Podcast appearances and mentions of grant larsen

Netflix's Temptation Island contestant Grant Larsen joins Mark Walberg for this week's episode of BonfireTalks with Mark L. Walberg. Mark opens the show by asking Grant about his transformative journey through the ups and downs of reality TV. Grant talks about his Initial struggles with public backlash and external criticism, which led him to prioritize internal peace and self-accountability. Grant also shares his post-show recovery, which included finding therapy, a newfound focus on personal growth, and his new entrepreneurial venture with his daughter. By shifting focus from external validation to internal understanding, Grant highlights the importance of self-awareness and peace in leading a fulfilling life. Follow Grant online:INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/grant_larsen_/?hl=en TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegrantlarsen?_t=ZS-8ubxyTU2UzP&_r=1 Daddy Daughter Swimwear Line:INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/amorabeachwearofficial/?hl=enWEBSITE: https://www.amorabeachwear.com/ And follow BonfireTalks online:INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/bonfiretalkspodcast  YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@BonfireTalksPodcast

Hey guys, welcome back to the X Podcast!

In this episode, I sit down with eye care industry veteran Grant Larsen to discuss effective change. Successful businesses are easily able to adapt, change, and add new services/ products based on the needs of their customers. As a business owner and leader, it's imperative we recognize steps to success and lead them within the business.Key Takeaways:Change is difficult. Don't think you have to do lead, drive change within your practice all by yourself.The first step to any successful endeavor is understand your “why”. Why are you doing this? Why are you passionate about seeing it succeed?Maintaining change isn't easy either. Learn from the challenges, the “failures”, and why something may not have gone to plan. Adjust accordingly and stay accountable.Have a scorecard for success. Manage against it. Recognition and reward is key to keeping your staff connected to your scorecard.Leverage the connected knowledge of experts around you to accelerate success. Learn from mistakes made and successes had.Getting started is key.Other episodes mentioned in this episode:Episode 48: The KPI's You Aren't Tracking with Bryan HobanEpisode 24: Focus On Financials Part 2 with Bryan HobanEpisode 23: Focus On Financials Part 1 with Bryan Hoban

What are the main challenges that I need to solve as a company trying to apply AI to help my business? In this episode, I have a conversation with an organization that provides an AI platform to help you overcome those.   Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. And today I have someone that I bumped into the not too long ago, I was at a conference and literally went to their booth and said, Oh, I want to learn more about this technology. I've been tracking your team, your organization, so it's my chance to learn more about it. And so I got to meet a Atalia Horenshtien I hope I said that right. I'm so excited to have Atalia here with me today. So first of all, "A" welcome I tell you and "B" did I say your name right? And then "C" the first question out of the box, explain the meaning behind your name. Atalia Thank you so much for having me. And you actually pronounced the name correctly. So kudos to your best. The meaning behind my name. So first of all, thanks to my parents for choosing such a unique name. It's actually a Hebrew name. I'm originally from, from Israel. And I totally I need Hebrew pronouncing it as a Talia is actually the first claim in Judaism kingdom. So it's a name from the Bible. And it's actually very unique even in Israel. Very cool. Grant Really. The queen in the Bible, I'm gonna have to go look that up. That's awesome. You should. That's very cool. Do we? Do we bow in your presence? Then? Do we do anything like that? Do we do we say Hey, this is me? Atalia No, no, no, no, not not at all. Grant Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time here today. Now as I understand that, I want to make sure I get this right. Your title in your organization is Global Technology Product Advocacy Lead, I actually had to write that down because I can only remember three things. And that's five words in a title, Global Technology Product Advocacy Lead for DataRobot. Did I get that? Right? Atalia Yeah, that's actually correct. Grant What do you do in that role? Atalia So we did a robot. I started as a customer facing data scientist, where I work with customers in different industries, and helping them how to solve complex AI and machine learning problems. And learning from this role, and those use cases. I shifted a bit towards to the advocacy side. So how we tell the technical story of DataRobot, how we educate the market about what's possible. Some of the use cases I implement, and some of the stuff I saw was working on collaboration with our marketing sales. And our customers as well. Grant Okay, got it. So that global part, I think, is critical, because I'm assuming that you go across multiple markets, you're not focused on any one. I gotta believe that gives you a sort of broader industry cross industry view on on AI and machine learning. Is that correct? Atalia Yeah, so I was very lucky to work with different industries in different geographical locations. And obviously, I see a lot of different trends and maturity around AI, where they are in the stage, how are they adopting? What's the process? There, technical knowledge, their technical stage? Yeah. So from United States to Europe to the Middle East. It's really, really interesting. And I'm very happy that I have the opportunity to do so. Grant So that's awesome. What know what got you into this world? What got you into AI and machine learning? Atalia Actually, it's a really interesting path because I started actually the software engineer Not not a, as a data scientist, and over time, obviously the software engineer you work with, with software development, system design, etc, some stuff that you see today in in machine learning operations. And then when I did my masters, I was mostly specific around business intelligence and machine learning. And I learned a lot, it was super interesting. So I took my software skills into a different level. And it's a funny story, because a professor of mine is actually working for DataRobot. And he's one of the main reasons I'm here. Grant Oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. So was the professor already at DataRobot when you were like, Okay, got it. Got it? Atalia Yep, he's still here. His name is Ted Kotler is a world class Person, both on the personality side, and he's a technical knowledge. So I'm very fortunate to work with great people in the company. Grant That's fascinating. I have a similar journey myself, meaning I too, came through the software engineering path, and then sort of stumbled into  through a whole range of things into the whole data science and ML/AI space. So a lot of people certainly do that. But it's sort of a shift in the thinking, isn't it the first time you come into the ML thinking, you're thinking about your data in a much different way. And algorithms and such you're like, wait, okay, I'm solving it. So much different. But I thoroughly enjoy that. All right. So I want to get to some of the things that are unique to, to DataRobot itself. I've worked with multiple AI and ML platforms. And as I mentioned in the intro, I had been watching and looking at DataRobot, watching your organization over time, take on more and more capabilities. When I when you demonstrated the latest capabilities and gave me a sense of where things are going. It started me thinking, what are the main challenges when you think about the AI and ML world? And the problems that are in this space? What are the main challenges that we face? And ultimately, I want to get to what is it that differentiates the way DataRobot does it in the market? But could you first start with what are some of the main challenges you see today, especially with your global perspective, in the AI space? Atalia Yeah. So I think the main main challenge today around the machine learning lifecycle is how you move models into productions and how you make sure your models are still accountable, and accurate with all the factors and new reality that is coming up, right. And get this today, everyone can just build psyche learn model or simple, you know, regression model. But when you work as an organization, and you have different infrastructures, different tools, different skill sets, different personas within your team, and you localize the development side of it, and every model has completely different requirements. So you're getting to inefficient lifecycle. So moving a model from development phase to production is a process that takes usually a lot of time, and it can be super complex. So something that I personally like about there rather than this is something I learned from customers, right that this is the biggest pain today is having an ability to have a platform that will be interoperable and flexible around how to support models that were created in variety of environments and languages, but also how to serve and manage and monitor models that were deployed to different endpoints necessarily to data on production server. Grant So sorry, just interrupt there. That was one of the things when you showed me I was fascinated with which was this ability to bring in models produced from a wide range of platforms and tool sets, if you will, and still bring them into the management aspect that I thought that was a critical characteristic around DataRobot itself. So when when you do that work, when you bring those models in and you manage those, what is it that that you're doing that makes that easier? A it's a it's helpful for me to have one place to bring those together but be what value then does that help me with as I tried to, to update those and refactor those moving forward? Atalia So it includes several other aspects. So first of all, as you mentioned, you have a single place where you can see all your models regardless where they've been created and regardless of the word have been deployed to. So like single pane of glass where you can see everything and, and being able to see at a glance which models are stale, which eventually preventing any risk to your business. Because it's not just about having the visibility to those models. It's also the ability to manage, monitor and govern them. So what is the service health status of this model from the the all endpoints, and what's the accuracy of the model, how it's changed over time, maybe some features that have been drifted. When you see those aspects, it's really helpful for you to understand, maybe you need to retrain your existence project, maybe you need to swipe your existence model with any challenger model, something that is performing better now with the new data that is coming up. Think about COVID That can be a really great example, right? When you train models on certain data set, but then all the reality has changed. All the products you did at that time are irrelevant today with the existence data. Grant Okay, yeah. And this this ability to see the either the drip, like you said, or the staleness of that that's such a critical capability. Is that is that a visual thing? Is it notification based? And how is it that you're being made aware of this? Atalia So it's definitely a visual thing. So you have an ability to see on a specific time when something happened, but you know, we're not expecting from people to go in consistently checking the platform, you can automate the whole process with notifications, if you want to get notified that, let's say, above a specific threshold, you have, under a specific threshold, sorry, you have a drift in accuracy, you would like to get a notification. And you can automate the whole process around retraining, what are the factors for retraining? So really looking to? Where are the areas we can automate the cycle in order to make the life of the user easier? But also, you know, with how much we are saying, Yes, we have AI and we have a donation, you you still need the man or the woman in the middle to approve this process? To be aware about this process, and there is still user intervention for some degree. Grant Okay. All right. So so let's take a scenario. You know, one of the current challenges around AI is this, you know, data bias problem. So what I want to figure out is, let's say in my organization, I've got this bias that comes in, I'm not aware of it at the time, I'm creating the model. There's no intentional harm here. But however, as we get into the production and rollout in its execution, it becomes obvious that the kinds of decisions or insights are certainly leaning a particular direction, what is it that helps me to discover or find that out? And therefore ultimately, correct that? Atalia That's a good question. I think ethical AI is one of the rising topics in AI, right. And mathematically, you can create a model that is not biased. But there are some techniques on how to make sure that the model is more fair, towards your sensitive features. And actually, there are some capabilities in the platform that really helping you not just in production, actually, but also in development, where you can manage bias litigation and tag those have the features and see in your development process already. What's the what's the bias and fairness around this specific project with those features that you chose, and then being able to seeing how the bias and fairness continues towards the production side where you have new data coming in, so you have an ability to target even before and this is helpful for you to understand how to deploy the model into production? And what are the changes that are required in order to keep this model fair. Grant So it's interesting that there's some capabilities in the platform that help you to identify potential bias factors or features along the way, be mindful of that. Let's go to the far right side of this, which is let's say we've done that work. We have the model produced, it's deployed, it's in production. How do I how do I Give feedback. Is there a way to say, A? What are my results of this model? And be? What are my end users potentially feedback on it as well? It's two different kinds of feedback. A is the model given me good insights or guidance? And then be? What about the end users themselves? And how do I get their feedback into there? Atalia Are you asking in general about the model, or specifically with the ethical side of it, Grant Either one, I'm fine with either side of it. Yeah. Atalia I'm still on the ethical side of it. So we provide those visualization tools as part of our ML ops capabilities, to track the bias and fairness on those sensitive features. So you can be certain that decisions that are made with the model are aligned with your technique that you applied during development process. That's, that's one thing. And obviously, if you see any changes over time, you can retrain your model, you can try out different things as part of your development, with our bison furnace techniques. And then overall, the insights you can get from a model, they are divided to two phases. On the development side. You know, in machine learning, we're always talking about the predictions, the predictions, but this is not really the main thing. Yes, we care about the predictions, right. But how we translate those predictions into business actions. Exactly. So having an ability to get that Explainable AI, this is something that I see all the time, especially with the business personas, decision making people, for them, it's really difficult to translate, what is it? Ai model, right? So we provide some graphs to, to present insights and explainability on a model, for example, what are the main factors on a macro level, that contributing to the model? So for example, let's take a churn use case. And you're looking to understand why customers are churning. And it's not just about oh, this customer, the likelihood that this customer will churn is 0.7. What does that mean? So we know what what's the factors, for example, how many times the customer may be called to call center a lot, and maybe the customers plan is, is very expensive. So some of the factors that really affect about if the customer is churning. So from a business perspective, we can decide, oh, maybe we should improve our customer service, maybe we should reduce our pricing. So on a macro level to see those main factors, but also being able to dive into the to the micro level, and check how a change of each one of the features is really impacting the target variable. So let's say if a customer called two times twice or three times to customer service, how that affects the likelihood to churn. So this is gonna be super helpful. And this is really where we add the expandability side to, to the predictions from from the model and the predictions themselves, you know, at the end, when you move the model to production, and now you have new data coming in, you look to score it, this is where you can integrate the predictions with your business applications. For example, you know, Tableau Power BI, all those business applications. So you can still continue to work with your existing business flows and tools as you like, and being able to generate decisions. Grant But I like as he explained, or that you shared explainability is one of those elements that helps with successful adoption and usage of an AI model, and ML model. If we step back and given your experience with customer success, how would you net that if you were to look at the patterns, both the good patterns as well as the anti patterns around customer success? What have you noticed over time, across lots of markets or industries, those success patterns for not only building the models but but actually getting the value in the outcomes from AI models? What have you seen? Atalia So I think this is the million dollar question because I always say that it's not enough just to purchase an AI machine learning tool, right? It's a it's about if you if you use it, and if really models made it to production. This is how we did Robert, manage our success and with ourselves as partners, to our customers, we have an organization that is professional services, that includes data scientists that helping customers on implementing the whole process, we have some AI success. division where you have consultant, past consultant that currently working for DataRobot can do irrigation sessions with with customers and really looking to unlock the potential that they can get, and really helping them to the whole process with our professional services. So, the process can be quite long and complex. And I think it really depends also in the maturity level of the customer, because based on their skill set based on if they already have some models in productions, or if we just started a process, those things can affect about the process, because when you need to take into consideration existing infrastructures and models versus building everything from scratch, and maybe educate the people on what they can get from AI and machine learning model. So, this is a bit different between maturity, and I think everything eventually stopped with change management, you see, a lot of times you know, there is this very motivated executive buyer that is looking to change and, and include AI in the organization. But then how do you really convince the people that working on a day to day basis that this is the tool that can really help them and sometimes we see it even with data scientists that they they still like keeping, like to keep the hands on and and code by themselves without really trust any any other tools. So this is where you provide some education with some horses on the platform, but also how you engage a model that is not like a black box, right? You have expandability, you have the process, you have documentation to really let the the employees to trust the process at the output of the product. Grant So building that that trust in that, in that process sounds like the key thing there is success stories. Is there a success story that you can share where you help the organization go through this and realize some outcomes? Atalia I can try to think about some of the success stories that are publicly covered. Yes, as you know, right. For example, we have a story from Stuart healthcare. They are the largest for profit private hospital. They're operating in the US. And they use machine learning to make big decisions about staff and patients, which eventually helping them to reduce costs and improve the patient outcomes and experience. And they already started the process and really decrease the cost as they wanted. So 1% reduction in registered nurses hours paid per patient they netted $2 million in saving per year for eight of the 38 hospitals enough to its network. I think this is a great number and also a greater effect. I'm always very happy when I see those stories around, you know, hospitals and health care, which eventually provide better outcomes for society as well. Grant If you were medium size organization looking at looking at Hey, how can I apply AI/ML to my business? What would you say to them in terms of adopting a platform like like DataRobot? What What would you say? What are the things that they should start doing? Atalia So the process, in my opinion, divided for three major stages. One is the why. look internally and think, Okay, why we need to use AI? What are those use cases that I'm looking to solve? And what will be the expected improvement or our AI from those use cases? Once we define those use cases? The next question will be the how, okay, we defined the why now how we implement it. So understand the skills that they have in house and then define what to outsource versus what to build, buy versus build right, and then choose the right tool and start the implementation. And when you start the implementation, the the end result will be the what? Once we have the model in production, so how, what are the outcome that we are getting and how we are making sure that the models are still accountable with our business and always start small start with one use case, just prove that works, we have adoption across our organization. And then it's going to be like a waterfall because many times one use case can really amplify the rest of the use cases and create motivation. And some of the outputs of one model will go to another use case, and so on. Grant Have you have you gotten a sense of the general amount of time? Or is there a pattern? In other words, let's say I get started today? Can I expect to see outcomes in three months? Six months? A year? Where's that said? Atalia I've seen it all I've seen organizations that that can do it quickly, within really, two months. And I've seen organizations that are still stuck. Because if we're going back to what I said earlier, it really depends also in in the organization itself, right? If you have a blocker from the IT, or from the scientist, or you know, maybe some requirements that you still need to, to to implement and you didn't and what is, what is it around your prioritization? So it really depends. And also, let's be realistic. It's not just that I decided today, oh, let's talk with AI and machine learning. And it can work right. I need to have specific state of my existence data so I can really produce a better outcome, right? Today with data centric AI approach. As your data is more clean and organized and relevant, you will have better outcomes on your model. So you need to be in certain of our data transformation process with your organization's data to really start. Wow, Grant Wow, that's that's awesome. I love that Atalia. Thank you so much for taking your time here today. With me any last comments before we wrap? Atalia Up, I'm just audience gonna feed the story don't afraid to, to ask questions. I always like to say at the end, Are You Smarter tomorrow than yesterday? Because as we evolving over time, you know, I was I was three years old. And then I'm trying to obviously I'm gonna be smarter over time, as I'm growing up, but in the in the small revolution. Are we smarter tomorrow than yesterday? Think about that chocolate thing, how you can be more innovative, how to make your life easier. And how to do some changes fitting your condition and with yourself to develop and achieve great outcomes. Grant That's a growth mindset. I love that Right? Which is always learning our learning isn't kept. And let's focus on what are the things we can take moving forward to improve our environment, our situation, the people we serve, and those around us. All right. Natalia, thank you so much for your time and your organization for allowing us to chat with you today, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of ClickAI radio. And until next time, go check out DataRobot. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook visit ClickAIRadio.com .

What are the main challenges that I need to solve as a company trying to apply AI to help my business? In this episode, I have a conversation with an organization that provides an AI platform to help you overcome those.   Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. And today I have someone that I bumped into the not too long ago, I was at a conference and literally went to their booth and said, Oh, I want to learn more about this technology. I've been tracking your team, your organization, so it's my chance to learn more about it. And so I got to meet a Atalia Horenshtien I hope I said that right. I'm so excited to have Atalia here with me today. So first of all, "A" welcome I tell you and "B" did I say your name right? And then "C" the first question out of the box, explain the meaning behind your name. Atalia Thank you so much for having me. And you actually pronounced the name correctly. So kudos to your best. The meaning behind my name. So first of all, thanks to my parents for choosing such a unique name. It's actually a Hebrew name. I'm originally from, from Israel. And I totally I need Hebrew pronouncing it as a Talia is actually the first claim in Judaism kingdom. So it's a name from the Bible. And it's actually very unique even in Israel. Very cool. Grant Really. The queen in the Bible, I'm gonna have to go look that up. That's awesome. You should. That's very cool. Do we? Do we bow in your presence? Then? Do we do anything like that? Do we do we say Hey, this is me? Atalia No, no, no, no, not not at all. Grant Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time here today. Now as I understand that, I want to make sure I get this right. Your title in your organization is Global Technology Product Advocacy Lead, I actually had to write that down because I can only remember three things. And that's five words in a title, Global Technology Product Advocacy Lead for DataRobot. Did I get that? Right? Atalia Yeah, that's actually correct. Grant What do you do in that role? Atalia So we did a robot. I started as a customer facing data scientist, where I work with customers in different industries, and helping them how to solve complex AI and machine learning problems. And learning from this role, and those use cases. I shifted a bit towards to the advocacy side. So how we tell the technical story of DataRobot, how we educate the market about what's possible. Some of the use cases I implement, and some of the stuff I saw was working on collaboration with our marketing sales. And our customers as well. Grant Okay, got it. So that global part, I think, is critical, because I'm assuming that you go across multiple markets, you're not focused on any one. I gotta believe that gives you a sort of broader industry cross industry view on on AI and machine learning. Is that correct? Atalia Yeah, so I was very lucky to work with different industries in different geographical locations. And obviously, I see a lot of different trends and maturity around AI, where they are in the stage, how are they adopting? What's the process? There, technical knowledge, their technical stage? Yeah. So from United States to Europe to the Middle East. It's really, really interesting. And I'm very happy that I have the opportunity to do so. Grant So that's awesome. What know what got you into this world? What got you into AI and machine learning? Atalia Actually, it's a really interesting path because I started actually the software engineer Not not a, as a data scientist, and over time, obviously the software engineer you work with, with software development, system design, etc, some stuff that you see today in in machine learning operations. And then when I did my masters, I was mostly specific around business intelligence and machine learning. And I learned a lot, it was super interesting. So I took my software skills into a different level. And it's a funny story, because a professor of mine is actually working for DataRobot. And he's one of the main reasons I'm here. Grant Oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. So was the professor already at DataRobot when you were like, Okay, got it. Got it? Atalia Yep, he's still here. His name is Ted Kotler is a world class Person, both on the personality side, and he's a technical knowledge. So I'm very fortunate to work with great people in the company. Grant That's fascinating. I have a similar journey myself, meaning I too, came through the software engineering path, and then sort of stumbled into  through a whole range of things into the whole data science and ML/AI space. So a lot of people certainly do that. But it's sort of a shift in the thinking, isn't it the first time you come into the ML thinking, you're thinking about your data in a much different way. And algorithms and such you're like, wait, okay, I'm solving it. So much different. But I thoroughly enjoy that. All right. So I want to get to some of the things that are unique to, to DataRobot itself. I've worked with multiple AI and ML platforms. And as I mentioned in the intro, I had been watching and looking at DataRobot, watching your organization over time, take on more and more capabilities. When I when you demonstrated the latest capabilities and gave me a sense of where things are going. It started me thinking, what are the main challenges when you think about the AI and ML world? And the problems that are in this space? What are the main challenges that we face? And ultimately, I want to get to what is it that differentiates the way DataRobot does it in the market? But could you first start with what are some of the main challenges you see today, especially with your global perspective, in the AI space? Atalia Yeah. So I think the main main challenge today around the machine learning lifecycle is how you move models into productions and how you make sure your models are still accountable, and accurate with all the factors and new reality that is coming up, right. And get this today, everyone can just build psyche learn model or simple, you know, regression model. But when you work as an organization, and you have different infrastructures, different tools, different skill sets, different personas within your team, and you localize the development side of it, and every model has completely different requirements. So you're getting to inefficient lifecycle. So moving a model from development phase to production is a process that takes usually a lot of time, and it can be super complex. So something that I personally like about there rather than this is something I learned from customers, right that this is the biggest pain today is having an ability to have a platform that will be interoperable and flexible around how to support models that were created in variety of environments and languages, but also how to serve and manage and monitor models that were deployed to different endpoints necessarily to data on production server. Grant So sorry, just interrupt there. That was one of the things when you showed me I was fascinated with which was this ability to bring in models produced from a wide range of platforms and tool sets, if you will, and still bring them into the management aspect that I thought that was a critical characteristic around DataRobot itself. So when when you do that work, when you bring those models in and you manage those, what is it that that you're doing that makes that easier? A it's a it's helpful for me to have one place to bring those together but be what value then does that help me with as I tried to, to update those and refactor those moving forward? Atalia So it includes several other aspects. So first of all, as you mentioned, you have a single place where you can see all your models regardless where they've been created and regardless of the word have been deployed to. So like single pane of glass where you can see everything and, and being able to see at a glance which models are stale, which eventually preventing any risk to your business. Because it's not just about having the visibility to those models. It's also the ability to manage, monitor and govern them. So what is the service health status of this model from the the all endpoints, and what's the accuracy of the model, how it's changed over time, maybe some features that have been drifted. When you see those aspects, it's really helpful for you to understand, maybe you need to retrain your existence project, maybe you need to swipe your existence model with any challenger model, something that is performing better now with the new data that is coming up. Think about COVID That can be a really great example, right? When you train models on certain data set, but then all the reality has changed. All the products you did at that time are irrelevant today with the existence data. Grant Okay, yeah. And this this ability to see the either the drip, like you said, or the staleness of that that's such a critical capability. Is that is that a visual thing? Is it notification based? And how is it that you're being made aware of this? Atalia So it's definitely a visual thing. So you have an ability to see on a specific time when something happened, but you know, we're not expecting from people to go in consistently checking the platform, you can automate the whole process with notifications, if you want to get notified that, let's say, above a specific threshold, you have, under a specific threshold, sorry, you have a drift in accuracy, you would like to get a notification. And you can automate the whole process around retraining, what are the factors for retraining? So really looking to? Where are the areas we can automate the cycle in order to make the life of the user easier? But also, you know, with how much we are saying, Yes, we have AI and we have a donation, you you still need the man or the woman in the middle to approve this process? To be aware about this process, and there is still user intervention for some degree. Grant Okay. All right. So so let's take a scenario. You know, one of the current challenges around AI is this, you know, data bias problem. So what I want to figure out is, let's say in my organization, I've got this bias that comes in, I'm not aware of it at the time, I'm creating the model. There's no intentional harm here. But however, as we get into the production and rollout in its execution, it becomes obvious that the kinds of decisions or insights are certainly leaning a particular direction, what is it that helps me to discover or find that out? And therefore ultimately, correct that? Atalia That's a good question. I think ethical AI is one of the rising topics in AI, right. And mathematically, you can create a model that is not biased. But there are some techniques on how to make sure that the model is more fair, towards your sensitive features. And actually, there are some capabilities in the platform that really helping you not just in production, actually, but also in development, where you can manage bias litigation and tag those have the features and see in your development process already. What's the what's the bias and fairness around this specific project with those features that you chose, and then being able to seeing how the bias and fairness continues towards the production side where you have new data coming in, so you have an ability to target even before and this is helpful for you to understand how to deploy the model into production? And what are the changes that are required in order to keep this model fair. Grant So it's interesting that there's some capabilities in the platform that help you to identify potential bias factors or features along the way, be mindful of that. Let's go to the far right side of this, which is let's say we've done that work. We have the model produced, it's deployed, it's in production. How do I how do I Give feedback. Is there a way to say, A? What are my results of this model? And be? What are my end users potentially feedback on it as well? It's two different kinds of feedback. A is the model given me good insights or guidance? And then be? What about the end users themselves? And how do I get their feedback into there? Atalia Are you asking in general about the model, or specifically with the ethical side of it, Grant Either one, I'm fine with either side of it. Yeah. Atalia I'm still on the ethical side of it. So we provide those visualization tools as part of our ML ops capabilities, to track the bias and fairness on those sensitive features. So you can be certain that decisions that are made with the model are aligned with your technique that you applied during development process. That's, that's one thing. And obviously, if you see any changes over time, you can retrain your model, you can try out different things as part of your development, with our bison furnace techniques. And then overall, the insights you can get from a model, they are divided to two phases. On the development side. You know, in machine learning, we're always talking about the predictions, the predictions, but this is not really the main thing. Yes, we care about the predictions, right. But how we translate those predictions into business actions. Exactly. So having an ability to get that Explainable AI, this is something that I see all the time, especially with the business personas, decision making people, for them, it's really difficult to translate, what is it? Ai model, right? So we provide some graphs to, to present insights and explainability on a model, for example, what are the main factors on a macro level, that contributing to the model? So for example, let's take a churn use case. And you're looking to understand why customers are churning. And it's not just about oh, this customer, the likelihood that this customer will churn is 0.7. What does that mean? So we know what what's the factors, for example, how many times the customer may be called to call center a lot, and maybe the customers plan is, is very expensive. So some of the factors that really affect about if the customer is churning. So from a business perspective, we can decide, oh, maybe we should improve our customer service, maybe we should reduce our pricing. So on a macro level to see those main factors, but also being able to dive into the to the micro level, and check how a change of each one of the features is really impacting the target variable. So let's say if a customer called two times twice or three times to customer service, how that affects the likelihood to churn. So this is gonna be super helpful. And this is really where we add the expandability side to, to the predictions from from the model and the predictions themselves, you know, at the end, when you move the model to production, and now you have new data coming in, you look to score it, this is where you can integrate the predictions with your business applications. For example, you know, Tableau Power BI, all those business applications. So you can still continue to work with your existing business flows and tools as you like, and being able to generate decisions. Grant But I like as he explained, or that you shared explainability is one of those elements that helps with successful adoption and usage of an AI model, and ML model. If we step back and given your experience with customer success, how would you net that if you were to look at the patterns, both the good patterns as well as the anti patterns around customer success? What have you noticed over time, across lots of markets or industries, those success patterns for not only building the models but but actually getting the value in the outcomes from AI models? What have you seen? Atalia So I think this is the million dollar question because I always say that it's not enough just to purchase an AI machine learning tool, right? It's a it's about if you if you use it, and if really models made it to production. This is how we did Robert, manage our success and with ourselves as partners, to our customers, we have an organization that is professional services, that includes data scientists that helping customers on implementing the whole process, we have some AI success. division where you have consultant, past consultant that currently working for DataRobot can do irrigation sessions with with customers and really looking to unlock the potential that they can get, and really helping them to the whole process with our professional services. So, the process can be quite long and complex. And I think it really depends also in the maturity level of the customer, because based on their skill set based on if they already have some models in productions, or if we just started a process, those things can affect about the process, because when you need to take into consideration existing infrastructures and models versus building everything from scratch, and maybe educate the people on what they can get from AI and machine learning model. So, this is a bit different between maturity, and I think everything eventually stopped with change management, you see, a lot of times you know, there is this very motivated executive buyer that is looking to change and, and include AI in the organization. But then how do you really convince the people that working on a day to day basis that this is the tool that can really help them and sometimes we see it even with data scientists that they they still like keeping, like to keep the hands on and and code by themselves without really trust any any other tools. So this is where you provide some education with some horses on the platform, but also how you engage a model that is not like a black box, right? You have expandability, you have the process, you have documentation to really let the the employees to trust the process at the output of the product. Grant So building that that trust in that, in that process sounds like the key thing there is success stories. Is there a success story that you can share where you help the organization go through this and realize some outcomes? Atalia I can try to think about some of the success stories that are publicly covered. Yes, as you know, right. For example, we have a story from Stuart healthcare. They are the largest for profit private hospital. They're operating in the US. And they use machine learning to make big decisions about staff and patients, which eventually helping them to reduce costs and improve the patient outcomes and experience. And they already started the process and really decrease the cost as they wanted. So 1% reduction in registered nurses hours paid per patient they netted $2 million in saving per year for eight of the 38 hospitals enough to its network. I think this is a great number and also a greater effect. I'm always very happy when I see those stories around, you know, hospitals and health care, which eventually provide better outcomes for society as well. Grant If you were medium size organization looking at looking at Hey, how can I apply AI/ML to my business? What would you say to them in terms of adopting a platform like like DataRobot? What What would you say? What are the things that they should start doing? Atalia So the process, in my opinion, divided for three major stages. One is the why. look internally and think, Okay, why we need to use AI? What are those use cases that I'm looking to solve? And what will be the expected improvement or our AI from those use cases? Once we define those use cases? The next question will be the how, okay, we defined the why now how we implement it. So understand the skills that they have in house and then define what to outsource versus what to build, buy versus build right, and then choose the right tool and start the implementation. And when you start the implementation, the the end result will be the what? Once we have the model in production, so how, what are the outcome that we are getting and how we are making sure that the models are still accountable with our business and always start small start with one use case, just prove that works, we have adoption across our organization. And then it's going to be like a waterfall because many times one use case can really amplify the rest of the use cases and create motivation. And some of the outputs of one model will go to another use case, and so on. Grant Have you have you gotten a sense of the general amount of time? Or is there a pattern? In other words, let's say I get started today? Can I expect to see outcomes in three months? Six months? A year? Where's that said? Atalia I've seen it all I've seen organizations that that can do it quickly, within really, two months. And I've seen organizations that are still stuck. Because if we're going back to what I said earlier, it really depends also in in the organization itself, right? If you have a blocker from the IT, or from the scientist, or you know, maybe some requirements that you still need to, to to implement and you didn't and what is, what is it around your prioritization? So it really depends. And also, let's be realistic. It's not just that I decided today, oh, let's talk with AI and machine learning. And it can work right. I need to have specific state of my existence data so I can really produce a better outcome, right? Today with data centric AI approach. As your data is more clean and organized and relevant, you will have better outcomes on your model. So you need to be in certain of our data transformation process with your organization's data to really start. Wow, Grant Wow, that's that's awesome. I love that Atalia. Thank you so much for taking your time here today. With me any last comments before we wrap? Atalia Up, I'm just audience gonna feed the story don't afraid to, to ask questions. I always like to say at the end, Are You Smarter tomorrow than yesterday? Because as we evolving over time, you know, I was I was three years old. And then I'm trying to obviously I'm gonna be smarter over time, as I'm growing up, but in the in the small revolution. Are we smarter tomorrow than yesterday? Think about that chocolate thing, how you can be more innovative, how to make your life easier. And how to do some changes fitting your condition and with yourself to develop and achieve great outcomes. Grant That's a growth mindset. I love that Right? Which is always learning our learning isn't kept. And let's focus on what are the things we can take moving forward to improve our environment, our situation, the people we serve, and those around us. All right. Natalia, thank you so much for your time and your organization for allowing us to chat with you today, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of ClickAI radio. And until next time, go check out DataRobot. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook visit ClickAIRadio.com .

On this special guest episode, Seth Hicks, Esq. explores the 7 Pillars of Private Banking Strategies® with Grant Larsen.  Grant and Seth discuss how Private Banking Strategies® help you accomplish:  Asset Protection  Tax-Free Growth  Financial Privacy  The “Velocity of Money” – Multiple Touches on the Same Dollar Guaranteed Compounding Tax Free Growth – the value … Continue reading Special Guest Appearance on Financial Investing Radio with Grant Larsen (Ep 27) →

In this episode of Financial investing radio, I speak with the person that introduced overnight trading to the financial markets. He will give you some guidance on how to build your wealth, I speak with The Wealth Architect. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. Okay, so today I have in the house, it's taken me a couple of tries here actually, literally, to catch Mark Yegee with me here today, longtime expert in the investing world. So grateful that he took the time to come here today and talk with us and share some of his secrets on how to grow your wealth. In fact, I think he's known as The Wealth Architect anyway, without me saying anything else. Mark, welcome. Mark Well, thanks. I'm not I'm not sure I like the title of longtime expert. But you know what, I guess it goes with the territory. But thanks. Great to be here, Grant, and I can't wait to get into what we do and what you do and have some fun with your audience. It should be great. Grant Yeah, thanks again. I appreciate that. So one of the things that caught my eye when your organization reached out and I was reviewing your profile, I just have to start here. There's this tip here about you getting into this world into the investing world at the age of 12. I mean, holy smokes at the age of 12. I was milking cows and hauling hay. I mean, there was not a stock market in sight. So I asked you, I mean, the only stock I saw had horns, right. And where I was milking it. So you know, if you'd have said, How's the stock market? We're like, well, we got, you know, 50 cows in the pasture, but like, What are you talking about? So, how did you get into this at 12? Mark Well, you know, my dad was a grew up on a farm. I didn't, I grew up in the city. And so I you know, I mowed my yard and cleaned my pool and got paid to do that. And every day, I would see my dad reading the Wall Street Journal, and it had all these symbols in it with numbers by them, and he would circle stuff. And I was so curious about what he's doing. And finally, one day, I'm like, Dad, what are you doing? I think it's like you thought I was ready. And so he said, Oh, this is how you invest in other people's businesses. And I was like, Oh, great. So over time, he started to kind of teach me that, you know, you're running your own business, doing your lawns, but you can also go out and invest in other people's businesses. And I thought that was fascinating. And after a while, after maybe a couple of months of telling me about it, he goes, but the only way you're gonna learn it is to take some of your money and put it in and I did. And so my first stock, I think it was 12 or 13 years old. It was right around that time. It was it was 100 shares of a company called Ailey company. Grant I've never heard of, I haven't heard of them. Mark No, I don't think they're around anymore. But they were they was this women's clothing store in the malls. And it fit all the criteria. Low P I mean, my dad taught me a few things. And it was alphabetical that I went, you know, I finally went, Hey, here's one. So I circled it. And I bought, you know, $300 worth of that stock was 100 shares at three bucks. And I just would watch it every day. And I was fascinating. Oh, there's the new print on it. And there's a new price. And the stock went to $6. So it's it was probably the worst thing that could ever happen. It's like, it's like when you grab the golf club and you hit it right down the middle. You think you're a good golfer? This is easy, right? It's as easy as like this, you know, or if you go to play craps and you hit it on the first you know, first dice roll. And so I I invested again, I saw commercial on TV, you know, and it said us, it said Allegheny Airlines is becoming US Airways or us there. I think it was at the time. Yeah. And I was like, Wow, what a cool name for an airline. And I you know, that was the only reason yeah, I think it might have might have met some of the other criteria as well. So I bought it and it went from 17 I remember to 35 so I doubled it again, which is probably the the next worst thing that could have happened but now I'm like, this is a piece of cake plus I don't even have to work the money is doubling and yeah, anyway, so you know, I guess I could buy more candy than I could. But that was it. That was the beginning and then he started intermediate. introducing me to books. My dad was a big Personal Growth Guy. So I had read, I had read books, you know, by Dale Carnegie very early on, I read books by Edward Thorpe McShane, the business who wrote a book called, oddly enough, he wrote, this first book was called beat the dealer need to deal with a guy who was an MIT professor. So he taught math at MIT. And he went to Las Vegas, and he figured out how to beat the roulette tables. And they, you know, he had another guy helping him and this was kind of a rudimentary metric computer in the 50s. And he figured out where the ball was coming out, and how quickly it was anyway, he figured out a way to get the probabilities in your favor, and he started to beat the roulette tables, and they kicked him out of Las Vegas. So he went back, and then he figured out well, I'm going to figure it out on Blackjack, and you've heard the story, there's been a movie made about him. Is that the movie? 21? Yeah, yep. All these kids went to MIT, you know, the students. And he brought them they all cleaned Vegas out and then finally got kicked out of that. And then he turned his his efforts to the market. And then he wrote a book called beat the market. And it was basically how to buy a stock and sell the warrants against the stock, which today are basically known as options. They're still warrants, but most people don't know what they are. And it was covered. It was a system of covered calls before they even had options. They didn't have options until 1971 or 1974, I think. And so but I was fascinated by because my dad was like, Oh, you got to learn this. And it was this thick book. It was really boring. And but I, I started to apply it. And I applied it so much that when I was 16 1718 years old, by the way, I bought my car with the winnings and the monies that I made in that those first few investments. I set up a brokerage firm at EF Hutton and my dad had this old timer broker. And I said okay, Harry, I want to buy 100 shares of IBM and I want to sell the you know, the call options against it. And he's like what? So we had to call in New York and get the options principal from EF Hutton on. And he understood why zoom, but my broker didn't even understand I did teach him what I was doing. And so all through high school and college... Grant And this was a high school you did that you sold your first in high school high on IBM? Mark Yeah. So IBM, and this is back when you pay a commission of $300 to do IBM. And they had quarterly options. And you know, the different it was a different game. And now we have so many more tools that are at our disposal. That's great. So yeah, I did this all the way through college. And finally, you know, I had several different entrepreneurial ventures and then I actually sold copiers, which for me was the worst thing. Anybody. Grant Like they just sort of jumped into the white when you're selling options, and you went from that to copiers. What happened? Mark? Mark Well, I mean, when I went to college, I didn't think that making money in the stock market was going to be on my my career. So I went to college. I got a marketing and business degree, and everything was hunky dory. And then I got out and pretty. I I started an entrepreneurial company in college. I was back when the Swatch watches were this big craze. Oh, yeah. And you remember those people put 10 Swatch watches on their wrists? Yeah. And I thought, Well, I went to the University of Florida and I thought why isn't there a swatch watch with a gator on it? Like a University of Florida Gator, you know? And, and I went to the I went to the, you know, the alumni office and I said, Can I license the gator. And this was back before the internet. This was back really? Right around the time faxes were becoming popular, but still pretty early back in. In 1980. What was this 85? Yeah. And they licensed the Florida Gator trademark to me. And I figured out a way to get to Hong Kong. I had no money at all. And when I was a junior and senior in college, I went to Hong Kong and I met manufacturers and I figured out a way for them to put the gator on these watches that I wear orange and blue the color the exact colors of the school. Yeah, and I brought back these you know, 2000 watches are added, manufactured and shipped. And I had them in my college wasn't my dorm room was my fraternity. I lived in the fraternity house last semester. And so I had them stacked floor to ceiling all these watches, right? So I go to the games, and I would sell these things and and I learned a lot about a lot, right? Traveling, manufacturing business, you know, buying good quality products versus crappy products. And I expanded to 23 schools in the southeast and finally just got out of that business about four years later. And then I sold copiers after that. And I that was miserable. But it was that was again instructive. And then finally I I said why I've been doing the market all these years. Why don't I just go do that? Amazing. Yeah, I got a couple of I got a job with a guy named Ernie Ollie who had already discount old discount stockbrokers. It was a discount broker like, like Charles Schwab, they were actually good buddies and they started when those got deregulated in the 70s. And I worked for Ernie for or a year and a half, two years, something like that started my own brokerage firm with a partner. And then we grew that to a to a pretty big venture became a Wall Street company that applied to do this financial technology, I could bore the I could bore you with all the little stuff that I've done in between. But it all has led me to this spot where I had a, you know, a big trading firm, Wall Street trading firm. And we traded, you know, billions of dollars worth of securities. Grant  I saw that, that's well, and did I read it right? That did you guys introduce after hours trading? Is that true? Mark Yeah, that was actually my idea. And everybody thought I was crazy at the time. But I thought, you know, we have this system that all we do is if somebody wants to buy and somebody wants to sell, our system was a computerized system, they just matched those sellers. And I said, why does that have to stop at four o'clock? Why Can't We? If somebody still wants to put the order on? What can we do it a 401? And then if we can do it a 401. Why can't we do it at 601? And then why even shut the thing off? Let's just let it run all night. It happened automatically anyway. And so yeah, we introduced after hours trading in 1999, I believe. And I was on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. And you know, a few things. Grant And then, and you're now you're talking to me now how am I now? Mark And now I've moved up to talking to you. Yeah. Grant Wow, you finally got up to Grant Larsen. I mean, Tom Brokaw, it's been a long time coming! Mark So just a stepping stone. You know, you got to stand on the giants that came before you gotta get to the grant Larsen. So. But, uh, but I'm glad to be talking to you. Because you know, everything that I've done in my life has led me to this exact point. And that exact point is now where I have a few hedge funds that I run. They're all based on all these mentors and all of them knowledge that I learned over the last 45 years. And now we help people call, you know, make what we call Safe, reliable income. Although if you look at it today, with this market, it's not safe, reliable income today. Grant Yeah, I turn my head and I'm looking at it that can you say sell off? Mark Yeah, don't don't even look. It is a light volume sell off. So I believe that there's a bounce coming in a couple of days. But boy, it's, it's painful for a lot of people right now. It's, you know, people think you just buy a stock and you hold it. And that's the way you invest. And then you get these 25% corrections in the market. And people's 401 k's are decimated, they go to 5060 70%. Yeah, it's just a shame. It's just a shame. Grant Ever since November, I saw got it at the end of last November on my systems and went, Okay, I'm gonna start preparing to hedge here. So I've just been building my hedging positions since then. And yeah, we've had some interesting volatility a couple times. But right now it's down hard for sure. Mark So it's horrible. Yeah. And you if you started in November, you probably if you correlate it, it's the exact day that Jerome Powell from the Fed said, we're going to start to raise rates. And from that point, we're down about 27 28%. And some stocks. I can tell you some stocks are down 50%, 60%, 70%. Grant Yeah. Facebook and others. I mean, they're down like massive 5060 out, yeah, Netflix got hammered with your training thing. And, yeah, just a lot of them are down really soon. Mark But it doesn't have to be that way. Right. Like, you know, a lot of people just don't know what they don't know. And we tell people that they can make two to 4% a week. Now, that doesn't always happen. But our goal is just like that analogy that I threw out before about the craps table. It's, it's to get the odds on your side, right? Yeah, I mean, I know, it's this is not gambling. But if you use gambling as an analogy, you can understand it better. If you're sitting around a poker table like Annie Duke or Phil Ivey or those guys that are on, you know, the the World Series of Poker, they don't win every hand. But if you have a pair of aces, you have the odds in your favor. If you stay in, unfortunately, sometimes three kings comes up and your opponent has a king, and then you lose, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have been in the game. So what we try to do is we try to create safe, reliable income by renting stocks, to other people that are going to our B that are willing to gamble and pay us a premium for having the option to buy our stock. I can explain that a bit more with an analogy, if you if you want to hear it, but that's really what we do. Grant And I'm selling options, then that's that's your main strategy. Mark Yeah, yeah, we buy we buy a good solid stock. So we have, we have a system called the cash flow machine, right? We call it the cash flow machine because you you put cash in, and then it gives you cash out more cash. And that's it's, it's a system that creates income, using what we call the four cornerstones it's the right stock, not just any stock, the right market, because you want the tailwind to be behind you. So we use a component of market timing and does help and then it's got to be the right spot on the chart. And usually you can find a high probability spot on the chart where this were the end institutions are behind the stock exchange in the right direction. Yeah, and we don't want to be against the institutions. That's the big money, right? We're little people. Yeah. So we want to be with them. And we can see where they are, they leave footprints on the chart. And then we go in that direction. And then the fourth Cornerstone is we squeeze the juice or we collect the rent. And that's the option premium that we get for selling upgrades and income. And it's a defensive strategy that we make, you know, two to 4% a month, conservatively. Grant Now, there's, you know, there's obviously a fair amount of margin that's needed in order to do this kind of thing. So you typically need to have fairly decent size accounts to do some of that stuff. What what's sort of the entry level that you see most of the people come in at how much is what sort of account size or capital do they need to have? Mark Well, it depends, we have a breadth of options that you can use so so I have a hedge fund that I run using this strategy for accredited investors, people that are worth, you know, more than a million dollars, you know, rich guys, basically, but not everybody qualifies for that. And I want to do whatever I want to make this accessible to everyone. So we have a set of courses. And we have my favorite thing is a mastermind group. And so the mastermind group is around a series of courses, and their video courses over my shoulder, I show you how to do the trading and you and you understand the philosophy behind it. And I give you the whole strategy. And then it's also surrounded by a full ecosystem of support. So we have like minded people that are also giving you support people that have just gone through the learning that you've gone through, you get mentorship from me, and I've got, you know, for decades of doing similar things in this, you get, you'll actually get something called the private access group where I put out the actual trades I do in my hedge fund. So you can learn from them, mimic them, do them, you know, do subsets of them, whatever. And then on Friday, and again, this was what I was alluding to a bit ago, on Friday, we have a mastermind call where we all get on a zoom call, some of us will share our screen show the trades we're making, I'll usually teach a concept about the current market or something, you know, that we should know. And then we hold each other accountable through a chat group all week, like, Hey, what are you doing? Who's doing what during the Fed announcement? Why are we you know, selling, you know, the Tesla when Tesla's coming out with numbers, you know, things like that. So to answer your question, that mastermind group, it's an investment in yourself, I give a money back guarantee, if you don't make enough money to cover the tuition because it's not a it's not a small amount. But it is the small amount of it's an investment in yourself, and you make it back with your investments. But in order to, for me to feel good justifying that you need about $150,000 to 2 million as a minimum, Now, not everybody has that. And I've had people that just you know, take the courses and do extremely well with five or 10 or 15,000. But they're not going to afford to be in the mentorship program, and the mastermind group and all that kind of stuff. But they can take the courses. And so we have a full breadth of offerings for people just so that we can they can learn it. I also have a free course on my on my website that you can sign up to take that kind of introduces you to the concept of what we do. You know, we got all kinds of stuff. My goal is Grant, it's financial education, right? We don't teach people about money in school. We just don't Yeah, it's it's not at all. I don't know about you, but I use money every day. I don't use Romeo and Juliet every day. And I don't use the Pythagorean Theorem every day. Grant One I don't use while shopping the grocery store. Okay. Mark I haven't used the Pythagorean Theorem, I don't know in at least a week. Yeah. And, you know, I don't learn I don't know much about you know, I don't use Cleopatra, and Henry the Eighth and his wives every day, but boy, I use money, it would be nice to know, would have been nice to know without having to go outside and learn how to buy houses in real estate, how to invest in the stock market, how to do my taxes would have been nice to have learned a little something like that. Yeah. So I believe that that's the biggest thing that people can do is they can invest in themselves by getting financially educated. And so that's part of that's a little part of what I do in the world is is help people with that. Grant So it's interesting that you're making this available to a wide range of people regardless of where they are right certainly you've got the capabilities to help those that are accredited, but for the person that's just trying to get going I mean, you walked that journey so you understand that and therefore you're made this available to them to help them ultimately get there are you positions intended to be longer term Are you have sort of a timeframe Are you more like a swing trader? Are you sort of long term Are you did sort of break it up you got portion of the portfolio's shorter term and some sort of longer term investment What's What's your philosophy on that? Mark Well, I can give you the short answer or the little bit longer answer that has some more depth let me give To the longer answer, since we got a nice podcast format going here, the longer answer is that everybody says, oh, you should be diversified, right. And to most people who are uneducated, don't have the financial education that we should have. They're educated by Wall Street. And Wall Street is run by two groups, lawyers and salespeople. And so lawyers are there to not get the firm sued. And for that, they've put you in average investments, because how can you get sued? How can you sue anybody if you just did an average return, and the salespeople are there to grab assets and a lot, the more you assets you grab, the more they pay the salesperson, but the more the firm can trade of that money and make money on it. And so what they want what we hear, and I was a Wall Street guy, so I can say this, is they want you to be diversified. So they tell you put your portfolio in a nice little portfolio of mutual funds and ETFs, a couple of stocks, and you know, maybe some bonds and you won't get hurt, right? And you get this average low returning 8% thing that you feel great about because woohoo. But that's the average, right? The s&p 500 over the last 500 year or sorry, 100 years, has made 9.4%. So if you're doing around nine point you do 9.6%, you're feeling really good about yourself. But you know, I did a study, exactly. You pat yourself on the back, right. But I did a study a few years ago, and in 2000, I think it was 13 and 14, or might have been 14 or 15. I can't remember but doesn't matter the years, the the stock, the stock market did about 28% or the s&p 500 Dow about 28% during those two years, but the top 10 stocks did 185%. So what you're doing when you diversify is you're you're supposedly spreading out your risk, but you're also muddying up your returns, you're taking the good returns, and you're making them crappy returns by some stocks even went out of business and the s&p 500. And the rest are kind of in the middle, just kind of figuring it out. Because not everybody can win. So why not just invest the top 10. Right. And easier said than done, of course. And so what we do is it's a probabilities game, we we you know, when you and I if you buy a stock, and I know you're a futures guy, too, but if you buy a stock or a future or an option, or any kind of investment, you've got a 50% chance of being right at the moment that you do it, yeah, you have a 50% chance of being wrong. Yeah, because there's a smart person on the other end that's got the other side of that trade, and they got a 50% chance. So it's whatever you do after it. So what we do is we we try to find the right stock stocks that are trending up, have above average return on investment, return on equity, earnings per sales, growth, per share growth, sales, growth, those kinds of things, great, great products. That's that, that gives us a little bit of an edge maybe takes us to 52%, then we try to find the right market, because 70% of the stocks performance, it comes from the performance of the market itself. So whatever. So they're in, right, whatever. And then sector performance is 38% of the stocks performance, right. So you're now you're adding you're stacking these, these percentages 52 to 54, maybe 5556, then you find the spot on the chart where it's about to break out or where there's institutional support, or it's bouncing off the 200 day moving average of the 50 day, there are spots on the chart that statistically over the last 120 years on on the right stocks seem to be where that they are going to support the stock. So now you're inching your probabilities up, you never get to 100%. But if we can get to 6070 80%, great, then what we do is we create income from the stock. Now, I don't know if your audience wants me to get wonky with statistics, but I'll give you one more. Okay, go for it. All right, here we go. When you buy an option, and an option is the right to do something, but not the obligation to do something at a certain price before a certain time. When you buy an option, you have an 80% chance of losing all of your money. 80% Wow, that's statistically what it is 80% chance, all options expire, without the buyer making money 80% of the time, because there's no free lunch. But there's also the other side of the trade, Somebody sold that option to the buyer. Well, if somebody's losing money, 80% of the time and they're the buyer, what do you think's happened on the other side of the trade? Grant I mean, someone's got 80% wins.  Mark Yeah. And that's right, it approaches 80% Doesn't always happen. But it does have the statistics in your favor. Because when you sell an option, you always pocket to time premium. And this is what we teach in the course of of how that works and what that is, but you always get the timeframe, you always get the amount that the gambler is willing to risk to have certain amount of time to be able to do something because they're getting leverage. And you know, you want me to give an analogy so I can tell you kind of what we do. Go for it, mark. So most people understand real estate way better than they understand these intangible pieces of paper. They're not even pieces of paper anymore in the stock market. So imagine you open up your window and your front door. And you look out the front door. And there's a vacant lot across the street that your your other neighbor, your friend Jim owns, right? And Jim puts up sign on it says For Sale $100,000. Right. And so Wow, you got your neighbor's got his one acre lot across the way for $100,000. And let's say this other guy, Bob is driving down the street. But Bob heard that there was a Hilton going to be put right up next to Jim's lot. And it's going to make Jim's love worth, not just 100,000. But since it's going to be this Hilton resort, it's going to be put there, it's gonna be worth a million dollars. Yeah, problem is Jim's broke. He doesn't have $100,000 or not, Jim, but Bob, the guy driving down the street. Yeah. But he goes to Jimmy stops his car and he finds Jim in front of the lot. They're, you know, cleaning it up getting ready to sell. And he says, Hey, I'll tell you what, I don't have the $100,000 to give you right now, you know the to buy the property. But I do have this $10,000 Can I give you the $10,000. And all you have to do is promise to take it off the market and not sell it to anybody else. You get to to keep the $10,000 for doing that. But anytime in the next six months, you have to sell it to me for 100,000. And Jim, the guy selling it goes, Wait a minute here, hang on a second, I get to keep the $10,000 I take the property off the off the market, and you're gonna buy it from me for the same price I'm asking anyway, sometime in the next six months. And if you don't I still keep the 10 Grand. And Bob goes, Yeah, that's the deal. And they shake hands and you make that deal. And they write up a contract. Now a couple of things can happen. One thing is Bob could have been right, and there's a big Hilton, they make an announcement. There's a big thing in the paper Hilton to buy, you know, the lot next door to Jim. Yeah. And now. Now Bob took his $10,000 investment. And now he turned into a million dollars. Yeah, he made a high huge amount of reward for knowing about that rumor. As you and I both know, information is not perfect on Wall Street. Yeah, it was a rumor. And it never even happened and nothing ever happened in the next six months. And there's no announcement. And so the the option expires, Jim kept the $10,000. Yeah, so now that now he's got a $90,000 basis in the property, let's call it Yep. And Bob lost the whole $10,000. So Bob had high risk, because he lost it all. But he could have made a killing. But Jim made the $10,000 no matter what. And he could turn around and find another Bob and sell it to another Bob for 10,000. and another and another another. So to answer your question, what we do is we find a position that we like, like I said, it's the right stock. And then we do the same exact thing in a stock market. So we find a position like Tesla right now is the big one. We're all in. We were an app a lot of a sudden Apple still to some of us traits and Apple, we have these great stocks like Nvidia and Microsoft and you know, the big ones. And there's certain criteria that they fit because this doesn't work for every stock. And then we just find a gambler out there like Bob that was driving down the street that thinks he knows more than everybody else. And he wants to give you some money in order for you to take that stock off the market and sell it to him at a certain price. Before that happens, and we do it weekly and monthly. We don't wait. Okay, we do weeklies, yeah, we do weeklies and people are paying a lot of money to have the option for a week to buy a share at Tesla. In a week that goes up, you know, they'll they'll pay you 20 bucks for a week for the stock to go up another $20 plus more.  Grant So it's really high at that point to write on those weeklies so yeah, it is yeah, yeah, it is. Mark So it's, it's, it's and it works. I can tell you some stories about some of the people in our program, and a lot of people are, you know, physicians and the physicians are. This is funny, funny to me. I didn't know this grant, but a lot of physicians just don't like being physicians, not because they don't like helping people, because that's what they really do. They just don't like the politics. Oh. So they don't want to be told when to be at work. And they don't want to be told the politics and other things they have to write up in the computer education, they have all this stuff. And so they can't wait to retire. And I always say why well wait till you're 65 and your hips don't work and your knees creak. And then you can travel the world and you don't feel like it. Yeah, I don't retire a little bit earlier. So a lot of our guys and gals in our program are retiring early, using using some of these things. And I'm really proud of that.  Grant That's, that's an amazing I love the analogy. And so it sounds like you're doing weekly as well as monthly sort of positions. So you're turning them around that you get involved in leap at all are you doing really long term positions is also. Mark We actually do we do we do long term positions as a proxy for the stock. That's something called synthetics. And we that's a wonky concept because there's deltas and all kinds of things that you'd have to teach people about, but yeah, the two to 4% that we make as our basic and then we kind of ratchet things up, if you want to take a little bit more risk, we like to tell people, it's about three times more return that you get, but take 1x more risk. But it all depends on the stock and the market and how you trade it. And, and 90% of this, at the end of the day comes down to emotion and mindset. And I always tell people, that that's that, to me. Grant That seems like that's one of the most critical aspects of this, there's the mechanics that you're describing that have to be right. But with all those being, quote, unquote, right point, that mindset, if you can't hold that position, or you're not confident in the system, then you really get whacked hard. How do you how do you get to the right mindset to do this Mark? Mark Well, you know, the premise starts from the word emotion and motion, money is tied to emotion very significantly, right? It's the number one cause of divorce even even more bigger cause than bad sex. And, and so money, money is a big deal. And people try it, they work hard for their money. And then when they put their money, it's so easy to click a mouse to get into a stock, right? Click, boom, you just invested $100,000, you don't have a strategy for when to get in. You don't have one to get out. You heard Cramer say something on TV that you should buy the stock. And pretty soon you're like, oh my god, it's down $10,000. And now you're getting emotional. And I don't know about you, but when you're angry or sad, or you know, the you don't make good emotional, emotional decisions, right? Not a time to make a decision. It's not the time. So what we do, and I believe that anything that is worth doing is worth doing right? Is we teach people a series of rules, right? Because rules allow you to say, is this, it's either yes or no, right? If you have a role, it takes the emotion out of the event, doesn't mean we don't have to deal with emotions, because boy, there are days like today, where things are moving around a lot. And you know, but we also teach you what to do in markets like today, like what do you do? Do you react? Do you protect you buy a color? Do you do whatever. And those and that system was just a system of rules is designed to reduce emotions, because when emotions go up, intelligence goes down, and vice versa. Right. So our goal in anything that you do in life, right, have a system like Michael Jordan had a system. And if he became the greatest basketball player ever, anybody has to have a system to do something really, really well. Grant So hands on help to overcome or manage meaning not overcome, manage the emotions through the system, the core of it, that helps you to have and maintain the right, the right mindset. I have another question for you slightly different. Time for one more question. Mark I got as much time as you want.  Grant Okay, question. This is crypto, what is going on there? Is that the place to go put your money? What do you think?  Mark Wait a minute, you said "Do I have time for one more question". And you asked me about crypto, which is a whole new universe of stuff? Yes, I did. Oh my god. Yeah, I have so much fun with Bitcoin right now. And it's, it's because a year ago, I was the biggest Bitcoin skeptic that there ever was. And today I have a cryptocurrency hedge fund because I decided that if I'm going to be in the financial services business, I need to learn about this. And I need to figure out why am I so skeptical? And why are so many people making money on it? And then when I got into it, Grant, I started to realize there are so many and it's not every crypto, there's almost there's like 20,000 different tokens. And I'm not recommending them I'm a Bitcoin guy with a with a little bit of cryptocurrency on the side maximalism. Right? But it's mostly because Bitcoin maximalism for me. And boy, I could get into all kinds of stuff. But if you just look at the whole man, I don't know where to start. But to keep it just keep it short. Let's let's just talk about what money is. Right? Money has certain properties, right? So we'll talk about and if you put three things in your brain as we talk about these. It might it might help but money is first of all, it's it's portable, right? You can take $1 Bill and you can walk across the street or you can go to get on a flight and go spend it right it's yeah, it also means it has to be accepted, universally accepted. So your dollar bill in your wallet will be a universally accepted somewhere else or they'll change it into something else. They won't look at it like a conch shell like they used to 500 years ago and say, well, the shells too small. We can't I used to actually trade with conch shells. Till some country said hey, we got a ton of these. Let's go buy a bunch of their stuff. So it's got to be universally accepted. It's got to be standard, right? $100 Bill is $100 bill, it's standard. It's got to be divisible. Well, you know, you sometimes you need a little less than 100 bucks, maybe not in your case. Maybe you're walking around with wads a hundreds but a lot of us we need you know dollar bills and $5 bills and pennies and nickels, and so it's divisible and it's in let's see what else it's um It's a store of value. It's a medium of exchange. So if you keep those so So looking at the dollar, I just described the dollar looking at Gold. Gold is pretty good, too. Gold's a good store of value, right? It's a good hedge against inflation doesn't pay you in any any interest or anything, but it's a good store of value. And a good hedge of inflation. Problem is, I'll bet you that you don't have any gold on you right now. Grant Yeah, that's it right there. Mark Yeah, that's it. So you're not walking around with a bunch of gold. And if you wanted to walk around with any kind of wealth in your pocket, you couldn't carry it in gold, right? It's heavy, you couldn't go across the border. Imagine if you're in Ukraine right now trying to come out of your country, because you have all this money, your bank account is closed? How do you get your gold out, they're gonna confiscate it, possibly at the border. If your guy they're not even letting you leave. I want to make you fight. So, you know, gold has got some really great properties. And for 5000 years, it's been a really great hedge on investing. You know, they used to actually shave off pieces of gold, but then you couldn't measure it. Right? And so they went to silver and then that's how coins got the ridges on the side of them. I don't know if you know that is because with with the people would shave off the silver, and then the coin would get smaller and smaller. So if it didn't have the ridges, they wouldn't accept that. Anyway. Grant Are you serious?  Mark That's yeah, that's why the ridge is... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then and then we can talk about Bitcoin. And now let me just give you a background of Bitcoin, bitcoin is called a cryptocurrency, which, right off the bat eliminates most people from understanding what it is, but it's actually a really simple, it's a really simple product. All money is a ledger based system. When you have a bank account, it's held on the bank accounts, books as a liability, they owe you that money, right? You can go in and say, I want to get my money, and they owe it to you. Right? So it's an asset on your books. It's a liability on theirs, depending on on what you believe, how the Fed really interprets that. But that's, that's another conversation. Yeah, yeah. But but it's all a ledger system, right? You know, you own a house that's got a value, and then there's a liability against it with the mortgage, those kinds of things. The same thing with cryptocurrency, and I'll give, I'll give you the analogy, just in case, there's somebody here that doesn't understand what cryptocurrency is, because it can be very wonky. Imagine you and me and Susie are sitting around a coffee table. And I've got this book, that's this blank journal, and we all decide to write a book. So I write the first sentence. You know, the dog bit, Johnny. Okay. And then you take you take the book, I pass it to you, and you go, Mark wrote the dog bit, Johnny check. That's what he wrote. And John, and Johnny screamed is your sentence, and you pass it to Susie and Susie says, Mark wrote the dog with Johnny check, Grant wrote, and Johnny screamed, Chuck, and that she writes her sentence. And then we just keep passing that around. And we pass around, and then we write this story. And the journal gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. And now it's 1000s or millions of pages. But you know what, the first sentence that I wrote is always in there. And the second sentence that you wrote is always in there. Yeah. And when those sentences are in, that's what's that's the blockchain. It's an immutable ledger ledger that can never be changed. Now, with Bitcoin, it has the advantage of this last component of money. And that this component of money is that was one that the dollar doesn't have, or any other fiat currency doesn't have. And Fiat just means by decree, it's just created by the government. It has scarcity. There's only going to be 21 million Bitcoins ever made, there's might have been 19 million made, the next 2 million would be made over the next 110 years. And so there's a scarce amount of those things. Well, you and I both know that, you know, if you gave somebody a dozen roses, that has a lot of value, but if you gave them two dozen roses that has some good value, and if you know if you gave them you know, 50 dozen roses. Well, that's cool, and you could story but pretty soon that last vowel that last rose doesn't have as much value as the first dozen roses and if you gave him 1000 roses, and 1000 Roses, the day after that pretty soon you'd be like, What do I do with all these roses? Now they're a nuisance and they don't have the value. So with scarcity it's like if you ever saw that tulip mania thing that you'd probably have in in in the Netherlands years ago the Dutch tulip mania it's that's indicative right? Because there was there was a scarcity you know, they created scarcity, but this is legitimate scarcity is 21 billion Bitcoin now. I'll tell you one more story. I know I can get a little bit wordy, but I just got back from El Salvador. So the reason I went to El Salvador is because number one, I run a cryptocurrency hedge fund and predominantly we're tracking Bitcoin. But El Salvador this little third world country that had civil war and has drug issues and Ms. 13 and nobody goes there. He has this really young, really visionary president named naive, okay? And this guy said, if if we're going to use the they use the US Dollar as their currency, and they see what we're doing to our currency in the US. And he's like, why would I want to put my I want to create a change in this country. I don't want to stake everything on this US dollars that's being debased. So he adopted Bitcoin as the first legal tender coin that I heard, and I thought, I gotta go check this out. Grant Well, close. Interesting.  Mark I was hoping it's a small country. I was I was sick. I thought you might have. Yeah, I met some other really cool people because I got invited to some thing with bunch of a bunch of government dignitaries on a different cryptocurrency launch, but it was really, it was really cool. And so I went down there because there's this place place called Bitcoin beach. Oh, no, ran an experiment for a year. And you might have seen it was just on a 60 minutes episode and Bitcoin beach. They just went to everybody and told them, You have to start accepting bitcoin, all the restaurants, all the hotels, all the people selling, you know, the little shell bracelets, and the necklaces and all that stuff. And they said, you have to start accepting bitcoin. How do we do that these third world, people would say, Well, you have this wallet that we're going to give you called the Chivo wallet, that's the name, the name of it, and you put it on your phone? Well, everybody's got a phone, right? And so you just accept it with this little QR code, QR code, what's a QR code, and they show them what that is. And so I went down there, and I bought my dinners, and my hotels, all with Bitcoin. And these people all understand it. They're third world people. And I go down the street and I tell people about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and they look at me like I haven't unicorn sticking out of my head. And they're like, this will never work. Bla bla bla, it will work because it has all of the properties of money, but you can carry it with you in your brain. All you have to do is memorize 24 words. And now you have access to your cryptocurrency wallet, anywhere in the world. So when they when they when we left Afghanistan, they shut down the banks, anybody who had wealth in the banks couldn't get at it. But if you had the foresight to have Bitcoin, you could get at it. So it's transforming. one more statistic couple more statistics. 70% of the world is unbanked. Imagine the person in Ethiopia, or somewhere in Africa where they don't have banks on the corner like we do. Now. They've never seen a bank. And so they use systems of barter, and they use systems of exchange with and they don't have a banking relationship. But with a $50 phone, and a wallet that holds your cryptocurrency or your Bitcoin, you now have a bank on your phone. So these people are now able to create this ecosystem where they, they they can be banked. The same statistic happened in El Salvador 70% of the people were unbanked. And 30% of the people had access to some kind of banking relationship. After they announced last year, that they were accepting bitcoin as their legal tender. It's the reverse now 70% of the country now has Bitcoin on their wallet because the country gave them $30 worth of bitcoin. So they can either save it, spend it, you know, give it to their buddy, whatever. And they're all part of this like new ecosystem, they figuring it out, they're spending money. And it's it's fungible, it's accepted. It's it's a store of value. It's it's it's universal, it's divisible. You don't have to buy one Bitcoin at $40,000, or whatever it is today. You could buy 100,000 of a Bitcoin. Yeah, you might fraction, right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the long answer to a very short question. Grant Well, yeah, well, it is it is a future. A lot of organizations pursuing it, who feels at risk by crypto who sue who isn't that's going to lose, right? What organizations or governments would fight against this? And why would people fight against moving to crypto? Mark Well, first of all, it's more accepted than you think. There's another country that accepted it in Africa. So there's two countries now that accepting it as legal tender. There are cities there's a city in Switzerland that is now accepting it. It's being widely adopted. So first, it was just a couple of nerds. And then you know, I don't know if you know this, but the first transaction on Bitcoin was to buy to Papa John pizzas, and I think it was for 10,000 bitcoins and the guy goes, Yeah, I'll give you the pizzas for stupid 10,000 Bitcoin. Well, that's bitcoin is now worth $453 million. But that was the first real transaction and it's actually a great story about two pizzas being worth $400 million, or whatever the number is. Grant So man, I did not know. Mark Wow, yeah, no, that's they call it the pizza, the pizza trade. But there are some entrenched interest in doing this because the government first of all is debasing our currency, our currency is lost 99 Point 5% of its value in the last 100 years. Right? That's why a car an average, sorry, an average house today cost $250,000. But that house, you know, it's a similar house in, you know, 20 Sorry, 1920 cars $5,000 We've We've debased our currency to almost nothing. And we feel like we're getting rich, our houses are going up, but you're not getting richer. It's just the denominator is getting more debased. So the governments are all threatened by this, and they don't. So what they're doing is they're trying to come out with something called a C D, BC, a centralized digital banking currency. Right, Senator CBBC. And, you know, they think and if you think about the dollar, it's already electronic, like on my phone, I have Apple Pay and Google Wallet and visa and, and I have, you know, I can move money through my bank account. One other thing that Bitcoin you can do is, and I had somebody that wanted wanted some money from the hedge fund last week, and she asked for the money on Wednesday, I had to clear it out of the brokerage firm on Thursday, it had to get to my bank on Friday. And then I had to wire it over the week, you know, on Friday, and it got to the she got the money a Wednesday on Wednesday. And I said, if you had just asked for Bitcoin, you would have had this money in 10 minutes. Yeah. Because banks, Bitcoin never closes, right, you can sell the coin on a Saturday or Sunday at three o'clock in the morning. So the government's are trying to figure out how to get in the game. Because if they're not in the game, they're going to be out of the game. The problem is, you don't want the government to be in charge of having your control of your money. That's the problem we have now. You don't want more of that. Now then they could just print that and infinitely like like many of the other stuff they've been doing. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's the big deal. Grant That is that's, that's a huge deal. Okay, so let me ask you this. So you've shared so many great insights mark, it's just, it's amazing. You're a wealth of insights? Well, you're a wealth architect, I guess you're living name, that's for sure. So where where can people go to learn more about you, and what it is you and your team are providing? Mark Well, there's lots of places, you know, marquee around the web. But I set up a site, a little page for us here for this particular podcast for your audience. And it's if you want to grab a pen or put it in your phone, it's it's go dot Destiny creation, because we believe in creating your destiny. So it's go dot destiny creation.com, forward slash grant. Very nice. And so if you go there, we'll have we'll have this podcast there and some notes and some links, but I'll give you guys who are listening. Not only a free book ebook called relic, regular paychecks is how to how to create regular paychecks out of the stock market. But if you poke around there, on our website, you'll figure out a way to get a free course to seven day we call it the accelerated training program, it highlights and teaches you actually, two of our programs. One is called the stock trade genius program. And the other is cash flow machine once for growth and once for income. And, and you know, then you can poke around and see if you want to go any further with us. But the bottom line is I want to educate you, I want you to figure out what you don't know, right, because there's a lot of times people just don't know what they don't know. And I don't want to see people happy with 8% returns and having to work for 45 years, and then retire on 20% of their income. I want to see people wealthy and you know, thriving and even in this market. So this is the this quarter has been the worst quarter in it since in since the Great Depression, the worst beginning of any years since the Great Depression. Most of our investors in my hedge fund made money this quarter. So it shows you that by playing defense, you actually can play a little bit of offense. Grant At the market today, we're already back to like, it's almost wiped out. Like the in fact, I think was wiped out, or at least on the index is the entire year. Right? Yeah, it's wiped out. Like, like, like, like the entire year. That's amazing. Mark And yeah, at least Yeah, that's it. And that's what the market does, right? It goes up. They always say it goes up with the staircase, and that comes down with the elevator. So the market just gets hammered really quickly. And it goes back and you go wow, it took two years to get this. And we gave it back in three months. Grant Got it. Yeah. Okay, so it's go.destinycreation.com/grant. I appreciate you doing that. That's very kind. Mark. Thanks for your time. Any final comments you want to share? Mark Not really. I mean, first of all, this was a lot of fun. You had some really great question. Do you have some really great insights, and I hope I didn't talk too much. I have a saying and I'll just leave you and your audience with the saying it's never give up your power in your health, your wealth, or your time. So thank you for your time and I was so honored to be here with you today. Grant. Grant Thank you. So much Mark. I really appreciate all your insights and the wisdom that you shared everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of Financial investing radio. And until next time, go get your destiny creation. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback.  

