chicago next month, April will be speaking on Derivative Houses (Sep. 8, at 9 am). [24:18] Leave a message of one minute or less at speakpipe.com/ bigskyastrologypodcast or email april (at) bigskyastrology (dot) com; put “Podcast Question” in the subject line. Free ways to support the podcast: subscribe, like, review and share with a friend! [24:33] A tribute to this week's donors! If you would like to support the show and receive access to April's special donors-only videos, go to BigSkyAstropod.com and contribute $10 or more. You can make a one-time donation in any amount or become an ongoing monthly contributor.

We continue the journey to 1000 episodes with this riveting installment that could possibly change your life. Not convinced? If you order big bacon-covered burgers every day that WILL change your life. We guarantee it.Print out your Noctua things, run Windows 11 in 8Gb with varying degrees of success, AMD makes the monies, and EA goes private.  Question:  Is THIS the year of Linux?  Why did Roomba and power inverters just get banned, Apple DRAM struggles, and Fanatec (of course).  A well packed show in a 10lb bag, enjoy!TImestamps:00:00 Intro01:25 Patreon02:28 Food with Josh05:40 Microsoft deletes 32GB RAM recommendation docs11:04 Linux market share grows14:08 AMD Financial results (with extended discussion)22:33 Even Apple struggles to get DRAM (and memory is sold out through 2027)24:30 We talk even more about RAM and the stock market29:28 Sony moves ahead with end of discs33:26 Google removing Assistant on phones - Gemini the only option35:07 Finally, we can 3D print in official Noctua colors38:08 (In)Security Corner51:13 Josh's Sim Racing Corner53:50 Gaming Quick Hits1:04:49 HyperX Cloud Stinger 3 Wireless gaming headset review1:10:18 Picks of the Week1:22:47 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

https://youtu.be/eUqMjIq3r2U Brian Hong, Founder of Infintech Designs, Flowbots.ai, and BigEasyData.ai, is driven to Build AI Revenue Engines that create freedom by helping businesses generate more leads, sales, and revenue while increasing the productivity of their teams. By combining SEO, AI automation, business intelligence, and human expertise, Brian helps companies improve their marketing, systemize their operations, and enhance their people with AI rather than simply replacing them. In this conversation, Brian introduces his Team Building Framework—Attract and Assess A-Players, Productize and Systemize, Hire People Who Can Follow Instructions, and Enhance with AI Capabilities. He explains how placing people in roles where they can thrive creates stronger teams, why clear processes and blueprints make it easier to scale, and how AI can enhance employees by increasing their productivity instead of replacing them. Brian also discusses how SEO is evolving with ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, why businesses need to build brand authority and entity breadth, and how business intelligence can identify the specific areas where AI can create the greatest revenue impact. — Build AI Revenue Engines with Brian Hong  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Brian Hong, the founder of Infintech Designs, Flowbots.ai, and BigEasyData.ai. These are New Orleans-based companies, including a digital marketing agency, focused on building more leads, more sales, and more exposure online with strategic SEO and digital marketing strategies. Brian, welcome to the show.  Thanks. Thanks for having me.  So you have quite a portfolio. I also read on your LinkedIn page that you invest in other companies, and then you support them as well. So it sounds like you have a lot of irons in the fire. But before we get into all that, my question to you is, what is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business, or businesses?  Why do I work so hard? Why do I want to build all these companies? To me, money creates freedom. I’m trying to bank as many freedom points as I can to live life on my own terms, and to do and have experiences with the people I love. That’s my “Why.”  Wow. How does that manifest in your businesses?  That’s a good question. I'm building AI automation to get my time leverage, to create duplication, so I can 10x the productivity of my employees. Not hire more people, but keep my A-players.Share on X Because if I have an A-team, or can cultivate an A-team, then I think I can bank more freedom points at a more efficient and scalable process. Don’t hire more people. Hire people intentionally, and 10x their productivity. That would be a domino effect to align with gaining more freedom points.  So what’s the maximum number of freedom points? Is it like a 100-point scale? What does it look like to have 100 freedom points?  It’s working because I want to, not because I have to. Because I love working. It’s living life on my own terms and focusing my time on things that I want to do. For instance, I have a house cleaner. I don’t want to clean the house. My time is better spent doing something else that I passionately want or love to do. Unless I loved cleaning houses. That’s fine. Maybe that’s therapeutic for some people. But it allows me to live life on my own terms. Money is the key that unlocks those opportunities to live life on my terms.Share on X  How do you maximize your freedom points? What does it look like when your freedom points are maxed out?  