In this episode of Financial investing radio, I speak with the person that introduced overnight trading to the financial markets. He will give you some guidance on how to build your wealth, I speak with The Wealth Architect. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. Okay, so today I have in the house, it's taken me a couple of tries here actually, literally, to catch Mark Yegee with me here today, longtime expert in the investing world. So grateful that he took the time to come here today and talk with us and share some of his secrets on how to grow your wealth. In fact, I think he's known as The Wealth Architect anyway, without me saying anything else. Mark, welcome. Mark Well, thanks. I'm not I'm not sure I like the title of longtime expert. But you know what, I guess it goes with the territory. But thanks. Great to be here, Grant, and I can't wait to get into what we do and what you do and have some fun with your audience. It should be great. Grant Yeah, thanks again. I appreciate that. So one of the things that caught my eye when your organization reached out and I was reviewing your profile, I just have to start here. There's this tip here about you getting into this world into the investing world at the age of 12. I mean, holy smokes at the age of 12. I was milking cows and hauling hay. I mean, there was not a stock market in sight. So I asked you, I mean, the only stock I saw had horns, right. And where I was milking it. So you know, if you'd have said, How's the stock market? We're like, well, we got, you know, 50 cows in the pasture, but like, What are you talking about? So, how did you get into this at 12? Mark Well, you know, my dad was a grew up on a farm. I didn't, I grew up in the city. And so I you know, I mowed my yard and cleaned my pool and got paid to do that. And every day, I would see my dad reading the Wall Street Journal, and it had all these symbols in it with numbers by them, and he would circle stuff. And I was so curious about what he's doing. And finally, one day, I'm like, Dad, what are you doing? I think it's like you thought I was ready. And so he said, Oh, this is how you invest in other people's businesses. And I was like, Oh, great. So over time, he started to kind of teach me that, you know, you're running your own business, doing your lawns, but you can also go out and invest in other people's businesses. And I thought that was fascinating. And after a while, after maybe a couple of months of telling me about it, he goes, but the only way you're gonna learn it is to take some of your money and put it in and I did. And so my first stock, I think it was 12 or 13 years old. It was right around that time. It was it was 100 shares of a company called Ailey company. Grant I've never heard of, I haven't heard of them. Mark No, I don't think they're around anymore. But they were they was this women's clothing store in the malls. And it fit all the criteria. Low P I mean, my dad taught me a few things. And it was alphabetical that I went, you know, I finally went, Hey, here's one. So I circled it. And I bought, you know, $300 worth of that stock was 100 shares at three bucks. And I just would watch it every day. And I was fascinating. Oh, there's the new print on it. And there's a new price. And the stock went to $6. So it's it was probably the worst thing that could ever happen. It's like, it's like when you grab the golf club and you hit it right down the middle. You think you're a good golfer? This is easy, right? It's as easy as like this, you know, or if you go to play craps and you hit it on the first you know, first dice roll. And so I I invested again, I saw commercial on TV, you know, and it said us, it said Allegheny Airlines is becoming US Airways or us there. I think it was at the time. Yeah. And I was like, Wow, what a cool name for an airline. And I you know, that was the only reason yeah, I think it might have might have met some of the other criteria as well. So I bought it and it went from 17 I remember to 35 so I doubled it again, which is probably the the next worst thing that could have happened but now I'm like, this is a piece of cake plus I don't even have to work the money is doubling and yeah, anyway, so you know, I guess I could buy more candy than I could. But that was it. That was the beginning and then he started intermediate. introducing me to books. My dad was a big Personal Growth Guy. So I had read, I had read books, you know, by Dale Carnegie very early on, I read books by Edward Thorpe McShane, the business who wrote a book called, oddly enough, he wrote, this first book was called beat the dealer need to deal with a guy who was an MIT professor. So he taught math at MIT. And he went to Las Vegas, and he figured out how to beat the roulette tables. And they, you know, he had another guy helping him and this was kind of a rudimentary metric computer in the 50s. And he figured out where the ball was coming out, and how quickly it was anyway, he figured out a way to get the probabilities in your favor, and he started to beat the roulette tables, and they kicked him out of Las Vegas. So he went back, and then he figured out well, I'm going to figure it out on Blackjack, and you've heard the story, there's been a movie made about him. Is that the movie? 21? Yeah, yep. All these kids went to MIT, you know, the students. And he brought them they all cleaned Vegas out and then finally got kicked out of that. And then he turned his his efforts to the market. And then he wrote a book called beat the market. And it was basically how to buy a stock and sell the warrants against the stock, which today are basically known as options. They're still warrants, but most people don't know what they are. And it was covered. It was a system of covered calls before they even had options. They didn't have options until 1971 or 1974, I think. And so but I was fascinated by because my dad was like, Oh, you got to learn this. And it was this thick book. It was really boring. And but I, I started to apply it. And I applied it so much that when I was 16 1718 years old, by the way, I bought my car with the winnings and the monies that I made in that those first few investments. I set up a brokerage firm at EF Hutton and my dad had this old timer broker. And I said okay, Harry, I want to buy 100 shares of IBM and I want to sell the you know, the call options against it. And he's like what? So we had to call in New York and get the options principal from EF Hutton on. And he understood why zoom, but my broker didn't even understand I did teach him what I was doing. And so all through high school and college... Grant And this was a high school you did that you sold your first in high school high on IBM? Mark Yeah. So IBM, and this is back when you pay a commission of $300 to do IBM. And they had quarterly options. And you know, the different it was a different game. And now we have so many more tools that are at our disposal. That's great. So yeah, I did this all the way through college. And finally, you know, I had several different entrepreneurial ventures and then I actually sold copiers, which for me was the worst thing. Anybody. Grant Like they just sort of jumped into the white when you're selling options, and you went from that to copiers. What happened? Mark? Mark Well, I mean, when I went to college, I didn't think that making money in the stock market was going to be on my my career. So I went to college. I got a marketing and business degree, and everything was hunky dory. And then I got out and pretty. I I started an entrepreneurial company in college. I was back when the Swatch watches were this big craze. Oh, yeah. And you remember those people put 10 Swatch watches on their wrists? Yeah. And I thought, Well, I went to the University of Florida and I thought why isn't there a swatch watch with a gator on it? Like a University of Florida Gator, you know? And, and I went to the I went to the, you know, the alumni office and I said, Can I license the gator. And this was back before the internet. This was back really? Right around the time faxes were becoming popular, but still pretty early back in. In 1980. What was this 85? Yeah. And they licensed the Florida Gator trademark to me. And I figured out a way to get to Hong Kong. I had no money at all. And when I was a junior and senior in college, I went to Hong Kong and I met manufacturers and I figured out a way for them to put the gator on these watches that I wear orange and blue the color the exact colors of the school. Yeah, and I brought back these you know, 2000 watches are added, manufactured and shipped. And I had them in my college wasn't my dorm room was my fraternity. I lived in the fraternity house last semester. And so I had them stacked floor to ceiling all these watches, right? So I go to the games, and I would sell these things and and I learned a lot about a lot, right? Traveling, manufacturing business, you know, buying good quality products versus crappy products. And I expanded to 23 schools in the southeast and finally just got out of that business about four years later. And then I sold copiers after that. And I that was miserable. But it was that was again instructive. And then finally I I said why I've been doing the market all these years. Why don't I just go do that? Amazing. Yeah, I got a couple of I got a job with a guy named Ernie Ollie who had already discount old discount stockbrokers. It was a discount broker like, like Charles Schwab, they were actually good buddies and they started when those got deregulated in the 70s. And I worked for Ernie for or a year and a half, two years, something like that started my own brokerage firm with a partner. And then we grew that to a to a pretty big venture became a Wall Street company that applied to do this financial technology, I could bore the I could bore you with all the little stuff that I've done in between. But it all has led me to this spot where I had a, you know, a big trading firm, Wall Street trading firm. And we traded, you know, billions of dollars worth of securities. Grant  I saw that, that's well, and did I read it right? That did you guys introduce after hours trading? Is that true? Mark Yeah, that was actually my idea. And everybody thought I was crazy at the time. But I thought, you know, we have this system that all we do is if somebody wants to buy and somebody wants to sell, our system was a computerized system, they just matched those sellers. And I said, why does that have to stop at four o'clock? Why Can't We? If somebody still wants to put the order on? What can we do it a 401? And then if we can do it a 401. Why can't we do it at 601? And then why even shut the thing off? Let's just let it run all night. It happened automatically anyway. And so yeah, we introduced after hours trading in 1999, I believe. And I was on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. And you know, a few things. Grant And then, and you're now you're talking to me now how am I now? Mark And now I've moved up to talking to you. Yeah. Grant Wow, you finally got up to Grant Larsen. I mean, Tom Brokaw, it's been a long time coming! Mark So just a stepping stone. You know, you got to stand on the giants that came before you gotta get to the grant Larsen. So. But, uh, but I'm glad to be talking to you. Because you know, everything that I've done in my life has led me to this exact point. And that exact point is now where I have a few hedge funds that I run. They're all based on all these mentors and all of them knowledge that I learned over the last 45 years. And now we help people call, you know, make what we call Safe, reliable income. Although if you look at it today, with this market, it's not safe, reliable income today. Grant Yeah, I turn my head and I'm looking at it that can you say sell off? Mark Yeah, don't don't even look. It is a light volume sell off. So I believe that there's a bounce coming in a couple of days. But boy, it's, it's painful for a lot of people right now. It's, you know, people think you just buy a stock and you hold it. And that's the way you invest. And then you get these 25% corrections in the market. And people's 401 k's are decimated, they go to 5060 70%. Yeah, it's just a shame. It's just a shame. Grant Ever since November, I saw got it at the end of last November on my systems and went, Okay, I'm gonna start preparing to hedge here. So I've just been building my hedging positions since then. And yeah, we've had some interesting volatility a couple times. But right now it's down hard for sure. Mark So it's horrible. Yeah. And you if you started in November, you probably if you correlate it, it's the exact day that Jerome Powell from the Fed said, we're going to start to raise rates. And from that point, we're down about 27 28%. And some stocks. I can tell you some stocks are down 50%, 60%, 70%. Grant Yeah. Facebook and others. I mean, they're down like massive 5060 out, yeah, Netflix got hammered with your training thing. And, yeah, just a lot of them are down really soon. Mark But it doesn't have to be that way. Right. Like, you know, a lot of people just don't know what they don't know. And we tell people that they can make two to 4% a week. Now, that doesn't always happen. But our goal is just like that analogy that I threw out before about the craps table. It's, it's to get the odds on your side, right? Yeah, I mean, I know, it's this is not gambling. But if you use gambling as an analogy, you can understand it better. If you're sitting around a poker table like Annie Duke or Phil Ivey or those guys that are on, you know, the the World Series of Poker, they don't win every hand. But if you have a pair of aces, you have the odds in your favor. If you stay in, unfortunately, sometimes three kings comes up and your opponent has a king, and then you lose, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have been in the game. So what we try to do is we try to create safe, reliable income by renting stocks, to other people that are going to our B that are willing to gamble and pay us a premium for having the option to buy our stock. I can explain that a bit more with an analogy, if you if you want to hear it, but that's really what we do. Grant And I'm selling options, then that's that's your main strategy. Mark Yeah, yeah, we buy we buy a good solid stock. So we have, we have a system called the cash flow machine, right? We call it the cash flow machine because you you put cash in, and then it gives you cash out more cash. And that's it's, it's a system that creates income, using what we call the four cornerstones it's the right stock, not just any stock, the right market, because you want the tailwind to be behind you. So we use a component of market timing and does help and then it's got to be the right spot on the chart. And usually you can find a high probability spot on the chart where this were the end institutions are behind the stock exchange in the right direction. Yeah, and we don't want to be against the institutions. That's the big money, right? We're little people. Yeah. So we want to be with them. And we can see where they are, they leave footprints on the chart. And then we go in that direction. And then the fourth Cornerstone is we squeeze the juice or we collect the rent. And that's the option premium that we get for selling upgrades and income. And it's a defensive strategy that we make, you know, two to 4% a month, conservatively. Grant Now, there's, you know, there's obviously a fair amount of margin that's needed in order to do this kind of thing. So you typically need to have fairly decent size accounts to do some of that stuff. What what's sort of the entry level that you see most of the people come in at how much is what sort of account size or capital do they need to have? Mark Well, it depends, we have a breadth of options that you can use so so I have a hedge fund that I run using this strategy for accredited investors, people that are worth, you know, more than a million dollars, you know, rich guys, basically, but not everybody qualifies for that. And I want to do whatever I want to make this accessible to everyone. So we have a set of courses. And we have my favorite thing is a mastermind group. And so the mastermind group is around a series of courses, and their video courses over my shoulder, I show you how to do the trading and you and you understand the philosophy behind it. And I give you the whole strategy. And then it's also surrounded by a full ecosystem of support. So we have like minded people that are also giving you support people that have just gone through the learning that you've gone through, you get mentorship from me, and I've got, you know, for decades of doing similar things in this, you get, you'll actually get something called the private access group where I put out the actual trades I do in my hedge fund. So you can learn from them, mimic them, do them, you know, do subsets of them, whatever. And then on Friday, and again, this was what I was alluding to a bit ago, on Friday, we have a mastermind call where we all get on a zoom call, some of us will share our screen show the trades we're making, I'll usually teach a concept about the current market or something, you know, that we should know. And then we hold each other accountable through a chat group all week, like, Hey, what are you doing? Who's doing what during the Fed announcement? Why are we you know, selling, you know, the Tesla when Tesla's coming out with numbers, you know, things like that. So to answer your question, that mastermind group, it's an investment in yourself, I give a money back guarantee, if you don't make enough money to cover the tuition because it's not a it's not a small amount. But it is the small amount of it's an investment in yourself, and you make it back with your investments. But in order to, for me to feel good justifying that you need about $150,000 to 2 million as a minimum, Now, not everybody has that. And I've had people that just you know, take the courses and do extremely well with five or 10 or 15,000. But they're not going to afford to be in the mentorship program, and the mastermind group and all that kind of stuff. But they can take the courses. And so we have a full breadth of offerings for people just so that we can they can learn it. I also have a free course on my on my website that you can sign up to take that kind of introduces you to the concept of what we do. You know, we got all kinds of stuff. My goal is Grant, it's financial education, right? We don't teach people about money in school. We just don't Yeah, it's it's not at all. I don't know about you, but I use money every day. I don't use Romeo and Juliet every day. And I don't use the Pythagorean Theorem every day. Grant One I don't use while shopping the grocery store. Okay. Mark I haven't used the Pythagorean Theorem, I don't know in at least a week. Yeah. And, you know, I don't learn I don't know much about you know, I don't use Cleopatra, and Henry the Eighth and his wives every day, but boy, I use money, it would be nice to know, would have been nice to know without having to go outside and learn how to buy houses in real estate, how to invest in the stock market, how to do my taxes would have been nice to have learned a little something like that. Yeah. So I believe that that's the biggest thing that people can do is they can invest in themselves by getting financially educated. And so that's part of that's a little part of what I do in the world is is help people with that. Grant So it's interesting that you're making this available to a wide range of people regardless of where they are right certainly you've got the capabilities to help those that are accredited, but for the person that's just trying to get going I mean, you walked that journey so you understand that and therefore you're made this available to them to help them ultimately get there are you positions intended to be longer term Are you have sort of a timeframe Are you more like a swing trader? Are you sort of long term Are you did sort of break it up you got portion of the portfolio's shorter term and some sort of longer term investment What's What's your philosophy on that? Mark Well, I can give you the short answer or the little bit longer answer that has some more depth let me give To the longer answer, since we got a nice podcast format going here, the longer answer is that everybody says, oh, you should be diversified, right. And to most people who are uneducated, don't have the financial education that we should have. They're educated by Wall Street. And Wall Street is run by two groups, lawyers and salespeople. And so lawyers are there to not get the firm sued. And for that, they've put you in average investments, because how can you get sued? How can you sue anybody if you just did an average return, and the salespeople are there to grab assets and a lot, the more you assets you grab, the more they pay the salesperson, but the more the firm can trade of that money and make money on it. And so what they want what we hear, and I was a Wall Street guy, so I can say this, is they want you to be diversified. So they tell you put your portfolio in a nice little portfolio of mutual funds and ETFs, a couple of stocks, and you know, maybe some bonds and you won't get hurt, right? And you get this average low returning 8% thing that you feel great about because woohoo. But that's the average, right? The s&p 500 over the last 500 year or sorry, 100 years, has made 9.4%. So if you're doing around nine point you do 9.6%, you're feeling really good about yourself. But you know, I did a study, exactly. You pat yourself on the back, right. But I did a study a few years ago, and in 2000, I think it was 13 and 14, or might have been 14 or 15. I can't remember but doesn't matter the years, the the stock, the stock market did about 28% or the s&p 500 Dow about 28% during those two years, but the top 10 stocks did 185%. So what you're doing when you diversify is you're you're supposedly spreading out your risk, but you're also muddying up your returns, you're taking the good returns, and you're making them crappy returns by some stocks even went out of business and the s&p 500. And the rest are kind of in the middle, just kind of figuring it out. Because not everybody can win. So why not just invest the top 10. Right. And easier said than done, of course. And so what we do is it's a probabilities game, we we you know, when you and I if you buy a stock, and I know you're a futures guy, too, but if you buy a stock or a future or an option, or any kind of investment, you've got a 50% chance of being right at the moment that you do it, yeah, you have a 50% chance of being wrong. Yeah, because there's a smart person on the other end that's got the other side of that trade, and they got a 50% chance. So it's whatever you do after it. So what we do is we we try to find the right stock stocks that are trending up, have above average return on investment, return on equity, earnings per sales, growth, per share growth, sales, growth, those kinds of things, great, great products. That's that, that gives us a little bit of an edge maybe takes us to 52%, then we try to find the right market, because 70% of the stocks performance, it comes from the performance of the market itself. So whatever. So they're in, right, whatever. And then sector performance is 38% of the stocks performance, right. So you're now you're adding you're stacking these, these percentages 52 to 54, maybe 5556, then you find the spot on the chart where it's about to break out or where there's institutional support, or it's bouncing off the 200 day moving average of the 50 day, there are spots on the chart that statistically over the last 120 years on on the right stocks seem to be where that they are going to support the stock. So now you're inching your probabilities up, you never get to 100%. But if we can get to 6070 80%, great, then what we do is we create income from the stock. Now, I don't know if your audience wants me to get wonky with statistics, but I'll give you one more. Okay, go for it. All right, here we go. When you buy an option, and an option is the right to do something, but not the obligation to do something at a certain price before a certain time. When you buy an option, you have an 80% chance of losing all of your money. 80% Wow, that's statistically what it is 80% chance, all options expire, without the buyer making money 80% of the time, because there's no free lunch. But there's also the other side of the trade, Somebody sold that option to the buyer. Well, if somebody's losing money, 80% of the time and they're the buyer, what do you think's happened on the other side of the trade? Grant I mean, someone's got 80% wins.  Mark Yeah. And that's right, it approaches 80% Doesn't always happen. But it does have the statistics in your favor. Because when you sell an option, you always pocket to time premium. And this is what we teach in the course of of how that works and what that is, but you always get the timeframe, you always get the amount that the gambler is willing to risk to have certain amount of time to be able to do something because they're getting leverage. And you know, you want me to give an analogy so I can tell you kind of what we do. Go for it, mark. So most people understand real estate way better than they understand these intangible pieces of paper. They're not even pieces of paper anymore in the stock market. So imagine you open up your window and your front door. And you look out the front door. And there's a vacant lot across the street that your your other neighbor, your friend Jim owns, right? And Jim puts up sign on it says For Sale $100,000. Right. And so Wow, you got your neighbor's got his one acre lot across the way for $100,000. And let's say this other guy, Bob is driving down the street. But Bob heard that there was a Hilton going to be put right up next to Jim's lot. And it's going to make Jim's love worth, not just 100,000. But since it's going to be this Hilton resort, it's going to be put there, it's gonna be worth a million dollars. Yeah, problem is Jim's broke. He doesn't have $100,000 or not, Jim, but Bob, the guy driving down the street. Yeah. But he goes to Jimmy stops his car and he finds Jim in front of the lot. They're, you know, cleaning it up getting ready to sell. And he says, Hey, I'll tell you what, I don't have the $100,000 to give you right now, you know the to buy the property. But I do have this $10,000 Can I give you the $10,000. And all you have to do is promise to take it off the market and not sell it to anybody else. You get to to keep the $10,000 for doing that. But anytime in the next six months, you have to sell it to me for 100,000. And Jim, the guy selling it goes, Wait a minute here, hang on a second, I get to keep the $10,000 I take the property off the off the market, and you're gonna buy it from me for the same price I'm asking anyway, sometime in the next six months. And if you don't I still keep the 10 Grand. And Bob goes, Yeah, that's the deal. And they shake hands and you make that deal. And they write up a contract. Now a couple of things can happen. One thing is Bob could have been right, and there's a big Hilton, they make an announcement. There's a big thing in the paper Hilton to buy, you know, the lot next door to Jim. Yeah. And now. Now Bob took his $10,000 investment. And now he turned into a million dollars. Yeah, he made a high huge amount of reward for knowing about that rumor. As you and I both know, information is not perfect on Wall Street. Yeah, it was a rumor. And it never even happened and nothing ever happened in the next six months. And there's no announcement. And so the the option expires, Jim kept the $10,000. Yeah, so now that now he's got a $90,000 basis in the property, let's call it Yep. And Bob lost the whole $10,000. So Bob had high risk, because he lost it all. But he could have made a killing. But Jim made the $10,000 no matter what. And he could turn around and find another Bob and sell it to another Bob for 10,000. and another and another another. So to answer your question, what we do is we find a position that we like, like I said, it's the right stock. And then we do the same exact thing in a stock market. So we find a position like Tesla right now is the big one. We're all in. We were an app a lot of a sudden Apple still to some of us traits and Apple, we have these great stocks like Nvidia and Microsoft and you know, the big ones. And there's certain criteria that they fit because this doesn't work for every stock. And then we just find a gambler out there like Bob that was driving down the street that thinks he knows more than everybody else. And he wants to give you some money in order for you to take that stock off the market and sell it to him at a certain price. Before that happens, and we do it weekly and monthly. We don't wait. Okay, we do weeklies, yeah, we do weeklies and people are paying a lot of money to have the option for a week to buy a share at Tesla. In a week that goes up, you know, they'll they'll pay you 20 bucks for a week for the stock to go up another $20 plus more.  Grant So it's really high at that point to write on those weeklies so yeah, it is yeah, yeah, it is. Mark So it's, it's, it's and it works. I can tell you some stories about some of the people in our program, and a lot of people are, you know, physicians and the physicians are. This is funny, funny to me. I didn't know this grant, but a lot of physicians just don't like being physicians, not because they don't like helping people, because that's what they really do. They just don't like the politics. Oh. So they don't want to be told when to be at work. And they don't want to be told the politics and other things they have to write up in the computer education, they have all this stuff. And so they can't wait to retire. And I always say why well wait till you're 65 and your hips don't work and your knees creak. And then you can travel the world and you don't feel like it. Yeah, I don't retire a little bit earlier. So a lot of our guys and gals in our program are retiring early, using using some of these things. And I'm really proud of that.  Grant That's, that's an amazing I love the analogy. And so it sounds like you're doing weekly as well as monthly sort of positions. So you're turning them around that you get involved in leap at all are you doing really long term positions is also. Mark We actually do we do we do long term positions as a proxy for the stock. That's something called synthetics. And we that's a wonky concept because there's deltas and all kinds of things that you'd have to teach people about, but yeah, the two to 4% that we make as our basic and then we kind of ratchet things up, if you want to take a little bit more risk, we like to tell people, it's about three times more return that you get, but take 1x more risk. But it all depends on the stock and the market and how you trade it. And, and 90% of this, at the end of the day comes down to emotion and mindset. And I always tell people, that that's that, to me. Grant That seems like that's one of the most critical aspects of this, there's the mechanics that you're describing that have to be right. But with all those being, quote, unquote, right point, that mindset, if you can't hold that position, or you're not confident in the system, then you really get whacked hard. How do you how do you get to the right mindset to do this Mark? Mark Well, you know, the premise starts from the word emotion and motion, money is tied to emotion very significantly, right? It's the number one cause of divorce even even more bigger cause than bad sex. And, and so money, money is a big deal. And people try it, they work hard for their money. And then when they put their money, it's so easy to click a mouse to get into a stock, right? Click, boom, you just invested $100,000, you don't have a strategy for when to get in. You don't have one to get out. You heard Cramer say something on TV that you should buy the stock. And pretty soon you're like, oh my god, it's down $10,000. And now you're getting emotional. And I don't know about you, but when you're angry or sad, or you know, the you don't make good emotional, emotional decisions, right? Not a time to make a decision. It's not the time. So what we do, and I believe that anything that is worth doing is worth doing right? Is we teach people a series of rules, right? Because rules allow you to say, is this, it's either yes or no, right? If you have a role, it takes the emotion out of the event, doesn't mean we don't have to deal with emotions, because boy, there are days like today, where things are moving around a lot. And you know, but we also teach you what to do in markets like today, like what do you do? Do you react? Do you protect you buy a color? Do you do whatever. And those and that system was just a system of rules is designed to reduce emotions, because when emotions go up, intelligence goes down, and vice versa. Right. So our goal in anything that you do in life, right, have a system like Michael Jordan had a system. And if he became the greatest basketball player ever, anybody has to have a system to do something really, really well. Grant So hands on help to overcome or manage meaning not overcome, manage the emotions through the system, the core of it, that helps you to have and maintain the right, the right mindset. I have another question for you slightly different. Time for one more question. Mark I got as much time as you want.  Grant Okay, question. This is crypto, what is going on there? Is that the place to go put your money? What do you think?  Mark Wait a minute, you said "Do I have time for one more question". And you asked me about crypto, which is a whole new universe of stuff? Yes, I did. Oh my god. Yeah, I have so much fun with Bitcoin right now. And it's, it's because a year ago, I was the biggest Bitcoin skeptic that there ever was. And today I have a cryptocurrency hedge fund because I decided that if I'm going to be in the financial services business, I need to learn about this. And I need to figure out why am I so skeptical? And why are so many people making money on it? And then when I got into it, Grant, I started to realize there are so many and it's not every crypto, there's almost there's like 20,000 different tokens. And I'm not recommending them I'm a Bitcoin guy with a with a little bit of cryptocurrency on the side maximalism. Right? But it's mostly because Bitcoin maximalism for me. And boy, I could get into all kinds of stuff. But if you just look at the whole man, I don't know where to start. But to keep it just keep it short. Let's let's just talk about what money is. Right? Money has certain properties, right? So we'll talk about and if you put three things in your brain as we talk about these. It might it might help but money is first of all, it's it's portable, right? You can take $1 Bill and you can walk across the street or you can go to get on a flight and go spend it right it's yeah, it also means it has to be accepted, universally accepted. So your dollar bill in your wallet will be a universally accepted somewhere else or they'll change it into something else. They won't look at it like a conch shell like they used to 500 years ago and say, well, the shells too small. We can't I used to actually trade with conch shells. Till some country said hey, we got a ton of these. Let's go buy a bunch of their stuff. So it's got to be universally accepted. It's got to be standard, right? $100 Bill is $100 bill, it's standard. It's got to be divisible. Well, you know, you sometimes you need a little less than 100 bucks, maybe not in your case. Maybe you're walking around with wads a hundreds but a lot of us we need you know dollar bills and $5 bills and pennies and nickels, and so it's divisible and it's in let's see what else it's um It's a store of value. It's a medium of exchange. So if you keep those so So looking at the dollar, I just described the dollar looking at Gold. Gold is pretty good, too. Gold's a good store of value, right? It's a good hedge against inflation doesn't pay you in any any interest or anything, but it's a good store of value. And a good hedge of inflation. Problem is, I'll bet you that you don't have any gold on you right now. Grant Yeah, that's it right there. Mark Yeah, that's it. So you're not walking around with a bunch of gold. And if you wanted to walk around with any kind of wealth in your pocket, you couldn't carry it in gold, right? It's heavy, you couldn't go across the border. Imagine if you're in Ukraine right now trying to come out of your country, because you have all this money, your bank account is closed? How do you get your gold out, they're gonna confiscate it, possibly at the border. If your guy they're not even letting you leave. I want to make you fight. So, you know, gold has got some really great properties. And for 5000 years, it's been a really great hedge on investing. You know, they used to actually shave off pieces of gold, but then you couldn't measure it. Right? And so they went to silver and then that's how coins got the ridges on the side of them. I don't know if you know that is because with with the people would shave off the silver, and then the coin would get smaller and smaller. So if it didn't have the ridges, they wouldn't accept that. Anyway. Grant Are you serious?  Mark That's yeah, that's why the ridge is... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then and then we can talk about Bitcoin. And now let me just give you a background of Bitcoin, bitcoin is called a cryptocurrency, which, right off the bat eliminates most people from understanding what it is, but it's actually a really simple, it's a really simple product. All money is a ledger based system. When you have a bank account, it's held on the bank accounts, books as a liability, they owe you that money, right? You can go in and say, I want to get my money, and they owe it to you. Right? So it's an asset on your books. It's a liability on theirs, depending on on what you believe, how the Fed really interprets that. But that's, that's another conversation. Yeah, yeah. But but it's all a ledger system, right? You know, you own a house that's got a value, and then there's a liability against it with the mortgage, those kinds of things. The same thing with cryptocurrency, and I'll give, I'll give you the analogy, just in case, there's somebody here that doesn't understand what cryptocurrency is, because it can be very wonky. Imagine you and me and Susie are sitting around a coffee table. And I've got this book, that's this blank journal, and we all decide to write a book. So I write the first sentence. You know, the dog bit, Johnny. Okay. And then you take you take the book, I pass it to you, and you go, Mark wrote the dog bit, Johnny check. That's what he wrote. And John, and Johnny screamed is your sentence, and you pass it to Susie and Susie says, Mark wrote the dog with Johnny check, Grant wrote, and Johnny screamed, Chuck, and that she writes her sentence. And then we just keep passing that around. And we pass around, and then we write this story. And the journal gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. And now it's 1000s or millions of pages. But you know what, the first sentence that I wrote is always in there. And the second sentence that you wrote is always in there. Yeah. And when those sentences are in, that's what's that's the blockchain. It's an immutable ledger ledger that can never be changed. Now, with Bitcoin, it has the advantage of this last component of money. And that this component of money is that was one that the dollar doesn't have, or any other fiat currency doesn't have. And Fiat just means by decree, it's just created by the government. It has scarcity. There's only going to be 21 million Bitcoins ever made, there's might have been 19 million made, the next 2 million would be made over the next 110 years. And so there's a scarce amount of those things. Well, you and I both know that, you know, if you gave somebody a dozen roses, that has a lot of value, but if you gave them two dozen roses that has some good value, and if you know if you gave them you know, 50 dozen roses. Well, that's cool, and you could story but pretty soon that last vowel that last rose doesn't have as much value as the first dozen roses and if you gave him 1000 roses, and 1000 Roses, the day after that pretty soon you'd be like, What do I do with all these roses? Now they're a nuisance and they don't have the value. So with scarcity it's like if you ever saw that tulip mania thing that you'd probably have in in in the Netherlands years ago the Dutch tulip mania it's that's indicative right? Because there was there was a scarcity you know, they created scarcity, but this is legitimate scarcity is 21 billion Bitcoin now. I'll tell you one more story. I know I can get a little bit wordy, but I just got back from El Salvador. So the reason I went to El Salvador is because number one, I run a cryptocurrency hedge fund and predominantly we're tracking Bitcoin. But El Salvador this little third world country that had civil war and has drug issues and Ms. 13 and nobody goes there. He has this really young, really visionary president named naive, okay? And this guy said, if if we're going to use the they use the US Dollar as their currency, and they see what we're doing to our currency in the US. And he's like, why would I want to put my I want to create a change in this country. I don't want to stake everything on this US dollars that's being debased. So he adopted Bitcoin as the first legal tender coin that I heard, and I thought, I gotta go check this out. Grant Well, close. Interesting.  Mark I was hoping it's a small country. I was I was sick. I thought you might have. Yeah, I met some other really cool people because I got invited to some thing with bunch of a bunch of government dignitaries on a different cryptocurrency launch, but it was really, it was really cool. And so I went down there because there's this place place called Bitcoin beach. Oh, no, ran an experiment for a year. And you might have seen it was just on a 60 minutes episode and Bitcoin beach. They just went to everybody and told them, You have to start accepting bitcoin, all the restaurants, all the hotels, all the people selling, you know, the little shell bracelets, and the necklaces and all that stuff. And they said, you have to start accepting bitcoin. How do we do that these third world, people would say, Well, you have this wallet that we're going to give you called the Chivo wallet, that's the name, the name of it, and you put it on your phone? Well, everybody's got a phone, right? And so you just accept it with this little QR code, QR code, what's a QR code, and they show them what that is. And so I went down there, and I bought my dinners, and my hotels, all with Bitcoin. And these people all understand it. They're third world people. And I go down the street and I tell people about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and they look at me like I haven't unicorn sticking out of my head. And they're like, this will never work. Bla bla bla, it will work because it has all of the properties of money, but you can carry it with you in your brain. All you have to do is memorize 24 words. And now you have access to your cryptocurrency wallet, anywhere in the world. So when they when they when we left Afghanistan, they shut down the banks, anybody who had wealth in the banks couldn't get at it. But if you had the foresight to have Bitcoin, you could get at it. So it's transforming. one more statistic couple more statistics. 70% of the world is unbanked. Imagine the person in Ethiopia, or somewhere in Africa where they don't have banks on the corner like we do. Now. They've never seen a bank. And so they use systems of barter, and they use systems of exchange with and they don't have a banking relationship. But with a $50 phone, and a wallet that holds your cryptocurrency or your Bitcoin, you now have a bank on your phone. So these people are now able to create this ecosystem where they, they they can be banked. The same statistic happened in El Salvador 70% of the people were unbanked. And 30% of the people had access to some kind of banking relationship. After they announced last year, that they were accepting bitcoin as their legal tender. It's the reverse now 70% of the country now has Bitcoin on their wallet because the country gave them $30 worth of bitcoin. So they can either save it, spend it, you know, give it to their buddy, whatever. And they're all part of this like new ecosystem, they figuring it out, they're spending money. And it's it's fungible, it's accepted. It's it's a store of value. It's it's it's universal, it's divisible. You don't have to buy one Bitcoin at $40,000, or whatever it is today. You could buy 100,000 of a Bitcoin. Yeah, you might fraction, right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the long answer to a very short question. Grant Well, yeah, well, it is it is a future. A lot of organizations pursuing it, who feels at risk by crypto who sue who isn't that's going to lose, right? What organizations or governments would fight against this? And why would people fight against moving to crypto? Mark Well, first of all, it's more accepted than you think. There's another country that accepted it in Africa. So there's two countries now that accepting it as legal tender. There are cities there's a city in Switzerland that is now accepting it. It's being widely adopted. So first, it was just a couple of nerds. And then you know, I don't know if you know this, but the first transaction on Bitcoin was to buy to Papa John pizzas, and I think it was for 10,000 bitcoins and the guy goes, Yeah, I'll give you the pizzas for stupid 10,000 Bitcoin. Well, that's bitcoin is now worth $453 million. But that was the first real transaction and it's actually a great story about two pizzas being worth $400 million, or whatever the number is. Grant So man, I did not know. Mark Wow, yeah, no, that's they call it the pizza, the pizza trade. But there are some entrenched interest in doing this because the government first of all is debasing our currency, our currency is lost 99 Point 5% of its value in the last 100 years. Right? That's why a car an average, sorry, an average house today cost $250,000. But that house, you know, it's a similar house in, you know, 20 Sorry, 1920 cars $5,000 We've We've debased our currency to almost nothing. And we feel like we're getting rich, our houses are going up, but you're not getting richer. It's just the denominator is getting more debased. So the governments are all threatened by this, and they don't. So what they're doing is they're trying to come out with something called a C D, BC, a centralized digital banking currency. Right, Senator CBBC. And, you know, they think and if you think about the dollar, it's already electronic, like on my phone, I have Apple Pay and Google Wallet and visa and, and I have, you know, I can move money through my bank account. One other thing that Bitcoin you can do is, and I had somebody that wanted wanted some money from the hedge fund last week, and she asked for the money on Wednesday, I had to clear it out of the brokerage firm on Thursday, it had to get to my bank on Friday. And then I had to wire it over the week, you know, on Friday, and it got to the she got the money a Wednesday on Wednesday. And I said, if you had just asked for Bitcoin, you would have had this money in 10 minutes. Yeah. Because banks, Bitcoin never closes, right, you can sell the coin on a Saturday or Sunday at three o'clock in the morning. So the government's are trying to figure out how to get in the game. Because if they're not in the game, they're going to be out of the game. The problem is, you don't want the government to be in charge of having your control of your money. That's the problem we have now. You don't want more of that. Now then they could just print that and infinitely like like many of the other stuff they've been doing. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's the big deal. Grant That is that's, that's a huge deal. Okay, so let me ask you this. So you've shared so many great insights mark, it's just, it's amazing. You're a wealth of insights? Well, you're a wealth architect, I guess you're living name, that's for sure. So where where can people go to learn more about you, and what it is you and your team are providing? Mark Well, there's lots of places, you know, marquee around the web. But I set up a site, a little page for us here for this particular podcast for your audience. And it's if you want to grab a pen or put it in your phone, it's it's go dot Destiny creation, because we believe in creating your destiny. So it's go dot destiny creation.com, forward slash grant. Very nice. And so if you go there, we'll have we'll have this podcast there and some notes and some links, but I'll give you guys who are listening. Not only a free book ebook called relic, regular paychecks is how to how to create regular paychecks out of the stock market. But if you poke around there, on our website, you'll figure out a way to get a free course to seven day we call it the accelerated training program, it highlights and teaches you actually, two of our programs. One is called the stock trade genius program. And the other is cash flow machine once for growth and once for income. And, and you know, then you can poke around and see if you want to go any further with us. But the bottom line is I want to educate you, I want you to figure out what you don't know, right, because there's a lot of times people just don't know what they don't know. And I don't want to see people happy with 8% returns and having to work for 45 years, and then retire on 20% of their income. I want to see people wealthy and you know, thriving and even in this market. So this is the this quarter has been the worst quarter in it since in since the Great Depression, the worst beginning of any years since the Great Depression. Most of our investors in my hedge fund made money this quarter. So it shows you that by playing defense, you actually can play a little bit of offense. Grant At the market today, we're already back to like, it's almost wiped out. Like the in fact, I think was wiped out, or at least on the index is the entire year. Right? Yeah, it's wiped out. Like, like, like, like the entire year. That's amazing. Mark And yeah, at least Yeah, that's it. And that's what the market does, right? It goes up. They always say it goes up with the staircase, and that comes down with the elevator. So the market just gets hammered really quickly. And it goes back and you go wow, it took two years to get this. And we gave it back in three months. Grant Got it. Yeah. Okay, so it's go.destinycreation.com/grant. I appreciate you doing that. That's very kind. Mark. Thanks for your time. Any final comments you want to share? Mark Not really. I mean, first of all, this was a lot of fun. You had some really great question. Do you have some really great insights, and I hope I didn't talk too much. I have a saying and I'll just leave you and your audience with the saying it's never give up your power in your health, your wealth, or your time. So thank you for your time and I was so honored to be here with you today. Grant. Grant Thank you. So much Mark. I really appreciate all your insights and the wisdom that you shared everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of Financial investing radio. And until next time, go get your destiny creation. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback.  

In this episode, we take a look at the seven pillars to grow your wealth. Grant Everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. My name is Grant Larsen. And today I have in the house, one of those unique people that understands some of the fascinating ways to build and protect your wealth. I'm excited to have with me here today, Seth Hicks. Welcome, Seth. Seth Thank you so much Grant, glad to be here. Grant So when you reached out to me, and you started to say, hey, could we talk I started to look into what it was you're doing. I mean, I'm hearing words like private banking and asset protection expert, you hear some of that stuff? And you think, Oh, wow, do I have to have an advanced degree, right in financial management to understand this stuff. But what occurred to me is that I've seen some of these principles before, they don't seem to be well known by most. And so what I'm excited about is the opportunity through this channel here for you to continue to get your voice out there and say, here's a way that you can build and protect yourself. So first of all, how did you get into this? Seth Well, I practice law for about 25 years now, and have structured transactions, commercial real estate transactions, business, acquisitions, and sales. And kind of help people keep what they make, so to speak. And when I met my now partner, Vance Lowe, the principle of private banking strategies, it floored me to find how easy it was to make a few changes, and effectively do 100%. better job. And so what I mean by that is private banking strategies, we use whole life insurance policies that are structured in a way to have a high cash value, and in the appropriate structure and appropriate jurisdiction. They're statutorily exempted and protect it, much like a homestead in certain states and many of the same state. So, for example, in the southern states, you've got a post Civil War air legislation where... Grant It goes that far back post Civil War? All right, absolutely. Seth Yeah. So private banking goes back as far as Civil War era. And even before that precedes branch banking, it precedes the the type of current culture banking that we have. And the post Civil War era statutes protected their their citizens, the state citizens from Northern carpetbagging. So for example, yeah, for so for, like example, in Texas, and Oklahoma and Florida. And a lot of those states, south of the Mason Dixon Line, you have laws that protect homesteads. So in the event that there's a liability, and someone has a homestead that they've declared, it is 100% protected from being taken from them. And that was a product of the Civil War. Grant So let me ask you this, when you talk about how you know protection from having it taken, I'm assuming you're talking about scenarios like maybe bankruptcy scenario, or something else where you owe other people but you've got this protective layer that no one could actually come in and take that foundation from you. Is that right? Seth That's right. A lot of our clients, you know, higher net worth, some of some are ultra high net worth, and many are blue collar, but they have created strategies to keep what they make. I mean, no one wants to effectively work hard to earn money and then and then lose it. So those type of folks who gravitate towards structures where they're able to keep what they make, so for example, if you've got a homestead You're in Texas or in Florida, and you want to use it as a vault, and you don't have any debt on it and you're able to pay the property taxes, year after year, then it is 100% exempted from creditors or from outside taking. Grant So that's an important baseline is that it does need to be debt free, you have to have no mortgage on that or any liens against that. That'd be right. Seth Sure, yeah, you've got to if you've got a, you know, a loan with a traditional bank, they have a right to the mortgage payments or, and so they will effectively if not paid, foreclose on that, and those rights are obviously superior. But if you're if you're in a position where you're able to, for example, use your own private bank, through the cash value in your own policies, and purchase and acquire your home, or other assets through that entity, you would do the same structure, you mean, obviously, your bank and part of the cycle is getting the money back. And that's something that the Vance prides himself on his teaching people how to get the money back, you've probably heard some of that, and your private banking, that's one of the reasons that people do it, they effectively take the banking equation back into their own law into their own become the bank. Grant So as the flow is something like this, you get one of these Whole Life policies, it takes some time for you to build up some cash value, but then that cash value becomes something you can leverage and use for either purchasing other assets or leveraging it and other investments, so to speak. And that has some protection wrapped around it, is that what you're describing? Seth That's exactly what I'm describing. And like I said, a lot of our clients are higher net worth or even ultra high net worth. And when they capitalize their bank, they are, they're able to do a lot more with it right out of the gate. But for the blue collar guy, you're right, it's a, it's a steady increase that you use. A lot of folks use this as a retirement strategy, because the ins and outs are not a taxable event. And if any of the audience wants to dig on that it's internal revenue code 7702. And what that basically outlines is that your whole life policies, your your cash in and your cash out, are not taxable events. So compare that with like an IRA or a 401 K, that someone's been socking money into. When you take those distributions. Well, if you take them too soon, you're penalized you penalized if you take them too late, you're penalized. Yeah, and it would take them right in that the right time. You're still paying taxes, I'm still paying taxes on it.  Grant So every single cash transaction on the cash value, no tax, no taxation on that, right. That's, that's amazing. How blue collar person or someone that's not old truck, how do they get started then Is it is it I hate to say as simple as but Is it as simple as getting started with your whole life policy earlier in your life than later? So you can begin building out that cash value is is that the number one thing are what else would you do? Seth You know, I wouldn't say age is the number one determined to factor. In fact, we've got an article and a podcast that we've produced that says, you know, you're never too old to start private banking. And here's why. And we go through the outlines the benefits and values, which include asset protection, tax free growth, financial privacy, no taxation on the legacy value. So if you're leaving high value to heirs and benefits, beneficiaries, don't pay any taxes on that transaction, even if it's ultra high. So there's some value there, depending on what your primary motivations and focus are. And the age of course, if you start earlier, you're going to accrue a much greater and higher value as you you know, as you go year after year, but let me give you an example. We've got one of our favorite clients is as a woman in Texas, who was a single mom, and she started out with a $5,000 annual whole life policy and she made she made that contribution for a few years and and then use that cash value to as a downpayment into an investment property. Oh really? So she purchased this investment property as and then she also had third party financing of course, she began to develop cash flow from that and she paid her bank, her private bank back and as that cash value increased in a crate increased, she did The exact same thing, she rinsed and repeated the process with the second investment property. And now she has a million dollar equity portfolio in real estate from where she started at $5,000 leverage. Now, we've been, you know, she's had the benefit of an appreciating real estate market, she's had good investments, but it illustrates the principle that you can actually start in that small of an amount and and multiply that seed into something that really brings a large harvest. Grant That's fascinating. One of the things I noticed from you was, I think you call it the Seven Pillars of private banking strategies. Can you speak to that for a moment? What are those? Seth Sure, the first, the first pillar we've been talking about is asset protection. And the second pillar is tax free growth, which is we also referenced that compare that to a 401 K, or an IRA, you may have tax free growth inside, but you're going to pay taxes when it comes out. And we've got some illustrations that kind of compare those two things and show you you know, which comes out ahead, and it may look like a contributions from an employer and other matching proceeds will come out ahead. But in overtime, they really don't. So you've with inside the policy, you've got compounding growth, and you've got a tax free growth. And you've got a financial privacy. third pillar is financial privacy. Whereas compare that to a bank, for example, who has to KYC know their customer, know your customer, they want to understand, you know, every aspect of money in and money out, you going to try to take out or put in a large cash, for example, a 510 $1,000 Cash, I'm into your Wells Fargo or Bank of America account. And they want to, you know, cross examine you on 50 questions about why you're using cash, where, you know, that doesn't happen in a private contract with the life insurance companies, we use it, it's totally private, and they don't raise their hand and go, Hey, there's a large transaction in or out, and they're not required to by the IRS Code 7702 Grant And it's just not part of their business model, right? Seth It's not part of their business model. No. And so it's interesting to point out this is kind of a little sidebar, but the largest players are the largest clients of the life insurance companies, or the centralized banks, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. I think the last time I looked at Wells Fargo has a 20 plus billion dollar annual premium for life insurance policies that they hold on employees and, and others. So if, you know, gives you some insight. Grant That's huge. Okay, so right, so asset protection, tax free growth. Seth Tax free growth, financial privacy, privacy, the big one is velocity of money. And once philosophy of money, we describe that a little bit and in the the example that I gave our audience with the woman who started with a $5,000 premium, and then when she had enough to make a down payment on an investment property, she did so and so she she paid a premium dollar into the whole life policy, she borrowed that same dollar out to make a downpayment, she purchased a piece of real estate with that dollar, she got a rental dollar back from the tenant, and she paid her bank back on the note and deed of trust. And that's the velocity of money. It's the multiple touches within your own economy of the same dollar. And I mean, I'm simplifying it there with $1 but that's effectively the transaction. Grant Now that like you said earlier, it's the rinse and repeat principle right meaning absolutely cut it out. She's liquidated it used it acquired some capital back repaid herself and now she's she's reset to do again, right? That's absolutely. When every Seth When every dollar that she pays back into her bank, Grant, it increases the cash value, dollar for dollar. So you've got that that loan from your bank coming out. And when you recycle that rental cash flow back in or that business cash flow, or that cryptocurrency sell, or whatever your investment might be back into your bank, your cash value goes right back up to whatever you've put in. And so you and I both know that banks they make money by lending money. So Wells Fargo with and Bank of America orca Chase and these large centralized banks, they put their money to work by making good loans. They make loans that are secured, they make loans that are collateralized. And they, ultimately they want that cash flow with an interest rate. Well, it's the same principle with your own private bank. And you want to make a good loan to the borrower, whether it's your business, whether it's your brother, whether it's whatever a third party, you want to make a good loan, make sure it's collateralized and secure in the chief got an investment, cash flow, and an ROI on that loan coming back to your bank. And there's that cash flow increases again, you do the same thing. So you begin to think like a banker, you think like a banker? Grant Yeah. Because that's so liberating, right to people to be able to be on that side of the table. Right? making those choices. Alright, and then what's the fifth? So there were seven? So I was four. What's the fifth one? Yeah, I'm looking at the seven pillars. Seth So guaranteed financing. Yeah, it financing. So let's say that you're that you've you've you've done like our our hypo example with a woman there. And she's gone through a number of years, but she only started with 5000. Remember, now let's say that she's got 100,000, in total cash value. And she's in a state like Texas, where you can buy an investment property for 100,000. Or she could lever into multiple properties on like an 8020, split, for example, you know, she could buy five properties with 20%, down and put 20,000 down on five properties that cost $100,000, financed the other 80%. And she's building cash flow on all five of those, and actually getting a much higher ROI. And in that example, what you what she would be doing was effectively using leverage to increase the ability to invest in multiple assets. And when her cash value stacks up high enough, she could take out the third party lenders, or she could continue to use that strategy of leverage. And that really depends on someone's their own risk tolerance, their own investment strategy, some folks, they you know, that they're going to eliminate those third party loans. And they're going to take that cash value and just totally take out the third party debt. And so the only debt that would remain on that particular real estate asset would be their, their own private bank. So the guaranteed financing part means you don't go to the bank, and you don't have to qualify, you don't have to go through any type of you know, yeah, because you're the bank. Yeah, you're the bank. Yeah. So you make sure you look that guy in the mirror, and you make sure that you're making a good loan on a good asset. And you do that. So but I described the principle of leverage, because a lot of times people get ahead on that concept of leverage, as opposed to just buying one property for $100,000. And let's say you're making 2000 a month, you got 24,000 in gross cash flow, versus, you know, if you spread that across five properties, and you got 24,000 times five life and cash flow, so you know, and you're able to just knock those debts out a lot faster. That's the velocity of money and guaranteed financing working together. Yeah. Grant And written replenishments faster. Okay. All right, number six, and seven, what are those on your seven pillars? Seth So guaranteed compounding it tax free growth is the part inside your policy that that cash value and your premium dollars, they are compounding inside the policy annually, and there's no taxable event. And so I think it was Einstein who said the, you know, the compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world or something along that line. And if you're not, you're not getting compounding interest, then you're making a mistake. So you don't get compounding interest in your centralized banks. You don't get compounding interest in various other investments or formats. But in this these policies you do. So that's, that's something that is very distinguishable and it also takes out the market risk with your policies and the values in there, you're not subject to market risk. So this is not universal life. This is not indexed. Universal Life or any type of risk transfer. To the the owner of the policy or to us, you're not taking on market risk. But in those types of policies Universal Life or index, Universal Life, ual  Grant You, you are taking on market risk and one of the things? That's right, so being in control of the risk, right, that's absolutely mental aspect. Seth Absolutely, if you're going to use your cash value and put it to work and investment, you should be the one that's able to identify that risk and not have it subject to equity market risk. So it never goes backwards, you're going to only see a steady prodding forward with this compounding growth. And after a certain number of years, it starts to go more parabolic. And that's, that's really the beauty of this. And the magic of it. Some folks, they they locked this stuff up for retirement strategy. And you know, some are using it for the leverage. Grant Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I've seen some financial people describe that risk control paradigm with a with a pyramid, right, and they'll describe it, you know, in the, in the manner that you want to have more control. So you start, you start, you should start these sorts of strategies first and get that established. And then and then over time, as you go up the pyramid, you have less control over it higher risk, potentially higher returns, but that might be where you're doing some you're, you know, trading or investing or self directed activities. And a lot of people invert that pyramid, right, that's a well, they'll start with that self directed trading or investing. It's, you know, high risk, low control, and then blow out what capital they have, when instead, turn that the other way around, start with these foundational approaches that you're describing, and then build on top of that. Does that make any sense? Seth Amen, absolutely does. Sometimes will, will describe that as, you know, Hare and tortoise paradigm. And some people go, Well, this isn't, you know, I can make this much here. And I make 12% Over here, I can make 15%. Well, no, you really can't over 30 years, and likely there's going to be a risk factor there that may blow you out. Totally. Grant Yeah. And the loss of control that absolutely, yeah. Now. Yeah. Seth I mean, you've got this third party risk, whenever you've got, you know, a transfer of your money to someone else. That's, you know, you've got that risk that counterparty risk, whereas this, these insurance companies, they don't fail. I mean, they've been paying dividends, since before the Civil War, year after year, through the Great Depression through the Civil War through every economic upturn and downturn that there is. And it's, it's just one of the reasons why grant is because there's a cash reserve requirement of one to one, as opposed to a cash reserve requirement at a Wells Fargo of maybe 10% or less. Yeah, so they take they take $1 In deposit, and they're able to lend out 10, or perhaps even 50, depending on what their total asset bases and that's, that's funny math. You just print money out of thin air, and then they're able to loan the printed money at an interest rate, and they're making money on something they never even received a receipt. Grant Fascinating, right? The before I ever heard about this approach of this technique, one, I have to tell you my origin story of learning about this for the first time, it was my wife was driving our minivan. It was when our kids were little. And she was backing out of the garage and kids were bouncing around everywhere. And you know, I would have made the same mistake, but she wasn't watching. And she was turning around and talking to the kids. Hey, kids sit down, she backs out and just wax the mirror off of the side of that house right on the minivan. And so you know, I come home from work. She's like, many of the mirrors hanging off the side. So I look at it go well, it was a really old minivan, really old minivan. And I was like, Well, okay, let me go get it fixed. And so I took it over to the dealer. And I had this thought goes through my mind. And the thought was wait, rather than because at the time, I think auto loans were going to like 4% or 5% or something like that. And at the time, our house had been paid off, but I decided to take out a home equity loan to do some fix ups on the home and it was running. The interest rate at that time was like half a percent on this home equity loan. And so I'm in there They're looking at getting the car fixed. And I'm going to dealer and all sudden I go, let me go look at the floor, showroom, and I walked over, you know, I pull out my home equity checkbook, and I just pay for it right there, boom, and I get this car course still today it's a joke if dad goes to fix the mirror comes home with the new car. So I come back with the, with this car. And oh, by the way, I'm driving back thinking, I'm a banker, man, I just, I'm a banker, I just, I just floated this thing myself, and got home. And of course, guy, you know, paid that off at a much less interest rate. A few years after that. I heard this principle you're talking about you've been discussing here. And it clicked, I went, wait, wait, that's kind of what I did. Right. But it wasn't using a whole life. But the whole principle is, let's put the people in charge. Right? Not not some other policy or program that larger organizations are bestowing upon you but rather put us the people in the driver's seat, so to speak, and be able to make those decisions themselves. And I think that that's really liberating.  Seth That's absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right. And that that's exactly the same principle is you're you're taking back the banking equation, you're becoming you're operating a private family bank that has generational value, and and has you where you are able to touch the same dollars that you make multiple times like we described in one of our examples and and you're that velocity, really accelerate your wealth curve. And without the taxation issues. And without the the asset protection risk, you're able to transfer assets generation to generation and take a whole nother opens up a whole nother doorway. So that brings us to our seventh pillar, which is legacy value, and the tax free transfer of these policies and the death benefits to the next generation or Asian officials. Wow. Yeah, tax free. So think about this, for example, there's a guy who most people know named Prince, and the or the artist, formerly known as Prince, he was a pop rock, yeah, seeing are pretty pretty well known. And he died not too long ago with an estate value of about $200 million. And he was a resident of Minnesota, ironically, and he had no private banking structure in place, he had really no estate tax planning structures in place. And between the federal government and the state of Minnesota, they took over $100 million of that 200 million, and in taxation and estate taxes, and his beneficiaries and heirs, you know, are left holding the short end of the stick, that none of that would have occurred with proper planning, or that same money in a private banking situation. And then, I've heard, I was reading some articles on Suze Orman who's a supposedly financial guru. And she talks about private banking on occasion, and she, she really has no concept of what it really does. And in this interview article with the guy from New York Times, she says, You know, I'm so worried or concerned about my, my partner, being left with less than half of my estate. And I think at the time of the article, she worked about 65 million. And so her partner, she said, is going to, you know, have have to, you know, take 30 million or whatever, instead of 35. And she didn't know how to overcome that problem. And I thought, this is really unbelievable, in the sense that it's such an easy solution. And we kind of we talked about this kind of off off recording about it's literally the stroke of a pen that you can accomplish these values and these benefits the Seven Pillars without having to be, you know, a black belt. And in any particular one one realm. Grant Financial genius, you just have to know that that's available that it's there. Absolutely. Seth Yeah. So you enter the policies, you fund your policies, you keep funding your policies, and you enjoy the these benefits. It's really not rocket science. It's more just of learning that it's there. And it it it blew my mind. It was an epiphany to me. Yeah, having practice law for decades and then and then seeing this was available. I thought it can be that easy. It can't be that easy to with the stroke of a pen to protect assets, but it is I mean, it's it's codified law and these contracts grant or it's worth mentioning that there they are regulated state by state. So each state has their own statutes that govern the the law, the protection, you're gonna need to protect it right.  Grant So some states better than others are worse, right? Seth Absolutely. And it's, it's kind of like the post Civil War era statutes in southern states. They protect their citizens, life insurance policies, they protect their citizens homesteads many times in comparison to other northern states or western states. So it is, Grant wow, that's huge. Okay, so, all right, I've really enjoyed the conversation, if you were to point people to a place to go to learn more about this, Seth, where you're going to point him to? Seth It's really easy, you go to our website, https://privatebankingstrategies.com, that's https://privatebankingstrategies.com. And there in you're going to find a an offer. And you can read a book that we wrote that that tells you about secrets that banks don't want you to know, effectively. And I like to call it a red pill book. And it spots issues that people may or may not be aware of. And it's it's amazes me, how many folks don't really understand what the banking folks are doing to them. You know, and with regards to mortgage rates, with regards to all sorts of issues, you just so this red pill book is something that pops up there for you. And you've put your contact information, your name and your email, and, and you can listen to the book on audio, or you can take it in a written form. And that's really the where we start. On our website, Grant, we've got a pretty wide volume of resources from podcasts that dive into particular pillars, or how to how the banking operates, to blog articles, and then our emails that will come to you also address certain issues like the Dodd Frank Act, and what how why does that matter to you? Are, are your are your, you know, is your cash safe? And and it's centralized bank, why or why not? You know, our, there's simple things that you can do to protect yourself. So we try to add value. And those emails that come out to folks, we try to help them make a decision that this is, you know, for them or not for them. And it's really that simple. So you just hit the website, private banking strategies.com. You can have the book for free, all the podcast, all the emails for free. And if those things resonate with you, then you can schedule an exploratory call with Vance and start to get into the nitty gritty of it into what it means.  Grant Wow, Seth, thank you so much for taking the time here today with us and with our audience here. Very enlightening. It feels like we're popping out of the matrix right with with red pill. I love the analogy. Thanks again for joining and for going over this today. Everyone. Take a look at what it is that Seth is talking about https://privatebankingstrategies.com Thanks again for joining in everybody and until next time, become your own private banker. Seth Thank you, Grant. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we take a look at the seven pillars to grow your wealth. Grant Everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. My name is Grant Larsen. And today I have in the house, one of those unique people that understands some of the fascinating ways to build and protect your wealth. I'm excited to have with me here today, Seth Hicks. Welcome, Seth. Seth Thank you so much Grant, glad to be here. Grant So when you reached out to me, and you started to say, hey, could we talk I started to look into what it was you're doing. I mean, I'm hearing words like private banking and asset protection expert, you hear some of that stuff? And you think, Oh, wow, do I have to have an advanced degree, right in financial management to understand this stuff. But what occurred to me is that I've seen some of these principles before, they don't seem to be well known by most. And so what I'm excited about is the opportunity through this channel here for you to continue to get your voice out there and say, here's a way that you can build and protect yourself. So first of all, how did you get into this? Seth Well, I practice law for about 25 years now, and have structured transactions, commercial real estate transactions, business, acquisitions, and sales. And kind of help people keep what they make, so to speak. And when I met my now partner, Vance Lowe, the principle of private banking strategies, it floored me to find how easy it was to make a few changes, and effectively do 100%. better job. And so what I mean by that is private banking strategies, we use whole life insurance policies that are structured in a way to have a high cash value, and in the appropriate structure and appropriate jurisdiction. They're statutorily exempted and protect it, much like a homestead in certain states and many of the same state. So, for example, in the southern states, you've got a post Civil War air legislation where... Grant It goes that far back post Civil War? All right, absolutely. Seth Yeah. So private banking goes back as far as Civil War era. And even before that precedes branch banking, it precedes the the type of current culture banking that we have. And the post Civil War era statutes protected their their citizens, the state citizens from Northern carpetbagging. So for example, yeah, for so for, like example, in Texas, and Oklahoma and Florida. And a lot of those states, south of the Mason Dixon Line, you have laws that protect homesteads. So in the event that there's a liability, and someone has a homestead that they've declared, it is 100% protected from being taken from them. And that was a product of the Civil War. Grant So let me ask you this, when you talk about how you know protection from having it taken, I'm assuming you're talking about scenarios like maybe bankruptcy scenario, or something else where you owe other people but you've got this protective layer that no one could actually come in and take that foundation from you. Is that right? Seth That's right. A lot of our clients, you know, higher net worth, some of some are ultra high net worth, and many are blue collar, but they have created strategies to keep what they make. I mean, no one wants to effectively work hard to earn money and then and then lose it. So those type of folks who gravitate towards structures where they're able to keep what they make, so for example, if you've got a homestead You're in Texas or in Florida, and you want to use it as a vault, and you don't have any debt on it and you're able to pay the property taxes, year after year, then it is 100% exempted from creditors or from outside taking. Grant So that's an important baseline is that it does need to be debt free, you have to have no mortgage on that or any liens against that. That'd be right. Seth Sure, yeah, you've got to if you've got a, you know, a loan with a traditional bank, they have a right to the mortgage payments or, and so they will effectively if not paid, foreclose on that, and those rights are obviously superior. But if you're if you're in a position where you're able to, for example, use your own private bank, through the cash value in your own policies, and purchase and acquire your home, or other assets through that entity, you would do the same structure, you mean, obviously, your bank and part of the cycle is getting the money back. And that's something that the Vance prides himself on his teaching people how to get the money back, you've probably heard some of that, and your private banking, that's one of the reasons that people do it, they effectively take the banking equation back into their own law into their own become the bank. Grant So as the flow is something like this, you get one of these Whole Life policies, it takes some time for you to build up some cash value, but then that cash value becomes something you can leverage and use for either purchasing other assets or leveraging it and other investments, so to speak. And that has some protection wrapped around it, is that what you're describing? Seth That's exactly what I'm describing. And like I said, a lot of our clients are higher net worth or even ultra high net worth. And when they capitalize their bank, they are, they're able to do a lot more with it right out of the gate. But for the blue collar guy, you're right, it's a, it's a steady increase that you use. A lot of folks use this as a retirement strategy, because the ins and outs are not a taxable event. And if any of the audience wants to dig on that it's internal revenue code 7702. And what that basically outlines is that your whole life policies, your your cash in and your cash out, are not taxable events. So compare that with like an IRA or a 401 K, that someone's been socking money into. When you take those distributions. Well, if you take them too soon, you're penalized you penalized if you take them too late, you're penalized. Yeah, and it would take them right in that the right time. You're still paying taxes, I'm still paying taxes on it.  Grant So every single cash transaction on the cash value, no tax, no taxation on that, right. That's, that's amazing. How blue collar person or someone that's not old truck, how do they get started then Is it is it I hate to say as simple as but Is it as simple as getting started with your whole life policy earlier in your life than later? So you can begin building out that cash value is is that the number one thing are what else would you do? Seth You know, I wouldn't say age is the number one determined to factor. In fact, we've got an article and a podcast that we've produced that says, you know, you're never too old to start private banking. And here's why. And we go through the outlines the benefits and values, which include asset protection, tax free growth, financial privacy, no taxation on the legacy value. So if you're leaving high value to heirs and benefits, beneficiaries, don't pay any taxes on that transaction, even if it's ultra high. So there's some value there, depending on what your primary motivations and focus are. And the age of course, if you start earlier, you're going to accrue a much greater and higher value as you you know, as you go year after year, but let me give you an example. We've got one of our favorite clients is as a woman in Texas, who was a single mom, and she started out with a $5,000 annual whole life policy and she made she made that contribution for a few years and and then use that cash value to as a downpayment into an investment property. Oh really? So she purchased this investment property as and then she also had third party financing of course, she began to develop cash flow from that and she paid her bank, her private bank back and as that cash value increased in a crate increased, she did The exact same thing, she rinsed and repeated the process with the second investment property. And now she has a million dollar equity portfolio in real estate from where she started at $5,000 leverage. Now, we've been, you know, she's had the benefit of an appreciating real estate market, she's had good investments, but it illustrates the principle that you can actually start in that small of an amount and and multiply that seed into something that really brings a large harvest. Grant That's fascinating. One of the things I noticed from you was, I think you call it the Seven Pillars of private banking strategies. Can you speak to that for a moment? What are those? Seth Sure, the first, the first pillar we've been talking about is asset protection. And the second pillar is tax free growth, which is we also referenced that compare that to a 401 K, or an IRA, you may have tax free growth inside, but you're going to pay taxes when it comes out. And we've got some illustrations that kind of compare those two things and show you you know, which comes out ahead, and it may look like a contributions from an employer and other matching proceeds will come out ahead. But in overtime, they really don't. So you've with inside the policy, you've got compounding growth, and you've got a tax free growth. And you've got a financial privacy. third pillar is financial privacy. Whereas compare that to a bank, for example, who has to KYC know their customer, know your customer, they want to understand, you know, every aspect of money in and money out, you going to try to take out or put in a large cash, for example, a 510 $1,000 Cash, I'm into your Wells Fargo or Bank of America account. And they want to, you know, cross examine you on 50 questions about why you're using cash, where, you know, that doesn't happen in a private contract with the life insurance companies, we use it, it's totally private, and they don't raise their hand and go, Hey, there's a large transaction in or out, and they're not required to by the IRS Code 7702 Grant And it's just not part of their business model, right? Seth It's not part of their business model. No. And so it's interesting to point out this is kind of a little sidebar, but the largest players are the largest clients of the life insurance companies, or the centralized banks, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. I think the last time I looked at Wells Fargo has a 20 plus billion dollar annual premium for life insurance policies that they hold on employees and, and others. So if, you know, gives you some insight. Grant That's huge. Okay, so right, so asset protection, tax free growth. Seth Tax free growth, financial privacy, privacy, the big one is velocity of money. And once philosophy of money, we describe that a little bit and in the the example that I gave our audience with the woman who started with a $5,000 premium, and then when she had enough to make a down payment on an investment property, she did so and so she she paid a premium dollar into the whole life policy, she borrowed that same dollar out to make a downpayment, she purchased a piece of real estate with that dollar, she got a rental dollar back from the tenant, and she paid her bank back on the note and deed of trust. And that's the velocity of money. It's the multiple touches within your own economy of the same dollar. And I mean, I'm simplifying it there with $1 but that's effectively the transaction. Grant Now that like you said earlier, it's the rinse and repeat principle right meaning absolutely cut it out. She's liquidated it used it acquired some capital back repaid herself and now she's she's reset to do again, right? That's absolutely. When every Seth When every dollar that she pays back into her bank, Grant, it increases the cash value, dollar for dollar. So you've got that that loan from your bank coming out. And when you recycle that rental cash flow back in or that business cash flow, or that cryptocurrency sell, or whatever your investment might be back into your bank, your cash value goes right back up to whatever you've put in. And so you and I both know that banks they make money by lending money. So Wells Fargo with and Bank of America orca Chase and these large centralized banks, they put their money to work by making good loans. They make loans that are secured, they make loans that are collateralized. And they, ultimately they want that cash flow with an interest rate. Well, it's the same principle with your own private bank. And you want to make a good loan to the borrower, whether it's your business, whether it's your brother, whether it's whatever a third party, you want to make a good loan, make sure it's collateralized and secure in the chief got an investment, cash flow, and an ROI on that loan coming back to your bank. And there's that cash flow increases again, you do the same thing. So you begin to think like a banker, you think like a banker? Grant Yeah. Because that's so liberating, right to people to be able to be on that side of the table. Right? making those choices. Alright, and then what's the fifth? So there were seven? So I was four. What's the fifth one? Yeah, I'm looking at the seven pillars. Seth So guaranteed financing. Yeah, it financing. So let's say that you're that you've you've you've done like our our hypo example with a woman there. And she's gone through a number of years, but she only started with 5000. Remember, now let's say that she's got 100,000, in total cash value. And she's in a state like Texas, where you can buy an investment property for 100,000. Or she could lever into multiple properties on like an 8020, split, for example, you know, she could buy five properties with 20%, down and put 20,000 down on five properties that cost $100,000, financed the other 80%. And she's building cash flow on all five of those, and actually getting a much higher ROI. And in that example, what you what she would be doing was effectively using leverage to increase the ability to invest in multiple assets. And when her cash value stacks up high enough, she could take out the third party lenders, or she could continue to use that strategy of leverage. And that really depends on someone's their own risk tolerance, their own investment strategy, some folks, they you know, that they're going to eliminate those third party loans. And they're going to take that cash value and just totally take out the third party debt. And so the only debt that would remain on that particular real estate asset would be their, their own private bank. So the guaranteed financing part means you don't go to the bank, and you don't have to qualify, you don't have to go through any type of you know, yeah, because you're the bank. Yeah, you're the bank. Yeah. So you make sure you look that guy in the mirror, and you make sure that you're making a good loan on a good asset. And you do that. So but I described the principle of leverage, because a lot of times people get ahead on that concept of leverage, as opposed to just buying one property for $100,000. And let's say you're making 2000 a month, you got 24,000 in gross cash flow, versus, you know, if you spread that across five properties, and you got 24,000 times five life and cash flow, so you know, and you're able to just knock those debts out a lot faster. That's the velocity of money and guaranteed financing working together. Yeah. Grant And written replenishments faster. Okay. All right, number six, and seven, what are those on your seven pillars? Seth So guaranteed compounding it tax free growth is the part inside your policy that that cash value and your premium dollars, they are compounding inside the policy annually, and there's no taxable event. And so I think it was Einstein who said the, you know, the compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world or something along that line. And if you're not, you're not getting compounding interest, then you're making a mistake. So you don't get compounding interest in your centralized banks. You don't get compounding interest in various other investments or formats. But in this these policies you do. So that's, that's something that is very distinguishable and it also takes out the market risk with your policies and the values in there, you're not subject to market risk. So this is not universal life. This is not indexed. Universal Life or any type of risk transfer. To the the owner of the policy or to us, you're not taking on market risk. But in those types of policies Universal Life or index, Universal Life, ual  Grant You, you are taking on market risk and one of the things? That's right, so being in control of the risk, right, that's absolutely mental aspect. Seth Absolutely, if you're going to use your cash value and put it to work and investment, you should be the one that's able to identify that risk and not have it subject to equity market risk. So it never goes backwards, you're going to only see a steady prodding forward with this compounding growth. And after a certain number of years, it starts to go more parabolic. And that's, that's really the beauty of this. And the magic of it. Some folks, they they locked this stuff up for retirement strategy. And you know, some are using it for the leverage. Grant Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I've seen some financial people describe that risk control paradigm with a with a pyramid, right, and they'll describe it, you know, in the, in the manner that you want to have more control. So you start, you start, you should start these sorts of strategies first and get that established. And then and then over time, as you go up the pyramid, you have less control over it higher risk, potentially higher returns, but that might be where you're doing some you're, you know, trading or investing or self directed activities. And a lot of people invert that pyramid, right, that's a well, they'll start with that self directed trading or investing. It's, you know, high risk, low control, and then blow out what capital they have, when instead, turn that the other way around, start with these foundational approaches that you're describing, and then build on top of that. Does that make any sense? Seth Amen, absolutely does. Sometimes will, will describe that as, you know, Hare and tortoise paradigm. And some people go, Well, this isn't, you know, I can make this much here. And I make 12% Over here, I can make 15%. Well, no, you really can't over 30 years, and likely there's going to be a risk factor there that may blow you out. Totally. Grant Yeah. And the loss of control that absolutely, yeah. Now. Yeah. Seth I mean, you've got this third party risk, whenever you've got, you know, a transfer of your money to someone else. That's, you know, you've got that risk that counterparty risk, whereas this, these insurance companies, they don't fail. I mean, they've been paying dividends, since before the Civil War, year after year, through the Great Depression through the Civil War through every economic upturn and downturn that there is. And it's, it's just one of the reasons why grant is because there's a cash reserve requirement of one to one, as opposed to a cash reserve requirement at a Wells Fargo of maybe 10% or less. Yeah, so they take they take $1 In deposit, and they're able to lend out 10, or perhaps even 50, depending on what their total asset bases and that's, that's funny math. You just print money out of thin air, and then they're able to loan the printed money at an interest rate, and they're making money on something they never even received a receipt. Grant Fascinating, right? The before I ever heard about this approach of this technique, one, I have to tell you my origin story of learning about this for the first time, it was my wife was driving our minivan. It was when our kids were little. And she was backing out of the garage and kids were bouncing around everywhere. And you know, I would have made the same mistake, but she wasn't watching. And she was turning around and talking to the kids. Hey, kids sit down, she backs out and just wax the mirror off of the side of that house right on the minivan. And so you know, I come home from work. She's like, many of the mirrors hanging off the side. So I look at it go well, it was a really old minivan, really old minivan. And I was like, Well, okay, let me go get it fixed. And so I took it over to the dealer. And I had this thought goes through my mind. And the thought was wait, rather than because at the time, I think auto loans were going to like 4% or 5% or something like that. And at the time, our house had been paid off, but I decided to take out a home equity loan to do some fix ups on the home and it was running. The interest rate at that time was like half a percent on this home equity loan. And so I'm in there They're looking at getting the car fixed. And I'm going to dealer and all sudden I go, let me go look at the floor, showroom, and I walked over, you know, I pull out my home equity checkbook, and I just pay for it right there, boom, and I get this car course still today it's a joke if dad goes to fix the mirror comes home with the new car. So I come back with the, with this car. And oh, by the way, I'm driving back thinking, I'm a banker, man, I just, I'm a banker, I just, I just floated this thing myself, and got home. And of course, guy, you know, paid that off at a much less interest rate. A few years after that. I heard this principle you're talking about you've been discussing here. And it clicked, I went, wait, wait, that's kind of what I did. Right. But it wasn't using a whole life. But the whole principle is, let's put the people in charge. Right? Not not some other policy or program that larger organizations are bestowing upon you but rather put us the people in the driver's seat, so to speak, and be able to make those decisions themselves. And I think that that's really liberating.  Seth That's absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right. And that that's exactly the same principle is you're you're taking back the banking equation, you're becoming you're operating a private family bank that has generational value, and and has you where you are able to touch the same dollars that you make multiple times like we described in one of our examples and and you're that velocity, really accelerate your wealth curve. And without the taxation issues. And without the the asset protection risk, you're able to transfer assets generation to generation and take a whole nother opens up a whole nother doorway. So that brings us to our seventh pillar, which is legacy value, and the tax free transfer of these policies and the death benefits to the next generation or Asian officials. Wow. Yeah, tax free. So think about this, for example, there's a guy who most people know named Prince, and the or the artist, formerly known as Prince, he was a pop rock, yeah, seeing are pretty pretty well known. And he died not too long ago with an estate value of about $200 million. And he was a resident of Minnesota, ironically, and he had no private banking structure in place, he had really no estate tax planning structures in place. And between the federal government and the state of Minnesota, they took over $100 million of that 200 million, and in taxation and estate taxes, and his beneficiaries and heirs, you know, are left holding the short end of the stick, that none of that would have occurred with proper planning, or that same money in a private banking situation. And then, I've heard, I was reading some articles on Suze Orman who's a supposedly financial guru. And she talks about private banking on occasion, and she, she really has no concept of what it really does. And in this interview article with the guy from New York Times, she says, You know, I'm so worried or concerned about my, my partner, being left with less than half of my estate. And I think at the time of the article, she worked about 65 million. And so her partner, she said, is going to, you know, have have to, you know, take 30 million or whatever, instead of 35. And she didn't know how to overcome that problem. And I thought, this is really unbelievable, in the sense that it's such an easy solution. And we kind of we talked about this kind of off off recording about it's literally the stroke of a pen that you can accomplish these values and these benefits the Seven Pillars without having to be, you know, a black belt. And in any particular one one realm. Grant Financial genius, you just have to know that that's available that it's there. Absolutely. Seth Yeah. So you enter the policies, you fund your policies, you keep funding your policies, and you enjoy the these benefits. It's really not rocket science. It's more just of learning that it's there. And it it it blew my mind. It was an epiphany to me. Yeah, having practice law for decades and then and then seeing this was available. I thought it can be that easy. It can't be that easy to with the stroke of a pen to protect assets, but it is I mean, it's it's codified law and these contracts grant or it's worth mentioning that there they are regulated state by state. So each state has their own statutes that govern the the law, the protection, you're gonna need to protect it right.  Grant So some states better than others are worse, right? Seth Absolutely. And it's, it's kind of like the post Civil War era statutes in southern states. They protect their citizens, life insurance policies, they protect their citizens homesteads many times in comparison to other northern states or western states. So it is, Grant wow, that's huge. Okay, so, all right, I've really enjoyed the conversation, if you were to point people to a place to go to learn more about this, Seth, where you're going to point him to? Seth It's really easy, you go to our website, https://privatebankingstrategies.com, that's https://privatebankingstrategies.com. And there in you're going to find a an offer. And you can read a book that we wrote that that tells you about secrets that banks don't want you to know, effectively. And I like to call it a red pill book. And it spots issues that people may or may not be aware of. And it's it's amazes me, how many folks don't really understand what the banking folks are doing to them. You know, and with regards to mortgage rates, with regards to all sorts of issues, you just so this red pill book is something that pops up there for you. And you've put your contact information, your name and your email, and, and you can listen to the book on audio, or you can take it in a written form. And that's really the where we start. On our website, Grant, we've got a pretty wide volume of resources from podcasts that dive into particular pillars, or how to how the banking operates, to blog articles, and then our emails that will come to you also address certain issues like the Dodd Frank Act, and what how why does that matter to you? Are, are your are your, you know, is your cash safe? And and it's centralized bank, why or why not? You know, our, there's simple things that you can do to protect yourself. So we try to add value. And those emails that come out to folks, we try to help them make a decision that this is, you know, for them or not for them. And it's really that simple. So you just hit the website, private banking strategies.com. You can have the book for free, all the podcast, all the emails for free. And if those things resonate with you, then you can schedule an exploratory call with Vance and start to get into the nitty gritty of it into what it means.  Grant Wow, Seth, thank you so much for taking the time here today with us and with our audience here. Very enlightening. It feels like we're popping out of the matrix right with with red pill. I love the analogy. Thanks again for joining and for going over this today. Everyone. Take a look at what it is that Seth is talking about https://privatebankingstrategies.com Thanks again for joining in everybody and until next time, become your own private banker. Seth Thank you, Grant. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Welcome to ClickAI Radio. In this episode I have a conversation with some AI experts on how AI ethics affect your business. Grant Okay, welcome, everybody to another episode of clique AI radio. Well in the house today I have got a return visitor very excited to have him and a brand new person. I'm excited to introduce you to Carlos Anchia. I've been practicing that I get that right, Carlos. Carlos Sounds great. Good to see you again. Grant Even old dogs can learn new tricks. There we go. All right, and Elizabeth Spears. Now I got that one easily. Right, Elizabeth? Elizabeth You did it? Yeah. I'm really happy to be here. Grant This is exciting for me to have them here with me today. They are co founders of plain sight AI. And a few episodes ago, I had an opportunity to speak with Carlos and he laid the foundation around the origin story of AI for vision, some of the techniques and the problems they're solving. And I started to nerd out on all of the benefits. In fact, you know what, Carlos, I need to tell you, since our last conversation, I actually circled back to your team and had a demo of what you guys are doing. And yeah, I think it was very impressive, very impressive, you know, a guy like me, where I've coded this stuff. And I was like, Oh, wow, you just took a lot of a lot of pain out of the process. You know, one of the pains that I saw come out of the process was the reduction in time, right that how long it would take for me to cycle another model through it. That was incredible, right? I can't remember the actual quantification of time, but it was at least a 50% of not even 80% reduction of cycle time is what I saw come through, there's even model versioning sort of techniques, there's just, you know, there's another really cool technique in there that I saw. And it had to do with this ability to augment or, or approximate test data, right, this ability to say, but but without creating more test data, it could approximate and create that for you. So now, your whole testing side just got a lot easier without building up, you know, those massive test cases and test basis for for doing the stuff So, alright, very impressive product set. And let's see, Elizabeth can you explain that? Elizabeth That's right, Chief Product Officer. So basically, kind of the strategy around what we're building and how we build it. And the order in which we build it is is kind of under my purview. Grant Okay, very good. Awesome. Well, it's so great to have both of you here today. So after I spoke with Carlos, last time, after we finished the recording, I said, You know what, I want to talk to you about ethics about AI ethics. And so as you heard in my previous podcast, I sort of laid the foundation for this conversation. And it's not the only areas of ethics around AI, but it's a place to start. And so we want to build on this. And we're gonna talk about these sort of four or five different areas just to begin the conversation. And I think this could translate certainly into other conversations as well. But to do that, could could one or both of you spend a little time giving the foundation of what is AI ethics as a relates to computer vision itself? What are some of the challenges or problems or misunderstandings that you see in this specific area of AI? Carlos Sure, I can take that one. So I think really, when we're talking around ethics, we're bowling any sort of technology, we're talking around how that technology is implemented, and the use of that, right and what's acceptable. So in the case of this technology, we're talking around computer vision and artificial intelligence, and how those things go into society. And it's really through its intended use on how we evaluate the technology. And I think really, computer vision continues to provide value to allow us to get through this digital transformation piece. As a technology, right? And, you know, once we start with, yes, this is a valuable technology, the conversation really now shifts to how do we use that technology for good, some cases bad, right? Where this is where that conversation arises around, you know, having the space to share what we believe is good or bad, or the right uses or the wrong usage just right. And it's a very, very gray area, when we look to address technology and advancement in technology against a black and white good or bad kind of a situation, we get into a lot of issues where, you know, there's a lot of controversy around some of these things, right, which is really, you know, as we started discussing it after the last podcast, it was really, you know, man, I really need to have a good podcast around this, because there's a lot to it. And you clearly said there was a previous one. And now there's this one, you know, I hope that there's a series of these so we can continue to express value and just have a free conversation around ethics in artificial intelligence. But really, what I'm trying to do is set the context, right. So like technology works great from the just the science of the application of that technology. And if you think of something like super controversial facial recognition, now, absolutely. I don't want people to look at my face when I'm standing on a corner. But if there's, you know, child abduction cases, yes, please use all the facial recognition you can I want that to succeed really well. And we've learned that technology works. So it's not the solution itself. It's how we're applying that solution. Right. And there's there's a lot of new ones to that. And, you know, Elizabeth can help shed a little bit of light here, because this is something that we evaluate on a constant basis and have really free discussions around. Grant Yeah, I would imagine you have to even as you take your platform into your into your customer base, even understanding what their use cases are imagined, at times, you might have to give a little guidance on the best way to apply our uses. What have you seen with this, Elizabeth? Elizabeth Yeah, you know, there's, it's interesting what Carlos is saying there's a lot of the same themes for evaluating the ethics and technology in general are similar ones that come up with when AI is applied. So things like fraud or bias is actually more can be more uniquely AI. But that absolutely exists in other technologies. And then inaccuracy and how that how that comes up in AI, and then things like consent and privacy. So a lot of the themes and we can we can talk about how AI applies to these, but a lot of the themes that come up, are really similar. And so one of the things that we try to do for our customers is, especially kind of your listener base, that's that small, medium businesses is take a lot of that complexity out of the, like, Hey, I just want to apply, you know, I just want to solve this one problem with AI, what are all of these concerns that I, you know, I may or may not know about. So, we try to do things like build, build things into the platform that make it so something like bias. So, for example, is usually comes down to data balance. So if we provide tools that really clearly show your data balance, then it helps people make unbiased models, right, and be confident that they're going to be using AI ethically, Grant So that I'm sure you're aware of this Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania case where they ended up using AI to predict criminality using image processing, right. And, of course, that it failed, right? Because it you know, looking at a an image of someone and saying, Oh, that person is a criminal, or that person's not a criminal. That's using some powerful technology, but in ways that, of course, has some strong problems or challenges around that. How do you help prevent something like this? Or how do you guide people to use this, this kind of tool or technology and in ways that are beneficial? Elizabeth Yeah. What's interesting about this one is that the same technology that causes the problem can also help solve the problem. So so when you're looking at your corpus of data, you can use AI to find places where you have data in balance and and just to kind of re explain the what happened in that case, right. So they had a data imbalance where it was Miss identifying Different races that they had less data for. So, you know, a less controversial example is if we're talking about fruit, right, so if we have a dataset that has 20, oranges, two bananas and 20, apples, then it's just going to be worse than identifying bananas, right? So one of the things that that can be done is you apply AI to automatically look at your data balance and say, and surface those issues where it can say, hey, you have less of this thing, you probably want to label more of that thing. Grant So I'll try to manage the data set better in terms of proper representation. And try finding, finding bias is a real challenge for organizations. And I think one of the things that your platform would allow or unable to do is if you can take off the pain of all of the machinery of just getting through this and and free up organizations time to be more strict in terms of evaluating and finally, oh, taking the time to do those kinds of things, I think you might have an opportunity to improve in that area meeting customers might be able to improve in there, would that be a fair takeaway? Elizabeth Yeah, it's something that that we're really passionate about trying to provide tools around. And, and we're kind of prioritizing these these tools. The other one is, is that has to do with your data is as well is finding inaccuracies in, in your models. So the one example is X ray machines. So they did. They've basically they had an inaccuracy in a model that was finding a correlation, I think it was for it was for the disease detection. So it was finding a correlation just when the X ray was mobile, versus when they went into kind of a hospital to get the X ray. And so, you know, these models are in many cases, really just very strong pattern detectors, right. And so one of the things that can really help to, you know, to prevent something like that is to make it easy to slice and dice your data in as many ways as possible, and then run models that way. And make sure that you aren't finding the same correlation, or the same sort of accuracy with a different data set, or a different running of the model in a different data set. So said, in other words, you would be able to say, I'm going to run all of the portable X-ray machines versus all of the hospital ones, and see if I'm getting the same correlation as I am with, you know, cancer versus not cancer, or whatever they were looking for. Grant A quick question for you on this. So in my experience with AI, I have found sort of two things to consider. One is the questions that I'm trying to get answered guides me in terms of, you know, how I prepare the model, right? I'm gonna first lean towards certain things, obviously, if I want to know that this is a banana, right, or an apple or what have you. So the kind of question that when I answer leads me to how I prepare the model, which means it leads me to the data that I select. And the question is, is do I do I? Should I spend the time really putting together the strong set of questions? And rather, rather than do that, just gather my data? And then and then execute that data, the build a model? And then Ben, try to answer some questions out of that, you see what I'm saying that way, maybe I'm not going to introduce any bias into it. Elizabeth So we we encourage a very clear sort of understanding of the questions that you want to answer, right? Because that helps you do a few things, it helps you craft a model that's really going to answer that question, as opposed to accidentally answering some other questions, right. But it also helps you right size the technology so far, for example, if you're doing if you're trying to answer the question of how many people are entering this building, because you want to understand, you know, limits of how many people can be in the building or, you know, COVID restrictions or whatever it is, that that solution doesn't need to have facial recognition, right. So to answer that question, you don't need you know, lots of other technologies included in there. And so yeah, So, so defining those questions ahead of time can really help in sort of a more ethical use of the technology. Grant So one of the first jobs we would then have a small medium business do would be get clarity around those questions that actually can help us take some of the bias out. Is that a fair takeaway from what you share? Elizabeth Exactly like the questions you're trying to answer. And the questions you aren't not trying to answer can also be helpful. Grant Oh, very good. Okay. All right. So all right, the opposite of that as well. All right. So while we could keep talking about bias, let's switch to something that is that I think comes right out of the movie iRobot, right. It's robot rights. Is this, is this a fluke? Or what, you know, is this for real? I mean, what do you think? Is there really an ethical thing to worry about here? Or what? What are your thoughts? Elizabeth You know, in most of the cases that I've seen, it's really more like, it comes down to just property, like treating property correctly, you know, like don't kick the robots because it's private property. So not really around sort of the robot rights but you know, some already established rules be in for the most part, I see this as kind of a Hollywood problem, more than a practical problem. Grant Maybe it makes good Will Smith movies. But other than that, yeah, fighting for rights, right. Now that seems like it's way out there in terms of terms of connection reality. Okay, so we can tell our listeners, don't worry about that for right now. Did you add something back there? Carlos Just an interesting point on the robot rights, right. While while it's far in the future, I think for robot rights, we are seeing a little bit of that now today. Right? When like Tesla AI day, when they came out, they decided that the robot shouldn't run too fast that the robot shouldn't be too strong. I think it's a bit. It's a bit interesting that, you know, we're also protecting the human race from for us building, you know, AI for bad and robots for bad in this case. So I think it's, it's, it's on both sides of that coin. And those are, those are product decisions that were made around. Let's make sure we can run that thing later. So I think I think as we continue to explore robots AI, the the use of that together, this topic will be very important, but I think it's far far away. Grant I'm wondering is that also blends into the next sort of ethical subtopic we talked about, which is threat to human dignity. And it might even crossed into that a little bit, right, which is, are we developing AI in a way that's going to help? protect the dignity of human certainly in health care situations? That certainly becomes important, right? You probably heard on the previous podcasts that I did, I played a little snippet from Google's duplex technology that was three year old technology, and those people had no idea. They're talking and interacting with AI. And so there's that aspect of this. So where's the line on this? When? When is it that someone needs to know that what you're interacting with is actually not human? And then does this actually mean there's a deeper problem that we're trying to solve in the industry, which is one of identity, we've got to actually create a way to know what it is that we're interacting with. And we have strong identity? Can you speak to that? Yeah, Elizabeth I think I think the there's two things that kind of come into play here. And the first is transparency, and the second is consent. So in this case, it really comes down to transparency, like it would be very simple in that example, for that bot to say, Hey, I'm a bot on behalf of, you know, Grant Larsen, and I'm trying to schedule a hair appointment, right, and then going from there. And that makes it a much more transparent and easy interaction. So I think in a lot of cases, really paying attention to transparency and consent can go a long way. Grant Yeah, absolutely. All right, that that that makes a lot of sense. It seems like we can get around some of these pieces fairly, fairly simply. All right, Carlos, any other thoughts on that one? Carlos The only thing there and then touches on the stuff you guys were talking about on the bias piece, right? We're really talking about visibility and introspection into the process. Right. And with bias, you have that in place, right? We can detect when you know there's a misrepresentation of classes within the the model. In some cases, there's human bias that you can get that right but it's it's having that visibility in the same case with the threat to human data. With that visibility comes the introspection where you can make those decisions. You see more about the problem. Grant Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. So if we were to to be able to determine we have a bad actor, if there's not transparency, that would be a way that we could help protect the dignity of humans through this. Alright. That's reasonable. All right. So let's move on to again, sounds Hollywood ish, but I'm not sure it is weaponization of AI. Right? What are the ethics around this? I'll just throw that one on the table. Where do you what do you want to take that? Carlos, you wanna start with that one? Carlos Sure. I mean, so weaponization and and I think when we talk about AI and, and the advancements of it, you quickly go to weaponization. But really, weaponization has two different pieces to it, right? It's obviously it depends on which side of that fence you're on, on whether you view that technology is beneficial or detrimental. But in some cases, that AI that same technology that is helping a pilot navigate, it also helps for a guided missile system or something like that. So we really have to balance and it goes back to use cases, and how we apply that technology as a people. But you know, weaponization, the rise against the machines, these kind of questions. While they're kind of out there. They're affecting society today. And we have to be able to have productive conversation around what we believe is good and bad around this while still allowing technology to succeed. So there's a lot of advancements in the weaponization and AI in that space, but it's really, I think we have to take it on a case by case basis, and not like a blanket statement, we can't use technology in these ways. Grant Interesting thoughts? What are your thoughts there? Elizabeth? Elizabeth Yeah, you know, I it makes me think of sort of turning it on its head is, is when is it? You know, when is it unethical not to use AI, right. And so, some of those questions come up when we are talking about weaponization, you can also be talking about saving human lives and making it safer for them to do some of these operations. And and that same question can come up in some of like, the medical use cases, right? So here in the US, we have a lot of challenges around being able to use AI in medical use cases, and there's, and there's some where you can have really good human oversight of the cases, you can have sort of reproducibility of those models, they can be as explainable as possible. But it's still really, really difficult to get FDA approval there. So I, again, I think there's two sides to that coin. Grant And, yeah, it's it's an interesting conversation have stuff wrong, because like, in that medical case, you talked about, you could see the value of using the same kind of technology that would be used to identify a human target, and then attack it, you could take that same capability, and instead use it in a search and rescue sort of scenario, right? Where you're flying something overhead, and you're trying to find, you know, pictures or images of people that might be lost out there. Same kind of thing, right, so, so where how, go ahead, you're gonna say something was, but I can see. Elizabeth And there's even simpler cases in medical, where it's like, you know, there's a shortage of radiologists right now in the US and, and you can use, you can use AI to be able to triage some of that imaging. So, because right now, people are having to, in some cases, wait a really long time to get their sort of imaging reviewed. And so can can, can, and should AI help there. There's also another one along those same lines, where, with things like CT scans, you can use what's called super resolution or de noising the image. And basically, you can use much less radiation in the first place to take the imaging and then use AI on top of it to be able to essentially enhance the image. So again, you know, ultimately exposing the patient to less less radiation. So yeah, there's it's pretty interesting when when we can and can't use it. Mm hmm. Carlos Yeah. And I think just to add a little bit to the one we can and can't right, so, advancements through drug discovery have largely been driven through AI in the same fashion weaponization of various all drugs or other types of drugs have also benefited from Ai. So, I mean, from a society's perspective, you know, you really have to Evaluate not only greater good, but that that ultimate use case like, where where do you want to make a stance around that technology piece. And understanding both sides really provides that discussion space that's needed, you have to be able to ask really honest questions to problems that are, you know, what you can see in the future. Grant So is the safeguard through all of this topic around ethics? Is the safeguard, basically, the moral compass that's found in the humans themselves? Or do we need to have less, you know, legislative or policy bodies? Right, that puts us together? Or is it a blending? What do you what's your take? Elizabeth Um, it's interesting, the UK just came out with a national AI strategy. And they are basically trying to build an entire AI assurance industry. And, and their approach is, so they want to make sure that they're make, they're keeping it so that you can be innovative in the space, right? They don't want to make it so regulatory, that you can't innovate. But they also want to make sure that there's consumer trust in in AI. So they're putting together from a, you know, a national perspective, a guidelines and tests and, and ways to give consumers confidence in whether a model is you know, reproducible, accurate, etc, etc, while at the same time not stifling innovation, because they know, you know, how important that AI is for a essentially a country's way to compete and and the opportunities for GDP that it provides as well. Grant Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, I can go ahead, Carlos. Carlos No, I think it's his it's your question. Left alone, should we got kind of govern ourselves? I think, I think we've proven that we can't do that as a people, right. So we need to have some sort of regulatory, and committee around the review of these things. But it has to be in the light of, you know, wanting to provide a better experience higher quality, deliver value, right. And I think I think when you start with, how do we get the technology adopted and in place and deployed in a fashion where society can benefit, you start making your decisions around, you know, what the good pieces are, and you'll start your start really starting to see the outliers around Hey, wait a second, that doesn't kind of conform to the guidelines that we wanted to get this implemented with? Elizabeth And I think also to your question, I think it's happening at all a lot of levels. Right. So there's, you know, state regulation around privacy and use of AI and facial recognition. And, and there's, you know, some the FDA is putting together some regulation, and then also individual companies, right, so people like Microsoft, etc, have have big groups around, you know, ethics and how AI should be used for, you know, them as a company. So I think it's happening at all levels. Grant Yeah, like we said, that is a people we need to have some level of governing bodies around this to, and of course, that's never the end all protection, for sure. But it is, it is a step in the right direction to to help monitoring and governance. Okay, so last question, right? This is gonna sound a little bit tangential, if I could use that word tangential. It's given the state of AI where it is today. Is it artificial intelligence? Or is it augmented intelligence? Carlos I can go with that. So I think it's a little bit of both. So I think the result is, is to augment our intelligence, right? We're really trying to make better decisions. Some of those are automated, some of those are not we're really trying to inform a higher quality decision. And yes, it's being applied in an artificial intelligence manner, because that's the technology that we're applying, but it's really to augment our lives. Right. And, and we're using it in a variety of use cases. We've talked about a lot of them here. But there's 1000s of use cases in AI that we don't even see today that are very easy. Something as simple as searching on the internet. That's helping a lot from you know, misspelling things and, you know, not not identifying exactly what you want and recommendation engines come and say, you know, I think I'm looking for this instead. It's like, Absolutely, thanks for saving me the frustration. We're really augmenting Life in that point. Grant The reason why I asked that as part of this ethics piece is one of the things I noticed. And as I work with the organizations, there's a misunderstanding of how far and what AI can do at times. And and there's this misunderstanding of therefore, what's my responsibility in this. And my argument is, it's augmented intelligence in terms of its outcome, and therefore, we can't absolve the outcomes and pass that off to AI and say, Oh, well, it told me to do this, just in the same breath, we can't absolve and say, We're not responsible for the use cases either. And the way in which we use it, so we own as a human human race, we own the responsibility to pick an apply the right use cases, to even be able to challenge the AI, insights and outcomes from that, and then to take the ownership of that in what the impacts are. Agree, disagree. Carlos Yeah, I would really agree with that. And if you if you think about how it's implemented, in many cases, right now, the best use of AI is with human oversight, right. So it's sort of, you know, AI is maybe making initial decision, and then the human is reviewing that, or, you know, making a judgment call based on that input. So it's, it's sort of helping human decisioning instead of replacing human decisioning. And I think that's a pretty important kind of guiding principle where, where, wherever that may be necessary, we should do it. There's one, you know, the Zillow case that that happened recently, where they were using machine learning to automatically buy houses, and it was not. There was not enough human oversight in that, and I think they ended up losing something like $500 million in the case, right. So it's not really an ethics thing, but but it's just an example where in a lot of these cases, the best scenario is to have aI paired with human oversight. Yeah, yeah. Great, I think. Grant Yeah, no, go right ahead. Yeah. Elizabeth You mentioned you mentioned being able to challenge the AI, right, and that that piece is really important, in most of the cases, especially in the one that he just mentioned, around that. That Zillow case, right, without the challenging piece, you don't have a path to improvement, you just kind of assume the role, and you get into deep trouble, like you saw there. But that challenging piece is really where innovation starts, you need to be able to get back and question kind of, you know, is this exactly what I want? And if it's not, how do I change it? Right. And that's how we drive kind of innovation in the space? Grant Well, and I would say that that comes full circle to the platform, I saw that your organization's developing, which is to reduce the time and effort it takes to be able to cycle on that right to build the model, get the outcome, evaluate, oh, challenge, make adjustments, but don't make the effort to recast and rebuild that model such that it becomes unaffordable or too much time, I need to be able to iterate on that quickly. And I think as a platform you developed and others that I've seen, you know, continue to reduce that I think it makes it easier for us to do that in it from a from a financially responsible and beneficial perspective. 100% Elizabeth Yeah, one of the one of the features that you mentioned was the versioning. And that really ties into a guiding principle of ethical use as well, which is reproducibility. So if you are, if you want to use a model, you need to be able to reduce, reproduce it reliably. And so you're getting the same kind of outputs. And so that's one of the features that we've put in there to help people that versioning feature to help people, you know, comply with that type of a regulation. Grant I've built enough AI models to know it's tough to go back to a particular version of an AI model and have reproducibility accountability. I mean, there's a whole bunch of LEDs on that. That's exceedingly valuable. That's right. Yeah. Okay, any any final comments for me there? Yeah. Carlos I think for my side, I'm really interested to see where we go as people with ethics in AI. I think we've touched on the transparency and visibility required to have these conversations around ethics and our ethical use of AI. But really, in this case, we're gonna start seeing more and more use cases and solutions in their lives or we're gonna butt up against these ethical questions, and being able to have an open forum where we can discuss this. That's really up to us. To provide we have to provide the space to have these conversations, and in some cases, arguments around the use of the technology. And I'm really looking forward to, you know, what comes out of that, you know, how long does it take for us to get to that space where, you know, we're advancing in technology and addressing issues while we advanced the technology. Grant Excellent. Thanks, Carlos. Elizabeth. Elizabeth Yeah, so for me as a as a product person in particular, I'm really interested in these the the societal conversation that we're having, and the regulations that are starting to be put together and kind of the guidelines from larger companies and companies like ours that are, you know, contributing to this thought leadership. And so what's really interesting for me is being able to take those, that larger conversation and that larger knowledge base and distill it down into simple tools for people like small and medium businesses that can then feel confident using AI and these things are just built in sort of protecting them from making some mistakes. So I'm really interested to see sort of how that evolves and how we can productize it to make it simple for people. Grant Yeah, yeah. Bingo. Exactly. Okay, everyone. I'd like to thank Carlos Elizabeth, for joining me here today. Wonderful conversation that I enjoyed that a lot. Thanks, everyone for listening. And until next time, get some AI with your ethics. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Welcome to ClickAI Radio. In this episode I have a conversation with some AI experts on how AI ethics affect your business. Grant Okay, welcome, everybody to another episode of clique AI radio. Well in the house today I have got a return visitor very excited to have him and a brand new person. I'm excited to introduce you to Carlos Anchia. I've been practicing that I get that right, Carlos. Carlos Sounds great. Good to see you again. Grant Even old dogs can learn new tricks. There we go. All right, and Elizabeth Spears. Now I got that one easily. Right, Elizabeth? Elizabeth You did it? Yeah. I'm really happy to be here. Grant This is exciting for me to have them here with me today. They are co founders of plain sight AI. And a few episodes ago, I had an opportunity to speak with Carlos and he laid the foundation around the origin story of AI for vision, some of the techniques and the problems they're solving. And I started to nerd out on all of the benefits. In fact, you know what, Carlos, I need to tell you, since our last conversation, I actually circled back to your team and had a demo of what you guys are doing. And yeah, I think it was very impressive, very impressive, you know, a guy like me, where I've coded this stuff. And I was like, Oh, wow, you just took a lot of a lot of pain out of the process. You know, one of the pains that I saw come out of the process was the reduction in time, right that how long it would take for me to cycle another model through it. That was incredible, right? I can't remember the actual quantification of time, but it was at least a 50% of not even 80% reduction of cycle time is what I saw come through, there's even model versioning sort of techniques, there's just, you know, there's another really cool technique in there that I saw. And it had to do with this ability to augment or, or approximate test data, right, this ability to say, but but without creating more test data, it could approximate and create that for you. So now, your whole testing side just got a lot easier without building up, you know, those massive test cases and test basis for for doing the stuff So, alright, very impressive product set. And let's see, Elizabeth can you explain that? Elizabeth That's right, Chief Product Officer. So basically, kind of the strategy around what we're building and how we build it. And the order in which we build it is is kind of under my purview. Grant Okay, very good. Awesome. Well, it's so great to have both of you here today. So after I spoke with Carlos, last time, after we finished the recording, I said, You know what, I want to talk to you about ethics about AI ethics. And so as you heard in my previous podcast, I sort of laid the foundation for this conversation. And it's not the only areas of ethics around AI, but it's a place to start. And so we want to build on this. And we're gonna talk about these sort of four or five different areas just to begin the conversation. And I think this could translate certainly into other conversations as well. But to do that, could could one or both of you spend a little time giving the foundation of what is AI ethics as a relates to computer vision itself? What are some of the challenges or problems or misunderstandings that you see in this specific area of AI? Carlos Sure, I can take that one. So I think really, when we're talking around ethics, we're bowling any sort of technology, we're talking around how that technology is implemented, and the use of that, right and what's acceptable. So in the case of this technology, we're talking around computer vision and artificial intelligence, and how those things go into society. And it's really through its intended use on how we evaluate the technology. And I think really, computer vision continues to provide value to allow us to get through this digital transformation piece. As a technology, right? And, you know, once we start with, yes, this is a valuable technology, the conversation really now shifts to how do we use that technology for good, some cases bad, right? Where this is where that conversation arises around, you know, having the space to share what we believe is good or bad, or the right uses or the wrong usage just right. And it's a very, very gray area, when we look to address technology and advancement in technology against a black and white good or bad kind of a situation, we get into a lot of issues where, you know, there's a lot of controversy around some of these things, right, which is really, you know, as we started discussing it after the last podcast, it was really, you know, man, I really need to have a good podcast around this, because there's a lot to it. And you clearly said there was a previous one. And now there's this one, you know, I hope that there's a series of these so we can continue to express value and just have a free conversation around ethics in artificial intelligence. But really, what I'm trying to do is set the context, right. So like technology works great from the just the science of the application of that technology. And if you think of something like super controversial facial recognition, now, absolutely. I don't want people to look at my face when I'm standing on a corner. But if there's, you know, child abduction cases, yes, please use all the facial recognition you can I want that to succeed really well. And we've learned that technology works. So it's not the solution itself. It's how we're applying that solution. Right. And there's there's a lot of new ones to that. And, you know, Elizabeth can help shed a little bit of light here, because this is something that we evaluate on a constant basis and have really free discussions around. Grant Yeah, I would imagine you have to even as you take your platform into your into your customer base, even understanding what their use cases are imagined, at times, you might have to give a little guidance on the best way to apply our uses. What have you seen with this, Elizabeth? Elizabeth Yeah, you know, there's, it's interesting what Carlos is saying there's a lot of the same themes for evaluating the ethics and technology in general are similar ones that come up with when AI is applied. So things like fraud or bias is actually more can be more uniquely AI. But that absolutely exists in other technologies. And then inaccuracy and how that how that comes up in AI, and then things like consent and privacy. So a lot of the themes and we can we can talk about how AI applies to these, but a lot of the themes that come up, are really similar. And so one of the things that we try to do for our customers is, especially kind of your listener base, that's that small, medium businesses is take a lot of that complexity out of the, like, Hey, I just want to apply, you know, I just want to solve this one problem with AI, what are all of these concerns that I, you know, I may or may not know about. So, we try to do things like build, build things into the platform that make it so something like bias. So, for example, is usually comes down to data balance. So if we provide tools that really clearly show your data balance, then it helps people make unbiased models, right, and be confident that they're going to be using AI ethically, Grant So that I'm sure you're aware of this Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania case where they ended up using AI to predict criminality using image processing, right. And, of course, that it failed, right? Because it you know, looking at a an image of someone and saying, Oh, that person is a criminal, or that person's not a criminal. That's using some powerful technology, but in ways that, of course, has some strong problems or challenges around that. How do you help prevent something like this? Or how do you guide people to use this, this kind of tool or technology and in ways that are beneficial? Elizabeth Yeah. What's interesting about this one is that the same technology that causes the problem can also help solve the problem. So so when you're looking at your corpus of data, you can use AI to find places where you have data in balance and and just to kind of re explain the what happened in that case, right. So they had a data imbalance where it was Miss identifying Different races that they had less data for. So, you know, a less controversial example is if we're talking about fruit, right, so if we have a dataset that has 20, oranges, two bananas and 20, apples, then it's just going to be worse than identifying bananas, right? So one of the things that that can be done is you apply AI to automatically look at your data balance and say, and surface those issues where it can say, hey, you have less of this thing, you probably want to label more of that thing. Grant So I'll try to manage the data set better in terms of proper representation. And try finding, finding bias is a real challenge for organizations. And I think one of the things that your platform would allow or unable to do is if you can take off the pain of all of the machinery of just getting through this and and free up organizations time to be more strict in terms of evaluating and finally, oh, taking the time to do those kinds of things, I think you might have an opportunity to improve in that area meeting customers might be able to improve in there, would that be a fair takeaway? Elizabeth Yeah, it's something that that we're really passionate about trying to provide tools around. And, and we're kind of prioritizing these these tools. The other one is, is that has to do with your data is as well is finding inaccuracies in, in your models. So the one example is X ray machines. So they did. They've basically they had an inaccuracy in a model that was finding a correlation, I think it was for it was for the disease detection. So it was finding a correlation just when the X ray was mobile, versus when they went into kind of a hospital to get the X ray. And so, you know, these models are in many cases, really just very strong pattern detectors, right. And so one of the things that can really help to, you know, to prevent something like that is to make it easy to slice and dice your data in as many ways as possible, and then run models that way. And make sure that you aren't finding the same correlation, or the same sort of accuracy with a different data set, or a different running of the model in a different data set. So said, in other words, you would be able to say, I'm going to run all of the portable X-ray machines versus all of the hospital ones, and see if I'm getting the same correlation as I am with, you know, cancer versus not cancer, or whatever they were looking for. Grant A quick question for you on this. So in my experience with AI, I have found sort of two things to consider. One is the questions that I'm trying to get answered guides me in terms of, you know, how I prepare the model, right? I'm gonna first lean towards certain things, obviously, if I want to know that this is a banana, right, or an apple or what have you. So the kind of question that when I answer leads me to how I prepare the model, which means it leads me to the data that I select. And the question is, is do I do I? Should I spend the time really putting together the strong set of questions? And rather, rather than do that, just gather my data? And then and then execute that data, the build a model? And then Ben, try to answer some questions out of that, you see what I'm saying that way, maybe I'm not going to introduce any bias into it. Elizabeth So we we encourage a very clear sort of understanding of the questions that you want to answer, right? Because that helps you do a few things, it helps you craft a model that's really going to answer that question, as opposed to accidentally answering some other questions, right. But it also helps you right size the technology so far, for example, if you're doing if you're trying to answer the question of how many people are entering this building, because you want to understand, you know, limits of how many people can be in the building or, you know, COVID restrictions or whatever it is, that that solution doesn't need to have facial recognition, right. So to answer that question, you don't need you know, lots of other technologies included in there. And so yeah, So, so defining those questions ahead of time can really help in sort of a more ethical use of the technology. Grant So one of the first jobs we would then have a small medium business do would be get clarity around those questions that actually can help us take some of the bias out. Is that a fair takeaway from what you share? Elizabeth Exactly like the questions you're trying to answer. And the questions you aren't not trying to answer can also be helpful. Grant Oh, very good. Okay. All right. So all right, the opposite of that as well. All right. So while we could keep talking about bias, let's switch to something that is that I think comes right out of the movie iRobot, right. It's robot rights. Is this, is this a fluke? Or what, you know, is this for real? I mean, what do you think? Is there really an ethical thing to worry about here? Or what? What are your thoughts? Elizabeth You know, in most of the cases that I've seen, it's really more like, it comes down to just property, like treating property correctly, you know, like don't kick the robots because it's private property. So not really around sort of the robot rights but you know, some already established rules be in for the most part, I see this as kind of a Hollywood problem, more than a practical problem. Grant Maybe it makes good Will Smith movies. But other than that, yeah, fighting for rights, right. Now that seems like it's way out there in terms of terms of connection reality. Okay, so we can tell our listeners, don't worry about that for right now. Did you add something back there? Carlos Just an interesting point on the robot rights, right. While while it's far in the future, I think for robot rights, we are seeing a little bit of that now today. Right? When like Tesla AI day, when they came out, they decided that the robot shouldn't run too fast that the robot shouldn't be too strong. I think it's a bit. It's a bit interesting that, you know, we're also protecting the human race from for us building, you know, AI for bad and robots for bad in this case. So I think it's, it's, it's on both sides of that coin. And those are, those are product decisions that were made around. Let's make sure we can run that thing later. So I think I think as we continue to explore robots AI, the the use of that together, this topic will be very important, but I think it's far far away. Grant I'm wondering is that also blends into the next sort of ethical subtopic we talked about, which is threat to human dignity. And it might even crossed into that a little bit, right, which is, are we developing AI in a way that's going to help? protect the dignity of human certainly in health care situations? That certainly becomes important, right? You probably heard on the previous podcasts that I did, I played a little snippet from Google's duplex technology that was three year old technology, and those people had no idea. They're talking and interacting with AI. And so there's that aspect of this. So where's the line on this? When? When is it that someone needs to know that what you're interacting with is actually not human? And then does this actually mean there's a deeper problem that we're trying to solve in the industry, which is one of identity, we've got to actually create a way to know what it is that we're interacting with. And we have strong identity? Can you speak to that? Yeah, Elizabeth I think I think the there's two things that kind of come into play here. And the first is transparency, and the second is consent. So in this case, it really comes down to transparency, like it would be very simple in that example, for that bot to say, Hey, I'm a bot on behalf of, you know, Grant Larsen, and I'm trying to schedule a hair appointment, right, and then going from there. And that makes it a much more transparent and easy interaction. So I think in a lot of cases, really paying attention to transparency and consent can go a long way. Grant Yeah, absolutely. All right, that that that makes a lot of sense. It seems like we can get around some of these pieces fairly, fairly simply. All right, Carlos, any other thoughts on that one? Carlos The only thing there and then touches on the stuff you guys were talking about on the bias piece, right? We're really talking about visibility and introspection into the process. Right. And with bias, you have that in place, right? We can detect when you know there's a misrepresentation of classes within the the model. In some cases, there's human bias that you can get that right but it's it's having that visibility in the same case with the threat to human data. With that visibility comes the introspection where you can make those decisions. You see more about the problem. Grant Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. So if we were to to be able to determine we have a bad actor, if there's not transparency, that would be a way that we could help protect the dignity of humans through this. Alright. That's reasonable. All right. So let's move on to again, sounds Hollywood ish, but I'm not sure it is weaponization of AI. Right? What are the ethics around this? I'll just throw that one on the table. Where do you what do you want to take that? Carlos, you wanna start with that one? Carlos Sure. I mean, so weaponization and and I think when we talk about AI and, and the advancements of it, you quickly go to weaponization. But really, weaponization has two different pieces to it, right? It's obviously it depends on which side of that fence you're on, on whether you view that technology is beneficial or detrimental. But in some cases, that AI that same technology that is helping a pilot navigate, it also helps for a guided missile system or something like that. So we really have to balance and it goes back to use cases, and how we apply that technology as a people. But you know, weaponization, the rise against the machines, these kind of questions. While they're kind of out there. They're affecting society today. And we have to be able to have productive conversation around what we believe is good and bad around this while still allowing technology to succeed. So there's a lot of advancements in the weaponization and AI in that space, but it's really, I think we have to take it on a case by case basis, and not like a blanket statement, we can't use technology in these ways. Grant Interesting thoughts? What are your thoughts there? Elizabeth? Elizabeth Yeah, you know, I it makes me think of sort of turning it on its head is, is when is it? You know, when is it unethical not to use AI, right. And so, some of those questions come up when we are talking about weaponization, you can also be talking about saving human lives and making it safer for them to do some of these operations. And and that same question can come up in some of like, the medical use cases, right? So here in the US, we have a lot of challenges around being able to use AI in medical use cases, and there's, and there's some where you can have really good human oversight of the cases, you can have sort of reproducibility of those models, they can be as explainable as possible. But it's still really, really difficult to get FDA approval there. So I, again, I think there's two sides to that coin. Grant And, yeah, it's it's an interesting conversation have stuff wrong, because like, in that medical case, you talked about, you could see the value of using the same kind of technology that would be used to identify a human target, and then attack it, you could take that same capability, and instead use it in a search and rescue sort of scenario, right? Where you're flying something overhead, and you're trying to find, you know, pictures or images of people that might be lost out there. Same kind of thing, right, so, so where how, go ahead, you're gonna say something was, but I can see. Elizabeth And there's even simpler cases in medical, where it's like, you know, there's a shortage of radiologists right now in the US and, and you can use, you can use AI to be able to triage some of that imaging. So, because right now, people are having to, in some cases, wait a really long time to get their sort of imaging reviewed. And so can can, can, and should AI help there. There's also another one along those same lines, where, with things like CT scans, you can use what's called super resolution or de noising the image. And basically, you can use much less radiation in the first place to take the imaging and then use AI on top of it to be able to essentially enhance the image. So again, you know, ultimately exposing the patient to less less radiation. So yeah, there's it's pretty interesting when when we can and can't use it. Mm hmm. Carlos Yeah. And I think just to add a little bit to the one we can and can't right, so, advancements through drug discovery have largely been driven through AI in the same fashion weaponization of various all drugs or other types of drugs have also benefited from Ai. So, I mean, from a society's perspective, you know, you really have to Evaluate not only greater good, but that that ultimate use case like, where where do you want to make a stance around that technology piece. And understanding both sides really provides that discussion space that's needed, you have to be able to ask really honest questions to problems that are, you know, what you can see in the future. Grant So is the safeguard through all of this topic around ethics? Is the safeguard, basically, the moral compass that's found in the humans themselves? Or do we need to have less, you know, legislative or policy bodies? Right, that puts us together? Or is it a blending? What do you what's your take? Elizabeth Um, it's interesting, the UK just came out with a national AI strategy. And they are basically trying to build an entire AI assurance industry. And, and their approach is, so they want to make sure that they're make, they're keeping it so that you can be innovative in the space, right? They don't want to make it so regulatory, that you can't innovate. But they also want to make sure that there's consumer trust in in AI. So they're putting together from a, you know, a national perspective, a guidelines and tests and, and ways to give consumers confidence in whether a model is you know, reproducible, accurate, etc, etc, while at the same time not stifling innovation, because they know, you know, how important that AI is for a essentially a country's way to compete and and the opportunities for GDP that it provides as well. Grant Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, I can go ahead, Carlos. Carlos No, I think it's his it's your question. Left alone, should we got kind of govern ourselves? I think, I think we've proven that we can't do that as a people, right. So we need to have some sort of regulatory, and committee around the review of these things. But it has to be in the light of, you know, wanting to provide a better experience higher quality, deliver value, right. And I think I think when you start with, how do we get the technology adopted and in place and deployed in a fashion where society can benefit, you start making your decisions around, you know, what the good pieces are, and you'll start your start really starting to see the outliers around Hey, wait a second, that doesn't kind of conform to the guidelines that we wanted to get this implemented with? Elizabeth And I think also to your question, I think it's happening at all a lot of levels. Right. So there's, you know, state regulation around privacy and use of AI and facial recognition. And, and there's, you know, some the FDA is putting together some regulation, and then also individual companies, right, so people like Microsoft, etc, have have big groups around, you know, ethics and how AI should be used for, you know, them as a company. So I think it's happening at all levels. Grant Yeah, like we said, that is a people we need to have some level of governing bodies around this to, and of course, that's never the end all protection, for sure. But it is, it is a step in the right direction to to help monitoring and governance. Okay, so last question, right? This is gonna sound a little bit tangential, if I could use that word tangential. It's given the state of AI where it is today. Is it artificial intelligence? Or is it augmented intelligence? Carlos I can go with that. So I think it's a little bit of both. So I think the result is, is to augment our intelligence, right? We're really trying to make better decisions. Some of those are automated, some of those are not we're really trying to inform a higher quality decision. And yes, it's being applied in an artificial intelligence manner, because that's the technology that we're applying, but it's really to augment our lives. Right. And, and we're using it in a variety of use cases. We've talked about a lot of them here. But there's 1000s of use cases in AI that we don't even see today that are very easy. Something as simple as searching on the internet. That's helping a lot from you know, misspelling things and, you know, not not identifying exactly what you want and recommendation engines come and say, you know, I think I'm looking for this instead. It's like, Absolutely, thanks for saving me the frustration. We're really augmenting Life in that point. Grant The reason why I asked that as part of this ethics piece is one of the things I noticed. And as I work with the organizations, there's a misunderstanding of how far and what AI can do at times. And and there's this misunderstanding of therefore, what's my responsibility in this. And my argument is, it's augmented intelligence in terms of its outcome, and therefore, we can't absolve the outcomes and pass that off to AI and say, Oh, well, it told me to do this, just in the same breath, we can't absolve and say, We're not responsible for the use cases either. And the way in which we use it, so we own as a human human race, we own the responsibility to pick an apply the right use cases, to even be able to challenge the AI, insights and outcomes from that, and then to take the ownership of that in what the impacts are. Agree, disagree. Carlos Yeah, I would really agree with that. And if you if you think about how it's implemented, in many cases, right now, the best use of AI is with human oversight, right. So it's sort of, you know, AI is maybe making initial decision, and then the human is reviewing that, or, you know, making a judgment call based on that input. So it's, it's sort of helping human decisioning instead of replacing human decisioning. And I think that's a pretty important kind of guiding principle where, where, wherever that may be necessary, we should do it. There's one, you know, the Zillow case that that happened recently, where they were using machine learning to automatically buy houses, and it was not. There was not enough human oversight in that, and I think they ended up losing something like $500 million in the case, right. So it's not really an ethics thing, but but it's just an example where in a lot of these cases, the best scenario is to have aI paired with human oversight. Yeah, yeah. Great, I think. Grant Yeah, no, go right ahead. Yeah. Elizabeth You mentioned you mentioned being able to challenge the AI, right, and that that piece is really important, in most of the cases, especially in the one that he just mentioned, around that. That Zillow case, right, without the challenging piece, you don't have a path to improvement, you just kind of assume the role, and you get into deep trouble, like you saw there. But that challenging piece is really where innovation starts, you need to be able to get back and question kind of, you know, is this exactly what I want? And if it's not, how do I change it? Right. And that's how we drive kind of innovation in the space? Grant Well, and I would say that that comes full circle to the platform, I saw that your organization's developing, which is to reduce the time and effort it takes to be able to cycle on that right to build the model, get the outcome, evaluate, oh, challenge, make adjustments, but don't make the effort to recast and rebuild that model such that it becomes unaffordable or too much time, I need to be able to iterate on that quickly. And I think as a platform you developed and others that I've seen, you know, continue to reduce that I think it makes it easier for us to do that in it from a from a financially responsible and beneficial perspective. 100% Elizabeth Yeah, one of the one of the features that you mentioned was the versioning. And that really ties into a guiding principle of ethical use as well, which is reproducibility. So if you are, if you want to use a model, you need to be able to reduce, reproduce it reliably. And so you're getting the same kind of outputs. And so that's one of the features that we've put in there to help people that versioning feature to help people, you know, comply with that type of a regulation. Grant I've built enough AI models to know it's tough to go back to a particular version of an AI model and have reproducibility accountability. I mean, there's a whole bunch of LEDs on that. That's exceedingly valuable. That's right. Yeah. Okay, any any final comments for me there? Yeah. Carlos I think for my side, I'm really interested to see where we go as people with ethics in AI. I think we've touched on the transparency and visibility required to have these conversations around ethics and our ethical use of AI. But really, in this case, we're gonna start seeing more and more use cases and solutions in their lives or we're gonna butt up against these ethical questions, and being able to have an open forum where we can discuss this. That's really up to us. To provide we have to provide the space to have these conversations, and in some cases, arguments around the use of the technology. And I'm really looking forward to, you know, what comes out of that, you know, how long does it take for us to get to that space where, you know, we're advancing in technology and addressing issues while we advanced the technology. Grant Excellent. Thanks, Carlos. Elizabeth. Elizabeth Yeah, so for me as a as a product person in particular, I'm really interested in these the the societal conversation that we're having, and the regulations that are starting to be put together and kind of the guidelines from larger companies and companies like ours that are, you know, contributing to this thought leadership. And so what's really interesting for me is being able to take those, that larger conversation and that larger knowledge base and distill it down into simple tools for people like small and medium businesses that can then feel confident using AI and these things are just built in sort of protecting them from making some mistakes. So I'm really interested to see sort of how that evolves and how we can productize it to make it simple for people. Grant Yeah, yeah. Bingo. Exactly. Okay, everyone. I'd like to thank Carlos Elizabeth, for joining me here today. Wonderful conversation that I enjoyed that a lot. Thanks, everyone for listening. And until next time, get some AI with your ethics. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, I have a guest who discusses nutritional AI that you can eat. Grant Everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. Wow. Today I have in the house with me. Mr. Daniel DeMillard, he is the CTO of FoodSpace, and I am just honored for the opportunity to meet him and to get to hear his story and what he and his organization has been doing with AI. Alright, let's jump into this. Okay, so, Daniel, first of all, welcome. Daniel Thanks for having me, Grant. Great to be here. Grant It is, it is really great to have you here and to have another another patriots in AI, right things that you guys are doing, as I got to know you. And before we started this recording, I was fascinated with the kind of work that you guys are doing and where you focus your use and application of AI. But before we get too deep into that, would you step back in time and tell us? Who's Daniel, where do you come from? And what is it that's brought you to this point to be CTO applying AI in such a cool way? Daniel Yep, so I actually studied economics and finance in school and came across an online class by Andrew Yang on Coursera. And at that point, I just absolutely fell in love with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I was like, wow, this is absolutely what I'm wanting. Yeah, with my life. So, you know, started studying a lot. Got a job eventually at IBM Watson, and worked at a small company doing what type classification, then I was doing some consulting on the side, where I actually got connected with iosshare, Nike, the CEO of foods, but at the time, it was a lunchbox. And they were developing a consumer facing app that, you know, they were trying to pair people with recipes. And you could set up a diet profile for yourself, and instantly order things online through instacart, based on recipes that you find. And I initially got engaged with them, building a wine pairing recommendation application, where, given a certain recipe will automatically recommend a wine pairing that would go well, really well I Grant ...need that certain kind of food, you're like, Hey, this is the right, right, Daniel ...we're gonna wanna medium red wine with that right or a very sweet dessert wine. Grant Until it this where lunchbox started, they were focusing on solving that problem. Daniel They were focused on solving the one stop shop for keeping all of your recipes together, ordering food very easily. And then also being able to manage your diets, and allergens, and just make making sure all of that was really seamless. And they also had a great mission of trying to mitigate food waste, so that they could recommend given all of the stuff that you have in your fridge that would normally sit there and forget about they could recommend a recipe and for you to make of the things that you've already selected. And so Grant all right, very good. All right. So so then you bumped into them, and you started to work with them. Tell us a little bit about the transition over to food space. How did the vision change? Daniel Yeah, it was actually pretty serendipitous, and rather abrupt. So back in 2019, io was a part of grocery shop, which is a big conference in the CPG space and food industry. And he's trying to pitch this idea of lunchbox to brands and retailers to get them to sign up for it. And they all have basically kept telling them the same thing of like, hey, it's a great idea. It's super interesting. I would love to but what you're asking for with all of these like dietary profiles, and The information necessary to build these types of recommendation algorithms. It's we just don't have it, we don't have ingredients and digitized nutrition labels. And, you know, we have the very minimum. So given that that information is like, Okay, well, we've got to take a step back. So he calls me up. And he says, you know, hey, Daniel, would it be possible given a bunch of computer or a bunch of e commerce images, to extract the product information from there and actually read it from those images. And I had done a little bit of stuff with computer vision by that point, using, like pre trained, convolutional neural net models on image net, and then using transfer learning to identify key regions. And so I stopped and thought about it. And I was like, yeah, you know, I think the problem is tractable enough. And the technology's in such place, now that we can absolutely solve this problem. And so yeah, two years later, we now have a model that can classify things that matter of seconds. And we're gonna extract that product information and seconds with 99.7% accuracy 99.7. So if I bring I can assume to you, and you can see the label on it, you can figure out what this is, you can identify it. Exactly. So we'll extract things like brand name, product, name, net weight, the ingredients, the nutrition label, any certifications, such as whether or not it's recycled, kosher, non GMO, vegan, all of that awesome stuff, including marketing claims, like low sodium or, you know, contains less sugar, those those types of things, well, pull out all of the relevant information from the product label. And we'll read it in the same way that a person would read it. A lot of other products that do something similar or are entirely based on the universal Product Code code, the UPC barcode on the back, where they're basically just looking things up from a database, a database might have inaccurate information, it might be out of date, so might have been accurate at one point, it might have been transmis, transcribe with whoever transcribed it in the first place, we're gonna read that label and not image, the same way that a human would label it so that it's, we're going to the ground truth. Grant So PC based, you're actually extracting the actual text, you're figuring out what this is, and then the semantics of it. What does that mean? Oh, it means this ingredient, this so much in the, you know, in terms of the amount of the ingredient, and so forth. Daniel Exactly. And then we will also derive new information from that information that we've extracted, such as whether or not it's going to be had certain allergens. If it contains peanuts, we're going to let you know if it has a peanut allergy. We're also going to determine whether or not it conforms to different diets. So I'm a vegetarian. And I'm constantly reading labels for obscure things like whether or not my cheese contains rennet in it, which is a animal derived enzyme. So we will read all of that for you, and then derive whether or not it's going to correspond with with your diet. Grant So can you talk about some of the use cases around this? So are you targeting b2b scenarios? Are you doing b2c? Is that something that I as an end consumer comes in interacts with it, let's say through through my cell phone? or How are you? How are people going to consume this this cool platform? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are primarily focused on optimizing the e commerce experience. So if you're on Walmart, or Albertsons or target, and you are using your favorite grocery delivery app, or you're going in to do pickup, all of that purchasing decisions are happening upfront on the e commerce website. And at the very least, we want to make sure that that information is present and accurate so that you can make the decisions yourself whether or not at the very least, you can see that ingredients label and search to see if that rennet in gradient is there, or if you're trying to, you know bulk up make sure that it has enough protein or has low sugar, low fat, whatever your dietary needs are. We want to make sure that information is there. But we really want to enable a more optimized ecommerce experiences where you know in your little left side of the toolbar, you can select vegetarian or pescatarian or low sodium diet or a South Beach diet, or I'm allergic to shellfish, and automatically only be shown products that correspond to your dietary needs. So we really think that optimizing that e commerce experience and the search is where we can have the largest impact right away. Grant So So some of the health profile of the person intersects with this, is it coming off? Like, I don't know, like, like the fitness app? Or is it coming off of other sort of apps? And then are capturing that health information? How do you integrate with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are basically providing the data to the retailer so that they can make those optimizations. But certainly being able to integrate with, you know, My Fitness Pal, or Weight Watchers would help optimize these experiences. And we are in discussions with those types of companies as well to improve their databases. So that you aren't, you don't have to manually type in all of that information on your fitness app, you can basically just look it up in the database, and it's accurate and recent. One problem that we've seen is that 30% or so of data is of grocery products are updated every year. So anyone I think use one of these apps has the experience of typing in their information, finding out finding the correct product, but it's a little bit outdated, the calories are a little off the nutrient profiles a little bit off, we're gonna make sure that it's updated. And in the right place. Grant That's interesting. So you talked about accuracy, the model accuracy for AI? And I think you should say 97%. Right. 99.7. Daniel Yeah, we are absolutely religious about that is, wow, you know, that is the problem that we're trying to solve. Right now, if you look up any product, on, say, a large, very large e commerce website, like walmart.com, there is a somewhere between 40 and 70% chance that there is at least one mistake on that website, regarding just the ingredients and nutrition information. So if you're trying to base you know, your health profile on that, it's it's an inaccurate, so we are just absolutely religious about getting every single piece of information. Correct, at least as so far as it corresponds to the product images. Grant So is this is this just for humans? Or is this also food for animals and pets? And how does this work? Daniel Yep, so we've definitely just, we started with humans, we are expanding to pet food and being able to build attributes around that two things like wet versus dry pet food, whether it's for a large size dog, or a small size dog. And all of those attributes we're hoping will also assist in that product search and discoverability so that you're not being shown a dog food, that's, you know, too too big for your small small dogs. Right. Grant Right. Right. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And then in terms of what we're talking about, who it's relevant to terms, your current market, so it's for humans, obviously, animals in the future. But as we think about the humans, this English base, is it other languages, Spanish or Mandarin or others? Where are you in terms of multilingual? Daniel Yep. So, you know, food is, I think, sacred to everyone everywhere. And as we move from this, in store grocery experience, where you're, you have the product in front of you, you can pick it up, and you can read the label to an e commerce experience, where somebody might just be dropping that off to your doorstep, and you don't see the product until it's there. We really think it's important that we have as larger reach as possible. So we definitely are working on expanding our algorithms to apply to different regulatory regulatory environments. You know, Europe has, I think, 12 allergens, whereas the united states currently has nine, and they just added sesame, to their allergens. They also have different nutrition labels and different information that they require to be on those. And then in addition to that, the different languages that are actually present there, and all of that obviously presents different technological issues, custom models for each of those markets, but really what we've spent a lot of time Building and working on is creating models that can quickly adapt to these new domains and building a really robust training pipeline. So that basically all we have to do is collect more data, instill a little bit of domain expertise, where we have to learn a little bit about that new market or that language. But after that, we can adapt our models very quickly to that new. Grant You know, I just have to ask, given that I love the AI piece of this, as well as just the benefit that you're bringing to human family. I mean, that's, that's huge. When I think about the AI portion of this, I think, how, how was building that model? I mean, how you have a lot of cans in your food storage now. I mean, how much? How many boxes of Cheerios did you buy? I mean, that's amazing. How did you get through all that? That's just that, right? There is a big challenge, right? To get through enough instances? Daniel Yeah, um, I Oh, and Dan, my business partners, they spent a lot of time getting kicked out of grocery stores, because they kept picking out prod products and taking pictures with their phones. And so they were kicked out of a few grocery stores, I think they learned to, you know, explain what, what they were doing their first after a little bit, but certainly a lot of time, taking pictures of your entire pantry. Going around the grocery store, just pick it up as many random things as possible. That's creative. Grant Yeah, that's, that's really great. If you have any particular challenges in terms of the kinds of food and other words, some things don't have labels, right. So certainly asparagus typically right or decent, things like that. So how do you deal with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So currently, we only support branded foods. So it does need to have that product label. But it's interesting that you should mention certain types of foods, we were doing a analysis an audit of our accuracy. And we were noticing that a certain product category, yogurt, in particular, was creating a lot of issues for us and was very low accuracy. And it turned out that the curvature of the yogurt container, and then the fact that it kind of tapers down, creating a lot of issues for OCR model, where the text is kind of getting bunched up at the edges of that, you know, yogurt container. So we actually had to like build a specific model just to handle those types of containers. So certainly, you know, a lot of our time and effort has been focused on the corner cases in those weird scenarios where that are particularly difficult. The like, very simple run of the mill cereal box, where it's a nice rectangular box and the nutrition labels very prominent. And it's a very usual format that's easier to solve that most of our time has been focused on these weird one offs, like these tobert, tapered yogurt containers. Grant So so let me think about because I love the, again, this problem that you're solving and how it benefits people and their dietary needs. When I think about how people can consume this, what's the way that they will be able to interact with this standard? And what's the state of what space is doing today? Is it? Is it out there ready to be used? Or Where are you guys? Daniel Yeah, we're currently working with brands to get their data to the retailers and some retailers are a little bit further along than others and optimizing the, you know, experience for you where you can set up those dietary profiles for yourself and only be shown the products that correspond to your values, or do you only want organic food or you have a gluten intolerance, only being charged on those foods that correspond with those values or dietary needs to just getting the product information out there to the retailers in the first place. We're also working with some initial engagements with smart appliance manufacturers, things like smart fridges and smart micro microwaves, where you can simply scan the product, either using the barcode or just the front of the product and instantly have your oven or your microwave set the time timer or the temperature for you to cook that product for you. Additionally, being able to do things like recipe planning based on the products that you have in your fridge, being able to order products from I'm a retailer directly using the feature on your fridge that is based on your dietary profiles and just you never needed to get on your computer. And you could just order, you know, your gluten free pizza directly from your smart fridge that is linked to a product database with information that we're providing, we really think that more and more people are going more and more of our purchasing Our food is going to happen in this virtual digitized space, whether that's through your computer, your smart fridge, and the more that information is available, the more that we can build a more customized experience, and really make shopping easier as well, so that you aren't ever being shown products that don't correspond to your dietary dietary needs or your values. You know, even being able to set timers and things for microwave, it might sound trivial, but it really should make the entire cooking, cooking experience that easier for you. Grant You know, I certainly could benefit from walking up to the fridge and say, what are the possibilities of what I can create from what's in there, my wife will do that she's got that AI model already in her head, but I don't have that model, same set of food and go, there's nothing in there. And then she can craft you know, miracles out of it. Daniel So yeah, I'm the exact same way. And, you know, you could you can set user profiles for everyone in your family and say, Hey, you know, I'm a pescetarian. And my daughter's gluten intolerant and my son really only it's organic food, and being able to mix and match all of those constraints, we can figure out what recipe and you know, what to eat for dinner, right? Grant And so it sounds like, like, like, we've done that, that South Beach diet multiple times. Sounds like you know, you can literally walk up to your, to your fridge at some point and say, Hey, what is it that I can make that is in compliance with the South Beach diet? Daniel Exactly. And then things like, you know, macros counting, like calorie counting, and counting how much protein that you're consuming, would be a lot easier using if all of this information is digitized, and you're interacting with it in a smart fridge type environment where it can track what you're picking up and making. So I think entering information into one of those calorie counting apps is often a pain and I think, a limitation for a lot of people. So anything that can mitigate some of that barrier to getting healthier and keeping track of what we're putting in our bodies, to me is very much welcome. Grant So we've talked about the art of the possibilities around this right? What is it that this can bring the people that dramatically influences and impacts their health? What do you see in terms of the downsides? What hurdles or challenges? What could get in the way of either people adopting this or getting value from it? What what concerns or challenges do you see there? Daniel Yeah, so some of the things that we've seen in the industry about the difficulty to use this type of data is, every retailer kind of has a different format for how they ask for data. Some retailers want the units and the nutrition and the value to be separate. So if you have seven grams for protein, sometimes they want us separate key for seven and a separate one for brands. They might call things different. Some people might think call things, UPC, other ones call it barcode. Other ones call it product ID. So that's some of the work in transit translating the data mapping or the data model to each of those retailers can be a major bottleneck for a brand say wants to get their data to Walmart to Albertsons to target. And they basically had to look at these like massive Excel spreadsheets, but like 70 columns or 150 columns, and manually copy that data over and it's a huge pain. And that that is one of the major reasons why only the largest of brands have the resources to get their data digitized in the first place. So what we do is, you know, we're going to first extract that information for you automatically from your images. You don't have to hire a team of people to do that extraction in the first place, where we've also built these mappings for the top 10 retailers where we can automatically syndicate and get the data in the format that they want to see. Whether that's directly through an API, and just automatically updating your information through an API, fortunately, some of the grocery industry isn't quite as forward thinking. So a lot of updates are just made through Excel spreadsheets. But we'll create that Excel spreadsheet for you. So that it's basically just a matter of sending that over an email. And I think that should mitigate a vast majority of the bottlenecks currently faced in the industry. Because some of the, I could just imagine being a brand manager and be like, Alright, well, here's my data mapping. But then there's these close lists for Walmart, where, you know, I'm supposed to put in a certain beef cut type for this product. And doing that, for every single one of my 150 500 products, that is going to be a huge ass. Grant Yeah, it has said that. It's one of the things that drew me to this. And when you and I were first talking about this recently, which was, I feel like the work that you're doing is not only scales to the larger brands, but also it's pulling out all this information that makes it available, even the small to medium business space as well. And so feels very scalable, therefore approachable to benefit a lot of people, lots of different scenarios. Daniel Yeah, absolutely. And we try to make things as easy as possible to get integrated with our system. So, you know, our simplest use case, if you already have data and a list of URLs for your product, you're going to send us over a CSV with your URL links and the product IDs associated with those. And we'll download those images for you and process them through the system. And now you can download it and whatever data format you want, you know, CSV or JSON, or an Excel or in target specific taxonomy format, or Walmart's or Albertsons. Or you can upload it through a, you know, drag and drop upload portal where you can just drop, drag a folder of your product images into that upload portal, interact with an API, or even give us access to your put them up on an FTP server and point us to it and we will download the images there. So it's really trying to make things as simple as possible. So that whatever your tech stack is, and whatever the size of your organization is, we can help you get up and running as quickly as possible. Grant Lots of integration strategies for if that's powerful. That's awesome. Alright, so let me ask you, if the for the people that are listening to this, where are you going to direct them to what's what's, where are you going to invite and where do they go find out more about this? Daniel Yep, so a FoodSpaceTech.com is the place to find all of the information. Grant Okay, FoodSpaceTech.com; Awesome. That's great. Daniel Okay, we actually just released a brand new website. So it looks great. And you can look at it now. Grant It looks awesome. I've asked you a ton of questions. What questions Haven't I asked you? What would you like to share that I haven't prompted you? Daniel Yeah. So I think that can be skepticism and the world of AI. And, you know, whether or not we can do what we say that we can do. And we are, again, just absolutely religious about product accuracy. And I think it's good for anyone who knows a lot about AI to know that AI can only take you so far and the machine learning is only going to get you so far. So we've spent a very large amount of our time building a very sophisticated human in the loop process, were really trying to figure out where the ML system is doing well and can be trusted, versus when a human needs to come in and take the reins and make a more educated more critical thinking decision about things with things like building known rules between the nutrition label. So calories is a very direct calculation from total carbohydrates and protein and total fat. So we can basically just cut check to see if that calculations done well. We can cross check our nutrition information against our ingredients where we've actually built models where we can predict certain nutrition elements based on the ingredients. You know, we know that a cookie were the first ingredient might be butter or sugar is going to have more fat content than something where the first ingredient is carrots. So if anything falls outside of those ranges, we can alert it and say, Hey, something's gone off the rails here, we should make sure if human takes a look at it. For certain container types, we know we are struggle a little bit more things like that yogurt container. So instead of relying on the ML models that work most of the time, but not all the time, we can just flag that certain product type for review by a human just to get another check on it. But we really think that the just to solve a problem, at least in the near term, using AI involves humans in that in the loop and being able to really distinguish that the easy cases, the happy path that I like to call from, hey, we've seen a new domain, you know, maybe it's a it, both English and Spanish is written on the back. So our models are getting a little bit confused. Let's flag that for review. Grant Yep. Yeah, I really appreciate the qualification around AI. I tend to prefer to think of it as augmented intelligence than artificial intelligence, I feel Yeah, I feel like that's the state of where it really is. There's so many things out there, like, Oh, you know, ai robots and Terminator that give a real misperception. But, but today, this stuff around deep fake, right, is really starting to become, you know, a bit of a challenge, right, in terms of creating even less trust around this. So it's a real misuse, if you will, of that. So in this particular case, this is obviously real, honorable use of AI itself. But the whole if we can keep people's perceptions to this is to augment your thinking process, right? Your cognitive behavior. So even though it's coming to you and saying, This is what you could or should eat, or this is what makes sense, you know, from a nutritional value, you still own the responsibility yourself, right to end up saying, Yeah, this is something I'm gonna do, I'm not passing that off, you know, to the AI model and say, do all the thinking for me, right? Daniel Oh, absolutely. And I could not agree more, you know, we are just providing the information to you. But it still requires that critical thinking and decision about your own values and your own goals to make the final decision about what you're going to put into your body. Right. We're just trying to make that easier. Make that whole decision process simpler. Yeah. Powerful. Grant They're very cool. Okay. All right. Any last comments, before we wrap up here, Daniel? No, it was a great to be here at Brampton. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time and for sharing this cool platform that you've put together everyone, go take a look at food space tech.com. Thank you for joining and until next time, go get some nutrition. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