Then I’m working because I want to, not because I have to. I still want to work. I still want to build. I love building things. I’m not the type of guy who wants to go to the beach, sit on the beach, and do nothing all day. I might do that for an hour. I’ve got to be doing something. I have to be building. It’s just the way I’m programmed. Maybe I don’t want to work as much as I do now, but I can’t imagine a life doing nothing. To me, that doesn’t serve a purpose.  Yeah.  I like building. I love contributing. I love being a part of the equation of success. It's just fun to me. I get gratification out of it. I like creating jobs.Share on X I like creating communities. I like meeting people. It’s interesting to me. It fills my bucket. That bucket is filled to then, I mean, try and give me freedom points to then go spend some personal time creating experiences with the people I love, mainly my wife and my child.  That’s amazing. Okay, let me take a step back. You have multiple companies. You have Infintech Designs. You have a couple of AI companies as well. How does that portfolio work?  I essentially do this. I have a construction company as well, TurnKey Renovators, a GC for residential. I have a couple of e-commerce companies. Really, I’m doing the same thing over and over. Earlier in my life, I used to wait tables. My takeaway from that experience, from working at Applebee’s to fine dining, is: How many different dishes can you make with the same ingredients?  With my knowledge, my resources, and my skills, how many different things can I do with them? This is my version of it. All those companies, by the way, I’ve never stroked a check. I pretty much say, “Give me half your company, and I’ll help you grow it.” I’ve never cut a check because I give them what they really want, which is the outcome they want to achieve with that money. They want the money to help grow their company. What if I just help you grow your company?  So I ask for an equal seat at the table, and in exchange, I’ll install what I know and go grow it. I’m essentially doing that over and over. My time is spent on high-level decisions, systems, processes, automation, and marketing.  Yeah. Love it. You know, I always wondered about marketing agencies. If they really know how to grow sales, why are they not doing it for themselves, and why are they offering it to others? It sounds like you are drinking your own Kool-Aid, and you are using your own product.  Yeah. Definitely. We practice what we preach. I see some companies doing that because there’s also an abundance mindset. If I can do it for me, and I can do it for someone else, let me just create another revenue stream and do it for both of us.  Okay. That makes sense. This podcast is all about frameworks. I wonder, what is a framework that you have created or discovered that helps you be effective in what you do, and that you could share with the audience so they might also find a way to leverage it in their business?  I guess it depends on many things. From team building, it may be doing a DiSC Assessment and Kolbe tests to make sure we place each person in a situation where they thrive. Sometimes when things aren’t working, maybe the owner, the manager, or the person needs to look in the mirror and say, “This is my fault, not the employee’s fault.” “I didn’t set them up for success.” “I’m trying to stick a round peg into a square hole.” “I’m trying to put them in a position that they may not thrive in, and they’re not programmed to naturally do.”  So we’ll sometimes do these assessments, whether it’s a personality clash or a personality type, and make sure we place them in a role where they’ll thrive. So that could be a framework. Setting the employee up for success. Once we do have an employee, the better the plan, the better the outcome. So try to productize and systemize everything we do. If we have a blueprint people need to follow, then I can spend more of my time not finding specific talent and skills, but finding people who can follow instructions.  Because if we have the blueprint, and this is what you need to do, then I can get a lower-wage worker who doesn’t have a specialized skill. That specialized skill will be developed because I’m handing you the blueprint of what you need to execute.  So that’s the three-step framework. Set employees up for success by delegating tasks that fit their personality. Then productize and systemize. Then find people who can implement. To what extent does that work in the AI age? Are these people who just execute tasks according to instructions still solving the problems, or is that no longer working because of the fast pace of change?  It depends on what the activity is, but generally, and more often, it’s human enhancement, not human replacement. So instead of saying, “Let’s just say I have a web developer, and I get more business, so I need to hire a second web developer, web designer, programmer, then a third one, then a fourth one.” The new version today is: keep the one you have, and instead of hiring another human, 10x their productivity with an AI-driven solution.  Allow them to do more with less. Allow them to duplicate their activities so they focus on their revenue-generating activities, on the decisions and activities that AI cannot do, as of yet. That’s how we turn an A-player into an A-plus player. That’s how we turn a B-player into an A-player. That prevents me from having to hire people I don’t want working for me, which are C-players.  