In this episode, I have a guest who discusses nutritional AI that you can eat. Grant Everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. Wow. Today I have in the house with me. Mr. Daniel DeMillard, he is the CTO of FoodSpace, and I am just honored for the opportunity to meet him and to get to hear his story and what he and his organization has been doing with AI. Alright, let's jump into this. Okay, so, Daniel, first of all, welcome. Daniel Thanks for having me, Grant. Great to be here. Grant It is, it is really great to have you here and to have another another patriots in AI, right things that you guys are doing, as I got to know you. And before we started this recording, I was fascinated with the kind of work that you guys are doing and where you focus your use and application of AI. But before we get too deep into that, would you step back in time and tell us? Who's Daniel, where do you come from? And what is it that's brought you to this point to be CTO applying AI in such a cool way? Daniel Yep, so I actually studied economics and finance in school and came across an online class by Andrew Yang on Coursera. And at that point, I just absolutely fell in love with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I was like, wow, this is absolutely what I'm wanting. Yeah, with my life. So, you know, started studying a lot. Got a job eventually at IBM Watson, and worked at a small company doing what type classification, then I was doing some consulting on the side, where I actually got connected with iosshare, Nike, the CEO of foods, but at the time, it was a lunchbox. And they were developing a consumer facing app that, you know, they were trying to pair people with recipes. And you could set up a diet profile for yourself, and instantly order things online through instacart, based on recipes that you find. And I initially got engaged with them, building a wine pairing recommendation application, where, given a certain recipe will automatically recommend a wine pairing that would go well, really well I Grant ...need that certain kind of food, you're like, Hey, this is the right, right, Daniel ...we're gonna wanna medium red wine with that right or a very sweet dessert wine. Grant Until it this where lunchbox started, they were focusing on solving that problem. Daniel They were focused on solving the one stop shop for keeping all of your recipes together, ordering food very easily. And then also being able to manage your diets, and allergens, and just make making sure all of that was really seamless. And they also had a great mission of trying to mitigate food waste, so that they could recommend given all of the stuff that you have in your fridge that would normally sit there and forget about they could recommend a recipe and for you to make of the things that you've already selected. And so Grant all right, very good. All right. So so then you bumped into them, and you started to work with them. Tell us a little bit about the transition over to food space. How did the vision change? Daniel Yeah, it was actually pretty serendipitous, and rather abrupt. So back in 2019, io was a part of grocery shop, which is a big conference in the CPG space and food industry. And he's trying to pitch this idea of lunchbox to brands and retailers to get them to sign up for it. And they all have basically kept telling them the same thing of like, hey, it's a great idea. It's super interesting. I would love to but what you're asking for with all of these like dietary profiles, and The information necessary to build these types of recommendation algorithms. It's we just don't have it, we don't have ingredients and digitized nutrition labels. And, you know, we have the very minimum. So given that that information is like, Okay, well, we've got to take a step back. So he calls me up. And he says, you know, hey, Daniel, would it be possible given a bunch of computer or a bunch of e commerce images, to extract the product information from there and actually read it from those images. And I had done a little bit of stuff with computer vision by that point, using, like pre trained, convolutional neural net models on image net, and then using transfer learning to identify key regions. And so I stopped and thought about it. And I was like, yeah, you know, I think the problem is tractable enough. And the technology's in such place, now that we can absolutely solve this problem. And so yeah, two years later, we now have a model that can classify things that matter of seconds. And we're gonna extract that product information and seconds with 99.7% accuracy 99.7. So if I bring I can assume to you, and you can see the label on it, you can figure out what this is, you can identify it. Exactly. So we'll extract things like brand name, product, name, net weight, the ingredients, the nutrition label, any certifications, such as whether or not it's recycled, kosher, non GMO, vegan, all of that awesome stuff, including marketing claims, like low sodium or, you know, contains less sugar, those those types of things, well, pull out all of the relevant information from the product label. And we'll read it in the same way that a person would read it. A lot of other products that do something similar or are entirely based on the universal Product Code code, the UPC barcode on the back, where they're basically just looking things up from a database, a database might have inaccurate information, it might be out of date, so might have been accurate at one point, it might have been transmis, transcribe with whoever transcribed it in the first place, we're gonna read that label and not image, the same way that a human would label it so that it's, we're going to the ground truth. Grant So PC based, you're actually extracting the actual text, you're figuring out what this is, and then the semantics of it. What does that mean? Oh, it means this ingredient, this so much in the, you know, in terms of the amount of the ingredient, and so forth. Daniel Exactly. And then we will also derive new information from that information that we've extracted, such as whether or not it's going to be had certain allergens. If it contains peanuts, we're going to let you know if it has a peanut allergy. We're also going to determine whether or not it conforms to different diets. So I'm a vegetarian. And I'm constantly reading labels for obscure things like whether or not my cheese contains rennet in it, which is a animal derived enzyme. So we will read all of that for you, and then derive whether or not it's going to correspond with with your diet. Grant So can you talk about some of the use cases around this? So are you targeting b2b scenarios? Are you doing b2c? Is that something that I as an end consumer comes in interacts with it, let's say through through my cell phone? or How are you? How are people going to consume this this cool platform? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are primarily focused on optimizing the e commerce experience. So if you're on Walmart, or Albertsons or target, and you are using your favorite grocery delivery app, or you're going in to do pickup, all of that purchasing decisions are happening upfront on the e commerce website. And at the very least, we want to make sure that that information is present and accurate so that you can make the decisions yourself whether or not at the very least, you can see that ingredients label and search to see if that rennet in gradient is there, or if you're trying to, you know bulk up make sure that it has enough protein or has low sugar, low fat, whatever your dietary needs are. We want to make sure that information is there. But we really want to enable a more optimized ecommerce experiences where you know in your little left side of the toolbar, you can select vegetarian or pescatarian or low sodium diet or a South Beach diet, or I'm allergic to shellfish, and automatically only be shown products that correspond to your dietary needs. So we really think that optimizing that e commerce experience and the search is where we can have the largest impact right away. Grant So So some of the health profile of the person intersects with this, is it coming off? Like, I don't know, like, like the fitness app? Or is it coming off of other sort of apps? And then are capturing that health information? How do you integrate with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So right now, we are basically providing the data to the retailer so that they can make those optimizations. But certainly being able to integrate with, you know, My Fitness Pal, or Weight Watchers would help optimize these experiences. And we are in discussions with those types of companies as well to improve their databases. So that you aren't, you don't have to manually type in all of that information on your fitness app, you can basically just look it up in the database, and it's accurate and recent. One problem that we've seen is that 30% or so of data is of grocery products are updated every year. So anyone I think use one of these apps has the experience of typing in their information, finding out finding the correct product, but it's a little bit outdated, the calories are a little off the nutrient profiles a little bit off, we're gonna make sure that it's updated. And in the right place. Grant That's interesting. So you talked about accuracy, the model accuracy for AI? And I think you should say 97%. Right. 99.7. Daniel Yeah, we are absolutely religious about that is, wow, you know, that is the problem that we're trying to solve. Right now, if you look up any product, on, say, a large, very large e commerce website, like walmart.com, there is a somewhere between 40 and 70% chance that there is at least one mistake on that website, regarding just the ingredients and nutrition information. So if you're trying to base you know, your health profile on that, it's it's an inaccurate, so we are just absolutely religious about getting every single piece of information. Correct, at least as so far as it corresponds to the product images. Grant So is this is this just for humans? Or is this also food for animals and pets? And how does this work? Daniel Yep, so we've definitely just, we started with humans, we are expanding to pet food and being able to build attributes around that two things like wet versus dry pet food, whether it's for a large size dog, or a small size dog. And all of those attributes we're hoping will also assist in that product search and discoverability so that you're not being shown a dog food, that's, you know, too too big for your small small dogs. Right. Grant Right. Right. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And then in terms of what we're talking about, who it's relevant to terms, your current market, so it's for humans, obviously, animals in the future. But as we think about the humans, this English base, is it other languages, Spanish or Mandarin or others? Where are you in terms of multilingual? Daniel Yep. So, you know, food is, I think, sacred to everyone everywhere. And as we move from this, in store grocery experience, where you're, you have the product in front of you, you can pick it up, and you can read the label to an e commerce experience, where somebody might just be dropping that off to your doorstep, and you don't see the product until it's there. We really think it's important that we have as larger reach as possible. So we definitely are working on expanding our algorithms to apply to different regulatory regulatory environments. You know, Europe has, I think, 12 allergens, whereas the united states currently has nine, and they just added sesame, to their allergens. They also have different nutrition labels and different information that they require to be on those. And then in addition to that, the different languages that are actually present there, and all of that obviously presents different technological issues, custom models for each of those markets, but really what we've spent a lot of time Building and working on is creating models that can quickly adapt to these new domains and building a really robust training pipeline. So that basically all we have to do is collect more data, instill a little bit of domain expertise, where we have to learn a little bit about that new market or that language. But after that, we can adapt our models very quickly to that new. Grant You know, I just have to ask, given that I love the AI piece of this, as well as just the benefit that you're bringing to human family. I mean, that's, that's huge. When I think about the AI portion of this, I think, how, how was building that model? I mean, how you have a lot of cans in your food storage now. I mean, how much? How many boxes of Cheerios did you buy? I mean, that's amazing. How did you get through all that? That's just that, right? There is a big challenge, right? To get through enough instances? Daniel Yeah, um, I Oh, and Dan, my business partners, they spent a lot of time getting kicked out of grocery stores, because they kept picking out prod products and taking pictures with their phones. And so they were kicked out of a few grocery stores, I think they learned to, you know, explain what, what they were doing their first after a little bit, but certainly a lot of time, taking pictures of your entire pantry. Going around the grocery store, just pick it up as many random things as possible. That's creative. Grant Yeah, that's, that's really great. If you have any particular challenges in terms of the kinds of food and other words, some things don't have labels, right. So certainly asparagus typically right or decent, things like that. So how do you deal with that? Daniel Yeah, absolutely. So currently, we only support branded foods. So it does need to have that product label. But it's interesting that you should mention certain types of foods, we were doing a analysis an audit of our accuracy. And we were noticing that a certain product category, yogurt, in particular, was creating a lot of issues for us and was very low accuracy. And it turned out that the curvature of the yogurt container, and then the fact that it kind of tapers down, creating a lot of issues for OCR model, where the text is kind of getting bunched up at the edges of that, you know, yogurt container. So we actually had to like build a specific model just to handle those types of containers. So certainly, you know, a lot of our time and effort has been focused on the corner cases in those weird scenarios where that are particularly difficult. The like, very simple run of the mill cereal box, where it's a nice rectangular box and the nutrition labels very prominent. And it's a very usual format that's easier to solve that most of our time has been focused on these weird one offs, like these tobert, tapered yogurt containers. Grant So so let me think about because I love the, again, this problem that you're solving and how it benefits people and their dietary needs. When I think about how people can consume this, what's the way that they will be able to interact with this standard? And what's the state of what space is doing today? Is it? Is it out there ready to be used? Or Where are you guys? Daniel Yeah, we're currently working with brands to get their data to the retailers and some retailers are a little bit further along than others and optimizing the, you know, experience for you where you can set up those dietary profiles for yourself and only be shown the products that correspond to your values, or do you only want organic food or you have a gluten intolerance, only being charged on those foods that correspond with those values or dietary needs to just getting the product information out there to the retailers in the first place. We're also working with some initial engagements with smart appliance manufacturers, things like smart fridges and smart micro microwaves, where you can simply scan the product, either using the barcode or just the front of the product and instantly have your oven or your microwave set the time timer or the temperature for you to cook that product for you. Additionally, being able to do things like recipe planning based on the products that you have in your fridge, being able to order products from I'm a retailer directly using the feature on your fridge that is based on your dietary profiles and just you never needed to get on your computer. And you could just order, you know, your gluten free pizza directly from your smart fridge that is linked to a product database with information that we're providing, we really think that more and more people are going more and more of our purchasing Our food is going to happen in this virtual digitized space, whether that's through your computer, your smart fridge, and the more that information is available, the more that we can build a more customized experience, and really make shopping easier as well, so that you aren't ever being shown products that don't correspond to your dietary dietary needs or your values. You know, even being able to set timers and things for microwave, it might sound trivial, but it really should make the entire cooking, cooking experience that easier for you. Grant You know, I certainly could benefit from walking up to the fridge and say, what are the possibilities of what I can create from what's in there, my wife will do that she's got that AI model already in her head, but I don't have that model, same set of food and go, there's nothing in there. And then she can craft you know, miracles out of it. Daniel So yeah, I'm the exact same way. And, you know, you could you can set user profiles for everyone in your family and say, Hey, you know, I'm a pescetarian. And my daughter's gluten intolerant and my son really only it's organic food, and being able to mix and match all of those constraints, we can figure out what recipe and you know, what to eat for dinner, right? Grant And so it sounds like, like, like, we've done that, that South Beach diet multiple times. Sounds like you know, you can literally walk up to your, to your fridge at some point and say, Hey, what is it that I can make that is in compliance with the South Beach diet? Daniel Exactly. And then things like, you know, macros counting, like calorie counting, and counting how much protein that you're consuming, would be a lot easier using if all of this information is digitized, and you're interacting with it in a smart fridge type environment where it can track what you're picking up and making. So I think entering information into one of those calorie counting apps is often a pain and I think, a limitation for a lot of people. So anything that can mitigate some of that barrier to getting healthier and keeping track of what we're putting in our bodies, to me is very much welcome. Grant So we've talked about the art of the possibilities around this right? What is it that this can bring the people that dramatically influences and impacts their health? What do you see in terms of the downsides? What hurdles or challenges? What could get in the way of either people adopting this or getting value from it? What what concerns or challenges do you see there? Daniel Yeah, so some of the things that we've seen in the industry about the difficulty to use this type of data is, every retailer kind of has a different format for how they ask for data. Some retailers want the units and the nutrition and the value to be separate. So if you have seven grams for protein, sometimes they want us separate key for seven and a separate one for brands. They might call things different. Some people might think call things, UPC, other ones call it barcode. Other ones call it product ID. So that's some of the work in transit translating the data mapping or the data model to each of those retailers can be a major bottleneck for a brand say wants to get their data to Walmart to Albertsons to target. And they basically had to look at these like massive Excel spreadsheets, but like 70 columns or 150 columns, and manually copy that data over and it's a huge pain. And that that is one of the major reasons why only the largest of brands have the resources to get their data digitized in the first place. So what we do is, you know, we're going to first extract that information for you automatically from your images. You don't have to hire a team of people to do that extraction in the first place, where we've also built these mappings for the top 10 retailers where we can automatically syndicate and get the data in the format that they want to see. Whether that's directly through an API, and just automatically updating your information through an API, fortunately, some of the grocery industry isn't quite as forward thinking. So a lot of updates are just made through Excel spreadsheets. But we'll create that Excel spreadsheet for you. So that it's basically just a matter of sending that over an email. And I think that should mitigate a vast majority of the bottlenecks currently faced in the industry. Because some of the, I could just imagine being a brand manager and be like, Alright, well, here's my data mapping. But then there's these close lists for Walmart, where, you know, I'm supposed to put in a certain beef cut type for this product. And doing that, for every single one of my 150 500 products, that is going to be a huge ass. Grant Yeah, it has said that. It's one of the things that drew me to this. And when you and I were first talking about this recently, which was, I feel like the work that you're doing is not only scales to the larger brands, but also it's pulling out all this information that makes it available, even the small to medium business space as well. And so feels very scalable, therefore approachable to benefit a lot of people, lots of different scenarios. Daniel Yeah, absolutely. And we try to make things as easy as possible to get integrated with our system. So, you know, our simplest use case, if you already have data and a list of URLs for your product, you're going to send us over a CSV with your URL links and the product IDs associated with those. And we'll download those images for you and process them through the system. And now you can download it and whatever data format you want, you know, CSV or JSON, or an Excel or in target specific taxonomy format, or Walmart's or Albertsons. Or you can upload it through a, you know, drag and drop upload portal where you can just drop, drag a folder of your product images into that upload portal, interact with an API, or even give us access to your put them up on an FTP server and point us to it and we will download the images there. So it's really trying to make things as simple as possible. So that whatever your tech stack is, and whatever the size of your organization is, we can help you get up and running as quickly as possible. Grant Lots of integration strategies for if that's powerful. That's awesome. Alright, so let me ask you, if the for the people that are listening to this, where are you going to direct them to what's what's, where are you going to invite and where do they go find out more about this? Daniel Yep, so a FoodSpaceTech.com is the place to find all of the information. Grant Okay, FoodSpaceTech.com; Awesome. That's great. Daniel Okay, we actually just released a brand new website. So it looks great. And you can look at it now. Grant It looks awesome. I've asked you a ton of questions. What questions Haven't I asked you? What would you like to share that I haven't prompted you? Daniel Yeah. So I think that can be skepticism and the world of AI. And, you know, whether or not we can do what we say that we can do. And we are, again, just absolutely religious about product accuracy. And I think it's good for anyone who knows a lot about AI to know that AI can only take you so far and the machine learning is only going to get you so far. So we've spent a very large amount of our time building a very sophisticated human in the loop process, were really trying to figure out where the ML system is doing well and can be trusted, versus when a human needs to come in and take the reins and make a more educated more critical thinking decision about things with things like building known rules between the nutrition label. So calories is a very direct calculation from total carbohydrates and protein and total fat. So we can basically just cut check to see if that calculations done well. We can cross check our nutrition information against our ingredients where we've actually built models where we can predict certain nutrition elements based on the ingredients. You know, we know that a cookie were the first ingredient might be butter or sugar is going to have more fat content than something where the first ingredient is carrots. So if anything falls outside of those ranges, we can alert it and say, Hey, something's gone off the rails here, we should make sure if human takes a look at it. For certain container types, we know we are struggle a little bit more things like that yogurt container. So instead of relying on the ML models that work most of the time, but not all the time, we can just flag that certain product type for review by a human just to get another check on it. But we really think that the just to solve a problem, at least in the near term, using AI involves humans in that in the loop and being able to really distinguish that the easy cases, the happy path that I like to call from, hey, we've seen a new domain, you know, maybe it's a it, both English and Spanish is written on the back. So our models are getting a little bit confused. Let's flag that for review. Grant Yep. Yeah, I really appreciate the qualification around AI. I tend to prefer to think of it as augmented intelligence than artificial intelligence, I feel Yeah, I feel like that's the state of where it really is. There's so many things out there, like, Oh, you know, ai robots and Terminator that give a real misperception. But, but today, this stuff around deep fake, right, is really starting to become, you know, a bit of a challenge, right, in terms of creating even less trust around this. So it's a real misuse, if you will, of that. So in this particular case, this is obviously real, honorable use of AI itself. But the whole if we can keep people's perceptions to this is to augment your thinking process, right? Your cognitive behavior. So even though it's coming to you and saying, This is what you could or should eat, or this is what makes sense, you know, from a nutritional value, you still own the responsibility yourself, right to end up saying, Yeah, this is something I'm gonna do, I'm not passing that off, you know, to the AI model and say, do all the thinking for me, right? Daniel Oh, absolutely. And I could not agree more, you know, we are just providing the information to you. But it still requires that critical thinking and decision about your own values and your own goals to make the final decision about what you're going to put into your body. Right. We're just trying to make that easier. Make that whole decision process simpler. Yeah. Powerful. Grant They're very cool. Okay. All right. Any last comments, before we wrap up here, Daniel? No, it was a great to be here at Brampton. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time and for sharing this cool platform that you've put together everyone, go take a look at food space tech.com. Thank you for joining and until next time, go get some nutrition. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