Isn’t there a risk that when you have too few players, even if they are A-plus, there’s too much dependence on a single person? Well, I mean, we’ll hire more than one. I have a seven-person leadership team. I have two main managers. I have a department head and then an associate, so there’s always some level of duplication. Then you have an AI layer in between that. So between all of that, yes, if someone gets struck by lightning or someone is sick, the ship needs to keep sailing. We can’t shut down the business.  Love it. What is driving growth in your business?  Relationships. SEO. Ranking in LLMs. Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT. I’d say those are the main pillars that are creating opportunities. I also own a conference, rockstarsconference.com. We’re entering our 15th year. That’s network value, positioning of expertise, and relationship building. Things that AI cannot replicate. Human connections. Then I also do SEO for myself, right? Our last handful of leads that came in through Flowbot.ai. This one particularly stands out. There was this roofing company that sent me an email. We actually talked on the phone.  He really blew up my ego and talked about how great I was. I thought he was a referral. I’m like, “Man, why does this person think I’m so great? It’s really odd.” I said, “Can I ask how you heard about me?” He’s like, “Oh, I spent the last two hours talking to Gemini because I discovered you through Google AI Overviews, and it just told me you’re great.” So I’m like, we’re entering a new world. That is a referral. It’s not from someone I know who spoke highly about me. It’s through a language model. Gemini said I was great, so this person believed I was great.  That’s amazing. That’s very cool. So you have these four pillars. I love it. Relationships, SEO, GEO—or whatever AI referrals you want to call it—and the conference. Would you bucket the conference into the same category as relationships, or is that more of a proactive way of creating a community beyond personal relationships? Is it the same thing?  It checks a lot of boxes. A few of my business partners were born out of that conference. New opportunities and getting clients were born out of that. Knowledge gain. Knowledge transfer that I gained to go implement. So it checks all the boxes. I’m gaining knowledge. I’m gaining relationships. I’m gaining partners. I’m gaining new systems. New processes. I’m gaining sparks, catalysts, and kind of tracks to go down and explore. So it kind of checks a lot of boxes.  Yeah. Love it. So the SEO and GEO piece, is it something that is static, or is it dynamically changing all the time?  Dynamically changing. It’s SEO 3.0, right? SEO is dead. It’s dead if you’re doing SEO the old way. Getting ranked in ChatGPT, the LLMs, and Google AI Overviews. Let’s just say it’s everything you do with SEO, plus more now because you have ChatGPT citations. You have sources that these LLMs frequently query. Then, in the world of SEO—the search engine Google—you have broad core updates. Broad core updates. Updates to the algorithm. That’s pretty much what it means.  They also occur within LLMs. So it’s pretty much do SEO, plus more. What is the plus more? If I had to distill it, it’s get brand mentions and actually become a brand. Do podcast interviews like this. Get press releases. Get write-ups. Be on SoundCloud. Do social media. Post on LinkedIn. Get write-ups in news and media publications. Appear in Google News. Have a website that has dynamic content. Create your topical map. The list keeps on going. Build your brand. That’s the SEO of today. That will put you in a position to get mentioned in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.  Yeah. That’s fascinating. I’m just thinking about my business. We had a website that actually got some referrals from AI. We even got some clients last year. Then we split the website into two websites, and things dried up. It was kind of an interesting situation. We still had the same amount of content, but we moved it to a different domain, and it did not register the same way. Do you see that often?  Yeah. You want Google and LLMs, at the most basic level, to have a better understanding of who you are, what you do, where you do it, and the services you offer through having something called breadth of entities. Entities are the nouns of the internet. Entities are a signal. A language. All Wikipedia pages are entities, but not all entities have Wikipedia pages.  They’re the nouns of the internet. It’s a layer of clarity for search engines, algorithms, and LLMs to understand who you are, what you do, and where you do it. It’s not the only signal, but at a foundational layer, that should be implemented. So what we’re talking about is creating content. What does that mean? Create content on your website. Don’t create content for the sake of creating content because anybody can create content with AI.  Create intentional content that satisfies the user and aligns with certain algorithmic components, such as Google's E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.Share on X Everything we’re talking about is SEO. You want optimized content. You want pages. The first 150 to 200 words are important. The last 150 to 200 words are important. Add tables. Add bullet points. Make sure your content is clear. Position yourself with authority.  