What is the one simple hack to increase my revenue? If you could apply a 3-step framework to overcome the main reason for business failure, would you? Hey, welcome, everybody. This is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining. So okay, been looking at this problem around revenue, right. And as a small to medium business owner, this is constantly a challenge. In fact, I was reading recently, some common reasons why small to medium businesses fail. In fact, this was something I saw on investopedia. And of course, was looking at other places as well, I came back with these four reasons, right? These are the most common reasons, one, financing challenges or hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So let's talk about the first one financing challenges or hurdles. Right. So some of the challenges, of course, running out of money. That's always a big challenge. In fact, the first startup company I got involved with, that was clearly the problem. You know, not only were we working, not smart, but we of course, didn't even think through what sort of runway we had on the finances. And so that clearly means that on a day to day basis, we have to be tracking, what's the revenue stream looking like, and how are we producing this. In fact, one of the things about this first one, right, the financing hurdles, it's what's strikes me is that if we address it, it actually gives us more runway to then address those other three, right management challenges and effective planning or, or even bad marketing decisions that we're making. So one of the things that I noticed here from the Small Business Administration, some results that they had, they said, 20% of small businesses fail in the first year 50%, go belly up. After five years, and for only 33% make it to 10 years, those are amazing odds. So this first, this first challenge here around financing hurdles, really stands out as the critical one to address. So I started to look at it. So what are some of the issues in here, and one of those is around missing the mark on how we price our products. And often we get stuck down into these pricing wars. That gets into how do we how do we define products? What's a funding model for those and so forth? Well, what led me to this next piece I'm going to go over is after working with some small to medium businesses, I started to hear this common theme about what do my business numbers mean? What do they What do they translate into? Where should I be investing my time and energy as well as my scarce resource? So I noticed over time, that simple framework started to appear out of this, right. And the thing about frameworks is, they help us to focus on the things that are most important. And then help us to de emphasize the things that aren't important. And so this framework has appeared over some period of time working with organizations doing this. So I wanted to introduce this framework. Now a framework generally has a series of steps. And so in this framework, there's three steps. I call this framework, the PIE framework, spelled p, e, maybe there's another way to spell pi. That's the way I know how to spell pie, the pie framework P-I-E. Alright. And again, this came out of addressing the question, How do I solve these funding hurdle challenges, right? And then in order to do that, what do I have available to me as a small to medium business owner that I can apply into this framework to help me resolve it? So the PIE framework came out of this out of these groups, right, that I was working with, and here's what P means ready? P means problem and information preparation, like what the heck is that? Right? So for problem and information preparation, one common thing that I've noticed is that some organizations will not literally write down what are the serious problems We're facing How would I prioritize those? Right? What, what are the most important problems we're facing? And then what's the information that I have available to me to help me serve as insights? Tell me solve that problem. that's step number one of the framework sounds simple, right? Sometimes life is just the simple things. The second step is the I pee. Okay, so the ideals with intelligence augmentation. Now, this is a course, where artificial intelligence comes in. Now, I intentionally use the term intelligence augmentation, because I personally think that's where AI is today. I think it's at the point where we apply it intelligently. And so the insights that come to us that have that have examined our our information and the problems that we're looking to solve, that serves as input then to the great intelligence you already have, and so P problem and information prep, step two, intelligence augmentation, right, and then step three, is executing on guidance. So that's the E, execute on guidance. Now you think, why would I have that in there, I find that interesting that over a period of time, a lot of organizations won't execute on the guidance. So you're been given this guidance from AI, and they won't do the execution on it. Here's the key about AI. First of all, the reason why we use the term intelligence augmentation is we're not expecting that we apply it blindly. So we do want to obviously, apply it intelligently, within the context of business constraints that we have that that is critical. On the other hand, though, while that's being said, I noticed that some organizations will do nothing, right, they won't make any adjustments. And hence, I put E as the third step to the framework. So if you want to have a simple hack for improving your revenue, you apply the PIE framework PIE, identify your problems and the information preparation that's needed to address those, run those in through artificial intelligence to then give insights that then augment your own intelligence and then make a plan to execute. On the guidance, three simple steps. I have found that when we've applied these in organizations, and they've executed on it, they'll discover things that they didn't even know that they didn't know. And that permits them to grow with the right kinds of customers without taking on new resources, which is a big challenge, obviously, for small to medium business owners. So there were four common reasons why SMBs failed, right? That it started with one financing hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So today, I've talked about the PIE framework to address this first one, right, which is around financing hurdles. The other three items of course need to be addressed. But with continued funding through AI inspired guidance, it's been my experience that it gives a runway right gives us a much longer runway to address those remaining three items, but we'll discuss those at another time. For now let's focus on overcoming the financing hurdles through the pie framework. Hey, thanks for joining and until next time, get some PIE. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

What is the one simple hack to increase my revenue? If you could apply a 3-step framework to overcome the main reason for business failure, would you? Hey, welcome, everybody. This is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining. So okay, been looking at this problem around revenue, right. And as a small to medium business owner, this is constantly a challenge. In fact, I was reading recently, some common reasons why small to medium businesses fail. In fact, this was something I saw on investopedia. And of course, was looking at other places as well, I came back with these four reasons, right? These are the most common reasons, one, financing challenges or hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So let's talk about the first one financing challenges or hurdles. Right. So some of the challenges, of course, running out of money. That's always a big challenge. In fact, the first startup company I got involved with, that was clearly the problem. You know, not only were we working, not smart, but we of course, didn't even think through what sort of runway we had on the finances. And so that clearly means that on a day to day basis, we have to be tracking, what's the revenue stream looking like, and how are we producing this. In fact, one of the things about this first one, right, the financing hurdles, it's what's strikes me is that if we address it, it actually gives us more runway to then address those other three, right management challenges and effective planning or, or even bad marketing decisions that we're making. So one of the things that I noticed here from the Small Business Administration, some results that they had, they said, 20% of small businesses fail in the first year 50%, go belly up. After five years, and for only 33% make it to 10 years, those are amazing odds. So this first, this first challenge here around financing hurdles, really stands out as the critical one to address. So I started to look at it. So what are some of the issues in here, and one of those is around missing the mark on how we price our products. And often we get stuck down into these pricing wars. That gets into how do we how do we define products? What's a funding model for those and so forth? Well, what led me to this next piece I'm going to go over is after working with some small to medium businesses, I started to hear this common theme about what do my business numbers mean? What do they What do they translate into? Where should I be investing my time and energy as well as my scarce resource? So I noticed over time, that simple framework started to appear out of this, right. And the thing about frameworks is, they help us to focus on the things that are most important. And then help us to de emphasize the things that aren't important. And so this framework has appeared over some period of time working with organizations doing this. So I wanted to introduce this framework. Now a framework generally has a series of steps. And so in this framework, there's three steps. I call this framework, the PIE framework, spelled p, e, maybe there's another way to spell pi. That's the way I know how to spell pie, the pie framework P-I-E. Alright. And again, this came out of addressing the question, How do I solve these funding hurdle challenges, right? And then in order to do that, what do I have available to me as a small to medium business owner that I can apply into this framework to help me resolve it? So the PIE framework came out of this out of these groups, right, that I was working with, and here's what P means ready? P means problem and information preparation, like what the heck is that? Right? So for problem and information preparation, one common thing that I've noticed is that some organizations will not literally write down what are the serious problems We're facing How would I prioritize those? Right? What, what are the most important problems we're facing? And then what's the information that I have available to me to help me serve as insights? Tell me solve that problem. that's step number one of the framework sounds simple, right? Sometimes life is just the simple things. The second step is the I pee. Okay, so the ideals with intelligence augmentation. Now, this is a course, where artificial intelligence comes in. Now, I intentionally use the term intelligence augmentation, because I personally think that's where AI is today. I think it's at the point where we apply it intelligently. And so the insights that come to us that have that have examined our our information and the problems that we're looking to solve, that serves as input then to the great intelligence you already have, and so P problem and information prep, step two, intelligence augmentation, right, and then step three, is executing on guidance. So that's the E, execute on guidance. Now you think, why would I have that in there, I find that interesting that over a period of time, a lot of organizations won't execute on the guidance. So you're been given this guidance from AI, and they won't do the execution on it. Here's the key about AI. First of all, the reason why we use the term intelligence augmentation is we're not expecting that we apply it blindly. So we do want to obviously, apply it intelligently, within the context of business constraints that we have that that is critical. On the other hand, though, while that's being said, I noticed that some organizations will do nothing, right, they won't make any adjustments. And hence, I put E as the third step to the framework. So if you want to have a simple hack for improving your revenue, you apply the PIE framework PIE, identify your problems and the information preparation that's needed to address those, run those in through artificial intelligence to then give insights that then augment your own intelligence and then make a plan to execute. On the guidance, three simple steps. I have found that when we've applied these in organizations, and they've executed on it, they'll discover things that they didn't even know that they didn't know. And that permits them to grow with the right kinds of customers without taking on new resources, which is a big challenge, obviously, for small to medium business owners. So there were four common reasons why SMBs failed, right? That it started with one financing hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So today, I've talked about the PIE framework to address this first one, right, which is around financing hurdles. The other three items of course need to be addressed. But with continued funding through AI inspired guidance, it's been my experience that it gives a runway right gives us a much longer runway to address those remaining three items, but we'll discuss those at another time. For now let's focus on overcoming the financing hurdles through the pie framework. Hey, thanks for joining and until next time, get some PIE. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

One simple hack to increase your revenue. In this episode we discuss how to increase your revenue through your business numbers. Grant Hi everybody this is Grant Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. In this episode, I have the opportunity to discuss with the infamous Blake nubar on how to get a grip on your business numbers. Everybody, welcome to another episode of click AI radio. This is Grant Larsen, I cannot tell you how excited I am today to have a visitor here with me someone that I've been dying to interview for a long time. I have really admired this man and what he's done. Blake nubar. Blake I appreciate you having me here, man. It's a pleasure. I'm ready to have some fun and and thanks for having me on the podcast. Grant Thanks for taking the time to do this. You know, I've chased you for some time, right? Just keep trying to track you down wherever you are on the planet, right? Trying to get a moment of your time. But thanks so much for doing that. In fact, I was remembering the first time that I met you. I happen to actually be sitting right next to you, right. And it was at a funnel hacking live. And I think it might have been the first one that I ever went to. And I'm sitting next to you. And we're just chatting for a minute. And then you were so humble all sudden, they're like, Blake nubar, please come up to the front. They call yell, I'm like what the heck, you had won this award for everything you've done to the business. How cool is that? Blake Yeah, it was wild, I would award the growth on that thing was insane. Actually, that was on the product. And that was really cool. And yeah, I remember sitting next to you specifically. And I was like, Wait, are you Steve's Dad? And you're like, yeah, I'm Steve's dad. I'm like, man, he talks about you all the time. Like in such an awesome way. It's fine. Nice to meet you. So, ya know, collecting the first is my first time walking across stage getting the the two comma club award. And that was done with an online business that it was called the b2b formula. I was working with a guy named Brian page on that. We kind of started that thing from ground zero type thing. Brian had a he had a course out really. But you know, wasn't making sales didn't know what a funnel was. All that good stuff. And we kind of like teamed up, you know, and we found each other through this thing. We started building this thing out. And you know, next thing you know, by implementing funnels and getting the right traffic sources in place. We did a million dollars in 43 days with that offer. And we were there at that funnel hacking live collecting that award that was actually here in Orlando, Florida, I believe, which is funny enough, because it's back here again, this year in 2021. Which should be exciting. So yeah, that that was a it was an exhilarating experience. A lot of crazy stuff happened. But on all Yeah, crazy to like help grow a business like that. Grant I think about how you got started, I've heard a little bit of your origin story. But could you just take a moment to talk about how did you get started into this? Yeah, so Blake Um, that my whole online journey and my funnel journey is different. My funnel journey is probably more applicable for this. So I was working in the nine to five, I was working in a fitness company. And we were working on building out this certification program for people that want to become personal trainers. If you want to become a personal trainer, you had to pass this exam. It's just like a standardized thing that you have to do. I don't know if it varies from state to state, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But we're building out the certification. And we want to like really go all in on this thing. So we spent we like really transformed how a training program should be. And we like we finished this thing. Like, it was crazy worth like nine months on this thing. It was a ton of time, but it was it was awesome. I had like a mobile app. It was this book. It was an online program and like all 360 views and amazing product. And we go and I hand it over to the marketing department and I'm like, Hey guys, like we're ready to rock and roll and start selling this thing and I almost like hand over the torch and they just couldn't sell it. Like nothing was moving and I just remember getting frustrated cuz I'm like, hey, like, Why is this not working? Like I thought that's your job. You're supposed to like market this stuff now and they're like driving traffic to like a website just like nothing was working. And I remember go I went home one night. And I was like frustrated Of course and I'm sitting there it's like three in the morning. I'm staring at my ceiling fan. And on my laptop on my on my bed. So I just remember pulling it open and looking through it. And I see this ad Come up. And I just remember the ad it just said weird marketing experiments to increase traffic conversions and sales online. I'll never forget the saint of it. And it's this crazy guy on it. His name is Russell Brunson. I had no idea who he was. And he was just like, full of energy. So I clicked on this ad. And next thing I know, I went in in a sales funnel. I didn't know I was in a phone, I thought I was on a website. But lo and behold, I was in a sales funnel. And it's basically Russell just being like, you want to grow a business online, you want to start a business, you need a funnel, you need a funnel, and he's like, going through all these different types of funnels. And I remember I was like, so intrigued by it. I was like, a 90 minute presentation, and I was so captivated. I remember, I watched it. Again, I watched it twice. So I watched this thing twice. It's like six in the morning, I go straight into the office, I started sketching out a funnel on the board, and the marketing department like, what are you doing, man? I'm like, I know how we're gonna sell this. We're gonna use a sales funnel, like, what's the sales funnel? And I'm like, I don't really know yet. But this guy Russell talks about it. And I think I think this is how we can sell this thing. So I start sketching this thing out. I call up one of our celebrity trainers, who is like the poster child of this brand new certification. I'm like, hey, so and so we need a webinar. Like I bought the perfect webinar stuff. I sent it over to him, he like records this webinar, he sends it back like a week later, I build my first funnel out ever inside of clickfunnels. I put this thing in, and I go to the marketing department say, Hey, guys, instead of like what you were doing, just drive traffic, I do what you do, but just send them to this thing here. And they're like, Alright, so they send people there. And people start often. And people start watching this thing, right? When we go deliver the offer. No one buys like not a single person purchase this thing. webinar ends, we're done. I go outside. I'm like, I'm like Kirsten to myself. I'm like, Oh, another fail What idea. And I remember how like one more last, like lackluster hope of trying to get this thing to work. And I walked back inside. And I just went to my computer and I clicked on the refresh button. And we made our first sale for like, it was like 797 bucks like $800. And I went nuts. And it's like I this Russell stuff works right funnels work. And I walked in the next day and I quit. And I set out on this journey for the for the next year of trying to understand how you know, basically the science of selling stuff online, like funnels and offers and messaging and all that good stuff. And the rest is history. Grant One sale. That's amazing. That's it. Blake There's no I think that's one thing I think a lot of us will relate to. And if you if you haven't relate to yet, you know, some people are watching and listening, they have it. The one thing I think a lot of people will tell you is that when you make your first ever sale online, whether it's $5 or 500, there's this feeling that happens where you just like there's no turning back, I want more of this experience again and again and again. Yeah, Grant Yeah. I love that, that so so your secret sauce as a business owner, it sounds like it's a combination of things. One, you stuck with this clearly right? And it took lots of tries to do. But I've watched you build from that, because I've seen some of the things you've created since then, which is just incredible. I think you've really been perfecting the art of the launch the product launch. He talked about that for a moment. Yeah. Blake So anytime you have a really creative idea, right? I'm never an advocate anymore. I used to be right of building it out first and then launch it. And I've kind of flipped that on its head. Now it's more like launch it first and then build it out. Because a lot of things that prohibit entrepreneurs from moving forward that stopped them in their tracks as they think they have to go build out these products and services first. And it's really difficult, right? There's a lot of friction in that. And almost it's like a recipe to fail and quit and give up and not want to do it again. So I'm more of a fan of See if you can go sell the idea that you have first and then go spend the time building it out. So anytime we have an idea, what we like to do is really go really hard in the paint, when it comes to launching because launching is definitely it's the way to prove your concept. It's the way that it gives you the short term capital to inject into building the process and fulfilling on it. And even putting more even gives you the capital you need to put into evergreen strategies like paid media and things like that. So we're just like what we do really well here my business partner and I is that we when it comes to a new idea, we really like to watch hard and aggressively like we like, we don't just like to send an email. We don't like to just make a Facebook post or a couple ads. Let's say we like to be the loudest people in the room where by the end of it, I'm hoping people look at me and like man, that Blake nubar dude, he's super annoying, because then I knew we did a good enough job because you couldn't escape us during that launch. So launching is one of those things where it's like, it's you got to become a master of it. Like you have to know how to do it. But you never want to stay in it. It's like learn how to launch and then learn how to move that stuff to the Evergreen model where it just keeps producing for your business day in and day out. So watching is it's it's something you have wasted you have to learn it you have to become really good at it and There's so many different types of launches you could do honestly, it's like, fall one of the frameworks and put your idea into that framework and then just see how it does and see if the markets willing to judge and pull out their credit cards to pay for it. Grant Are there certain social media platforms that you tend to focus on for your launches? Yes, so we, I'm a fan of Facebook. Blake I like have this love/hate relationship with Facebook, because it's like, as much as as great of a place it is, it's like you have very little control as an advertiser. So Facebook's a really good spot we enjoy. I think the all our biggest launch we've ever done was only by utilizing Facebook, which is crazy, right? It's just because Facebook to me is the hub. Like if you're on social media, you're on you have Facebook, on your phone, or you use Facebook, you might have the other ones too, you might have like tik tok and Instagram and all the other ones. But Facebook is definitely the core. So I'm like, Okay, let's focus on Facebook, which a reason behind that was a we didn't want to get overwhelmed. I didn't want to like every additional platform, you have to like fake have to. It's just more stuff you have to create. It's different type of content you have to create because the platforms have different ways of posting and stuff. So we're just like, let's do Facebook. That's our favorite. But now as we've expanded the business, and we've grown, we really focus on Facebook and Instagram, those are kind of the the two big honey holes, I would say when it comes to it. We do email marketing and things like that. But it's really Facebook and Instagram, because like I said, that's where every I mean, everyone's on Facebook, I mean, and you take it literal ticket, figuratively, the world's on Facebook. So what better platform to use, and the one where everyone's kind of congregating. Grant Okay, that's awesome. So you know where you're going to find your people. So you grew this business and you become expert at launches and launches. And you got to a certain point in your business, there was some time or place or condition you got into Lake where it led you to reach out and try to track down someone like myself, what were those conditions? Blake Yeah, so I remember, you know, the business was growing, we were doing really big revenue numbers. And I remember when I was working with Brian, right, previously, I remember, he had a consultant that was really advocate about understanding your data. And I didn't get it at first, I'm just like, What does any of this stuff mean? And as you really start to see, when your business grows, if you don't have a grip on the numbers, you're kind of in trouble. And I remember we were getting to a point where our revenues were, you know, high six figures every month. And I'm just over here. And I remember I think I reached out to I don't know, if I reached out to Steve, or Steve reached out to me. But I remember one instance happened in regards to conversations like, you need to talk to my dad. And I'm like, he knows this stuff. And he's, it seems like it's what he does. And I'm like, Okay, done deal. And the reason I reached out to you is because I realized that in order for your business to have a grip on it to have a pulse on what it's doing to scale it right with predictability. You're you have to understand these numbers, and especially having understanding numbers in a way where you can make really educated decisions based on that data. See, most entrepreneurs, when you're first getting started, you let your intuition guide your decisions. That's great. Like you have a gut reaction. Oh, this is a cool idea. Let's go watch it. But as that thing works, you need to use less intuition and more data to kind of guide where you want to go. Now, if you want to develop new products sure where your intuition run wild, right. But when you want to make really educated decisions on growing your company and what different verticals to go after what different traffic sources, it should no longer be this game of guessing right, which a lot of entrepreneurs start making the mistake of it's like I touched one thing it turned to gold, we think we can touch some more turns to gold. And it usually always backfires. It has to be the data. So I started thinking, Okay, I don't want to make that same mistake where it's like you think you're the end all be all, and everything you're gonna do is going to be magical. It's not, who can I contact that knows data because I'm staring at this stuff. And I it's like a foreign language. I'm like, looking at like, I don't even know, but I'm just staring at these. And I'm like, this is this way too much data here. And like, no one had a really easy way of organizing it so led me to contacting you. And that's kind of where things began. Grant That freaked me out at first and I'm like, Oh, yeah, we're gonna do some AI on this. That just sound weird to you. Blake Yeah, I was just like, you know, I've heard of AI before. And like my geeky brain can like understand it to an extent. But I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Grant, just do your magic because this sounds crazy to me still. Grant Alright, so it's important to you to understand your business numbers, like you said, so that you can figure out some predictability. It helps you what influenced some of your planning or your next like, if you don't know your numbers in your business, right? Blake You can skate, you can look you can get to you can just run a start a successful business and grow it to an extent flying blind. Like you can do that. You could you know, you can get a little lucky. You can have something that's pretty stable. But if you really want to grow your business and you're wondering why you're capping out and everything, your tribes not working, there's a good chance you have no idea what your numbers are, right? So if you really there's I don't know another Way to scale a company then by really understanding your data, because when you understand your data, you know, what's converting what's working, what's not. And you can focus more energy on the things that are working and put more money behind those, hence, scaling those. And like kind of divesting out of things that aren't working so well. And the only way to do that is to really have a grip over the data inside of your business, which honestly, is probably the last thing entrepreneurs do, right? Because it's just so overwhelming. You just like the one thing you want to avoid. But I can't express at least in the last few months, how much I like realized how important it really is, to having a grip on it and what it can do for your business. It's the difference maker in your business. Grant Okay, that's, that's awesome. So when you got started working with us, how much did you have to know about AI? That, were we shoving it down your throat? We're like, hey, learn logistic regression. Come on Blake. Blake Great, I had no idea of anything you you you had, like, I knew nothing going into it. And I still didn't have to know that much. Because working with you, you're able to articulate the data in a way my brain my, you know, kindergarten brain could understand with pictures and awesome things like that. So going into it. No, I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't have to know anything, which was great. Because you knew exactly how that data worked. You knew how to show me and you basically just were withdrawal. You're like, this is what this means. I'm like, I understand that instead of me trying to figure out what to do. Or the guess is it literally taught you told me what, on this day or this time or after a holiday or before holiday or during this season? Or during this quarter? This is what you should do? and not do. I was like, I can understand that. So it was simple. Grant So let me ask you about that in terms of ways to make something like this easier for a business owner. Now that you've gone through this experience, what would be some some tips that you would share with others to help them in their journey going through this? Blake Yeah, just look, data is one of those things. Again, I can't stress it enough anymore. And I don't think many people geek out on it. Like, the thing is, always have a grip on your business when it comes to the numbers, because then you can have the ability to have someone like grant come in and help and help you and show you on what to do with those numbers. Right. Having those numbers is great. You might tell me all day, I know my conversions in my business. And I know, I know my opt in rate. And I know this grants the person that can tell you what that really means and what to do with it. And that's the difference. Because it's one thing, knowing about the numbers, the next is being able to take action on what that data means. And if you look at most things, right? There's every software on this planet will tell you numbers, right, here's your conversion rate, here's your OPT in rate, here's what won the split test. But there's another layer after that. And that was like that was what I was really impressed working with you is that you were the second layer, you were the the team that came in, I was like, Hey, this is what this means. That's great. But this is what it means to do with it. So I would advise anyone, that's whether you're just getting going or you're looking to grow your business, start to get a little grip on your numbers, because then you're able to, you know, work with someone as amazing as grant to help you really scale those numbers by making those decisions. Grant Blake, you've been more than generous with your time with us today. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for doing this. Any final tips or comments to people who are starting to grow their business? Yeah, so starting to grow your business, always make sure a I'll start from the beginning, you're gonna solve a big problem, right? Blake Find a big problem, if you find out that you're capping a lot, right? There could be a lot of reasons, like I said, data could be one of them. But just remember, like, solve really big problems, right? Because then it's gonna give you room to grow. And as you start growing, get a real grip on those numbers. Because seriously, there's no other way to scale. You can't scale a business without that predictability. And having that predictability is going to give you the chance to grow your business on a whole new level. Again, understanding what those is and work yourself like grant or some this AI technology. That's absolutely amazing, right? It tells you exactly what to do in order to make those decisions. So no longer do you have to guess anymore. I mean, we've been guessing our whole lives as marketers with split testing and things like that. It's amazing to know that you can go into situations right where the data is, this is kind of how this is how it works. And these are the these are the ways you need to react based on that on on all that information. So that's my final words. I know it's more like this is the geek mind going but solve big problems, get a grip on your numbers and then find a way to take that those numbers and use them to make those decisions to grow your business on a whole new level. Grant Hey, thanks again, Blake for joining us. And thanks everyone for listening in. Until next time, get a grip on your numbers. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

One simple hack to increase your revenue. In this episode we discuss how to increase your revenue through your business numbers. Grant Hi everybody this is Grant Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. In this episode, I have the opportunity to discuss with the infamous Blake nubar on how to get a grip on your business numbers. Everybody, welcome to another episode of click AI radio. This is Grant Larsen, I cannot tell you how excited I am today to have a visitor here with me someone that I've been dying to interview for a long time. I have really admired this man and what he's done. Blake nubar. Blake I appreciate you having me here, man. It's a pleasure. I'm ready to have some fun and and thanks for having me on the podcast. Grant Thanks for taking the time to do this. You know, I've chased you for some time, right? Just keep trying to track you down wherever you are on the planet, right? Trying to get a moment of your time. But thanks so much for doing that. In fact, I was remembering the first time that I met you. I happen to actually be sitting right next to you, right. And it was at a funnel hacking live. And I think it might have been the first one that I ever went to. And I'm sitting next to you. And we're just chatting for a minute. And then you were so humble all sudden, they're like, Blake nubar, please come up to the front. They call yell, I'm like what the heck, you had won this award for everything you've done to the business. How cool is that? Blake Yeah, it was wild, I would award the growth on that thing was insane. Actually, that was on the product. And that was really cool. And yeah, I remember sitting next to you specifically. And I was like, Wait, are you Steve's Dad? And you're like, yeah, I'm Steve's dad. I'm like, man, he talks about you all the time. Like in such an awesome way. It's fine. Nice to meet you. So, ya know, collecting the first is my first time walking across stage getting the the two comma club award. And that was done with an online business that it was called the b2b formula. I was working with a guy named Brian page on that. We kind of started that thing from ground zero type thing. Brian had a he had a course out really. But you know, wasn't making sales didn't know what a funnel was. All that good stuff. And we kind of like teamed up, you know, and we found each other through this thing. We started building this thing out. And you know, next thing you know, by implementing funnels and getting the right traffic sources in place. We did a million dollars in 43 days with that offer. And we were there at that funnel hacking live collecting that award that was actually here in Orlando, Florida, I believe, which is funny enough, because it's back here again, this year in 2021. Which should be exciting. So yeah, that that was a it was an exhilarating experience. A lot of crazy stuff happened. But on all Yeah, crazy to like help grow a business like that. Grant I think about how you got started, I've heard a little bit of your origin story. But could you just take a moment to talk about how did you get started into this? Yeah, so Blake Um, that my whole online journey and my funnel journey is different. My funnel journey is probably more applicable for this. So I was working in the nine to five, I was working in a fitness company. And we were working on building out this certification program for people that want to become personal trainers. If you want to become a personal trainer, you had to pass this exam. It's just like a standardized thing that you have to do. I don't know if it varies from state to state, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But we're building out the certification. And we want to like really go all in on this thing. So we spent we like really transformed how a training program should be. And we like we finished this thing. Like, it was crazy worth like nine months on this thing. It was a ton of time, but it was it was awesome. I had like a mobile app. It was this book. It was an online program and like all 360 views and amazing product. And we go and I hand it over to the marketing department and I'm like, Hey guys, like we're ready to rock and roll and start selling this thing and I almost like hand over the torch and they just couldn't sell it. Like nothing was moving and I just remember getting frustrated cuz I'm like, hey, like, Why is this not working? Like I thought that's your job. You're supposed to like market this stuff now and they're like driving traffic to like a website just like nothing was working. And I remember go I went home one night. And I was like frustrated Of course and I'm sitting there it's like three in the morning. I'm staring at my ceiling fan. And on my laptop on my on my bed. So I just remember pulling it open and looking through it. And I see this ad Come up. And I just remember the ad it just said weird marketing experiments to increase traffic conversions and sales online. I'll never forget the saint of it. And it's this crazy guy on it. His name is Russell Brunson. I had no idea who he was. And he was just like, full of energy. So I clicked on this ad. And next thing I know, I went in in a sales funnel. I didn't know I was in a phone, I thought I was on a website. But lo and behold, I was in a sales funnel. And it's basically Russell just being like, you want to grow a business online, you want to start a business, you need a funnel, you need a funnel, and he's like, going through all these different types of funnels. And I remember I was like, so intrigued by it. I was like, a 90 minute presentation, and I was so captivated. I remember, I watched it. Again, I watched it twice. So I watched this thing twice. It's like six in the morning, I go straight into the office, I started sketching out a funnel on the board, and the marketing department like, what are you doing, man? I'm like, I know how we're gonna sell this. We're gonna use a sales funnel, like, what's the sales funnel? And I'm like, I don't really know yet. But this guy Russell talks about it. And I think I think this is how we can sell this thing. So I start sketching this thing out. I call up one of our celebrity trainers, who is like the poster child of this brand new certification. I'm like, hey, so and so we need a webinar. Like I bought the perfect webinar stuff. I sent it over to him, he like records this webinar, he sends it back like a week later, I build my first funnel out ever inside of clickfunnels. I put this thing in, and I go to the marketing department say, Hey, guys, instead of like what you were doing, just drive traffic, I do what you do, but just send them to this thing here. And they're like, Alright, so they send people there. And people start often. And people start watching this thing, right? When we go deliver the offer. No one buys like not a single person purchase this thing. webinar ends, we're done. I go outside. I'm like, I'm like Kirsten to myself. I'm like, Oh, another fail What idea. And I remember how like one more last, like lackluster hope of trying to get this thing to work. And I walked back inside. And I just went to my computer and I clicked on the refresh button. And we made our first sale for like, it was like 797 bucks like $800. And I went nuts. And it's like I this Russell stuff works right funnels work. And I walked in the next day and I quit. And I set out on this journey for the for the next year of trying to understand how you know, basically the science of selling stuff online, like funnels and offers and messaging and all that good stuff. And the rest is history. Grant One sale. That's amazing. That's it. Blake There's no I think that's one thing I think a lot of us will relate to. And if you if you haven't relate to yet, you know, some people are watching and listening, they have it. The one thing I think a lot of people will tell you is that when you make your first ever sale online, whether it's $5 or 500, there's this feeling that happens where you just like there's no turning back, I want more of this experience again and again and again. Yeah, Grant Yeah. I love that, that so so your secret sauce as a business owner, it sounds like it's a combination of things. One, you stuck with this clearly right? And it took lots of tries to do. But I've watched you build from that, because I've seen some of the things you've created since then, which is just incredible. I think you've really been perfecting the art of the launch the product launch. He talked about that for a moment. Yeah. Blake So anytime you have a really creative idea, right? I'm never an advocate anymore. I used to be right of building it out first and then launch it. And I've kind of flipped that on its head. Now it's more like launch it first and then build it out. Because a lot of things that prohibit entrepreneurs from moving forward that stopped them in their tracks as they think they have to go build out these products and services first. And it's really difficult, right? There's a lot of friction in that. And almost it's like a recipe to fail and quit and give up and not want to do it again. So I'm more of a fan of See if you can go sell the idea that you have first and then go spend the time building it out. So anytime we have an idea, what we like to do is really go really hard in the paint, when it comes to launching because launching is definitely it's the way to prove your concept. It's the way that it gives you the short term capital to inject into building the process and fulfilling on it. And even putting more even gives you the capital you need to put into evergreen strategies like paid media and things like that. So we're just like what we do really well here my business partner and I is that we when it comes to a new idea, we really like to watch hard and aggressively like we like, we don't just like to send an email. We don't like to just make a Facebook post or a couple ads. Let's say we like to be the loudest people in the room where by the end of it, I'm hoping people look at me and like man, that Blake nubar dude, he's super annoying, because then I knew we did a good enough job because you couldn't escape us during that launch. So launching is one of those things where it's like, it's you got to become a master of it. Like you have to know how to do it. But you never want to stay in it. It's like learn how to launch and then learn how to move that stuff to the Evergreen model where it just keeps producing for your business day in and day out. So watching is it's it's something you have wasted you have to learn it you have to become really good at it and There's so many different types of launches you could do honestly, it's like, fall one of the frameworks and put your idea into that framework and then just see how it does and see if the markets willing to judge and pull out their credit cards to pay for it. Grant Are there certain social media platforms that you tend to focus on for your launches? Yes, so we, I'm a fan of Facebook. Blake I like have this love/hate relationship with Facebook, because it's like, as much as as great of a place it is, it's like you have very little control as an advertiser. So Facebook's a really good spot we enjoy. I think the all our biggest launch we've ever done was only by utilizing Facebook, which is crazy, right? It's just because Facebook to me is the hub. Like if you're on social media, you're on you have Facebook, on your phone, or you use Facebook, you might have the other ones too, you might have like tik tok and Instagram and all the other ones. But Facebook is definitely the core. So I'm like, Okay, let's focus on Facebook, which a reason behind that was a we didn't want to get overwhelmed. I didn't want to like every additional platform, you have to like fake have to. It's just more stuff you have to create. It's different type of content you have to create because the platforms have different ways of posting and stuff. So we're just like, let's do Facebook. That's our favorite. But now as we've expanded the business, and we've grown, we really focus on Facebook and Instagram, those are kind of the the two big honey holes, I would say when it comes to it. We do email marketing and things like that. But it's really Facebook and Instagram, because like I said, that's where every I mean, everyone's on Facebook, I mean, and you take it literal ticket, figuratively, the world's on Facebook. So what better platform to use, and the one where everyone's kind of congregating. Grant Okay, that's awesome. So you know where you're going to find your people. So you grew this business and you become expert at launches and launches. And you got to a certain point in your business, there was some time or place or condition you got into Lake where it led you to reach out and try to track down someone like myself, what were those conditions? Blake Yeah, so I remember, you know, the business was growing, we were doing really big revenue numbers. And I remember when I was working with Brian, right, previously, I remember, he had a consultant that was really advocate about understanding your data. And I didn't get it at first, I'm just like, What does any of this stuff mean? And as you really start to see, when your business grows, if you don't have a grip on the numbers, you're kind of in trouble. And I remember we were getting to a point where our revenues were, you know, high six figures every month. And I'm just over here. And I remember I think I reached out to I don't know, if I reached out to Steve, or Steve reached out to me. But I remember one instance happened in regards to conversations like, you need to talk to my dad. And I'm like, he knows this stuff. And he's, it seems like it's what he does. And I'm like, Okay, done deal. And the reason I reached out to you is because I realized that in order for your business to have a grip on it to have a pulse on what it's doing to scale it right with predictability. You're you have to understand these numbers, and especially having understanding numbers in a way where you can make really educated decisions based on that data. See, most entrepreneurs, when you're first getting started, you let your intuition guide your decisions. That's great. Like you have a gut reaction. Oh, this is a cool idea. Let's go watch it. But as that thing works, you need to use less intuition and more data to kind of guide where you want to go. Now, if you want to develop new products sure where your intuition run wild, right. But when you want to make really educated decisions on growing your company and what different verticals to go after what different traffic sources, it should no longer be this game of guessing right, which a lot of entrepreneurs start making the mistake of it's like I touched one thing it turned to gold, we think we can touch some more turns to gold. And it usually always backfires. It has to be the data. So I started thinking, Okay, I don't want to make that same mistake where it's like you think you're the end all be all, and everything you're gonna do is going to be magical. It's not, who can I contact that knows data because I'm staring at this stuff. And I it's like a foreign language. I'm like, looking at like, I don't even know, but I'm just staring at these. And I'm like, this is this way too much data here. And like, no one had a really easy way of organizing it so led me to contacting you. And that's kind of where things began. Grant That freaked me out at first and I'm like, Oh, yeah, we're gonna do some AI on this. That just sound weird to you. Blake Yeah, I was just like, you know, I've heard of AI before. And like my geeky brain can like understand it to an extent. But I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Grant, just do your magic because this sounds crazy to me still. Grant Alright, so it's important to you to understand your business numbers, like you said, so that you can figure out some predictability. It helps you what influenced some of your planning or your next like, if you don't know your numbers in your business, right? Blake You can skate, you can look you can get to you can just run a start a successful business and grow it to an extent flying blind. Like you can do that. You could you know, you can get a little lucky. You can have something that's pretty stable. But if you really want to grow your business and you're wondering why you're capping out and everything, your tribes not working, there's a good chance you have no idea what your numbers are, right? So if you really there's I don't know another Way to scale a company then by really understanding your data, because when you understand your data, you know, what's converting what's working, what's not. And you can focus more energy on the things that are working and put more money behind those, hence, scaling those. And like kind of divesting out of things that aren't working so well. And the only way to do that is to really have a grip over the data inside of your business, which honestly, is probably the last thing entrepreneurs do, right? Because it's just so overwhelming. You just like the one thing you want to avoid. But I can't express at least in the last few months, how much I like realized how important it really is, to having a grip on it and what it can do for your business. It's the difference maker in your business. Grant Okay, that's, that's awesome. So when you got started working with us, how much did you have to know about AI? That, were we shoving it down your throat? We're like, hey, learn logistic regression. Come on Blake. Blake Great, I had no idea of anything you you you had, like, I knew nothing going into it. And I still didn't have to know that much. Because working with you, you're able to articulate the data in a way my brain my, you know, kindergarten brain could understand with pictures and awesome things like that. So going into it. No, I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't have to know anything, which was great. Because you knew exactly how that data worked. You knew how to show me and you basically just were withdrawal. You're like, this is what this means. I'm like, I understand that instead of me trying to figure out what to do. Or the guess is it literally taught you told me what, on this day or this time or after a holiday or before holiday or during this season? Or during this quarter? This is what you should do? and not do. I was like, I can understand that. So it was simple. Grant So let me ask you about that in terms of ways to make something like this easier for a business owner. Now that you've gone through this experience, what would be some some tips that you would share with others to help them in their journey going through this? Blake Yeah, just look, data is one of those things. Again, I can't stress it enough anymore. And I don't think many people geek out on it. Like, the thing is, always have a grip on your business when it comes to the numbers, because then you can have the ability to have someone like grant come in and help and help you and show you on what to do with those numbers. Right. Having those numbers is great. You might tell me all day, I know my conversions in my business. And I know, I know my opt in rate. And I know this grants the person that can tell you what that really means and what to do with it. And that's the difference. Because it's one thing, knowing about the numbers, the next is being able to take action on what that data means. And if you look at most things, right? There's every software on this planet will tell you numbers, right, here's your conversion rate, here's your OPT in rate, here's what won the split test. But there's another layer after that. And that was like that was what I was really impressed working with you is that you were the second layer, you were the the team that came in, I was like, Hey, this is what this means. That's great. But this is what it means to do with it. So I would advise anyone, that's whether you're just getting going or you're looking to grow your business, start to get a little grip on your numbers, because then you're able to, you know, work with someone as amazing as grant to help you really scale those numbers by making those decisions. Grant Blake, you've been more than generous with your time with us today. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for doing this. Any final tips or comments to people who are starting to grow their business? Yeah, so starting to grow your business, always make sure a I'll start from the beginning, you're gonna solve a big problem, right? Blake Find a big problem, if you find out that you're capping a lot, right? There could be a lot of reasons, like I said, data could be one of them. But just remember, like, solve really big problems, right? Because then it's gonna give you room to grow. And as you start growing, get a real grip on those numbers. Because seriously, there's no other way to scale. You can't scale a business without that predictability. And having that predictability is going to give you the chance to grow your business on a whole new level. Again, understanding what those is and work yourself like grant or some this AI technology. That's absolutely amazing, right? It tells you exactly what to do in order to make those decisions. So no longer do you have to guess anymore. I mean, we've been guessing our whole lives as marketers with split testing and things like that. It's amazing to know that you can go into situations right where the data is, this is kind of how this is how it works. And these are the these are the ways you need to react based on that on on all that information. So that's my final words. I know it's more like this is the geek mind going but solve big problems, get a grip on your numbers and then find a way to take that those numbers and use them to make those decisions to grow your business on a whole new level. Grant Hey, thanks again, Blake for joining us. And thanks everyone for listening in. Until next time, get a grip on your numbers. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Running your business AND being a MARKETING GENIUS AND hiring AND training AND selling AND delivering AND...well, you get the idea, is a challenge. How would you perform differently if you could have insightful guidance on WHERE to FOCUS your MARKETING activities WITHOUT BEING A MARKETING GENIUS? Hi Everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. All right. So today we're talking about blasting, blasting by your competition without becoming a marketing genius. I remember when I was in college, and I was taking my classes in computer science and business, all those kinds of things, economics, etc. And then I had a marketing class, and I was like marketing, Holy smokes, why do I need marketing? And it turns out, I never did become that marketing genius, you know, is like oh, marketing. Wow. Okay. So the question is, are you a marketing genius? So you and I've had the opportunity to, to help build and run multiple startup companies and marketing such a critical role. You know, in your college, you're like, gee, do I really need this in my life? But the question is, if you're a small to medium business owner, are you a marketing genius? And if not, why not? Right? It actually is, we know as you know, takes a lot of time, to as a small to medium business owner, to of course, run the business, but also to do marketing itself in when you wear so many hats, it's actually really difficult to pivot constantly back into that role, or to never leave the role, and yet still take care of other things. I was looking recently, I was looking up recently, some material on how to become a marketer. I thought, Oh, this will be interesting, you know, because you hear you know, people like Russell Brunson, or Steve Larsen or others, right, talking about what it means to be a marketer. And I ran, I ran into this particular book, I think, I think it's like 30 years old. It says here, learn how to be a marketer. In five steps. You're ready. These are the five steps number one, complete high school. Number two, obtain a bachelor's degree number three, complete a marketing internship. Number four, gain work experience. And number five, obtain a graduate degree if needed. I thought it was joking. But they were actually serious. That Nah, I don't I don't think that's what we're after. Really, what, what I'm really thinking about is most of us aren't marketing experts coming from business, right? We're not graduating from college with a marketing degree. But what we're really interested in what I'm interested in, is how do I apply marketing to my business? Right, even though I'm focused in other areas, how can I really be effective at marketing with my business, so I was looking at this other less than they had eight steps that I thought was kind of interesting. So I'm gonna I'm going to use these eight steps. And then I'm going to show some techniques for applying these so here are the eight steps one, conduct marketing research again, don't forget this is about applying marketing to your business. Alright, so number one, conduct marketing research. Alright, to profile your target market. Three, identify your unique selling proposition for develop your business brand. Five, choose your marketing avenues. Six, set your goals and budgets. Stay with me, seven, nurture your loyal customers and eight, monitor and review. I was like, Alright, that's a little closer again. That's nothing you'd perhaps really hear from someone like Russell Brunson, right. Here's what I did with the list though. I looked at those eight steps that they just articulated. And I said, I can identify four areas where I would apply artificial intelligence. In other words, here's really the point. When I'm running my small and medium business and am super busy, it is a benefit and a real it's gold to the business, if I can get insights from AI at certain places where I'm making marketing decisions. So I'm going to show how those apply AI for these, the four that I chose is step two, profile your target market. Step three, identify your unique selling proposition. And then step seven, nurture your loyal customers, and then eight, monitor and review. So I'm going to break those down, I'm going to start here with step two, profiling your target markets. Alright, so when, as you know, when when you apply at least one we've been applying AI to a company, we look at the business information, and we identify key subgroups for those customers. So let's say let's say you're looking at your at your customer set, what you're really interested in knowing is of that customer set, which which ones actually break down into markets or sub markets, and what are the most profitable ones there, this is a critical activity, because you want to be able to understand best how to reach those customers in each of those sub markets. The AI examines the good and the not good behaviors within each target market. So when we apply it, we're going after a breakdown of sub markets across that that customer set, our experience has been this is gold to your business, right. So for example, one company that we are applying this to, you're ready for this, this is kind of a unique one, but as an example, but the their market segmentation was based on customer behavior before, during and after a US holiday. And their business was directly affected by this segmentation. And it turns out that it was actually a different group and segment of customers that would get involved before, during and after their marketing was best served, we discovered through the AI by promoting seven days or more before the upcoming us holiday. And this permitted them to reduce their post holiday spend, and then redirect them to pre holiday spend. Now, there are certainly other target market segmentations, right, other than holidays, but for this particular example, when you're profiling your target market, ai does a great job at helping you to understand the nuances between those different profiles of the market. And that helps you to redirect your spend. Now, here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So this particular group we were working with, it's not like you know, they were massive marketing people. In fact, they looked at that and said, Wow, we never would have seen this right. So AI really shines in this area. All right, let me go to the next one. So this was in that list. This was Step three, it was called identify your unique selling proposition. Here's one of the key ways that we've seen to apply AI. It's actually a very timing based approach. And by that I mean, I've seen this work best if a company is willing to pivot, one of the most expensive things you and I know that a company can do is to continue down the wrong path too long, right. And so if you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to discover, hey, I'm on the wrong path, obviously, that's beneficial to business. So identifying your unique selling proposition often comes with some intentional planning, and some trial and error. So the cycle from what I've experienced goes like this, number one, connect your business activities to AI. Number two, apply your unique selling proposition number three, the AI monitors this, and they gives you early feedback much earlier than then most of our brains can do it right. And then number four, This, of course, saves you time and money as you pivot away from the pain and then into the money or into things that are more profitable. And so finding the unique selling proposition requires trial and error sometimes, right. And so AI being connected to this allows us to do that trial, discover those things very quickly with AI, is this going to continue to be a positive thing or not? Now, the good news is, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. right let me go to the next one in the list. This one was number seven in their list is called nurture your loyal customers. Now, what I found is one of the most insightful features, let me say that again, one of the most insightful features of applying AI in this area is the ability to analyze scenarios. Here's how it works. The AI gives us insight to the customers and the markets, right that you're working on. And you know, specifically those that are performing well. Typically, what you want to do is when you find those golden veins of customers that are performing well, you really actually want to drill more into that and discover nuances, where you can really exploit and build out because you really want to get your services and your products into that customer set. So with this, what what happens is you execute a series of AI scenarios, and it does some analysis that looks at and provides predictions. So building on the previous example, right of the company had mentioned a moment ago, where they were segmenting, based on us holidays. It turns out in that situation, right? Again, this is just the example unique to them, not saying it's for you, it turns out that the better customers that ultimately did not refund and got more value, were the ones who purchase before the US holiday. And you're ready. Now here's a deeper scenario, right where the AI identifies this. And what it did is said, Look, it goes deeper into that and says, Hey, there served better by those that you talked to that were later in the day, can you believe that in the time of day, and when they were using a specific salesperson with a specific product. So now the AI got very specific and says, have very high probability that in the situations before you, you know, seven days before, this us holiday with this particular salesperson in this product, to have a very high probability of producing X amount of percentage increase in sales, not only but also to get customers that are truly loyal, that don't refund and that actually get value from it, that combination performed higher loyalty and greater value. Now, that's obviously a very unique situation. And there are many other scenarios as well. The key point is, typically, it's hard for our brains to see all of those connection points. But the ai ai picks that up. Now, this enables us to raise the level of service to our loyal customers, and also, to course, grow the loyal customer base. Because when you think about it, if there's any base that I really want to grow, it's not just that I want to bring in more revenue to my business, it's, I want to bring in more loyal revenue, I want to bring in customers that understand and appreciate the value of what it is that the business is providing. Here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So AI really shines in this area. All right, so let's take a look at one other here. So this was step, excuse me, this was step eight in their list. And so what I found here, this one was called monitor and review. And you know, it's easy when you read a list like that, and you go Okay, sure monitoring review that's on almost every list, right? here's here's the critical aspect, though of applying AI. The basic premise is this. What we've seen is over time, your business context changes, right. All I all I have to do is say COVID. And we all nod our head. Yeah, business context has changed. But it's always certainly not you know, anything as large as a pandemic, could be new competitor could be new products, new technology, changing your customer base, new laws or regulations, all sorts of things occur, right, which changes the business context. What this means is that your assumptions and the patterns around those change, which means having AI continually monitoring for these adjustments, and making you aware that it's time to make your own adjustment that's actually worth gold, right? Not waiting too long to continue down the wrong path. The AI In fact, starts to pick it up before our brains do and says, Hey, this is going outside of the patterns here. Need to make you aware of it. Now, the key point is and you probably know what I'm going to say now, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. So I know in my years of running different small startup businesses is it doing marketing? You know, it's always a challenge. On top of everything else you're doing, heck, I'm taking out the garbage, right and helping to deliver the services and products and trying to find the next customer to sell, looking to hire and so forth. You know what that means. But having AI to help fill in and fine tune the scarce resources, fine tune the scarce resources that we have in our small medium businesses, in the ways that I just articulated those four steps, right, there is huge benefit to businesses. So we've looked at these four areas. And what it does is it reduces the need for you to be a marketing expert. I'm not saying it doesn't reduce the need for marketing at all. What it does do though, is it reduces the amount of expertise that I need to have to help pick the right places to go focus or to move away from the AI applied in these areas really helps a lot. All right. Hey, stay tuned for some upcoming webinars. We're gonna host right to bring more information to you on how to apply AI to your business. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, use AI to help your marketing. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Running your business AND being a MARKETING GENIUS AND hiring AND training AND selling AND delivering AND...well, you get the idea, is a challenge. How would you perform differently if you could have insightful guidance on WHERE to FOCUS your MARKETING activities WITHOUT BEING A MARKETING GENIUS? Hi Everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. All right. So today we're talking about blasting, blasting by your competition without becoming a marketing genius. I remember when I was in college, and I was taking my classes in computer science and business, all those kinds of things, economics, etc. And then I had a marketing class, and I was like marketing, Holy smokes, why do I need marketing? And it turns out, I never did become that marketing genius, you know, is like oh, marketing. Wow. Okay. So the question is, are you a marketing genius? So you and I've had the opportunity to, to help build and run multiple startup companies and marketing such a critical role. You know, in your college, you're like, gee, do I really need this in my life? But the question is, if you're a small to medium business owner, are you a marketing genius? And if not, why not? Right? It actually is, we know as you know, takes a lot of time, to as a small to medium business owner, to of course, run the business, but also to do marketing itself in when you wear so many hats, it's actually really difficult to pivot constantly back into that role, or to never leave the role, and yet still take care of other things. I was looking recently, I was looking up recently, some material on how to become a marketer. I thought, Oh, this will be interesting, you know, because you hear you know, people like Russell Brunson, or Steve Larsen or others, right, talking about what it means to be a marketer. And I ran, I ran into this particular book, I think, I think it's like 30 years old. It says here, learn how to be a marketer. In five steps. You're ready. These are the five steps number one, complete high school. Number two, obtain a bachelor's degree number three, complete a marketing internship. Number four, gain work experience. And number five, obtain a graduate degree if needed. I thought it was joking. But they were actually serious. That Nah, I don't I don't think that's what we're after. Really, what, what I'm really thinking about is most of us aren't marketing experts coming from business, right? We're not graduating from college with a marketing degree. But what we're really interested in what I'm interested in, is how do I apply marketing to my business? Right, even though I'm focused in other areas, how can I really be effective at marketing with my business, so I was looking at this other less than they had eight steps that I thought was kind of interesting. So I'm gonna I'm going to use these eight steps. And then I'm going to show some techniques for applying these so here are the eight steps one, conduct marketing research again, don't forget this is about applying marketing to your business. Alright, so number one, conduct marketing research. Alright, to profile your target market. Three, identify your unique selling proposition for develop your business brand. Five, choose your marketing avenues. Six, set your goals and budgets. Stay with me, seven, nurture your loyal customers and eight, monitor and review. I was like, Alright, that's a little closer again. That's nothing you'd perhaps really hear from someone like Russell Brunson, right. Here's what I did with the list though. I looked at those eight steps that they just articulated. And I said, I can identify four areas where I would apply artificial intelligence. In other words, here's really the point. When I'm running my small and medium business and am super busy, it is a benefit and a real it's gold to the business, if I can get insights from AI at certain places where I'm making marketing decisions. So I'm going to show how those apply AI for these, the four that I chose is step two, profile your target market. Step three, identify your unique selling proposition. And then step seven, nurture your loyal customers, and then eight, monitor and review. So I'm going to break those down, I'm going to start here with step two, profiling your target markets. Alright, so when, as you know, when when you apply at least one we've been applying AI to a company, we look at the business information, and we identify key subgroups for those customers. So let's say let's say you're looking at your at your customer set, what you're really interested in knowing is of that customer set, which which ones actually break down into markets or sub markets, and what are the most profitable ones there, this is a critical activity, because you want to be able to understand best how to reach those customers in each of those sub markets. The AI examines the good and the not good behaviors within each target market. So when we apply it, we're going after a breakdown of sub markets across that that customer set, our experience has been this is gold to your business, right. So for example, one company that we are applying this to, you're ready for this, this is kind of a unique one, but as an example, but the their market segmentation was based on customer behavior before, during and after a US holiday. And their business was directly affected by this segmentation. And it turns out that it was actually a different group and segment of customers that would get involved before, during and after their marketing was best served, we discovered through the AI by promoting seven days or more before the upcoming us holiday. And this permitted them to reduce their post holiday spend, and then redirect them to pre holiday spend. Now, there are certainly other target market segmentations, right, other than holidays, but for this particular example, when you're profiling your target market, ai does a great job at helping you to understand the nuances between those different profiles of the market. And that helps you to redirect your spend. Now, here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So this particular group we were working with, it's not like you know, they were massive marketing people. In fact, they looked at that and said, Wow, we never would have seen this right. So AI really shines in this area. All right, let me go to the next one. So this was in that list. This was Step three, it was called identify your unique selling proposition. Here's one of the key ways that we've seen to apply AI. It's actually a very timing based approach. And by that I mean, I've seen this work best if a company is willing to pivot, one of the most expensive things you and I know that a company can do is to continue down the wrong path too long, right. And so if you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to discover, hey, I'm on the wrong path, obviously, that's beneficial to business. So identifying your unique selling proposition often comes with some intentional planning, and some trial and error. So the cycle from what I've experienced goes like this, number one, connect your business activities to AI. Number two, apply your unique selling proposition number three, the AI monitors this, and they gives you early feedback much earlier than then most of our brains can do it right. And then number four, This, of course, saves you time and money as you pivot away from the pain and then into the money or into things that are more profitable. And so finding the unique selling proposition requires trial and error sometimes, right. And so AI being connected to this allows us to do that trial, discover those things very quickly with AI, is this going to continue to be a positive thing or not? Now, the good news is, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. right let me go to the next one in the list. This one was number seven in their list is called nurture your loyal customers. Now, what I found is one of the most insightful features, let me say that again, one of the most insightful features of applying AI in this area is the ability to analyze scenarios. Here's how it works. The AI gives us insight to the customers and the markets, right that you're working on. And you know, specifically those that are performing well. Typically, what you want to do is when you find those golden veins of customers that are performing well, you really actually want to drill more into that and discover nuances, where you can really exploit and build out because you really want to get your services and your products into that customer set. So with this, what what happens is you execute a series of AI scenarios, and it does some analysis that looks at and provides predictions. So building on the previous example, right of the company had mentioned a moment ago, where they were segmenting, based on us holidays. It turns out in that situation, right? Again, this is just the example unique to them, not saying it's for you, it turns out that the better customers that ultimately did not refund and got more value, were the ones who purchase before the US holiday. And you're ready. Now here's a deeper scenario, right where the AI identifies this. And what it did is said, Look, it goes deeper into that and says, Hey, there served better by those that you talked to that were later in the day, can you believe that in the time of day, and when they were using a specific salesperson with a specific product. So now the AI got very specific and says, have very high probability that in the situations before you, you know, seven days before, this us holiday with this particular salesperson in this product, to have a very high probability of producing X amount of percentage increase in sales, not only but also to get customers that are truly loyal, that don't refund and that actually get value from it, that combination performed higher loyalty and greater value. Now, that's obviously a very unique situation. And there are many other scenarios as well. The key point is, typically, it's hard for our brains to see all of those connection points. But the ai ai picks that up. Now, this enables us to raise the level of service to our loyal customers, and also, to course, grow the loyal customer base. Because when you think about it, if there's any base that I really want to grow, it's not just that I want to bring in more revenue to my business, it's, I want to bring in more loyal revenue, I want to bring in customers that understand and appreciate the value of what it is that the business is providing. Here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So AI really shines in this area. All right, so let's take a look at one other here. So this was step, excuse me, this was step eight in their list. And so what I found here, this one was called monitor and review. And you know, it's easy when you read a list like that, and you go Okay, sure monitoring review that's on almost every list, right? here's here's the critical aspect, though of applying AI. The basic premise is this. What we've seen is over time, your business context changes, right. All I all I have to do is say COVID. And we all nod our head. Yeah, business context has changed. But it's always certainly not you know, anything as large as a pandemic, could be new competitor could be new products, new technology, changing your customer base, new laws or regulations, all sorts of things occur, right, which changes the business context. What this means is that your assumptions and the patterns around those change, which means having AI continually monitoring for these adjustments, and making you aware that it's time to make your own adjustment that's actually worth gold, right? Not waiting too long to continue down the wrong path. The AI In fact, starts to pick it up before our brains do and says, Hey, this is going outside of the patterns here. Need to make you aware of it. Now, the key point is and you probably know what I'm going to say now, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. So I know in my years of running different small startup businesses is it doing marketing? You know, it's always a challenge. On top of everything else you're doing, heck, I'm taking out the garbage, right and helping to deliver the services and products and trying to find the next customer to sell, looking to hire and so forth. You know what that means. But having AI to help fill in and fine tune the scarce resources, fine tune the scarce resources that we have in our small medium businesses, in the ways that I just articulated those four steps, right, there is huge benefit to businesses. So we've looked at these four areas. And what it does is it reduces the need for you to be a marketing expert. I'm not saying it doesn't reduce the need for marketing at all. What it does do though, is it reduces the amount of expertise that I need to have to help pick the right places to go focus or to move away from the AI applied in these areas really helps a lot. All right. Hey, stay tuned for some upcoming webinars. We're gonna host right to bring more information to you on how to apply AI to your business. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, use AI to help your marketing. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

Disruptions take many forms, some come from competitors, some come from partners, and some come from pandemics. As a small business owner, are we creating the disruption or aligning with the noise it produces? What can we as small business owners do with disruptions without taking our last cent? Hey, everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about disruption, right disruption to our business disruption to our profits. How do we use disruption to grow our profits without taking our last cent? That's a huge issue and topic today. What we really want to discuss is aligning with destruction. What does it mean to do that? We all know who Clayton Christensen is, back in the 1990s. I think it was he had coined this concept called disruptive innovation. I'm going to quote something that he said on that, alright, you're ready. It's three sentences. So buckle up. All right. So when another company comes along with a novel technology appealing to a niche market, you're not likely to respond right away to this marginal demand. He goes on to say, yet, as new technology improves, suddenly a broader swath of customers find they need it, and you don't have it. Last sentence, here we go. So you have to marshal your resources to deal with the shift in demand as quickly as possible. And quote, all right, so here's here's not. So if the disruptions coming, of course, from our competitors, often our teams, and we've all lived this, we're focused on some other projects. And we often don't have the right set of skills even to address what that disruption is. And so we've got to pivot to deal with that. This style, as we all know, is rather reactionary in behavior, right? It's quite common for us, though. So the question is, is there another way, if we continually ask the question about emerging competitors, and preparing for continual disruption, then our business can be more nimble to address disruption, the challenges we all know is we get caught up in the daily weeds of running and executing the business and then stopping to step back and look at this actually takes a lot of time and effort, of course, now, as a small business, most of us find it really difficult to set aside some innovation team, right, that's constantly looking at disruption. You know, the big, the big organizations will often have those kinds of teams. But one approach is to continually keep a pulse on the most effective and least effective behaviors of your teams. And then being prepared to draw the least effective behaviors on a continual basis. This actually is one of the key key characteristics of AI. When you apply AI on an ongoing on an ongoing nature to your business, it actually helps you to inform, hey, this is something that is not adding to your bottom line in as effective as a manner. And so you want to leverage that right? Take advantage, stop those ineffective behaviors. This means that though, we have to continually rethink and retool, we have to be prepared to relook at our offerings and our operations, and be willing to make adjustments to those. And sometimes if we get too comfortable, that actually turns to really hurt us. But again, we're all busy on a regular basis doing this is difficult. So again, leveraging AI helps us to augment our own intelligence, freeing up our brainpower for creative thinking, I don't know about you, but I know I don't want to sit and go through endless sets of spreadsheets to try to find patterns and discover what this stuff looks like. I mean, you can show some things through a few cool, you know, charts in Google Slides or an Excel things like that. But what it doesn't do, those are dashboards that are basically historical. The AI however, has the ability to discover the patterns that use insights that that are difficult for us for our brains to actually see. Now, some will view disruption as part of their Risk management strategy. And so it's important that we look at this, are we going to look at disruption from an innovative perspective? And we're going to take whatever the whatever the destructive disruption is, and am I going to use it to innovate forward? Or am I going to look at disruption from a perspective of let me manage the risk, it's not that one is better or one is worse, some people and some organizations are driven more by moving away from pain. And other organizations are benefited or more focused or motivated, I should say, by moving towards some goal or vision, either one, both have to respond to disruption. So not long ago, I was talking with a utilities company, and there had just been a major storm in the northwest part of the US. And they were scrambling to deal with the outages. Now, these kinds of disruptions, of course, affect our daily processes. And it may require changes to our own business processes and management structure. I was looking at a report not long ago, it came from Accenture. And the report in this article I was reviewing it's called the report was called breaking through disruption, embrace the power of the wise pivot. Now I love the way that Accenture uses the term wise pivot. Because that truly is the essence of organizations that have survived. It's their ability to to pivot. Alright, one of the things that Accenture pointed out in this is that they looked across 18 industry sectors and they surveyed, you know what those organizations or organizations in those sectors had been doing to deal with with with disruption, they looked over an eight year period of time. What they found is that the majority of them actually left about $41 trillion in enterprise value, they left it meaning they left it exposed, they didn't go embrace it or take take advantage of opportunities. $41 trillion of money left on the table. That's massive, right? That's really massive. So this was about 63% of the companies that they looked at, faced high level of disruption during that period of time. Now those, that report was pre COVID. Right? That's huge. All right. Now, we all know that, obviously COVID hit and actually those numbers are much higher, right, in terms of the percentage of companies being impacted by disruption. COVID being one of those. So as a small business owner, what's our job? Are we in the job of creating disruption? Or are we in the job of aligning with disruption? Well, I would say it's both. But let's talk about disruption right now, in the sense that we align our businesses with it to ride the tide. Okay, that's often much easier for us to do as small business owners. Now, I ran into a framework that some organizations have put together around parameters to evaluate a disruptions potential impact to your business, I kind of like what they did here. They broke it into three areas. There's evaluating it from an industry perspective, looking at the impact to competitors, and your protection from competitors. And what would happen to you if your competitor won? So that's the first category, the other category? The second category was internal, which is, what's the impact to your current business? And what level of internal challenges are you having? And then the third category was focusing on your customers, right? How do your customers feel about this disruption? Is it impacting them? Is it is it just a novelty to them? What is that? So what I did was I took this framework, and I filled it in with an example of blockbuster and Netflix, right? Who doesn't know this one? Right. Let's, let's try this one out. Okay. So from an industry perspective, so we've got blockbuster, obviously Netflix comes in. And and at the time, how is blockbuster responding to this? Well, you know, when it first started to happen, actually, as Clayton Christensen pointed out, look, okay, Netflix comes along, and yeah, they have this shipping DVD thing, right? And okay, they're starting to stream a little bit, but you know what, they just think that their customers think this thing's a novelty, it's going to go away. There are some internal debates, obviously in blockbuster, right. They're looking at this saying, you know, what, we're unwilling to pivot were unwilling to make changes to this. And at the time, the industry's impact, at least some sure from their perspective, I wasn't there in their board. rooms for sure. But from the external behavior looks like that they didn't view that it was a winner take all scenario, right? And so this competition from them certainly didn't see or from, from Netflix didn't seem that much of a threat. All right, hindsight 2020. Obviously, what we do see is how did Disney and Amazon and Hulu and so forth, how did they respond to disruptive streaming? Well, we all know that they aligned and leverage did is we all have multiple accounts today, right across these different streaming platforms. So I refer back to Clayton Christensen, right, when another company comes along with a novel technology, and you're not likely to respond right away. Because you know what, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. There's some point though, where it crosses this threshold where suddenly your even your customers are starting to ask about it. And he can't ignore it, right? And even organizations like Disney, and Amazon and Hulu line up with this, right? So let's try another example. Let's say instead of talking about blockbuster, let's talk about you. And instead of talking about Netflix, let's talk about the disruption of COVID. Alright, so you with the disruption of COVID on your business. So if we look at the three areas, all right, what's the impact here of COVID? To your industry, and to the competitors, your competitors in your industry? Right? What is the impact to them? What's the internal impact to your business? And what's happening? Is there some internal controversy? I'm sure there is? And what's the impact to the resources of your organization? And then the third category is how, how are your customers being impacted by this? Is this a novelty? Are their own processes being disruptive? The question is, how will you pivot and align? Now? What does this have to do with AI? Right? Well, quite a bit, I would argue the key message here is about pivoting your business. And as a small business owner, you actually can't afford to pivot with blinders on using AI to analyze and expose your sales behaviors, you know, discovering, not just sales, but business behaviors, and so forth. discovering what you don't know you don't know that, that actually becomes even more critical now than ever. And then as you discover what you don't know you don't know and AI exposes those things. You need to be able to prevent, you know, pivot pivot your business. Now to learn more about how to pivot with the current disruption. We're going to be launching a webinar soon, so keep an eye out for information on this. You can get started though by going to click ai radio.com. Alright, everybody. Thank you for joining and until next time, prepare to pivot your business in the current disruption. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

Disruptions take many forms, some come from competitors, some come from partners, and some come from pandemics. As a small business owner, are we creating the disruption or aligning with the noise it produces? What can we as small business owners do with disruptions without taking our last cent? Hey, everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about disruption, right disruption to our business disruption to our profits. How do we use disruption to grow our profits without taking our last cent? That's a huge issue and topic today. What we really want to discuss is aligning with destruction. What does it mean to do that? We all know who Clayton Christensen is, back in the 1990s. I think it was he had coined this concept called disruptive innovation. I'm going to quote something that he said on that, alright, you're ready. It's three sentences. So buckle up. All right. So when another company comes along with a novel technology appealing to a niche market, you're not likely to respond right away to this marginal demand. He goes on to say, yet, as new technology improves, suddenly a broader swath of customers find they need it, and you don't have it. Last sentence, here we go. So you have to marshal your resources to deal with the shift in demand as quickly as possible. And quote, all right, so here's here's not. So if the disruptions coming, of course, from our competitors, often our teams, and we've all lived this, we're focused on some other projects. And we often don't have the right set of skills even to address what that disruption is. And so we've got to pivot to deal with that. This style, as we all know, is rather reactionary in behavior, right? It's quite common for us, though. So the question is, is there another way, if we continually ask the question about emerging competitors, and preparing for continual disruption, then our business can be more nimble to address disruption, the challenges we all know is we get caught up in the daily weeds of running and executing the business and then stopping to step back and look at this actually takes a lot of time and effort, of course, now, as a small business, most of us find it really difficult to set aside some innovation team, right, that's constantly looking at disruption. You know, the big, the big organizations will often have those kinds of teams. But one approach is to continually keep a pulse on the most effective and least effective behaviors of your teams. And then being prepared to draw the least effective behaviors on a continual basis. This actually is one of the key key characteristics of AI. When you apply AI on an ongoing on an ongoing nature to your business, it actually helps you to inform, hey, this is something that is not adding to your bottom line in as effective as a manner. And so you want to leverage that right? Take advantage, stop those ineffective behaviors. This means that though, we have to continually rethink and retool, we have to be prepared to relook at our offerings and our operations, and be willing to make adjustments to those. And sometimes if we get too comfortable, that actually turns to really hurt us. But again, we're all busy on a regular basis doing this is difficult. So again, leveraging AI helps us to augment our own intelligence, freeing up our brainpower for creative thinking, I don't know about you, but I know I don't want to sit and go through endless sets of spreadsheets to try to find patterns and discover what this stuff looks like. I mean, you can show some things through a few cool, you know, charts in Google Slides or an Excel things like that. But what it doesn't do, those are dashboards that are basically historical. The AI however, has the ability to discover the patterns that use insights that that are difficult for us for our brains to actually see. Now, some will view disruption as part of their Risk management strategy. And so it's important that we look at this, are we going to look at disruption from an innovative perspective? And we're going to take whatever the whatever the destructive disruption is, and am I going to use it to innovate forward? Or am I going to look at disruption from a perspective of let me manage the risk, it's not that one is better or one is worse, some people and some organizations are driven more by moving away from pain. And other organizations are benefited or more focused or motivated, I should say, by moving towards some goal or vision, either one, both have to respond to disruption. So not long ago, I was talking with a utilities company, and there had just been a major storm in the northwest part of the US. And they were scrambling to deal with the outages. Now, these kinds of disruptions, of course, affect our daily processes. And it may require changes to our own business processes and management structure. I was looking at a report not long ago, it came from Accenture. And the report in this article I was reviewing it's called the report was called breaking through disruption, embrace the power of the wise pivot. Now I love the way that Accenture uses the term wise pivot. Because that truly is the essence of organizations that have survived. It's their ability to to pivot. Alright, one of the things that Accenture pointed out in this is that they looked across 18 industry sectors and they surveyed, you know what those organizations or organizations in those sectors had been doing to deal with with with disruption, they looked over an eight year period of time. What they found is that the majority of them actually left about $41 trillion in enterprise value, they left it meaning they left it exposed, they didn't go embrace it or take take advantage of opportunities. $41 trillion of money left on the table. That's massive, right? That's really massive. So this was about 63% of the companies that they looked at, faced high level of disruption during that period of time. Now those, that report was pre COVID. Right? That's huge. All right. Now, we all know that, obviously COVID hit and actually those numbers are much higher, right, in terms of the percentage of companies being impacted by disruption. COVID being one of those. So as a small business owner, what's our job? Are we in the job of creating disruption? Or are we in the job of aligning with disruption? Well, I would say it's both. But let's talk about disruption right now, in the sense that we align our businesses with it to ride the tide. Okay, that's often much easier for us to do as small business owners. Now, I ran into a framework that some organizations have put together around parameters to evaluate a disruptions potential impact to your business, I kind of like what they did here. They broke it into three areas. There's evaluating it from an industry perspective, looking at the impact to competitors, and your protection from competitors. And what would happen to you if your competitor won? So that's the first category, the other category? The second category was internal, which is, what's the impact to your current business? And what level of internal challenges are you having? And then the third category was focusing on your customers, right? How do your customers feel about this disruption? Is it impacting them? Is it is it just a novelty to them? What is that? So what I did was I took this framework, and I filled it in with an example of blockbuster and Netflix, right? Who doesn't know this one? Right. Let's, let's try this one out. Okay. So from an industry perspective, so we've got blockbuster, obviously Netflix comes in. And and at the time, how is blockbuster responding to this? Well, you know, when it first started to happen, actually, as Clayton Christensen pointed out, look, okay, Netflix comes along, and yeah, they have this shipping DVD thing, right? And okay, they're starting to stream a little bit, but you know what, they just think that their customers think this thing's a novelty, it's going to go away. There are some internal debates, obviously in blockbuster, right. They're looking at this saying, you know, what, we're unwilling to pivot were unwilling to make changes to this. And at the time, the industry's impact, at least some sure from their perspective, I wasn't there in their board. rooms for sure. But from the external behavior looks like that they didn't view that it was a winner take all scenario, right? And so this competition from them certainly didn't see or from, from Netflix didn't seem that much of a threat. All right, hindsight 2020. Obviously, what we do see is how did Disney and Amazon and Hulu and so forth, how did they respond to disruptive streaming? Well, we all know that they aligned and leverage did is we all have multiple accounts today, right across these different streaming platforms. So I refer back to Clayton Christensen, right, when another company comes along with a novel technology, and you're not likely to respond right away. Because you know what, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. There's some point though, where it crosses this threshold where suddenly your even your customers are starting to ask about it. And he can't ignore it, right? And even organizations like Disney, and Amazon and Hulu line up with this, right? So let's try another example. Let's say instead of talking about blockbuster, let's talk about you. And instead of talking about Netflix, let's talk about the disruption of COVID. Alright, so you with the disruption of COVID on your business. So if we look at the three areas, all right, what's the impact here of COVID? To your industry, and to the competitors, your competitors in your industry? Right? What is the impact to them? What's the internal impact to your business? And what's happening? Is there some internal controversy? I'm sure there is? And what's the impact to the resources of your organization? And then the third category is how, how are your customers being impacted by this? Is this a novelty? Are their own processes being disruptive? The question is, how will you pivot and align? Now? What does this have to do with AI? Right? Well, quite a bit, I would argue the key message here is about pivoting your business. And as a small business owner, you actually can't afford to pivot with blinders on using AI to analyze and expose your sales behaviors, you know, discovering, not just sales, but business behaviors, and so forth. discovering what you don't know you don't know that, that actually becomes even more critical now than ever. And then as you discover what you don't know you don't know and AI exposes those things. You need to be able to prevent, you know, pivot pivot your business. Now to learn more about how to pivot with the current disruption. We're going to be launching a webinar soon, so keep an eye out for information on this. You can get started though by going to click ai radio.com. Alright, everybody. Thank you for joining and until next time, prepare to pivot your business in the current disruption. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