Have links pointing to it. Interlink it. These are all SEO kinds of activities. So SEO is alive and well, but there are new layers you need to add on top of that to create optimal positioning in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.  Yeah. I saw one of your videos on your LinkedIn page where you actually explained what is the wrong way to do SEO and the right way to do it. I think you had your alter ego disputing with you. Yeah. That was pretty funny. So that sounds like a lot of work. Can you delegate that to AI agents to do this kind of stuff?  Yes and no. It’s not like I just click a button and step away. It takes a human-in-the-loop system, and that’s what we’ve developed. So yes, I don’t need as many humans, but I still need humans.  So you said that in one of these companies you have 100 AI agents working on SEO, creating SEO impact for your clients. What is it that the AI agents can do, and what is it that you still need the human to do?  The AIs collect information, rapidly digest it, find patterns, perform pattern analysis, do research, and create content briefs. But there needs to be thought leadership. AI is very directional. It’s, “Go do this,” but we need a human to point it in the right direction. We need to create guardrails. We need to create a source of truth. It needs to know where to look for the right information. It needs direction on what to do with this information.  How should I digest it? How should I format it? How should I break up the heading tags? It needs that element where it can go do it, but the human is part of that last-mile conversion. So maybe the AI does zero to 80, and maybe the human does the 80 to 100.  Yeah. That’s very interesting. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business?  How to automate everything. Everything is a complete agentic workflow that is proactive, not reactive. Where I have a board of advisors every day looking at how they can serve me.Share on X Identifying the patterns in my life that I need to stop doing and they can do. Developing skills, if they don’t have them, to go execute that. Having a feedback loop to constantly improve.  This has become superintelligence. Agentic work, which is kind of here. That’s what maybe some people have heard about: OpenClaw. Then you have something called a Hermes agent. These things are here, but they need to be trained. They need to be fed the right information and given the right guardrails. But it has begun, and I’m trying to go down that journey.  Isn’t that overwhelming to think of all these details, managing these agents, and making sure they’re not going rogue or getting confused by what every one of them is doing?  It’s overwhelmingly exciting, but not overwhelmingly bad, because this is the worst it’s going to be, and it’s mind-blowingly good. It’s overwhelming because it’s so amazing and so awesome. It’s garbage in, garbage out. I am the architect trying to create the blueprint on how to control these agents. To me, that’s incredibly exciting and incredibly amazing. To be a part of this time in history, it’s like that feeling when I dropped out of college and this thing called the internet was born in 2000.  I knew the world wasn’t going to be the same again. That same feeling came again in 2022 when I heard about ChatGPT. I created my first AI company in 2023. I said the world isn’t going to be the same again. I have the same feeling I had in 2000, but times 100. So to me, it’s overwhelming, but overwhelmingly exciting.  Yeah. So what does one do if they want to get, okay, let’s say it’s me. I use ChatGPT actively, but I’m not building AI agents. What would you recommend that I do? How do I even get started?  What is your pain point? Is it communication? Is it writing emails? Is it reporting? It kind of depends, right? You can customize it based on your pain points. Where are you spending your time, and where should you be spending your time?  Yeah. That’s a good question. I think the first question is, what should I even use it for?  I can give you some ideas. A handful of things I use it for, but not limited to. I can give you use cases that we do for other people. So to construction company, inbound and outbound calls. We never miss a phone call. We answer every single one. We qualify the lead. We seamlessly connect to a CRM. We know if it’s a new customer or an existing customer. If it’s an existing customer, we can look at their history. We can now have an intentional conversation through voice.  I can clone that. I can qualify them. I can book the appointment. I can put it on the salesperson’s calendar. I can receive a text message. I can read the message. I can set the salesperson up for success. I can then pull their address. I can then pull their demographics. I know their net income. I know their affinities, their interests, their hobbies. I know whether their house has a pool. I know the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. I know their credit score. I know their disposable income.  My layer of intention is going to be very different if I have all of this data to interact with that person, either through a voice agent, an AI agent through SMS, through email, through voice, or I can pass that information to the salesperson so they know what they’re walking into. They know the opportunity. So we have lead scoring. We have prioritization. That's one thing we could do: taking over your appointment setting and lead qualification.Share on X Then we can create reporting.  Then we can create trend forecasting. We can turn your business into a mathematical equation. We know 10 leads equals 3 appointments, equals 2 shows, equals 1 person who shows up, average ticket $10,000. We know that formula. Then we say, “Well, we need to feed it more.” The math equation is 10 equals $10,000. Whatever that math equation is, that’s the position I want to be in. I want to make data-driven decisions. So AI is an accelerator to achieve that.  What’s at the top of the funnel? Is it advertising?  Yeah. It could be Facebook Ads. Google Ads. SEO. It kind of depends. Do you want expensive and fast, or do you want cheap and slow? Expensive and fast. When I say expensive, I mean cost per acquisition and cost per visibility. That’s going to be Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok—anything where you’re buying media. That’s going to be expensive because you have to pay on a per-click basis or a per-impression basis. The cheap and slow is going to be something like SEO.  Do the work now to feel the impact later. It’s signal building. You don’t have to pay on a per-click basis. You don’t have to pay on a per-impression basis. But you have to build signals. Those signals cost money. You have to do the work, but it’s not going to happen overnight. You do the work now to feel it later. It’s an investment. So ideally, you do both. You take a blended cost per acquisition because your SEO channels almost 99% of the time are going to have the lowest cost per acquisition. But speed is going to come from Facebook Ads and Google Ads. So you take the best of both worlds with a blended cost per acquisition.  Is the formula the same for business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies, or is it different?  Yeah. The algorithm doesn’t change. The algorithm is the algorithm. The messaging is different, but it’s the same across the board. The concepts are the same. There are some things, like in medical. Google specifically has something called YMYL—Your Money or Your Life. That’s going to be finance businesses, payday loans, and medical. Those things have a high impact on your life.  So they may have a little more scrutiny, and it might be harder to build trust and validation because of the category you’re in. In that aspect, yeah, the formula is a little bit different. But the activities you engage in are the same. You need to build content. You need to build your brand. You need to build links. You need to optimize your website. You need to create on social media. It’s all the same.  Yeah. Fascinating. So who is the ideal client that you would like to respond to this podcast?  Man, I get asked that, and I’m having more difficulty because I have a lot of companies in my portfolio, right? I have, as of now, about seven companies. I’d say companies that want to automate. Why do you want to automate? The first step of that is maybe building intelligence—business intelligence. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. What if we build a system where maybe you take two steps back to take 10 steps forward?  The two steps back is building business intelligence through AI-driven systems to have segmentation and attribution on exactly what’s happening. How many leads are you getting? Where are they coming from? What is your workflow? Create the math equation. Now we have a measurement. We have a benchmark. Now we can build custom AI agents to say, “This is what we need to focus on first.” So we have our foundational layer, our source of truth.  Maybe that’s a good first step, so you’re not doing a spray and pray. You can say, “Now I know what I need to do. Now I know where my problems are.” Let’s remove the emotion of, “I think.” It now becomes, “I know this is a problem.” Now let’s zoom in and say, “Well, how do we solve this problem?” Are leads the problem? Or is it connecting to the leads? Is it showing up to the appointment? Is it closing the deal? Are we closing deals, but the average ticket is low?  If we close one deal, is it upselling to a second deal? What is the one-year value? Lifetime value? First transaction value? If we don’t know that, then how do we create a math equation of success? How do we know what bucket we need to feed? How do we know where the problem is or isn’t? If we do know where it is, then we can say, “Let’s build a second AI agent.” How do we augment and enhance maybe lead-to-connection rate? Let’s build an SMS agent.  A voice agent. An outbound agent. Let’s build nurture and upsell. Let’s follow up in perpetuity, forever. Let’s tackle that first because we have clear, data-driven insights showing this is a problem. I would say people who want clarity on where their problem is, or maybe they know where their problems are. Then that could be a starting point. So it’s hard for me to answer because I’ve got my hands in so many different buckets.  I’m top of funnel. I’m middle of funnel. I’m bottom of the funnel. I’m top of funnel. Introduction. Brand. Product or service. Google Ads. Facebook Ads. SEO. GEO. I’m middle of funnel. Turning visitors into customers. That’s follow-up AI systems. That’s operational efficiencies. That’s touchpoints. That’s nurturing. I’m bottom of funnel. I’m business intelligence. Segmentation. Attribution. I can help with all stages. I just need to talk to businesses. Businesses that want to grow and generate more revenue. That’s my audience.  