The competitive landscape has changed; large businesses are investing more and more in R&D & AI, outpacing Small-to-Medium business investment. With COVID-19 having much more significant impact on Small-to-Medium businesses, every tool we can use to re-kindle small businesses is needed. In this episode I have the opportunity to interview a technology provider who has seen the secrets to business growth through AI. Hi Everybody, this is Grant Larsen, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So glad to have you here with us today. All right, I told you a couple episodes ago about something exciting that was coming up. And this episode is one of those pieces, it is an opportunity that I've been looking for for a long time to bring in. One of the industry experts that I work with. His name is Tommy Stewart Say hi, Tommy. Hello, hello. Thanks, Grant. Thank you. Alright, hey, thanks for being here with us today, Tommy. So I'm excited about this conversation. Because the relationship that I have with Tommy and his organization is foundational to the work that we do at click AI. Now let me talk about this. Tommy and his group provide an AI platform. And there's some real beautiful synergies that we have between the click AI work and what Tommy and his team are doing. So without further ado, let me stop chatting here and give you Tommy a chance to introduce yourself, talk about your background and who you are. Thanks, Grant. And this is a really, really an exciting opportunity just to sit down and have a chat with you. But for most, for the most part, you know, this has been a great run for us all. And this is an exciting space. So I've been in CRM and sales for 20 plus years, I won't say how long I've actually been but and work for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Teradata and the likes. And, you know, I've been very fortunate to meet our CEO, he sold his last product to Salesforce. And we're on this journey, really to democratize kind of a core capability to millions of people across all businesses. And the exciting thing is that I've enjoyed over my career has been able to solve problems, right, you know, whether large or small. And so I feel like I have a unique opportunity today in this marketplace to introduce a technology that has been far reaching and that kind of black box to individuals who never thought they would have access. And so I'm really excited this is I think I'm in a new space in my career where kind of like when we started CRM, and that initiative with Tom Siebel, and seeing it, you know, match rate over the time with the likes of Salesforce. I think we're in the cutting edge, I think we're in the space that is actually going to change how people do business. And small companies and what you're talking about are going to really pick up speed speed, because there's technology available today. That wasn't available years ago. Yeah, that's amazing. I love the way that your company's name is spelled. Can you spell that out? A-i-b-l-e Yeah. So it's pronounced "Able", right. But "AI-ble", alright, and the mission or the vision that you talked about, which is to democratize AI. That's when I first met your organization. That's what resonated with me immediately. And I immediately saw "Wait a minute", I'm seeing this divide. It's a bit of a digital divide between big companies and small companies, and how I feel that the big companies are getting this advantage that is propelling them. And we're gonna go over a few things in this episode today that will actually call that out. But that is propelling them, which is good for the big companies, but not so good for the small companies. And I saw Aible as a way to help propel the small and medium business to take advantage of AI. So are you ready for just a slew of questions I'm going to run by you? Absolutely. Fire away. Let's have it. Let's go. All right, here's one. Okay, so you and your organization and you and I partner together And together, we bring this AI to small and medium businesses, but from what you're seeing what problems do you see small to medium businesses face today? What are they experiencing as you guys go around and talk about various companies? Well, you know, let's start with the basics, you know, raising and managing your capital, right, you know, everybody needs revenue, but fundamentally adopting new technology or top technology that is really been tasked to help enterprises and so When you think about a small business trying to get into the market, launch a new technology or launch a new product, and have the same capabilities of large companies, typically, the cost to acquire that technology has been so far off, it's been impossible. So many small companies are figuring out how can I start? How can I adapt? And how can I stay contemporary, because at the point in time, where large companies are going to take technology, they're just going to move some of the small companies away. And so a lot of small business owners are figuring out how can I use what I have today? And a reasonable amount of spin? And how do I actually differentiate myself in the marketplace? And so that's kind of the main thing is how do I get started? How do I innovate? And how do I adapt to when change happens? And how do I drive business results? And so using a technology like artificial intelligence, you know, augment it with human intelligence, right? You know, you got to have to have that human intervention component, really will help small businesses. And so that's what we're seeing today. And there are several companies that are saying, I'm just going to put my toe in the water and take a stab at kind of what's going on, I think that's the best way to do it. So hopefully, that helps, you know, some small companies understand that. It's not that far off, and you have access to the capabilities at the big boys, but you got to take advantage of it. Yeah, that was one of the things that impressed me when I first met the CEO of your organization, one of the things that he did last summer was amazing. He said, You know what, for a period of time, I'm going to make our technologies available to organizations that are trying to solve problems or are being impacted by COVID. And any gave it away for a period of time. It's like, hey, if you want to, if you're solving problems, or your business is negatively impacted, then you know, we'll we'll make this available. That's that's true humanitarian, I love that about your organization. Alright, so there's a series of problems, you see their sales problems or supply chain problems appear to categorize them. Do you see sales solving with sales problems? Are companies using AI a lot for that? Absolutely. Because there's, there's so much that's in the normal, what I call the sales journey. And typically, you know, I come out of the CRM business, right? And CRM was a great tool that everybody adopted. And it was fundamentally built for operational efficiency, right? How do I create velocity? How do I assess risks? How do I forecast? How do I navigate my customers through their lifecycle? But you know, at the end of the day, you know, navigating sales using artificial intelligence is so much more than just CRM. In fact, some of the market indicators suggest that a lot of these CRM companies are buying AI companies, because their CRM needs to be a little bit smarter. And so, you know, so who are the right customers to go target? What are the most profitable customers to target? What is the right lifecycle? What is the right marketing campaigns? How do I use my spin, so using AI to help you look at data, whether small or large and identify blind spots, identify opportunities that you couldn't see on a historical facing dashboard is really going to be exciting. And we see sales as one of the leading areas where artificial intelligence is taking a big enroll right now. I saw a McKinsey report that had stated that, that 60% of large companies were getting some benefits for by using AI in their sales cycle. So let me say the other of the big companies using AI, which has a lot of them now, 60% of them were gaining revenue advantages and increasing their sales because of AI. So I think there's enough precedents there, the US in the small to medium business space should go after that. So on the benefits side, so you've seen companies come in, try to adopt AI? What have been some of the benefits that you've seen organizations experience? Can you talk about some of those? Well, first and foremost, doing less, doing more with less, right, as a small company, you don't have a decision science team, you don't have 25 business analysts. And so being able to allow an individual to do most of what, you know, five, or six or seven people are doing other companies is first and foremost, one of the benefits secondarily, is really focusing on business impact. So our our custom loss function, our AI is trained, or algorithms are trained around what are the best financial and business outcomes. So it allows you to prioritize, I mean, the main thing you can't do as a small company is to have a six month strategy that was off target, right? You don't get time back. Right. And so it allows you to actually deprioritize and then secondarily, to be extremely agile, right disruption, never asked for permission, right? The COVID the pandemic came, it didn't say, hey, America, hey, I... ...can I do this? Okay, if I did this, no. And so as a small company, you need to basically see some of the opportunities and one of our customers here went from being a manufacturer of machines to being a manufacturer of solutions. For the pandemic and medical equipment, and having that ability to pivot, having that ability to look at data, and to look at opportunities and be really opportunistic and nimble, is some of the benefits that we've seen in the early stages. Okay, fascinating. Now, on the flip side of that, what have been some of the hurdles that you've seen these companies go through while they're on their journey? You know, applying AI? Well, in fact, when you say AI scares a lot of people. Yeah. I don't know who's old enough. But there was a show called Lost in Space, and the robot would come out, and it was really spooky. That robot look nothing like the Terminator, right? You know. So for those of us who are older, or younger folks who are listening, have no clue what we just said. But at the end of the day, right, artificial intelligence scares a lot of people. And so one of the big, you know, hurdles is adoption. Right? How do I get started? This seems so foreign. That seems so far away. This seems so complex, and the industry has actually, many companies been very, very successful by making this a very complex, you know, solution for people who have statistical degrees, who sat in departments and got paid a lot of money to do some really cool stuff, You know, tape on their glasses, right? Yeah, absolutely. But now, you know, that hurdle has been removed. And so it's not as far as you think it's not a big leap, as you believe it is, we've been invented our capability into tools that people are using today like Tableau and Salesforce in Power BI, and we can actually download somewhere outcomes in an Excel spreadsheet. Because that's been the big step is adoption. How can I use this advanced technology today, and as a small company, you don't have six to nine months to do a digital Indian transformation, right? You have a matter of weeks and months. And so we, we see that as one of the biggest hurdles, and the biggest fears is just Hey, I just don't have enough or the skill set to get started. And that's been the biggest fear for most small companies. One of the things that myself, my organization did was when we saw this connection with Salesforce and Tableau, we said, hey, let's do the same thing with Click Funnels. And so in a similar manner, you can come along, be running your sales processes through there. And out of that, then comes the data that moves right into an AI pipeline, that starts to give you the information on that. But I won't, I won't give too much away on that secret. Let's start though about the human element in all of this. So it seems like so when you're in a really big company, obviously, the human element is important, meaning the mindset of the people, but I think it's even more important than the small and medium business. Because as you said, You can't be wrong for that six months strategy, right? You're closer to hand to mouth. And so with that, what I found is this need for executives in the small, medium business to be vulnerable, if I could use that term, meaning to be willing to be open to the insights that come from AI? Have you seen examples where organizations have been given AI insights? And sometimes they move and execute on it? But other times they don't? Can you talk about how important mindset isn't this? Well, collaboration is key. And if you were to go and look at our, you know, kind of our mission statement, you know, ClickAI & Aible really helps companies kind of transform around strategic decisions and kind of act optimally, if you will, react to change and collaborate, right? We have a solution that is involves you the human human input, right. So part of our even modeling design, we ask business users for that, the outcome of that is can be a rather illuminating, right? And that's kind of where the insights begin to evolve. But it's experienced the 20 year veteran who's done supply chain who've done sales or marketing can say, Well, I believe the model is correct. But here's kind of how I would apply it today. And I think there's that balance between accepting what AI gives you and allowing the human intervention, the business experience to be embedded in that and then making those strategic decisions. And we have a platform that does that. And I think it's important, especially for a small business for a CEO to now understand that his entire marketing budget has been spent targeting customers that aren't profitable, can be illuminating. Wow, we just spent our third quarter marketing budget on people who don't have a high propensity to buy our product, right? And then having someone say, okay, we understand that, but what is the what is the human part of that, then that will allow us to transition and to take that data? And so, it has been an exciting journey, right? helping organizations identify blind spots, opportunities, areas of improvement, just think about the productivity per employee, right, getting 20 30% productivity improvement just by having better decisioning. Right, based on business impact, and so we think there's a little bit of fear From executives getting information, but there's also that illumination that comes about that leads to profits and better focus better alignment of resources that overcomes that initial aha moment. You had mentioned blind spots, I think, for me in the organizations that I've worked with and applying AI, using the Aible platform, I have noticed that, that it's the blind spots where the biggest opportunity for revenue and sales and business growth have taken place. It's that area where you don't know, what you don't know, right. And when AI exposes or illuminates things in that area, I've seen business owners come to me and say, "I had no idea that you know, this was the case, or that I was causing this problem", or that, "oh, if I just tweaked into this more than, you know, my sales will magnify dramatically. Okay. And part of that, though Grant is because the solutions that have been presented to provide that have been historically facing right review facing the dashboard. So the world right, and so we've looked at a lot of cool, colorful dashboards with, you know, automation, and they look fancy, but they're all looking in the rearview mirror. And the problem is that 90% of these decisions are being made by looking at these dashboards, looking at PowerPoint and looking at data that fundamentally looks we're looks at historical data and allows you to make decisions that sometimes aren't the right ones. Yeah, it's no longer valid. So not long ago, there is this Harvard Business Review article that came out that was talking about somewhat of this digital divide, right, where, whereas looking at the impact of AI and technology, on big companies and small companies. And you know, for a long time, sort of the myth has been that sort of the unspoken word has been, hey, if you want to innovate, and go do something exciting, you're going to go into the small medium business, that's where the companies can be nimble and grow. This Harvard Business Review a few months ago, came out and said, we're actually finding that that competitive edge is waning, that in fact, what's going on is that the big guys are innovating more now. They're adding more to their r&d budgets. And in fact, when Lou Gerstner wrote that book, he says elephants can't dance. They even quoted that right? Where they're talking about even IBM itself, your I can now pivot and do things more nimble. Now, you may or may not agree with some of that. But what you can't ignore are some of the statistics that are coming out. And these statistics are showing that it's becoming more difficult for smaller companies to become big and profitable. That's what they came out from the Harvard Business Review, you know, the small companies of yesterday, right, the Apple's and Amazon's and Netflix and Microsoft, they went through a period of time where, hey, they made this investment in technology. And we're able to lean into that, and produce these large mammoth organizations. But what we're finding now, and this is interesting, this is some stats from the Harvard Business Review, this was 2019. So what I'm going to share here is this was pre COVID. Right? So before COVID, in 20 1910, to 15%, of large companies reported losses, and in 20 1960 to 65% of small companies reported losses. That's that's a big, that's that's huge, right. And this was during economic boom time, right? In 2019, the economy was doing pretty well. Now, during COVID, almost two thirds, I'm sorry, before COVID, almost two thirds, then of those small companies couldn't cover their expenses. Now, let me pivot into COVID with COVID coming on, and the impact to the businesses has not been equitable, right? We know that, in general, the big companies have not lost to the same degree that the small companies had McKinsey in a report just a few months ago said that during COVID, at least 36% of the 6 million small businesses close so that's over 2 million businesses closed. We haven't seen the same 36% loss, you know, for the big guys during that same period of time. So what this means in my mind is we need to provide something that will help the small to medium business owner, maintain retain recapture competitive edge, the big guys aren't getting as negatively impact in general, obviously, certain sectors are like transportation and others. But in general, the small businesses have definitely taken it on the chin, the little guys taking it on the chin, and with the big guys investing more in technology and leveraging AI and getting access to these technologies ahead of the small to medium size business. It just occurred to me that this is a ripe opportunity to take something like what ClickAI is providing with Aible, which is to democratize AI make it available for the small to medium business for pennies on the dollar. I mean, I was doing some analysis the other day, and I think I, what I came back with, you know, you're gonna spend around $300 thousand dollars to reproduce one of these teams to start doing AI by the time you hire your data scientists, right, and your computer scientists and you start purchasing the platform, and everything you're going to spend at least $300,000 to do this. And I think one of the cool things that we've created through this partnership is the ability for small and medium businesses to go nowhere near that number and yet to leverage, you know, tons of years of work experience and insight and technology to help the small to medium business, progress and grow. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, in. First and foremost, I think you've done a great job in creating kind of a turnkey solution that can get companies up and running and be competitive tomorrow, right? I think that's a competitive that is, but you talk about the large companies, I was at a CIO conference a couple years ago at Columbia University and hurt this gentleman, Toby redshaw, who's at Verizon, who's head of strategy in 5g innovation. And he was talking about enterprise agility, right? Big companies understand being slow and methodical is not going to have you gonna allow you to survive, survive. With the pandemic, it is forced a maxi ramp up. And so if small companies believe that they're going to be larger or fast, smaller and faster than these large companies, that's changed. Innovation is now their competitive advantage. It's a survival tactic. I mean, companies have gone out of business. And so you're finding these large company be more innovative. And even in the banking industry, where you see small credit unions who had that personal touch, and the one to one experience, getting pushed aside by big banks are saying we have to do both, we have to have a social presence and a big financial presence. And so they're getting in more social media, they're using AI to determine the best customers and in turn, you know, predictions and stuff like that. And so having small businesses, grab a hold of technology and be just as nimble, as an enterprise organization, at 20%, or 25%, of the cost is not only a competitive advantage, but think of the things they can do. Right? You know, being really fast, right? And putting booster rockets on, on the back of kind of this engine, if you will, of innovation. And so it's not a nice to have. It's a must have just to be in the game. The world has changed so fast that technology, who adopts it when they adopted how fast they adopted could be a game changer. And so large companies have figured it out because they had to, you know, but small companies, they don't figure it out the they will be non existent. I think your organization has done a really good job in providing that gap. And then people should be jumping on like tomorrow. Yeah, I appreciate that. So one final question. Yep. For one more? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. One more question. Therefore, what? In other words, if you were to say something to a small to medium business, what would you say to them to get started with this? Because as you mentioned earlier, people hear AI and they, you know, shutter and run the other direction. And, and yet our whole purpose has been to make this adoptable with as little effort as possible, what would you say to the small to medium business get started with a Start now, right? It's not as far off as you think and your discovery of technology and capabilities, or a lot of really cool things out there. Look, for those companies that are purpose built. We happen to be purpose built around business impact. We don't train our models on accuracy, log loss, and all those other amazing, cool scientific statistical words that you know, get people goosebumps, right. It's all about business impact. So start now start small, and align your strategic imperatives and infuse that second thing, use the data that you have today. Most companies said it's going to take me years, let's figure out what you have today. And then lastly, from a cultural transformation, it's not a big leap. Give people insights into the tools that they use today. You have someone who's doing supply chain working in sa p give them insights in sa p, give them insights inside of Tableau given insight inside of Salesforce, you know, give them some insights on the PowerPoint, you know, just allow them to use it today in a way that they can ingest and make decisions and and watch the difference take place. You know, it's it's not a big leap. You know, we are very excited about being a part of a capability that is intended to be used as widely as PowerPoint. Right. Right. At the end of the day, this sophisticated capability can be used by anybody. And and so I would say to every small business CEO, start now, start with you have and get people immediate value where they work today and see the results. Build on from there. Excellent. Well, Tommy, thank you so much for taking time with me today. I really appreciate that in for answering a million questions that I warned you that I'd be throwing a lot at you. So I'm going to do this, everybody. Thanks again for joining this episode. For additional insights, please go to click ai radio.com get signed up and subscribe and we will get more information to you. Thanks again for everybody. And until next time, get some AI. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

The competitive landscape has changed; large businesses are investing more and more in R&D & AI, outpacing Small-to-Medium business investment. With COVID-19 having much more significant impact on Small-to-Medium businesses, every tool we can use to re-kindle small businesses is needed. In this episode I have the opportunity to interview a technology provider who has seen the secrets to business growth through AI. Hi Everybody, this is Grant Larsen, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So glad to have you here with us today. All right, I told you a couple episodes ago about something exciting that was coming up. And this episode is one of those pieces, it is an opportunity that I've been looking for for a long time to bring in. One of the industry experts that I work with. His name is Tommy Stewart Say hi, Tommy. Hello, hello. Thanks, Grant. Thank you. Alright, hey, thanks for being here with us today, Tommy. So I'm excited about this conversation. Because the relationship that I have with Tommy and his organization is foundational to the work that we do at click AI. Now let me talk about this. Tommy and his group provide an AI platform. And there's some real beautiful synergies that we have between the click AI work and what Tommy and his team are doing. So without further ado, let me stop chatting here and give you Tommy a chance to introduce yourself, talk about your background and who you are. Thanks, Grant. And this is a really, really an exciting opportunity just to sit down and have a chat with you. But for most, for the most part, you know, this has been a great run for us all. And this is an exciting space. So I've been in CRM and sales for 20 plus years, I won't say how long I've actually been but and work for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Teradata and the likes. And, you know, I've been very fortunate to meet our CEO, he sold his last product to Salesforce. And we're on this journey, really to democratize kind of a core capability to millions of people across all businesses. And the exciting thing is that I've enjoyed over my career has been able to solve problems, right, you know, whether large or small. And so I feel like I have a unique opportunity today in this marketplace to introduce a technology that has been far reaching and that kind of black box to individuals who never thought they would have access. And so I'm really excited this is I think I'm in a new space in my career where kind of like when we started CRM, and that initiative with Tom Siebel, and seeing it, you know, match rate over the time with the likes of Salesforce. I think we're in the cutting edge, I think we're in the space that is actually going to change how people do business. And small companies and what you're talking about are going to really pick up speed speed, because there's technology available today. That wasn't available years ago. Yeah, that's amazing. I love the way that your company's name is spelled. Can you spell that out? A-i-b-l-e Yeah. So it's pronounced "Able", right. But "AI-ble", alright, and the mission or the vision that you talked about, which is to democratize AI. That's when I first met your organization. That's what resonated with me immediately. And I immediately saw "Wait a minute", I'm seeing this divide. It's a bit of a digital divide between big companies and small companies, and how I feel that the big companies are getting this advantage that is propelling them. And we're gonna go over a few things in this episode today that will actually call that out. But that is propelling them, which is good for the big companies, but not so good for the small companies. And I saw Aible as a way to help propel the small and medium business to take advantage of AI. So are you ready for just a slew of questions I'm going to run by you? Absolutely. Fire away. Let's have it. Let's go. All right, here's one. Okay, so you and your organization and you and I partner together And together, we bring this AI to small and medium businesses, but from what you're seeing what problems do you see small to medium businesses face today? What are they experiencing as you guys go around and talk about various companies? Well, you know, let's start with the basics, you know, raising and managing your capital, right, you know, everybody needs revenue, but fundamentally adopting new technology or top technology that is really been tasked to help enterprises and so When you think about a small business trying to get into the market, launch a new technology or launch a new product, and have the same capabilities of large companies, typically, the cost to acquire that technology has been so far off, it's been impossible. So many small companies are figuring out how can I start? How can I adapt? And how can I stay contemporary, because at the point in time, where large companies are going to take technology, they're just going to move some of the small companies away. And so a lot of small business owners are figuring out how can I use what I have today? And a reasonable amount of spin? And how do I actually differentiate myself in the marketplace? And so that's kind of the main thing is how do I get started? How do I innovate? And how do I adapt to when change happens? And how do I drive business results? And so using a technology like artificial intelligence, you know, augment it with human intelligence, right? You know, you got to have to have that human intervention component, really will help small businesses. And so that's what we're seeing today. And there are several companies that are saying, I'm just going to put my toe in the water and take a stab at kind of what's going on, I think that's the best way to do it. So hopefully, that helps, you know, some small companies understand that. It's not that far off, and you have access to the capabilities at the big boys, but you got to take advantage of it. Yeah, that was one of the things that impressed me when I first met the CEO of your organization, one of the things that he did last summer was amazing. He said, You know what, for a period of time, I'm going to make our technologies available to organizations that are trying to solve problems or are being impacted by COVID. And any gave it away for a period of time. It's like, hey, if you want to, if you're solving problems, or your business is negatively impacted, then you know, we'll we'll make this available. That's that's true humanitarian, I love that about your organization. Alright, so there's a series of problems, you see their sales problems or supply chain problems appear to categorize them. Do you see sales solving with sales problems? Are companies using AI a lot for that? Absolutely. Because there's, there's so much that's in the normal, what I call the sales journey. And typically, you know, I come out of the CRM business, right? And CRM was a great tool that everybody adopted. And it was fundamentally built for operational efficiency, right? How do I create velocity? How do I assess risks? How do I forecast? How do I navigate my customers through their lifecycle? But you know, at the end of the day, you know, navigating sales using artificial intelligence is so much more than just CRM. In fact, some of the market indicators suggest that a lot of these CRM companies are buying AI companies, because their CRM needs to be a little bit smarter. And so, you know, so who are the right customers to go target? What are the most profitable customers to target? What is the right lifecycle? What is the right marketing campaigns? How do I use my spin, so using AI to help you look at data, whether small or large and identify blind spots, identify opportunities that you couldn't see on a historical facing dashboard is really going to be exciting. And we see sales as one of the leading areas where artificial intelligence is taking a big enroll right now. I saw a McKinsey report that had stated that, that 60% of large companies were getting some benefits for by using AI in their sales cycle. So let me say the other of the big companies using AI, which has a lot of them now, 60% of them were gaining revenue advantages and increasing their sales because of AI. So I think there's enough precedents there, the US in the small to medium business space should go after that. So on the benefits side, so you've seen companies come in, try to adopt AI? What have been some of the benefits that you've seen organizations experience? Can you talk about some of those? Well, first and foremost, doing less, doing more with less, right, as a small company, you don't have a decision science team, you don't have 25 business analysts. And so being able to allow an individual to do most of what, you know, five, or six or seven people are doing other companies is first and foremost, one of the benefits secondarily, is really focusing on business impact. So our our custom loss function, our AI is trained, or algorithms are trained around what are the best financial and business outcomes. So it allows you to prioritize, I mean, the main thing you can't do as a small company is to have a six month strategy that was off target, right? You don't get time back. Right. And so it allows you to actually deprioritize and then secondarily, to be extremely agile, right disruption, never asked for permission, right? The COVID the pandemic came, it didn't say, hey, America, hey, I... ...can I do this? Okay, if I did this, no. And so as a small company, you need to basically see some of the opportunities and one of our customers here went from being a manufacturer of machines to being a manufacturer of solutions. For the pandemic and medical equipment, and having that ability to pivot, having that ability to look at data, and to look at opportunities and be really opportunistic and nimble, is some of the benefits that we've seen in the early stages. Okay, fascinating. Now, on the flip side of that, what have been some of the hurdles that you've seen these companies go through while they're on their journey? You know, applying AI? Well, in fact, when you say AI scares a lot of people. Yeah. I don't know who's old enough. But there was a show called Lost in Space, and the robot would come out, and it was really spooky. That robot look nothing like the Terminator, right? You know. So for those of us who are older, or younger folks who are listening, have no clue what we just said. But at the end of the day, right, artificial intelligence scares a lot of people. And so one of the big, you know, hurdles is adoption. Right? How do I get started? This seems so foreign. That seems so far away. This seems so complex, and the industry has actually, many companies been very, very successful by making this a very complex, you know, solution for people who have statistical degrees, who sat in departments and got paid a lot of money to do some really cool stuff, You know, tape on their glasses, right? Yeah, absolutely. But now, you know, that hurdle has been removed. And so it's not as far as you think it's not a big leap, as you believe it is, we've been invented our capability into tools that people are using today like Tableau and Salesforce in Power BI, and we can actually download somewhere outcomes in an Excel spreadsheet. Because that's been the big step is adoption. How can I use this advanced technology today, and as a small company, you don't have six to nine months to do a digital Indian transformation, right? You have a matter of weeks and months. And so we, we see that as one of the biggest hurdles, and the biggest fears is just Hey, I just don't have enough or the skill set to get started. And that's been the biggest fear for most small companies. One of the things that myself, my organization did was when we saw this connection with Salesforce and Tableau, we said, hey, let's do the same thing with Click Funnels. And so in a similar manner, you can come along, be running your sales processes through there. And out of that, then comes the data that moves right into an AI pipeline, that starts to give you the information on that. But I won't, I won't give too much away on that secret. Let's start though about the human element in all of this. So it seems like so when you're in a really big company, obviously, the human element is important, meaning the mindset of the people, but I think it's even more important than the small and medium business. Because as you said, You can't be wrong for that six months strategy, right? You're closer to hand to mouth. And so with that, what I found is this need for executives in the small, medium business to be vulnerable, if I could use that term, meaning to be willing to be open to the insights that come from AI? Have you seen examples where organizations have been given AI insights? And sometimes they move and execute on it? But other times they don't? Can you talk about how important mindset isn't this? Well, collaboration is key. And if you were to go and look at our, you know, kind of our mission statement, you know, ClickAI & Aible really helps companies kind of transform around strategic decisions and kind of act optimally, if you will, react to change and collaborate, right? We have a solution that is involves you the human human input, right. So part of our even modeling design, we ask business users for that, the outcome of that is can be a rather illuminating, right? And that's kind of where the insights begin to evolve. But it's experienced the 20 year veteran who's done supply chain who've done sales or marketing can say, Well, I believe the model is correct. But here's kind of how I would apply it today. And I think there's that balance between accepting what AI gives you and allowing the human intervention, the business experience to be embedded in that and then making those strategic decisions. And we have a platform that does that. And I think it's important, especially for a small business for a CEO to now understand that his entire marketing budget has been spent targeting customers that aren't profitable, can be illuminating. Wow, we just spent our third quarter marketing budget on people who don't have a high propensity to buy our product, right? And then having someone say, okay, we understand that, but what is the what is the human part of that, then that will allow us to transition and to take that data? And so, it has been an exciting journey, right? helping organizations identify blind spots, opportunities, areas of improvement, just think about the productivity per employee, right, getting 20 30% productivity improvement just by having better decisioning. Right, based on business impact, and so we think there's a little bit of fear From executives getting information, but there's also that illumination that comes about that leads to profits and better focus better alignment of resources that overcomes that initial aha moment. You had mentioned blind spots, I think, for me in the organizations that I've worked with and applying AI, using the Aible platform, I have noticed that, that it's the blind spots where the biggest opportunity for revenue and sales and business growth have taken place. It's that area where you don't know, what you don't know, right. And when AI exposes or illuminates things in that area, I've seen business owners come to me and say, "I had no idea that you know, this was the case, or that I was causing this problem", or that, "oh, if I just tweaked into this more than, you know, my sales will magnify dramatically. Okay. And part of that, though Grant is because the solutions that have been presented to provide that have been historically facing right review facing the dashboard. So the world right, and so we've looked at a lot of cool, colorful dashboards with, you know, automation, and they look fancy, but they're all looking in the rearview mirror. And the problem is that 90% of these decisions are being made by looking at these dashboards, looking at PowerPoint and looking at data that fundamentally looks we're looks at historical data and allows you to make decisions that sometimes aren't the right ones. Yeah, it's no longer valid. So not long ago, there is this Harvard Business Review article that came out that was talking about somewhat of this digital divide, right, where, whereas looking at the impact of AI and technology, on big companies and small companies. And you know, for a long time, sort of the myth has been that sort of the unspoken word has been, hey, if you want to innovate, and go do something exciting, you're going to go into the small medium business, that's where the companies can be nimble and grow. This Harvard Business Review a few months ago, came out and said, we're actually finding that that competitive edge is waning, that in fact, what's going on is that the big guys are innovating more now. They're adding more to their r&d budgets. And in fact, when Lou Gerstner wrote that book, he says elephants can't dance. They even quoted that right? Where they're talking about even IBM itself, your I can now pivot and do things more nimble. Now, you may or may not agree with some of that. But what you can't ignore are some of the statistics that are coming out. And these statistics are showing that it's becoming more difficult for smaller companies to become big and profitable. That's what they came out from the Harvard Business Review, you know, the small companies of yesterday, right, the Apple's and Amazon's and Netflix and Microsoft, they went through a period of time where, hey, they made this investment in technology. And we're able to lean into that, and produce these large mammoth organizations. But what we're finding now, and this is interesting, this is some stats from the Harvard Business Review, this was 2019. So what I'm going to share here is this was pre COVID. Right? So before COVID, in 20 1910, to 15%, of large companies reported losses, and in 20 1960 to 65% of small companies reported losses. That's that's a big, that's that's huge, right. And this was during economic boom time, right? In 2019, the economy was doing pretty well. Now, during COVID, almost two thirds, I'm sorry, before COVID, almost two thirds, then of those small companies couldn't cover their expenses. Now, let me pivot into COVID with COVID coming on, and the impact to the businesses has not been equitable, right? We know that, in general, the big companies have not lost to the same degree that the small companies had McKinsey in a report just a few months ago said that during COVID, at least 36% of the 6 million small businesses close so that's over 2 million businesses closed. We haven't seen the same 36% loss, you know, for the big guys during that same period of time. So what this means in my mind is we need to provide something that will help the small to medium business owner, maintain retain recapture competitive edge, the big guys aren't getting as negatively impact in general, obviously, certain sectors are like transportation and others. But in general, the small businesses have definitely taken it on the chin, the little guys taking it on the chin, and with the big guys investing more in technology and leveraging AI and getting access to these technologies ahead of the small to medium size business. It just occurred to me that this is a ripe opportunity to take something like what ClickAI is providing with Aible, which is to democratize AI make it available for the small to medium business for pennies on the dollar. I mean, I was doing some analysis the other day, and I think I, what I came back with, you know, you're gonna spend around $300 thousand dollars to reproduce one of these teams to start doing AI by the time you hire your data scientists, right, and your computer scientists and you start purchasing the platform, and everything you're going to spend at least $300,000 to do this. And I think one of the cool things that we've created through this partnership is the ability for small and medium businesses to go nowhere near that number and yet to leverage, you know, tons of years of work experience and insight and technology to help the small to medium business, progress and grow. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, in. First and foremost, I think you've done a great job in creating kind of a turnkey solution that can get companies up and running and be competitive tomorrow, right? I think that's a competitive that is, but you talk about the large companies, I was at a CIO conference a couple years ago at Columbia University and hurt this gentleman, Toby redshaw, who's at Verizon, who's head of strategy in 5g innovation. And he was talking about enterprise agility, right? Big companies understand being slow and methodical is not going to have you gonna allow you to survive, survive. With the pandemic, it is forced a maxi ramp up. And so if small companies believe that they're going to be larger or fast, smaller and faster than these large companies, that's changed. Innovation is now their competitive advantage. It's a survival tactic. I mean, companies have gone out of business. And so you're finding these large company be more innovative. And even in the banking industry, where you see small credit unions who had that personal touch, and the one to one experience, getting pushed aside by big banks are saying we have to do both, we have to have a social presence and a big financial presence. And so they're getting in more social media, they're using AI to determine the best customers and in turn, you know, predictions and stuff like that. And so having small businesses, grab a hold of technology and be just as nimble, as an enterprise organization, at 20%, or 25%, of the cost is not only a competitive advantage, but think of the things they can do. Right? You know, being really fast, right? And putting booster rockets on, on the back of kind of this engine, if you will, of innovation. And so it's not a nice to have. It's a must have just to be in the game. The world has changed so fast that technology, who adopts it when they adopted how fast they adopted could be a game changer. And so large companies have figured it out because they had to, you know, but small companies, they don't figure it out the they will be non existent. I think your organization has done a really good job in providing that gap. And then people should be jumping on like tomorrow. Yeah, I appreciate that. So one final question. Yep. For one more? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. One more question. Therefore, what? In other words, if you were to say something to a small to medium business, what would you say to them to get started with this? Because as you mentioned earlier, people hear AI and they, you know, shutter and run the other direction. And, and yet our whole purpose has been to make this adoptable with as little effort as possible, what would you say to the small to medium business get started with a Start now, right? It's not as far off as you think and your discovery of technology and capabilities, or a lot of really cool things out there. Look, for those companies that are purpose built. We happen to be purpose built around business impact. We don't train our models on accuracy, log loss, and all those other amazing, cool scientific statistical words that you know, get people goosebumps, right. It's all about business impact. So start now start small, and align your strategic imperatives and infuse that second thing, use the data that you have today. Most companies said it's going to take me years, let's figure out what you have today. And then lastly, from a cultural transformation, it's not a big leap. Give people insights into the tools that they use today. You have someone who's doing supply chain working in sa p give them insights in sa p, give them insights inside of Tableau given insight inside of Salesforce, you know, give them some insights on the PowerPoint, you know, just allow them to use it today in a way that they can ingest and make decisions and and watch the difference take place. You know, it's it's not a big leap. You know, we are very excited about being a part of a capability that is intended to be used as widely as PowerPoint. Right. Right. At the end of the day, this sophisticated capability can be used by anybody. And and so I would say to every small business CEO, start now, start with you have and get people immediate value where they work today and see the results. Build on from there. Excellent. Well, Tommy, thank you so much for taking time with me today. I really appreciate that in for answering a million questions that I warned you that I'd be throwing a lot at you. So I'm going to do this, everybody. Thanks again for joining this episode. For additional insights, please go to click ai radio.com get signed up and subscribe and we will get more information to you. Thanks again for everybody. And until next time, get some AI. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

What if the problems facing your business could be solved with ONE INSIGHT? What would you do to gain the Insight You Needed to move your business forward? If the INSIGHT YOU GAINED required you to make changes to your business...would you do it? Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of ClickAI Radio. My name is Grant Larsen. Alright, so today we are talking about insights one insight away. So there's many of you know, Russell Brunson, he uses this phrase a lot called one funnel away. I'm sure a lot of us have heard that. And what I like about that idea is that it keeps us moving forward, right? It's this notion that, alright, I've got a problem I'm trying to solve. And what I'm really looking for is just that next funnel, right, that next opportunity, and that could be the tipping point that helps me solve some problem and grow the business. Well, it's similar in terms of AI. So with AI, it's one insight away, how many insights will it take for us to actually solve a problem for our business? So to do that, I started looking at the notion of insights. And where when did insights come about? And how did people start even talking about insights? I found one place right here is kind of an interesting, there's a book actually on Amazon. It's called inside out kind of kind of clicky. Inside Out, get ideas out of your head and into the world. And the author is Tina Seelig. She's a unit at Stanford University professor, and she discusses how to take her ingenious course I think I'm saying the name right. And to make imaginative ideas, reality. Interesting, right. Okay. And here's another one. This one's actually called inside out. The words are combined, it's a website insightoutshow.com. And, and it's actually a pretty interesting set of podcasts. They're they're dedicated to bringing insights or exposing insights that have changed people's lives. And so it's got some best selling entrepreneurs and authors and thought leaders that are on there. So that was kind of interesting. I also looked into some examples of people that that found insights, and then they applied them. Here's one that was particularly interesting. This was on medium.com. It says guy that when was this anyway, this was about a year ago or so. This guy, he pulled an 18 ton truck at some state titles. And he's trying to this is an a sportsman or strongman competition, right? And he's pretty, pretty small guy. And he's pulling a truck that's 200 times heavier than him. And he ended up placing fourth, and he beat a ton of people that were much larger and much stronger. And, and he goes on to describe I love what he says here. He says, how's it even possible? How is it possible that a guy that's 10 to 50 kilograms heavier than me? They couldn't get the truck as far as I did. And he points out, it all came down to a single insight. Being in one of the lightest weight divisions, I didn't have the luxury of watching a whole bunch of people go before me to figure out the best way to do it. I had only two chances. So for the competitors went before me, I got up right beside them in front of them at an angle, I got an every position I could watch how they did it any any point for advantage others might miss. And then he says I found it. This is a cool part. Okay, he he finds the insight. And of course, if we get meta here for a moment, he really introspect it right? He watched others, he saw what was going on, he looked at what information was available to him. Hint, Hint, nudge, nudge, and then he goes on, he says, I found it. And he's got some video on this. Anyway, he says, you'll notice in the video, not long after I start pulling, there's a point where I stop at the pedestrian crossing, and really leaning hard. No one else did that. They tried to pull slow and steady the whole time. They did that because that's the way you usually do. Trump poll. Then he goes on to say, but they did it because they didn't see what I saw. So here's the insight. He said just after the start, there was a small divot in the road in perceptible unless you saw it from the side, and we're really paying attention. So he ended up what happened is the people that were just going sort of slow and steady, the truck would get into that divot. And they couldn't pull through, they didn't have the momentum. He However, when he came up to that point, let the truck come into the divot, and knew to let it sort of roll back a little, then he leaned in super hard, and pulled it out of that divot and ended up taking for what a What a cool insight, right, he studied the situation, look at the information that was available to him. So back in 1936, in the one of the co founders of the London School of Economics, published a book called The Art of thought, I think his name is Graham Wallace, and called the art of thought. And he outlined four stages in the creative process. Okay, so it was Wallace's stages of control where when you're going to get insight, there's some preparation, then there's some incubation illumination, and then verification, right? So so in this guy's example, where he's got the truck, right, and he's doing some preparation, right, he's watching the people. So that's the preparation is seeing how they get through it. And then he incubates and ultimately enough to the point where he can discover this debit. And then the illumination comes about, and he's able to leverage it. So what if we did that with our business? Right? What if we took the four steps preparation, incubation illumination and verification? What if I said, with artificial intelligence, that's how we get insights for our business. So the preparation stage is obviously doing transactions in my business. And there's a point where I need to prepare and curate that information. And then I need to think about what problems Am I trying to solve, like, in the case of this truck guy, right? That's pulling it. His problem, of course, was how do I beat everyone else, when he didn't really know at the time, is that his real problem was not, how do I beat everyone? It was, how do I get through that divot. And so in the course of incubation, he sees this and then some illumination comes on how he can actually use the debit to his advantage, and then pull on through to it. So we use artificial intelligence to do the same thing. We go through our preparation, we incubate we think about what problem we are trying to solve. And in the course of doing it, we actually get some illumination on Wait a minute, maybe the problem I'm solving isn't the one I originally thought there. There's another problem here. And that's illuminating me into in terms of what I need to go solve. So that led me to this interesting point here, I looked something up. And it was, what's the difference between insight and intuition? And it turns out that one of the definitions that I saw was that, hey, intuition is the use of patterns that you've already learned. Whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns. And so in the case of this guy pull in this truck, right? So he's got some intuition on things that he can do, to perhaps use his body and align it properly to pull the truck through, but what he really needed. And what he ultimately discovered was an insight, a new pattern, which was, how do I actually deal with the real problem at hand, which is this divot that's got me stuck. Alright. So insight, that turns out is being able to see something right clearly that what's times we didn't know even existed beforehand. And that often includes having an understanding of the cause and the effect relationships, meaning if I, if I do something, then something else will happen. Sometimes we call it an epiphany or an aha moment, you know, I've applied AI to multiple organizations, there's typically this epiphany, or this insight moment, right, which is, oh, gotcha. Now that I look at what the AI is telling me about my sales transactions. I didn't realize that, you know, when it's Tuesday in Belgium that I shouldn't be selling or whatever it is, right? So these insights come and then you start to realize, wait, I've got to go solve some of these specific problems. I thought it was solving a bigger problem. But before I can, metaphorically move my truck further down. I've got to get through the divot and AI brings those insights. So the real question is, how can I reduce the time to getting insights? So if the value is let me get insights, I'd that I'd actually like to get some velocity with that. Could I get insights more quickly, right. Could I get through that? iteration cycle faster. And of course, there are multiple ways to do that. But here's one example. This was, this was an example from Google. And they were they were working on reducing time to insight with AI. This is an interesting article from them. They were using some of their video imaging computer vision AI, right, which is actually takes takes a lot of horsepower from from the computational perspective, but in any event, in their article, they they ended up using AI to analyze videos, and they were doing it with Dunkin Donuts. And, you know, because you know, can you have too many donuts? I don't know. So they're using it with Dunkin Donuts. And they were building a Youtube video to promote I think it's called their Donut Fries. I didn't even know such a thing existed. But apparently, if you marry a donut with a potato, you get fries, Donut Fries. So in any event, they were they were doing this donut fries thing. And by by running AI against their videos, they were able to make adjustments to the video. And they got more than 6000 comments on it, which ultimately built the right sentiment score for them to get the right promotion level. Gosh, what does that mean? The net effect is they ended up getting insight tank time down to 28 minutes right now that's that's kind of amazing, right? I mean, that that's not typical. But the point is, you'd want to be able to take your business, get your business information, and then run it through a cycle and get that turnaround time as quickly as possible. Because the sooner we can discover the divots in the road, that are the real problems we need to solve for our business. Actually, then the better it is for us, we can move our truck move our business forward. Okay, everyone, the key to reduce time to insight is to use AI in your business. Hey, everyone, thank you for joining and until next time, go get some insights. Thank you for joining Grant on click AI radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

What if the problems facing your business could be solved with ONE INSIGHT? What would you do to gain the Insight You Needed to move your business forward? If the INSIGHT YOU GAINED required you to make changes to your business...would you do it? Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of ClickAI Radio. My name is Grant Larsen. Alright, so today we are talking about insights one insight away. So there's many of you know, Russell Brunson, he uses this phrase a lot called one funnel away. I'm sure a lot of us have heard that. And what I like about that idea is that it keeps us moving forward, right? It's this notion that, alright, I've got a problem I'm trying to solve. And what I'm really looking for is just that next funnel, right, that next opportunity, and that could be the tipping point that helps me solve some problem and grow the business. Well, it's similar in terms of AI. So with AI, it's one insight away, how many insights will it take for us to actually solve a problem for our business? So to do that, I started looking at the notion of insights. And where when did insights come about? And how did people start even talking about insights? I found one place right here is kind of an interesting, there's a book actually on Amazon. It's called inside out kind of kind of clicky. Inside Out, get ideas out of your head and into the world. And the author is Tina Seelig. She's a unit at Stanford University professor, and she discusses how to take her ingenious course I think I'm saying the name right. And to make imaginative ideas, reality. Interesting, right. Okay. And here's another one. This one's actually called inside out. The words are combined, it's a website insightoutshow.com. And, and it's actually a pretty interesting set of podcasts. They're they're dedicated to bringing insights or exposing insights that have changed people's lives. And so it's got some best selling entrepreneurs and authors and thought leaders that are on there. So that was kind of interesting. I also looked into some examples of people that that found insights, and then they applied them. Here's one that was particularly interesting. This was on medium.com. It says guy that when was this anyway, this was about a year ago or so. This guy, he pulled an 18 ton truck at some state titles. And he's trying to this is an a sportsman or strongman competition, right? And he's pretty, pretty small guy. And he's pulling a truck that's 200 times heavier than him. And he ended up placing fourth, and he beat a ton of people that were much larger and much stronger. And, and he goes on to describe I love what he says here. He says, how's it even possible? How is it possible that a guy that's 10 to 50 kilograms heavier than me? They couldn't get the truck as far as I did. And he points out, it all came down to a single insight. Being in one of the lightest weight divisions, I didn't have the luxury of watching a whole bunch of people go before me to figure out the best way to do it. I had only two chances. So for the competitors went before me, I got up right beside them in front of them at an angle, I got an every position I could watch how they did it any any point for advantage others might miss. And then he says I found it. This is a cool part. Okay, he he finds the insight. And of course, if we get meta here for a moment, he really introspect it right? He watched others, he saw what was going on, he looked at what information was available to him. Hint, Hint, nudge, nudge, and then he goes on, he says, I found it. And he's got some video on this. Anyway, he says, you'll notice in the video, not long after I start pulling, there's a point where I stop at the pedestrian crossing, and really leaning hard. No one else did that. They tried to pull slow and steady the whole time. They did that because that's the way you usually do. Trump poll. Then he goes on to say, but they did it because they didn't see what I saw. So here's the insight. He said just after the start, there was a small divot in the road in perceptible unless you saw it from the side, and we're really paying attention. So he ended up what happened is the people that were just going sort of slow and steady, the truck would get into that divot. And they couldn't pull through, they didn't have the momentum. He However, when he came up to that point, let the truck come into the divot, and knew to let it sort of roll back a little, then he leaned in super hard, and pulled it out of that divot and ended up taking for what a What a cool insight, right, he studied the situation, look at the information that was available to him. So back in 1936, in the one of the co founders of the London School of Economics, published a book called The Art of thought, I think his name is Graham Wallace, and called the art of thought. And he outlined four stages in the creative process. Okay, so it was Wallace's stages of control where when you're going to get insight, there's some preparation, then there's some incubation illumination, and then verification, right? So so in this guy's example, where he's got the truck, right, and he's doing some preparation, right, he's watching the people. So that's the preparation is seeing how they get through it. And then he incubates and ultimately enough to the point where he can discover this debit. And then the illumination comes about, and he's able to leverage it. So what if we did that with our business? Right? What if we took the four steps preparation, incubation illumination and verification? What if I said, with artificial intelligence, that's how we get insights for our business. So the preparation stage is obviously doing transactions in my business. And there's a point where I need to prepare and curate that information. And then I need to think about what problems Am I trying to solve, like, in the case of this truck guy, right? That's pulling it. His problem, of course, was how do I beat everyone else, when he didn't really know at the time, is that his real problem was not, how do I beat everyone? It was, how do I get through that divot. And so in the course of incubation, he sees this and then some illumination comes on how he can actually use the debit to his advantage, and then pull on through to it. So we use artificial intelligence to do the same thing. We go through our preparation, we incubate we think about what problem we are trying to solve. And in the course of doing it, we actually get some illumination on Wait a minute, maybe the problem I'm solving isn't the one I originally thought there. There's another problem here. And that's illuminating me into in terms of what I need to go solve. So that led me to this interesting point here, I looked something up. And it was, what's the difference between insight and intuition? And it turns out that one of the definitions that I saw was that, hey, intuition is the use of patterns that you've already learned. Whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns. And so in the case of this guy pull in this truck, right? So he's got some intuition on things that he can do, to perhaps use his body and align it properly to pull the truck through, but what he really needed. And what he ultimately discovered was an insight, a new pattern, which was, how do I actually deal with the real problem at hand, which is this divot that's got me stuck. Alright. So insight, that turns out is being able to see something right clearly that what's times we didn't know even existed beforehand. And that often includes having an understanding of the cause and the effect relationships, meaning if I, if I do something, then something else will happen. Sometimes we call it an epiphany or an aha moment, you know, I've applied AI to multiple organizations, there's typically this epiphany, or this insight moment, right, which is, oh, gotcha. Now that I look at what the AI is telling me about my sales transactions. I didn't realize that, you know, when it's Tuesday in Belgium that I shouldn't be selling or whatever it is, right? So these insights come and then you start to realize, wait, I've got to go solve some of these specific problems. I thought it was solving a bigger problem. But before I can, metaphorically move my truck further down. I've got to get through the divot and AI brings those insights. So the real question is, how can I reduce the time to getting insights? So if the value is let me get insights, I'd that I'd actually like to get some velocity with that. Could I get insights more quickly, right. Could I get through that? iteration cycle faster. And of course, there are multiple ways to do that. But here's one example. This was, this was an example from Google. And they were they were working on reducing time to insight with AI. This is an interesting article from them. They were using some of their video imaging computer vision AI, right, which is actually takes takes a lot of horsepower from from the computational perspective, but in any event, in their article, they they ended up using AI to analyze videos, and they were doing it with Dunkin Donuts. And, you know, because you know, can you have too many donuts? I don't know. So they're using it with Dunkin Donuts. And they were building a Youtube video to promote I think it's called their Donut Fries. I didn't even know such a thing existed. But apparently, if you marry a donut with a potato, you get fries, Donut Fries. So in any event, they were they were doing this donut fries thing. And by by running AI against their videos, they were able to make adjustments to the video. And they got more than 6000 comments on it, which ultimately built the right sentiment score for them to get the right promotion level. Gosh, what does that mean? The net effect is they ended up getting insight tank time down to 28 minutes right now that's that's kind of amazing, right? I mean, that that's not typical. But the point is, you'd want to be able to take your business, get your business information, and then run it through a cycle and get that turnaround time as quickly as possible. Because the sooner we can discover the divots in the road, that are the real problems we need to solve for our business. Actually, then the better it is for us, we can move our truck move our business forward. Okay, everyone, the key to reduce time to insight is to use AI in your business. Hey, everyone, thank you for joining and until next time, go get some insights. Thank you for joining Grant on click AI radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

So you got your business running, and COVID-19 is hitting you hard. How can you work smarter, using the assets already at your fingertips? Steve J Larsen joins Grant to discuss how to Evergreen your business using artificial intelligence!! Grant Larsen Alright everybody welcome. This is Grant Larsen on click AI radio. Welcome to another episode. I'm very excited today because I've got this person in my life and he came into my life over 30 years ago, who would this be? Who would be in my life over 30 years ago? Well, I'm happy to announce it's my son Steven. Well, Mom and mom and dad we call you Steven. Right? I think your your show name is Steve Jay Larson. Right? Tchaikovsky, Steve or psychology Steven. Steve Larsen Either is fine. You brought me into this world! Grant Larsen I might slip back into Stephen node now and then Okay. All right. Okay, so Steve, or Steven has been really successful in business. He's done a fantastic job starting up businesses and applying technology. And as I started to think about the work that I'm doing in AI and what it means to businesses, I thought I can go grab Steven and get his thoughts and his stories now. He's focused on solving a real specific problem for businesses. And so before we get into that, and how we talk how the problem is Solving is actually addressed and and is actually benefited by using AI before we get there. I want to back up and give Steven a chance to introduce himself and talk about your origin story. So why don't we back up? I don't know let's say Should we go back to when we brought you home from the hospital? I mean, how far back! Steve Larsen Now I as far as professionally speaking goes, like the way this all started for me was I mean, you know, I was I feel like I'm saying this now to listeners about you, because in high school, I was selling tons of stuff. I sold stuff all over the place. We grabbed golf balls from the golf course clean up selling right back to the golfers and I mean, sold laser pointer pens had to do a bunch of community service as a punishment for that in. It's just lots of lots of entrepreneurial drives that I didn't realize I was doing or had in college. Really, when it first started, I would say, actually started and had a hard time feed my family for a bit and asked you for cash. I remember that. And I said, you know, as getting a student loan, which good or bad as well, it's another conversation how easy it is to get student loans, but money was on the way. And I said, Hey, could you float us some cash? And you said, "Son, no. If I give you this money now, you will not exhaust the resources he didn't know you had."" Grant Larsen I remember saying that. That was a painful discussion. Steve Larsen It was a little painful for me. Yeah, yeah. It was a moment of I saw immediately what we were what you were doing. And I was like, okay, and it's basically, you know, it's been shown that we don't do anything without a new environment, not necessarily new willpower. And so it put me in a unique spot where my back was against the wall in a way I would not have put it on my own. And you basically said, figured out kid, you know, which is great, but it's just started my entrepreneurial, like, puzzle. And I did everything from real estate to diamonds to ebooks to other physical products to flipping stuff to go. And I mean, it was literally about a year ago riebeck went back and counted again, it's about 34 tries over five years. Grant Larsen I saw that on one of your podcasts as amazing. Steve Larsen It's crazy when recounted all of them, and the names of each one of them when they happen when they hurt. Like why that, thankfully, Mona like they didn't work like I'm so grateful to try to didn't work or I'd be doing it. Yeah, like yeah, turn around and think the journey you know, so. So I am professionally mostly known for my work at clickfunnels when I got hired to work there as a lead funnel builder over there and and did that for a few years. And then I was like, I still got this itch. Russell, you know, Russell Brunson is like I gotta go man, and it... Grant Larsen ...must have been a strange conversation right? Steve Larsen But he was extremely supportive. Have and which I think was rare and amazing of him and still good friends and still chat almost daily and still actually still do work for him. Just most people don't know. It's a Yeah, my involvement at the one phone away challenge has been fun, but basically what it showed me, I was already building successful sales funnels before I worked for him for a lot of other companies. But he certainly helped sharpen the saw, you know, and by all the things I was observing and things that the community was struggling with, and I decided to make an active stance and helping people make attractive offers and launch them into specifically internet. And so when I left Yeah, the first million took a little while, but came and then the next one faster next month, faster, faster. And it has been fascinating to see how it's how it's blown up since then. So that's, that's the professional nutshell. Yeah, Grant Larsen Yeah, that's an awesome story. What a journey now that journeys led you into some things that I think you've identified to me a couple times that maybe the market doesn't talk too much about now that that's campaigns and can we talk about what those are? And I think there's different kinds of campaigns you've identified. Steve Larsen Yeah, absolutely. So every time I say campaign well actually I was actually for a while in high school my dream was to be a high school history teacher and even into college most people don't know that I was gonna I was like high school history teacher that's why American history specifically and so I like history is when I saw their paycheck i i unmarried that dream. Like, oh, I can do history otherwise, but I love studying marketing history. And you go back and you start looking to see you know, the internet became publicly available. 1991 you look previously before that, and all these marketers these rich dead marketers, they had to go do things that we never have to go do because the internet's here so I got really obsessed about year and a half two years ago have these these models that that guys without tech had to Go through in order to still globally or nationally launched a physical product. That's, that's amazing. And so when I started seeing was these patterns, and I started recognizing that in the very successful product launches without the internet, what they were doing was what I would call a campaign, although that works kind of getting poisons. Now, I'd say, in a campaign I define it as being just a series of mini events that lead to a big one. So like guys, like PT Barnum, you know, like, yeah, show greatest showmen. Mm hmm. He had this museum his entire career, he would go every time we had a new product, or thing to show in his museum. He create these stories and these many events and he'd go to another city and create pressure and buzz and roll that pressure buzz into another city and build it. It's common, here comes the big unveiling of the new thing in my museum. And that rolls into the next thing. Now let's get the press involved. Boom, right? And that's like, but we don't do that. Now. People are like, I'm gonna launch my products and they send one email On the dates available, no one's heard about it since then. And they're like the internet's of scram. And you're like, Okay, campaigns. That's a reality like. Grant Larsen You don't know, the truth, right? Steve Larsen Yeah. So like campaigns today, like, well, I'm running Facebook campaigns. That's not a campaign. It can be part of one. But it's not a campaign in and of itself. And so I go in and I help basically, companies launch their products online to creating these small pressure events that roll into a bigger, they're rolling to a bigger, all quoting, inciting a future release date, similar to how Hollywood releases a product or movie, you know, with this increasing level of pressure towards the release date. So that's, that's what I say a campaign is. Grant Larsen Okay. All right. And through this, as you focused on this, I think you've identified these different kinds of campaigns, right? Yeah. So you talked about there's one in particular that caught my fancy because I think it lines up with some of the things that I've been doing in the AI space and that's I think we call an evergreen campaign. Is that Right. Steve Larsen Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in my pursuit of looking to see what these campaigns were, and I'm trying to bring back kind of this dying art, you know, think about the internet with such free distribution, but we'll treat it terribly because no one knows how to leverage it anymore. Like it's called an E blast, weakest form of campaign ever just blast it out there, available. Like I didn't know it was even coming. Anyway, but there's these certain campaign styles that I've noticed are really good for getting the rocket into space. But there's other kinds that are good for keeping it in orbit. And more often than not, I've been noticing that when someone launches something on the internet, they will turn around and though they'll build the rocket, it's an amazing offer a great funnel, it's a good sales, it's good enough to do really well it actually could go into space, but they don't put enough fuel in the thing. So then they go back like the Rockets terrible. It's like you put a quarter tank gas in something that needs a lot more to get out into orbit. There's nothing wrong with your funnel 980 percent of time I'd say that I don't really touch my offer after I launch it, that's not usually the issue. It's just that there's not enough no noise, not a buzz, they get it out there. So I have a list of launch campaigns and evergreen campaigns get into orbit and keep it in orbit. That's kind of so with my funnel building process with my internal team. I've incorporated your AI stuff into our evergreen stuff, because I'm terrible. The evergreen Phase I like to launch stuff. If we can use AI to show patterns in what it is that like, that's great, because I anyway, yeah, that's that's kind of what happened. Grant Larsen That's, that's what got me thinking about about you is when I saw your powerful ability to take organizations and to help them launch, and I come from a world of Hey, the thing is launched, how do we how do we keep it going, right? The thing in space, right? And that's what led me into the AI world and so on. Here's the question I have now that COVID is hit and impacted all of us. Right and tons of small businesses are being certainly negatively impacted. How do we keep that that thing launched? Right? What impact has that had to the Evergreen campaigns? Do you think it's possible to keep the small companies going in this? I mean, would AI help us something like that? Steve Larsen Yeah, absolutely. There's two, there's two moves them, I'm encouraging everyone to go for right out of the gate, first cut costs, I went through all my stuff, I was able to cut 13 grand a month in expenses that I didn't realize we didn't need to be spending, which means I had to sell less to keep just as much I'm just more profitable now. Like, that's the first easy move. The second easy move is to, you know, when you're creating an offer, offer creation and the way we sell is really a function of value. It's like how valuable am I? So we've asked the question then, like, what is value? We know what prices we know what cost is how do you define value? Because value is not right. Money, but can be, but sometimes isn't. And you're like, Whoa, so that was another one of the questions I started diving into few years ago. And what kind of deep with that and found out like value is usefulness. That's it. And it's not usefulness in the eyes of the Creator, it's useless in the eyes of the user. And so so again, first of all cut costs second of all become more useful to the marketplace. And then third, when you are figuring out how to keep those repeat sales going, I mean things like AI is huge, showing all the patterns that are I can't see it's massive, consistent content creation has been a big one for us. The way our ads have been working, and using AI to show ads, how they're working with Facebook ads, massive just got that report from you on a product will re launch and re evergreen at the end of this week. I mean, it's we're we're doing this everyone who's listening or watching right now. It's a It's been, it's been powerful. I think when it comes to evergreening stuff, though, consistent content creation and consistent ways to find new veins of gold. And having a look at that, I think it's gonna be one of the easiest things moving forward. We I mean, you come from such a huge, big, big e entrepreneur world, you know, and I come from very much the small E, small entrepreneurs are like, look at all the resources that these big e companies have. And it's, it's something's been on my mind for years now. I'm like, I make decisions based on how someone's belief patterns are, how they are their stories, you know, what it is that they've been telling themselves, and I'm trying to enter the conversation in their mind at a certain place, these big e entrepreneurs that you have access, they're just looking at data towers. Like, most of the time, they're just looking at data towers and huge spreadsheets, and they're letting data show which both is right but I don't have access to so I feel like I remember when you and I first started talking about goats like, Dad, if I could tell Turn around and get these big, massive data towers and have like, see the pattern, I could have the best of both skill sets. Yeah. And I feel like that's the marriage that's happening. Grant Larsen So that conversation was very pivotal in my mind. Because as you know, I've been working with large companies who have access to that. And you think about a guy like Jeff Bezos right? And you think, what secrets is he getting and leveraging out of his data? Right? He's been doing an incredible job with it, right? And we all know the other big companies that do that, certainly apple and Facebook and so forth. But that conversation made me start thinking, Hey, I, I want to democratize AI. I want to I want to take AI. So it's no longer just in the grasp of these big data science teams in these big organizations. And I want to put this into the small and medium business world so that we can compete. I mean, I think that's a fabric of capitalism, right? It's a fat capitalist pig, right? Yes. So I thought, Wait, this Is this is the right time and the right timing to do something like that? So, quick question I have for you. And actually what came out of that conversation was the way the AI works is you and I know it's evergreen is that when you go apply it, and I know you're, you're applying it right now in your organization. So, so when you apply it, what happens is, is you're gonna change your history, right? Your something will change, because you're going to change your behavior, right? And then then, in a few months, guess what, you should take another look at the AI again, because you've changed your data footprint right in the sand basically, right, got a turn, look back and say, Okay, so we changed ourselves. What does the AI tell us? Now? That's another key aspect of evergreening the business. Does that make sense? Steve Larsen Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's like, I mean, that's what you told me too. It's like data is all historical, because it happened in the past. And then you have to keep taking new stamps of the data because it changes the predictions in the past. And what's gonna happen and, and so what we've been doing. So when I was leaving clickfunnels, one of the roles, the final role that Russell's asking me to do was help bobe an internal funnel agency. When I got there, it was literally just he and I, there was an a copywriter a designer, we were doing everything. And then as we brought in a funnel guy, you know, another assistant guy or another copywriter, we had to finally actually build a process beyond Hey, what are you on? Alright, let's do this. Right, we started building a system and, and I started documenting it and making these processes and systems for what it took to get a successful funnel out the door. So that I wasn't just leaving him and he had to just hold this thing now. Yeah, well, what that turned into and started developing into and what's now turn into two and a half years later, is this 12 step process that designs launches in evergreens lucrative funnels. Well, just a little while ago, I was Like, why aren't we in the launch phase in the, in the funnel building phase, we need to be setting up data capture systems that I can then send to click AI. So that we're so that it's there. It's there, when we get to step 12, which is evergreening. And then I can send it to click, and then you go, Hey, here's all the patterns and insights your naked eye can't see. And then we go back, and we make the tweaks and the changes. And that that's, that's awesome. Because I evergreen phase, and now I get computers looking at it. Grant Larsen And you know, what's interesting is a lot of companies hate the Evergreen phase. And so that's why looking for ways to automate it with things like AI, take some of the monotony out of it, right? Because otherwise you lose the creative edge because you end up just going into maintenance mode. where's the fun in that right as humans we love to create. And so I see the AI piece as a way to help us still explore the creative avenues in terms of evergreening our businesses. Yeah, so I have a question for you. What in your mind are the biggest hurdles to small to medium companies leveraging AI to help them? What do you think would be the things that would get in the way of that? Steve Larsen Yeah, you know, especially when it comes to the small entrepreneur, they're thinking sale, sale, sale sale sale sale, because they gotta eat what they kill, you know, and, and since most of them are so new, they don't really have any evergreen selling systems. And so they're, I mean, I've been at phase two for a while. It's like you're selling and launching and selling and launching. We recently went back and I started making a list of all of the projects that we had once launched, that were very successful that we're not doing a thing with that aren't selling because I'm not doing that last phase. It was like 15 projects, and I was like, that is literally millions of automated dollars. I'll have to do nothing for just sitting there. I was so mad. I was so I was livid. I was like Darn you and your distaste for evergreen. So that's what I went back and started adding In those things, to our funnel process to tie into click AI, and I think the danger and the challenge for small entrepreneurs will be not understanding how simple it is to simply I mean, this is how, for everyone who's listening now, this is as simple as I mean, data capture systems. Yeah, it's a zap to a Google Sheet. There's nothing else download it and then like, send to ClickAI.com. This grandiose thing, it is behind the scenes on you. It's super smart, very wizardry. But I think that because we hear data science, you know, the spoiling the entrepreneur data science, and, you know, all this stuff is gonna be this massive, like, I gotta go get a Harry Potter wand and like, you know, get up, you know what I mean? But it can be simple. Grant Larsen Yeah, you know, it's funny, you mentioned that we're doing some stuff for Blake Nubar the other day, and he goes, he said the same thing is like, "Okay, so, Alright, so what am I going to have to do?"" I said, "Send me your Excel file."" I go, "Yeah, yeah, we, we got the rest."" He said, "Yeah, okay." And then we will tell you what changes to go put in place. He's like, "Okay, well, that's simpler than I thought so." Yeah. Yeah, it's critical. Yeah, it's hard part was just just in the head, right. It sounds scary. Ai right. So you're like, oh, gosh, that this must must be hard. Okay, so, all right. I know we're, we're out of time here. Really appreciate your time. Steven, I will just mention one other thing. Do you remember the last wrestling match we had when it was you and Kenneth and Jared and me and we are wrestling on the floor in Colorado and I got off the floor and I said, "I'm done wrestling you guys."" I went upstairs and told your Mom, "Okay, I think that's the last time I tried to wrestle those guys. They're kicking the crap out of me." I know you're super busy. Just really appreciate your time coming here today and representing capitalist pig. A lot of luck the branding. Thanks for doing that. Any final comments? Steve Larsen No, it's just it's fun to see ClickAI go. You know, I actually I do get asked frequently to like, okay, looking from where you are in the funnel world and all that stuff, you know, and where do you see it happening and I don't see a way where the marriage of AI and and small e funnel tech can't happen because it's already have I feel like it's something you have to jump on and find a solution for similar to how like, you know, email autoresponders are out and now suddenly few people have heard of these SMTP providers now you can send email on your own now you sending like, do you have Windows yet yet? Was it I feel like that's what AI is gonna be soon. It's like, do you have an AI provider and so, this is like a, you know, the pre bubble, you know can take advantage of. Grant Larsen Exactly. Steven, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate that and Everybody, thanks for listening today and until next time, get some AI. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIradio.com now.  