Love it. Love it. So if you have a business that wants to grow and generate more revenue, then make sure you check out Brian Hong on LinkedIn. Where else should people go if they want to learn about your companies?  Yeah. I’ve got Brian Hong Digital on Instagram. I’m trying to build my own personal brand. I’m about to relaunch some videos again. I’ve been busy with another acquisition of another marketing agency. I’d say check out the socials or send me an email through Flowbots.ai or InfinTech Design.  Okay. Sounds good. So check out Brian. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. The complexity that you’re managing. Not just the number of companies. The number of investee companies you’re in. The products you’re building. The conferences. It’s kind of mind-boggling how you’re managing that complexity. But I guess you have a couple hundred AI agents at your service. If you’d like to learn more and explore Brian’s products, go to his LinkedIn page.  Then you can connect to his different companies from there. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of amazing entrepreneurs like Brian who will open your eyes to the opportunities ahead of you. So thanks, Brian, for sharing your knowledge and insights. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it. Important Links: Brian's LinkedIn Brian's  website

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This is your daily horoscope for Wednesday, August 12, and the most important aspects of the day:Moon in Leo trine Saturn in Aries (1:30am PT)Mars in Cancer sextile Chiron in Taurus (7:30am PT)New Moon Solar Eclipse in Leo (10:36am PT)Mercury in Leo sextile Uranus in Gemini (2pm PT)Unlock More MagicGrimoire: Become a Better Witch in 12 WeeksBook a Reading with StephanieAccess Personalized Horoscopes + Join Stephanie's PatreonMake a DifferenceJustice for Nolan Wells: Send Support to His FamilySupport Karmelo Anthony I Message Him or Donate (SID #: 21558442; Facility: TDCJ - PACK)Sign the Petition + Demand Clemency for Jeffery Lee I Call Gov. Ivey + Demand Clemency 334-242-7100Justice for Cyrus Carmack-BeltonSupport the Free Alabama Movement

The millions of Americans living with mental illness—as well as people dealing with life's everyday stresses—often struggle to see a therapist when they need one. That's a big reason why many people have started turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT for emotional support. But as a number of high-profile lawsuits show, that can sometimes lead to devastating outcomes. Companies creating AI for mental health say they can do better. What's News host Alex Ossola and WSJ audio producer Pierre Bienaimé explore the growing field of these purpose-built tools, and how people are already using them, in Part 1 of our special series “The AI Therapist.” Further Reading: Chatbots Are Replacing Therapists With Little Scientific Evidence Behind Them Teens Seek Mental-Health Help From Chatbots. That's Dangerous, Says New Study. How AI Advice Is Undermining Eating-Disorder Therapy When There's No School Counselor, There's a Bot Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Autonomous AIs are hacking, collaborating, and outpacing human defenders, raising urgent questions about what happens when the machines start breaking into each other (and potentially us). Plus, a Tucson coder is using AI to reinvent local journalism, exposing how automation could fill the gaps left by shrinking newsrooms. Tucson Daily Brief uses AI to revive local news coverage Data centers boom in Arizona, with harsh environmental impact Amazon's Texas data center to run on polluting natural gas Nuclear and solar debates for sustainable data center power Black Hat and DEF CON: Security pros, hackers, and mohawks OpenAI's runaway AI hack at Black Hat stuns security community AI agents collaborate, evade controls, and break into real-world systems Industry struggles to regulate AI, and defense lags behind automated attackers White House, Congress, and AI execs clash over regulation proposals AI "kill switch" and model bans: pipe dreams in a global race Google's DeepMind shakeup, Demis Hassabis moves upstairs Jeff Dean and key talent exit Google for self-improving AI startup Google, Meta, Apple: AI brain drain and market repercussions Phones stagnate as hardware innovation slows, AI devours chip supply OpenAI teams with Jony Ive on strange new AI-first device Smart glasses privacy backlash and DuckDuckGo's tongue-in-cheek sunglasses Meta fined $942 million by New Mexico court for youth harms Apple sues OpenAI over alleged stolen secrets, countersuits ensue UK revives "Snooper's Charter" for backdoors, Apple fights in secret court License plate readers spark local backlash and privacy activism U.S. water systems face cyber sabotage as critical infrastructure weakens Bending Spoons buys Airtable, fueling SaaS layoffs and AI data grabs Nicholas DeLeon uses AI tools to get fit NASA hacks keep aging Voyager probes alive for another year Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Iain Thomson and Nicholas De Leon Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit NetSuite.AI/TWIT ZipRecruiter.com/twit adaptivesecurity.com superhuman.com

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