So you got your business running, and COVID-19 is hitting you hard. How can you work smarter, using the assets already at your fingertips? Steve J Larsen joins Grant to discuss how to Evergreen your business using artificial intelligence!! Grant Larsen Alright everybody welcome. This is Grant Larsen on click AI radio. Welcome to another episode. I'm very excited today because I've got this person in my life and he came into my life over 30 years ago, who would this be? Who would be in my life over 30 years ago? Well, I'm happy to announce it's my son Steven. Well, Mom and mom and dad we call you Steven. Right? I think your your show name is Steve Jay Larson. Right? Tchaikovsky, Steve or psychology Steven. Steve Larsen Either is fine. You brought me into this world! Grant Larsen I might slip back into Stephen node now and then Okay. All right. Okay, so Steve, or Steven has been really successful in business. He's done a fantastic job starting up businesses and applying technology. And as I started to think about the work that I'm doing in AI and what it means to businesses, I thought I can go grab Steven and get his thoughts and his stories now. He's focused on solving a real specific problem for businesses. And so before we get into that, and how we talk how the problem is Solving is actually addressed and and is actually benefited by using AI before we get there. I want to back up and give Steven a chance to introduce himself and talk about your origin story. So why don't we back up? I don't know let's say Should we go back to when we brought you home from the hospital? I mean, how far back! Steve Larsen Now I as far as professionally speaking goes, like the way this all started for me was I mean, you know, I was I feel like I'm saying this now to listeners about you, because in high school, I was selling tons of stuff. I sold stuff all over the place. We grabbed golf balls from the golf course clean up selling right back to the golfers and I mean, sold laser pointer pens had to do a bunch of community service as a punishment for that in. It's just lots of lots of entrepreneurial drives that I didn't realize I was doing or had in college. Really, when it first started, I would say, actually started and had a hard time feed my family for a bit and asked you for cash. I remember that. And I said, you know, as getting a student loan, which good or bad as well, it's another conversation how easy it is to get student loans, but money was on the way. And I said, Hey, could you float us some cash? And you said, "Son, no. If I give you this money now, you will not exhaust the resources he didn't know you had."" Grant Larsen I remember saying that. That was a painful discussion. Steve Larsen It was a little painful for me. Yeah, yeah. It was a moment of I saw immediately what we were what you were doing. And I was like, okay, and it's basically, you know, it's been shown that we don't do anything without a new environment, not necessarily new willpower. And so it put me in a unique spot where my back was against the wall in a way I would not have put it on my own. And you basically said, figured out kid, you know, which is great, but it's just started my entrepreneurial, like, puzzle. And I did everything from real estate to diamonds to ebooks to other physical products to flipping stuff to go. And I mean, it was literally about a year ago riebeck went back and counted again, it's about 34 tries over five years. Grant Larsen I saw that on one of your podcasts as amazing. Steve Larsen It's crazy when recounted all of them, and the names of each one of them when they happen when they hurt. Like why that, thankfully, Mona like they didn't work like I'm so grateful to try to didn't work or I'd be doing it. Yeah, like yeah, turn around and think the journey you know, so. So I am professionally mostly known for my work at clickfunnels when I got hired to work there as a lead funnel builder over there and and did that for a few years. And then I was like, I still got this itch. Russell, you know, Russell Brunson is like I gotta go man, and it... Grant Larsen ...must have been a strange conversation right? Steve Larsen But he was extremely supportive. Have and which I think was rare and amazing of him and still good friends and still chat almost daily and still actually still do work for him. Just most people don't know. It's a Yeah, my involvement at the one phone away challenge has been fun, but basically what it showed me, I was already building successful sales funnels before I worked for him for a lot of other companies. But he certainly helped sharpen the saw, you know, and by all the things I was observing and things that the community was struggling with, and I decided to make an active stance and helping people make attractive offers and launch them into specifically internet. And so when I left Yeah, the first million took a little while, but came and then the next one faster next month, faster, faster. And it has been fascinating to see how it's how it's blown up since then. So that's, that's the professional nutshell. Yeah, Grant Larsen Yeah, that's an awesome story. What a journey now that journeys led you into some things that I think you've identified to me a couple times that maybe the market doesn't talk too much about now that that's campaigns and can we talk about what those are? And I think there's different kinds of campaigns you've identified. Steve Larsen Yeah, absolutely. So every time I say campaign well actually I was actually for a while in high school my dream was to be a high school history teacher and even into college most people don't know that I was gonna I was like high school history teacher that's why American history specifically and so I like history is when I saw their paycheck i i unmarried that dream. Like, oh, I can do history otherwise, but I love studying marketing history. And you go back and you start looking to see you know, the internet became publicly available. 1991 you look previously before that, and all these marketers these rich dead marketers, they had to go do things that we never have to go do because the internet's here so I got really obsessed about year and a half two years ago have these these models that that guys without tech had to Go through in order to still globally or nationally launched a physical product. That's, that's amazing. And so when I started seeing was these patterns, and I started recognizing that in the very successful product launches without the internet, what they were doing was what I would call a campaign, although that works kind of getting poisons. Now, I'd say, in a campaign I define it as being just a series of mini events that lead to a big one. So like guys, like PT Barnum, you know, like, yeah, show greatest showmen. Mm hmm. He had this museum his entire career, he would go every time we had a new product, or thing to show in his museum. He create these stories and these many events and he'd go to another city and create pressure and buzz and roll that pressure buzz into another city and build it. It's common, here comes the big unveiling of the new thing in my museum. And that rolls into the next thing. Now let's get the press involved. Boom, right? And that's like, but we don't do that. Now. People are like, I'm gonna launch my products and they send one email On the dates available, no one's heard about it since then. And they're like the internet's of scram. And you're like, Okay, campaigns. That's a reality like. Grant Larsen You don't know, the truth, right? Steve Larsen Yeah. So like campaigns today, like, well, I'm running Facebook campaigns. That's not a campaign. It can be part of one. But it's not a campaign in and of itself. And so I go in and I help basically, companies launch their products online to creating these small pressure events that roll into a bigger, they're rolling to a bigger, all quoting, inciting a future release date, similar to how Hollywood releases a product or movie, you know, with this increasing level of pressure towards the release date. So that's, that's what I say a campaign is. Grant Larsen Okay. All right. And through this, as you focused on this, I think you've identified these different kinds of campaigns, right? Yeah. So you talked about there's one in particular that caught my fancy because I think it lines up with some of the things that I've been doing in the AI space and that's I think we call an evergreen campaign. Is that Right. Steve Larsen Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in my pursuit of looking to see what these campaigns were, and I'm trying to bring back kind of this dying art, you know, think about the internet with such free distribution, but we'll treat it terribly because no one knows how to leverage it anymore. Like it's called an E blast, weakest form of campaign ever just blast it out there, available. Like I didn't know it was even coming. Anyway, but there's these certain campaign styles that I've noticed are really good for getting the rocket into space. But there's other kinds that are good for keeping it in orbit. And more often than not, I've been noticing that when someone launches something on the internet, they will turn around and though they'll build the rocket, it's an amazing offer a great funnel, it's a good sales, it's good enough to do really well it actually could go into space, but they don't put enough fuel in the thing. So then they go back like the Rockets terrible. It's like you put a quarter tank gas in something that needs a lot more to get out into orbit. There's nothing wrong with your funnel 980 percent of time I'd say that I don't really touch my offer after I launch it, that's not usually the issue. It's just that there's not enough no noise, not a buzz, they get it out there. So I have a list of launch campaigns and evergreen campaigns get into orbit and keep it in orbit. That's kind of so with my funnel building process with my internal team. I've incorporated your AI stuff into our evergreen stuff, because I'm terrible. The evergreen Phase I like to launch stuff. If we can use AI to show patterns in what it is that like, that's great, because I anyway, yeah, that's that's kind of what happened. Grant Larsen That's, that's what got me thinking about about you is when I saw your powerful ability to take organizations and to help them launch, and I come from a world of Hey, the thing is launched, how do we how do we keep it going, right? The thing in space, right? And that's what led me into the AI world and so on. Here's the question I have now that COVID is hit and impacted all of us. Right and tons of small businesses are being certainly negatively impacted. How do we keep that that thing launched? Right? What impact has that had to the Evergreen campaigns? Do you think it's possible to keep the small companies going in this? I mean, would AI help us something like that? Steve Larsen Yeah, absolutely. There's two, there's two moves them, I'm encouraging everyone to go for right out of the gate, first cut costs, I went through all my stuff, I was able to cut 13 grand a month in expenses that I didn't realize we didn't need to be spending, which means I had to sell less to keep just as much I'm just more profitable now. Like, that's the first easy move. The second easy move is to, you know, when you're creating an offer, offer creation and the way we sell is really a function of value. It's like how valuable am I? So we've asked the question then, like, what is value? We know what prices we know what cost is how do you define value? Because value is not right. Money, but can be, but sometimes isn't. And you're like, Whoa, so that was another one of the questions I started diving into few years ago. And what kind of deep with that and found out like value is usefulness. That's it. And it's not usefulness in the eyes of the Creator, it's useless in the eyes of the user. And so so again, first of all cut costs second of all become more useful to the marketplace. And then third, when you are figuring out how to keep those repeat sales going, I mean things like AI is huge, showing all the patterns that are I can't see it's massive, consistent content creation has been a big one for us. The way our ads have been working, and using AI to show ads, how they're working with Facebook ads, massive just got that report from you on a product will re launch and re evergreen at the end of this week. I mean, it's we're we're doing this everyone who's listening or watching right now. It's a It's been, it's been powerful. I think when it comes to evergreening stuff, though, consistent content creation and consistent ways to find new veins of gold. And having a look at that, I think it's gonna be one of the easiest things moving forward. We I mean, you come from such a huge, big, big e entrepreneur world, you know, and I come from very much the small E, small entrepreneurs are like, look at all the resources that these big e companies have. And it's, it's something's been on my mind for years now. I'm like, I make decisions based on how someone's belief patterns are, how they are their stories, you know, what it is that they've been telling themselves, and I'm trying to enter the conversation in their mind at a certain place, these big e entrepreneurs that you have access, they're just looking at data towers. Like, most of the time, they're just looking at data towers and huge spreadsheets, and they're letting data show which both is right but I don't have access to so I feel like I remember when you and I first started talking about goats like, Dad, if I could tell Turn around and get these big, massive data towers and have like, see the pattern, I could have the best of both skill sets. Yeah. And I feel like that's the marriage that's happening. Grant Larsen So that conversation was very pivotal in my mind. Because as you know, I've been working with large companies who have access to that. And you think about a guy like Jeff Bezos right? And you think, what secrets is he getting and leveraging out of his data? Right? He's been doing an incredible job with it, right? And we all know the other big companies that do that, certainly apple and Facebook and so forth. But that conversation made me start thinking, Hey, I, I want to democratize AI. I want to I want to take AI. So it's no longer just in the grasp of these big data science teams in these big organizations. And I want to put this into the small and medium business world so that we can compete. I mean, I think that's a fabric of capitalism, right? It's a fat capitalist pig, right? Yes. So I thought, Wait, this Is this is the right time and the right timing to do something like that? So, quick question I have for you. And actually what came out of that conversation was the way the AI works is you and I know it's evergreen is that when you go apply it, and I know you're, you're applying it right now in your organization. So, so when you apply it, what happens is, is you're gonna change your history, right? Your something will change, because you're going to change your behavior, right? And then then, in a few months, guess what, you should take another look at the AI again, because you've changed your data footprint right in the sand basically, right, got a turn, look back and say, Okay, so we changed ourselves. What does the AI tell us? Now? That's another key aspect of evergreening the business. Does that make sense? Steve Larsen Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's like, I mean, that's what you told me too. It's like data is all historical, because it happened in the past. And then you have to keep taking new stamps of the data because it changes the predictions in the past. And what's gonna happen and, and so what we've been doing. So when I was leaving clickfunnels, one of the roles, the final role that Russell's asking me to do was help bobe an internal funnel agency. When I got there, it was literally just he and I, there was an a copywriter a designer, we were doing everything. And then as we brought in a funnel guy, you know, another assistant guy or another copywriter, we had to finally actually build a process beyond Hey, what are you on? Alright, let's do this. Right, we started building a system and, and I started documenting it and making these processes and systems for what it took to get a successful funnel out the door. So that I wasn't just leaving him and he had to just hold this thing now. Yeah, well, what that turned into and started developing into and what's now turn into two and a half years later, is this 12 step process that designs launches in evergreens lucrative funnels. Well, just a little while ago, I was Like, why aren't we in the launch phase in the, in the funnel building phase, we need to be setting up data capture systems that I can then send to click AI. So that we're so that it's there. It's there, when we get to step 12, which is evergreening. And then I can send it to click, and then you go, Hey, here's all the patterns and insights your naked eye can't see. And then we go back, and we make the tweaks and the changes. And that that's, that's awesome. Because I evergreen phase, and now I get computers looking at it. Grant Larsen And you know, what's interesting is a lot of companies hate the Evergreen phase. And so that's why looking for ways to automate it with things like AI, take some of the monotony out of it, right? Because otherwise you lose the creative edge because you end up just going into maintenance mode. where's the fun in that right as humans we love to create. And so I see the AI piece as a way to help us still explore the creative avenues in terms of evergreening our businesses. Yeah, so I have a question for you. What in your mind are the biggest hurdles to small to medium companies leveraging AI to help them? What do you think would be the things that would get in the way of that? Steve Larsen Yeah, you know, especially when it comes to the small entrepreneur, they're thinking sale, sale, sale sale sale sale, because they gotta eat what they kill, you know, and, and since most of them are so new, they don't really have any evergreen selling systems. And so they're, I mean, I've been at phase two for a while. It's like you're selling and launching and selling and launching. We recently went back and I started making a list of all of the projects that we had once launched, that were very successful that we're not doing a thing with that aren't selling because I'm not doing that last phase. It was like 15 projects, and I was like, that is literally millions of automated dollars. I'll have to do nothing for just sitting there. I was so mad. I was so I was livid. I was like Darn you and your distaste for evergreen. So that's what I went back and started adding In those things, to our funnel process to tie into click AI, and I think the danger and the challenge for small entrepreneurs will be not understanding how simple it is to simply I mean, this is how, for everyone who's listening now, this is as simple as I mean, data capture systems. Yeah, it's a zap to a Google Sheet. There's nothing else download it and then like, send to ClickAI.com. This grandiose thing, it is behind the scenes on you. It's super smart, very wizardry. But I think that because we hear data science, you know, the spoiling the entrepreneur data science, and, you know, all this stuff is gonna be this massive, like, I gotta go get a Harry Potter wand and like, you know, get up, you know what I mean? But it can be simple. Grant Larsen Yeah, you know, it's funny, you mentioned that we're doing some stuff for Blake Nubar the other day, and he goes, he said the same thing is like, "Okay, so, Alright, so what am I going to have to do?"" I said, "Send me your Excel file."" I go, "Yeah, yeah, we, we got the rest."" He said, "Yeah, okay." And then we will tell you what changes to go put in place. He's like, "Okay, well, that's simpler than I thought so." Yeah. Yeah, it's critical. Yeah, it's hard part was just just in the head, right. It sounds scary. Ai right. So you're like, oh, gosh, that this must must be hard. Okay, so, all right. I know we're, we're out of time here. Really appreciate your time. Steven, I will just mention one other thing. Do you remember the last wrestling match we had when it was you and Kenneth and Jared and me and we are wrestling on the floor in Colorado and I got off the floor and I said, "I'm done wrestling you guys."" I went upstairs and told your Mom, "Okay, I think that's the last time I tried to wrestle those guys. They're kicking the crap out of me." I know you're super busy. Just really appreciate your time coming here today and representing capitalist pig. A lot of luck the branding. Thanks for doing that. Any final comments? Steve Larsen No, it's just it's fun to see ClickAI go. You know, I actually I do get asked frequently to like, okay, looking from where you are in the funnel world and all that stuff, you know, and where do you see it happening and I don't see a way where the marriage of AI and and small e funnel tech can't happen because it's already have I feel like it's something you have to jump on and find a solution for similar to how like, you know, email autoresponders are out and now suddenly few people have heard of these SMTP providers now you can send email on your own now you sending like, do you have Windows yet yet? Was it I feel like that's what AI is gonna be soon. It's like, do you have an AI provider and so, this is like a, you know, the pre bubble, you know can take advantage of. Grant Larsen Exactly. Steven, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate that and Everybody, thanks for listening today and until next time, get some AI. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIradio.com now.  

Hey everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining ClickAI Radio. Okay, so COVID-19 has certainly been on all of our minds and it has radically impacted our businesses. But to talk about that, I want to back up and tell you just quick story. So one day, my kids were building something that they called a moving landmass. Now, it was a platform of wood and nails, and duct tape. And the idea was to ride the platform, this this moving landmass down the street. So it did okay, until the actual framework fell apart. Because the duct tape was not the answer, right? Although duct tape is the answer to a lot of things. I myself am a duct tape fan, but it didn't have the properties that were needed for this particular purpose. So sometimes in our businesses, we apply duct tape, right? And and sometimes that's just fine. It's the right answer when we just got to hold something together whether it's a quick business process or minor adjustments or changes in some messaging, gotta hold it together so that we can provide value to our customers. Well, coming out of COVID-19 may actually require some duct tape, of course, but in a lot of cases, it's going to require a more serious business re architecting. And looking at that, I'll give an example. Recently I was looking at an article in The Washington Post, the title of it was and you may have seen this, the title of it was the end of small business. I think this came out on July 9, take a look at it. The writer does a good job describing his view, right? He basically says, Look, it's probably over for a lot of small medium businesses, only the large corporations are going to survive this. He makes a couple comments about even when the economy recovers more or less obviously people are going to still need to buy things, but the Coronavirus is going to you know, obviously change mainstream across the country right. It's gonna accelerate some changes that have been waiting a long time. And so a lot of the mom and pop stores are at risk. This is the viewpoint of course of this writer. He further went on to point out that in the 1980s, one half of retail shopping took place in independent stores. And today, it's less than a quarter. He makes one other key point that I'll just call out here. He says, like, many small businesses and weaker corporations won't have enough capital to outlast the pandemic, and their customers will be claimed by a handful of winners, with the cash and the technological infrastructure necessary to survive and prosper in the new environment. That's the context so we're living in so that's in quote there. That's the context we're living in, right, which is a lot of our small businesses are at risk. No doubt, no surprise to everybody. But it's gonna be Hey, can you hold on to your cash and can you survive the pandemic? Make it long enough so that you can still have another business day. I've done my share of investing and trading, the real thought there is live to invest or trade another day, right? Well, as a business owner, can we live to invest and trade or do our business another day? So again, take a look at that Washington Post article, interesting viewpoint, flipping the coin. I also looked at another article, this is from Forbes, and they were talking about their viewpoint was, hey, six ways to rebuild your small business after COVID-19. All right, so the Washington Post was just a little bit like a you know, the sky is falling, and in some case, it really has fallen. In other cases, though, like from the Forbes perspective, they're describing, hey, in order to come out of this, right, there's six things that you got to take a look at number one, and this was let's see, this was April 20th 2020 is when they wrote this article. So take a look at that one online. six ways to reopen as a small business number one, here's the six things they pointed out. Number one, assess the financial damage. Number two, take a second look at your business plan. Number three, consider whether you'll need funding to recover. Number four, revamp your budget to account for new spending. Number five, develop a timeline for rebuilding. Number six, create a contingency plan on the next crisis. Right now, I want to talk about a couple of these for just a moment. So on Step three, where talks about Hey, consider the funding that you might need to recover. Clearly, you've heard about the SBA, the Small Business Administration that's been handing out some pretty decent loans recently to small businesses. I know a number of people, number of business owners, small business owners that have taken advantage of that, and I can see some real value in it. I think the interest rates are really low. You see everything from Like 2.75% to 4%, those are some pretty decent rates. I think I also saw that you don't really start paying it back until like a year after you, you actually take take the loan, so they give you 12 months. And then I think it was a 20 year sort of deal. So it's an awesome stimulus, of course, for the small to medium business. But earlier, when I first started this episode, I talked about duct tape, right? And here's, here's the point I want to make on it if I just apply for an SBA loan, but I continue to spend and execute on the same business model as I had before. COVID-19. The likelihood of my business sustaining the big changes is much smaller. In other words, I probably won't survive. Here's the point. It's kinda like duct tape, right? It's if I if I just take the money, and I don't really change the way I'm going to do business. I don't change my business architecture, my plan, etc. But I just take and apply it. I'm kind of duct taping the situation, because the world has changed, as pointed out in that Washington Post article, whether or not you agree with everything there. There's some great insights there. The fact of the matter is if we just take that sort of funding, and we just apply it, again, without making any sort of adjustments, we're kind of duct taping it right? And like my kids big moving landmass, it's not going to hold up to the weight of things. So here's a thought, rather gonna suggest that you think about what assets Do you already have, which can give you insights in order to help you make adjustments. So I'm definitely a fan of taking advantage of the SBA loan, but don't just do that on its own. Let's also take a look at what assets you've already as a business owner developed over time. Well, you've captured the information that you have available to you now As you think about, you know, revamping your budget, which was number four in that Forbes list, gonna encourage you to think about a few things here. First of all, you've got a lot of business information or data that you've collected over time, right? And in fact, lots of times you have a lot of data, it turns out that a lot of that data contains insights to patterns, your patterns, right? So it's the patterns of your good behavior, and your bad, you know, your bad behavior, things that they shouldn't have done, right. He listened to some of my previous episodes, I shared some bad things that I did, and some of my earlier startups 20 plus 30 plus years ago, so easy to do the bad things, but I tell you what, rather than just taking the quick fix of the money, let's step back and look at your data, what it's going to tell you, right and what the insights are there. They're so before you get too far, examine the data or get someone who knows how to Do it right to examine the data and identify your best behaviors and the activities to carry forward and then identify those behaviors, right the things to actually stop doing. It makes no sense to come out of COVID-19 with a renewed plan, and updated funding if we continue to spend our time and resources money on bad behavior. So get someone to apply some artificial intelligence and data analytics on your data to help get you the insights. It actually is a good spend, right? It's a good spend to stop sharpen the saw in you know, Wasn't that a Stephen r covey thing? I think, yeah, he's like a sharpen the saga. Right? This is sharpen the saw time. All right, step back, take some of that funding that you're getting from the SBA and apply it to doing some data analytics and some artificial intelligence to tell you based on your patterns, the things that are good, they're not good and do some predictive analysis on that. So you're spending In your time on the better activities, you know, duct tape is a powerful thing. In fact, one of the things that our kids have done with it over the years is birthday times or Christmas times, they'll even wrap presents in duct tape. Right? And that makes for quite the serious moment trying to get that stuff on done. So still a fan of the duct tape, but if we don't, if we don't work smarter, coming out of COVID-19 we're actually gonna have a hard time surviving as small to medium businesses, right? Have In fact, there's some effect. The bad thinking, back to that Washington Post article, he made the comment that a lot of that money is moved to you know, the large organizations right, like Amazon or Walmart or things like that. So as a small to medium business owner, we're obviously competing with organizations that leverage a lot of data. Amazon at leverages a lot of data, right? They look at how you spend, they look at how you search and so on. We actually have to play a similar game as a small to medium business owner. Now the challenge in a small medium business organization is, I'm not going to be able to go hire a large team to do that. Well, there's organizations that will help you through that. So you don't take on all that cost. But you get an opportunity to go at the data and insights that are in there with very little cost to yourself. So I sure hope you take a moment to don't apply duct tape; don't just take the money and keep doing the same things. Stop and examine what you got at your fingertips stuff that's already there available to help you. Alright, everyone, keep buying duct tape on the fan. Let's use it for the right reasons. Thanks for joining. My name's Grant Larsen and but until next time, let's use our duct tape right. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback and remember to Download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

Hey everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining ClickAI Radio. Okay, so COVID-19 has certainly been on all of our minds and it has radically impacted our businesses. But to talk about that, I want to back up and tell you just quick story. So one day, my kids were building something that they called a moving landmass. Now, it was a platform of wood and nails, and duct tape. And the idea was to ride the platform, this this moving landmass down the street. So it did okay, until the actual framework fell apart. Because the duct tape was not the answer, right? Although duct tape is the answer to a lot of things. I myself am a duct tape fan, but it didn't have the properties that were needed for this particular purpose. So sometimes in our businesses, we apply duct tape, right? And and sometimes that's just fine. It's the right answer when we just got to hold something together whether it's a quick business process or minor adjustments or changes in some messaging, gotta hold it together so that we can provide value to our customers. Well, coming out of COVID-19 may actually require some duct tape, of course, but in a lot of cases, it's going to require a more serious business re architecting. And looking at that, I'll give an example. Recently I was looking at an article in The Washington Post, the title of it was and you may have seen this, the title of it was the end of small business. I think this came out on July 9, take a look at it. The writer does a good job describing his view, right? He basically says, Look, it's probably over for a lot of small medium businesses, only the large corporations are going to survive this. He makes a couple comments about even when the economy recovers more or less obviously people are going to still need to buy things, but the Coronavirus is going to you know, obviously change mainstream across the country right. It's gonna accelerate some changes that have been waiting a long time. And so a lot of the mom and pop stores are at risk. This is the viewpoint of course of this writer. He further went on to point out that in the 1980s, one half of retail shopping took place in independent stores. And today, it's less than a quarter. He makes one other key point that I'll just call out here. He says, like, many small businesses and weaker corporations won't have enough capital to outlast the pandemic, and their customers will be claimed by a handful of winners, with the cash and the technological infrastructure necessary to survive and prosper in the new environment. That's the context so we're living in so that's in quote there. That's the context we're living in, right, which is a lot of our small businesses are at risk. No doubt, no surprise to everybody. But it's gonna be Hey, can you hold on to your cash and can you survive the pandemic? Make it long enough so that you can still have another business day. I've done my share of investing and trading, the real thought there is live to invest or trade another day, right? Well, as a business owner, can we live to invest and trade or do our business another day? So again, take a look at that Washington Post article, interesting viewpoint, flipping the coin. I also looked at another article, this is from Forbes, and they were talking about their viewpoint was, hey, six ways to rebuild your small business after COVID-19. All right, so the Washington Post was just a little bit like a you know, the sky is falling, and in some case, it really has fallen. In other cases, though, like from the Forbes perspective, they're describing, hey, in order to come out of this, right, there's six things that you got to take a look at number one, and this was let's see, this was April 20th 2020 is when they wrote this article. So take a look at that one online. six ways to reopen as a small business number one, here's the six things they pointed out. Number one, assess the financial damage. Number two, take a second look at your business plan. Number three, consider whether you'll need funding to recover. Number four, revamp your budget to account for new spending. Number five, develop a timeline for rebuilding. Number six, create a contingency plan on the next crisis. Right now, I want to talk about a couple of these for just a moment. So on Step three, where talks about Hey, consider the funding that you might need to recover. Clearly, you've heard about the SBA, the Small Business Administration that's been handing out some pretty decent loans recently to small businesses. I know a number of people, number of business owners, small business owners that have taken advantage of that, and I can see some real value in it. I think the interest rates are really low. You see everything from Like 2.75% to 4%, those are some pretty decent rates. I think I also saw that you don't really start paying it back until like a year after you, you actually take take the loan, so they give you 12 months. And then I think it was a 20 year sort of deal. So it's an awesome stimulus, of course, for the small to medium business. But earlier, when I first started this episode, I talked about duct tape, right? And here's, here's the point I want to make on it if I just apply for an SBA loan, but I continue to spend and execute on the same business model as I had before. COVID-19. The likelihood of my business sustaining the big changes is much smaller. In other words, I probably won't survive. Here's the point. It's kinda like duct tape, right? It's if I if I just take the money, and I don't really change the way I'm going to do business. I don't change my business architecture, my plan, etc. But I just take and apply it. I'm kind of duct taping the situation, because the world has changed, as pointed out in that Washington Post article, whether or not you agree with everything there. There's some great insights there. The fact of the matter is if we just take that sort of funding, and we just apply it, again, without making any sort of adjustments, we're kind of duct taping it right? And like my kids big moving landmass, it's not going to hold up to the weight of things. So here's a thought, rather gonna suggest that you think about what assets Do you already have, which can give you insights in order to help you make adjustments. So I'm definitely a fan of taking advantage of the SBA loan, but don't just do that on its own. Let's also take a look at what assets you've already as a business owner developed over time. Well, you've captured the information that you have available to you now As you think about, you know, revamping your budget, which was number four in that Forbes list, gonna encourage you to think about a few things here. First of all, you've got a lot of business information or data that you've collected over time, right? And in fact, lots of times you have a lot of data, it turns out that a lot of that data contains insights to patterns, your patterns, right? So it's the patterns of your good behavior, and your bad, you know, your bad behavior, things that they shouldn't have done, right. He listened to some of my previous episodes, I shared some bad things that I did, and some of my earlier startups 20 plus 30 plus years ago, so easy to do the bad things, but I tell you what, rather than just taking the quick fix of the money, let's step back and look at your data, what it's going to tell you, right and what the insights are there. They're so before you get too far, examine the data or get someone who knows how to Do it right to examine the data and identify your best behaviors and the activities to carry forward and then identify those behaviors, right the things to actually stop doing. It makes no sense to come out of COVID-19 with a renewed plan, and updated funding if we continue to spend our time and resources money on bad behavior. So get someone to apply some artificial intelligence and data analytics on your data to help get you the insights. It actually is a good spend, right? It's a good spend to stop sharpen the saw in you know, Wasn't that a Stephen r covey thing? I think, yeah, he's like a sharpen the saga. Right? This is sharpen the saw time. All right, step back, take some of that funding that you're getting from the SBA and apply it to doing some data analytics and some artificial intelligence to tell you based on your patterns, the things that are good, they're not good and do some predictive analysis on that. So you're spending In your time on the better activities, you know, duct tape is a powerful thing. In fact, one of the things that our kids have done with it over the years is birthday times or Christmas times, they'll even wrap presents in duct tape. Right? And that makes for quite the serious moment trying to get that stuff on done. So still a fan of the duct tape, but if we don't, if we don't work smarter, coming out of COVID-19 we're actually gonna have a hard time surviving as small to medium businesses, right? Have In fact, there's some effect. The bad thinking, back to that Washington Post article, he made the comment that a lot of that money is moved to you know, the large organizations right, like Amazon or Walmart or things like that. So as a small to medium business owner, we're obviously competing with organizations that leverage a lot of data. Amazon at leverages a lot of data, right? They look at how you spend, they look at how you search and so on. We actually have to play a similar game as a small to medium business owner. Now the challenge in a small medium business organization is, I'm not going to be able to go hire a large team to do that. Well, there's organizations that will help you through that. So you don't take on all that cost. But you get an opportunity to go at the data and insights that are in there with very little cost to yourself. So I sure hope you take a moment to don't apply duct tape; don't just take the money and keep doing the same things. Stop and examine what you got at your fingertips stuff that's already there available to help you. Alright, everyone, keep buying duct tape on the fan. Let's use it for the right reasons. Thanks for joining. My name's Grant Larsen and but until next time, let's use our duct tape right. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback and remember to Download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

What does it mean to make money!!?? That's That's a big question on a lot of our minds, right? What what does that actually mean, especially for all this going on with COVID-19 and such? Wow, small to medium businesses are just getting hammered. I'm sure a lot of you have been seeing the small to medium business loans, the SBA loans that are coming out. And obviously, some of those are even grants, if you will. What I wanted to talk about was some of the secrets that we've learned in terms of making money or earning more money in our businesses. It actually kind of goes back to some of the things that we've done with our kids. So, so quick, quick little story here. So we have a large family. We have six kids. And we basically have started each of our children with running their own business in our home. I call it the yard manager. So as each of our children were growing up, they each took turns being the art manager, and over the years well, first of all, I should probably explain why What What it means is they're responsible for getting the work done in the yard. Now, that means they have the opportunity to hire their siblings that have budgets, they'll have cost of goods sold requirements. But in the end, they ultimately have to send me an invoice. And one of the lessons they've learned over time is no invoice no money. And so there were times when I went without paying them for weeks and they'd be like, Hey, Dad, where's you know, where's the money? It'd be like, you got to send the invoice. And so they would do that and they'd get into the pattern of that and help them to start tracking and finding some independence but I noticed a pattern over many years of doing this as each child took on the role as they came into the role they are crowned you know, with with this crown, your crown is the art manager anyway, the pattern that I noticed is that is it they almost always Start projecting into the future. So as they start to see the flow of the money coming, right, and they start to get into the pattern of that, and they start collecting the data. Now, of course, the data in this little operation is very simple. It's, it's, here's the work that was done. Here's the data was done. Here's the amount and of course we come up with with what those mounts are ahead of time. And here's who was involved with it, if any, mostly it's down, but like, like I said, sometimes some of them hate doing weeding, right. So they, they want to hire that out to their siblings. But in any event, they almost always start projecting into the future because they see the money flow, and they start looking at ways to optimize it. Alright, so maybe there's another way they can figure out to get the work done faster or cheaper. And of course, like I said, they're looking at the cost of goods sold. Some of them may have even looked at patterns like, Well, okay, when it's storms or rains or whatever it might be, they realize that there is Come reduces, right? Well, it's interesting when we look at our businesses and we look start looking at the data that we have available to us, it actually becomes a critical activity to monetize our, our data, right to commercialize it. There's a couple obvious ways, of course, for companies to commercialize data. One of those is the data, of course gets collected, and it's analyzed for product development purposes, right or to make better products. And of course, that can translate into improve sales and, you know, products with higher value and so forth. That's the first sort of obvious way. The second obvious way is, of course, the data gets used to identify problems and bottlenecks in internal processes, which of course then can eliminate or improve, you know, business bottlenecks and improve the efficiency and profitability. Right. So those are two obvious ways. I saw that with our kids in the US Manage payroll. Again, I've seen it many years over over time with small to medium businesses. So I wanted to look at some examples of some companies on how they've used data like, there's a search and discovery service called Foursquare, and they sell its data to retailers. So they can optimize their outdoor advertising and online marketing to match you know, the routes that people use to navigate the city. Right. There's other groups, media companies that collect digital data on people's interest, and then they sell that to online advertisers. Certainly weather forecasting companies like freaka can, you know, they also help advertising match weather conditions? Those are certainly some examples. There's other companies and this is of course, in some cases, it's their own data, or its data there that they're intentionally collecting from others or for others. Certainly An example would be Facebook. Right. So the you know, the question is, you've got Facebook, right? Would Facebook really have paid $22 billion? And you know, for WhatsApp in 2014? If if, in fact WhatsApp didn't already have data on 600 million consumers worldwide? I mean, they probably wouldn't have done that. Right. So it wasn't the fact that what's apps revenues were massive. I think at the time, maybe they're around 10 million back in 2014, or 2013. You know, Microsoft, what did they pay over 2 billion, I think is two and a half billion. They did that for from Minecraft, and that the time Minecraft had very little actual revenues. It was the data that the Microsoft was after, which is a key valuation. So, fact of the matter is, even as a small to medium business owner, if we're not cognizant of the data and information we're tracking, we're actually leaving money on the table and now ends up hurting us rather than helping us. And in today's technology world, it actually becomes more important for us to do this to take a moment to get our data strategy together. Doesn't have to take a lot of work. We got to take some effort to do that. Well, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, hey, data is the new oil. Right? And there are some people that certainly say that, and I think that while at a surface level, you might say, Yeah, that makes sense. But there's some challenges with that with that metaphor. Turns out in reality, I think we're the oil in the metaphor, right? It's humans, right? It's the footprint, the digital footprint. The transactions that we do, the places we go, the people we see how we interact. That's actually the data. And that's actually where the money is. It's tracking that. So we have to be much more cognizant of how we of course give our data but also as business owners We need to be more cognizant of, if a consumer is sharing certain kinds of data, and they're open to that. It's important for us to also understand the opportunity that's available there as well. I think when Zuckerberg you know, Facebook when he was testifying before Congress, he explained a bit about how Facebook makes money, right? He said something about, Hey, you know, it's we're taking data in terms of what's happening, you know, where the people are clicking what they're doing, who they're interacting with. And then ultimately, they sell that, you know, off to advertisers, right? I think they do over 200 billion a year annually, right, basically, by selling our information. So to get started, it's really important that you know, as a small to medium business owners that we start with the data that we currently have, we have to look at it and say, what's our business, what's my role in the business, and then there's typically at least three things to get through. are no one is we got to look at the patterns of our data, right, we should analyze it. Look for patterns and trends that certainly present themselves. But number two, we got to look for what those patterns mean, they tell a message, right? There's some information about it. And the key to this is to figure out what's actionable and what's not. And number three is to focus on the big picture, where are we trying to go as a business? What are we trying to get done, and then use some tools to help us get there. Now one of the things that we do is we apply artificial intelligence to do that. So because after a while you realize you go mind not looking at all this information, number one, number one, right take so much time number two, the AI is proving to help see things that we can't see very easily with our eyes. And so given the fact that we believe that there's money on the table in our data, that we don't have to do a lot of extra work to go harvest it. We just got to go mind for it. Pull it out, leveraging technologies like AI helps us to do that. One of the things that we've seen that comes out of this is the ability to make better decisions, right? And so I'm not a fan of saying take AI and hand it off, and we just go blindly do whatever it says, I'm more in the line of thinking that this is augmented intelligence, use the intuition that you have as a business owner, but then augment it with what AI insights are providing. So, you know, these days, as I'd mentioned, you know, the more that we have data at our fingertips, the more important it is for us to leverage some kind of techniques that will help us to, you know, understand and get the insights from it. Now, recently, I was applying some AI for a company and was evaluating patterns and the predictions and as I reviewed it with the business owner, he made the statement simply, I had no idea I had no idea that the patterns were existing in my business, and that if I did more of this and less of that, I actually can, you know, increase my sales as well as you know, reduce some of my losses. And that's just as important to know ahead of time. You know what this is actually, uh, you know, historically and predictively a losing venture on these particular set of activities. Therefore, let's stop doing that. So whether we'll see improvements in you know, making more money or reducing losses, both are certainly benefits to our business. All right. So there you have it, the How To Make Money, it's in our data. Let's go after the data. And quite frankly, there's enough tools and services out there today, that even if we don't have the skill sets in our small to medium business, reach out to someone such as ourselves that click AI and talk to us about it or find someone else but nevertheless, go harvesting for that data. My name is Grant Larsen. Thanks for joining us. Next time, go find the money in your data. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook. Visit ClickAIRadio.com now!!

What does it mean to make money!!?? That's That's a big question on a lot of our minds, right? What what does that actually mean, especially for all this going on with COVID-19 and such? Wow, small to medium businesses are just getting hammered. I'm sure a lot of you have been seeing the small to medium business loans, the SBA loans that are coming out. And obviously, some of those are even grants, if you will. What I wanted to talk about was some of the secrets that we've learned in terms of making money or earning more money in our businesses. It actually kind of goes back to some of the things that we've done with our kids. So, so quick, quick little story here. So we have a large family. We have six kids. And we basically have started each of our children with running their own business in our home. I call it the yard manager. So as each of our children were growing up, they each took turns being the art manager, and over the years well, first of all, I should probably explain why What What it means is they're responsible for getting the work done in the yard. Now, that means they have the opportunity to hire their siblings that have budgets, they'll have cost of goods sold requirements. But in the end, they ultimately have to send me an invoice. And one of the lessons they've learned over time is no invoice no money. And so there were times when I went without paying them for weeks and they'd be like, Hey, Dad, where's you know, where's the money? It'd be like, you got to send the invoice. And so they would do that and they'd get into the pattern of that and help them to start tracking and finding some independence but I noticed a pattern over many years of doing this as each child took on the role as they came into the role they are crowned you know, with with this crown, your crown is the art manager anyway, the pattern that I noticed is that is it they almost always Start projecting into the future. So as they start to see the flow of the money coming, right, and they start to get into the pattern of that, and they start collecting the data. Now, of course, the data in this little operation is very simple. It's, it's, here's the work that was done. Here's the data was done. Here's the amount and of course we come up with with what those mounts are ahead of time. And here's who was involved with it, if any, mostly it's down, but like, like I said, sometimes some of them hate doing weeding, right. So they, they want to hire that out to their siblings. But in any event, they almost always start projecting into the future because they see the money flow, and they start looking at ways to optimize it. Alright, so maybe there's another way they can figure out to get the work done faster or cheaper. And of course, like I said, they're looking at the cost of goods sold. Some of them may have even looked at patterns like, Well, okay, when it's storms or rains or whatever it might be, they realize that there is Come reduces, right? Well, it's interesting when we look at our businesses and we look start looking at the data that we have available to us, it actually becomes a critical activity to monetize our, our data, right to commercialize it. There's a couple obvious ways, of course, for companies to commercialize data. One of those is the data, of course gets collected, and it's analyzed for product development purposes, right or to make better products. And of course, that can translate into improve sales and, you know, products with higher value and so forth. That's the first sort of obvious way. The second obvious way is, of course, the data gets used to identify problems and bottlenecks in internal processes, which of course then can eliminate or improve, you know, business bottlenecks and improve the efficiency and profitability. Right. So those are two obvious ways. I saw that with our kids in the US Manage payroll. Again, I've seen it many years over over time with small to medium businesses. So I wanted to look at some examples of some companies on how they've used data like, there's a search and discovery service called Foursquare, and they sell its data to retailers. So they can optimize their outdoor advertising and online marketing to match you know, the routes that people use to navigate the city. Right. There's other groups, media companies that collect digital data on people's interest, and then they sell that to online advertisers. Certainly weather forecasting companies like freaka can, you know, they also help advertising match weather conditions? Those are certainly some examples. There's other companies and this is of course, in some cases, it's their own data, or its data there that they're intentionally collecting from others or for others. Certainly An example would be Facebook. Right. So the you know, the question is, you've got Facebook, right? Would Facebook really have paid $22 billion? And you know, for WhatsApp in 2014? If if, in fact WhatsApp didn't already have data on 600 million consumers worldwide? I mean, they probably wouldn't have done that. Right. So it wasn't the fact that what's apps revenues were massive. I think at the time, maybe they're around 10 million back in 2014, or 2013. You know, Microsoft, what did they pay over 2 billion, I think is two and a half billion. They did that for from Minecraft, and that the time Minecraft had very little actual revenues. It was the data that the Microsoft was after, which is a key valuation. So, fact of the matter is, even as a small to medium business owner, if we're not cognizant of the data and information we're tracking, we're actually leaving money on the table and now ends up hurting us rather than helping us. And in today's technology world, it actually becomes more important for us to do this to take a moment to get our data strategy together. Doesn't have to take a lot of work. We got to take some effort to do that. Well, I'm sure you've heard the phrase, hey, data is the new oil. Right? And there are some people that certainly say that, and I think that while at a surface level, you might say, Yeah, that makes sense. But there's some challenges with that with that metaphor. Turns out in reality, I think we're the oil in the metaphor, right? It's humans, right? It's the footprint, the digital footprint. The transactions that we do, the places we go, the people we see how we interact. That's actually the data. And that's actually where the money is. It's tracking that. So we have to be much more cognizant of how we of course give our data but also as business owners We need to be more cognizant of, if a consumer is sharing certain kinds of data, and they're open to that. It's important for us to also understand the opportunity that's available there as well. I think when Zuckerberg you know, Facebook when he was testifying before Congress, he explained a bit about how Facebook makes money, right? He said something about, Hey, you know, it's we're taking data in terms of what's happening, you know, where the people are clicking what they're doing, who they're interacting with. And then ultimately, they sell that, you know, off to advertisers, right? I think they do over 200 billion a year annually, right, basically, by selling our information. So to get started, it's really important that you know, as a small to medium business owners that we start with the data that we currently have, we have to look at it and say, what's our business, what's my role in the business, and then there's typically at least three things to get through. are no one is we got to look at the patterns of our data, right, we should analyze it. Look for patterns and trends that certainly present themselves. But number two, we got to look for what those patterns mean, they tell a message, right? There's some information about it. And the key to this is to figure out what's actionable and what's not. And number three is to focus on the big picture, where are we trying to go as a business? What are we trying to get done, and then use some tools to help us get there. Now one of the things that we do is we apply artificial intelligence to do that. So because after a while you realize you go mind not looking at all this information, number one, number one, right take so much time number two, the AI is proving to help see things that we can't see very easily with our eyes. And so given the fact that we believe that there's money on the table in our data, that we don't have to do a lot of extra work to go harvest it. We just got to go mind for it. Pull it out, leveraging technologies like AI helps us to do that. One of the things that we've seen that comes out of this is the ability to make better decisions, right? And so I'm not a fan of saying take AI and hand it off, and we just go blindly do whatever it says, I'm more in the line of thinking that this is augmented intelligence, use the intuition that you have as a business owner, but then augment it with what AI insights are providing. So, you know, these days, as I'd mentioned, you know, the more that we have data at our fingertips, the more important it is for us to leverage some kind of techniques that will help us to, you know, understand and get the insights from it. Now, recently, I was applying some AI for a company and was evaluating patterns and the predictions and as I reviewed it with the business owner, he made the statement simply, I had no idea I had no idea that the patterns were existing in my business, and that if I did more of this and less of that, I actually can, you know, increase my sales as well as you know, reduce some of my losses. And that's just as important to know ahead of time. You know what this is actually, uh, you know, historically and predictively a losing venture on these particular set of activities. Therefore, let's stop doing that. So whether we'll see improvements in you know, making more money or reducing losses, both are certainly benefits to our business. All right. So there you have it, the How To Make Money, it's in our data. Let's go after the data. And quite frankly, there's enough tools and services out there today, that even if we don't have the skill sets in our small to medium business, reach out to someone such as ourselves that click AI and talk to us about it or find someone else but nevertheless, go harvesting for that data. My name is Grant Larsen. Thanks for joining us. Next time, go find the money in your data. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook. Visit ClickAIRadio.com now!!

"What do you mean we only have 4 weeks of money left in the business??!!!"" Do we need data transparency in our small-to-medium business...?? You bet we do... All right. Hey, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. So all right. I was thinking about data right how important data In data is and I was talking with one of the one of the entrepreneurs that I know, he's been running his business here for several years, doing a fantastic job knocking it out of the park. But I was doing some AI work with him, right. And, and he was pointing out something I thought was really critical, which was He's like, Hey, you know, Grant, he's like, a lot of us, you know, small to medium business owners. We're just trying to keep the lights on, right? We're trying to get stuff done trying to keep things going. And the fact of the matter is, we don't always have the ability, or the opportunity to go back and really look at our data. In fact, lots of times we're making a lot of decisions by intuition. And I thought, gosh, you know, that's, I think he's spot on. And so it prompted me in this particular episode to talk about the need for data, not not to replace intuition, but to augment it. So let's talk about that. So years ago, When I did my very first startup company, gosh, this was almost hate to say it. This was in the 80s. So my, my wife and I had we had just come out of college and, and, and we were going to move to Chicago Actually, I had my first job offers with a large technology company. I don't even think they're in existence today. Actually, they're not 30 plus years later, but anyway, so I had received an offer from them. I actually accepted it. And then about a week later, I'm up on campus on at the college worth college and I'm working through and I see this entrepreneur opportunity on the board there. And I look at it and I'm just drawn to it. And I'm like, No, I actually think that's the route I want to go. So I go home to my wife. I'm like, honey, I got, I got, I got this great idea. How about we leave the you know, hey, here's all this security Sort of job opportunity, let's go after a startup company. So it took a lot of convincing of eventually, we did it. So I went, I turned down the sort of for sure deal with the big company with a startup company in Chicago. So at the time, we had our first child. So this is a big decision, right to go at the higher risk, sort of opportunity. So what I did was, you know, rented this truck got my wife and my little baby in the in the truck, we drove across the country. We ended up in Chicago, I remember pulling in thinking, Man, where in the heck am I gonna live? I mean, it, it pivoted so quickly. It's just shocking to me how fast you know, our trajectory changed. So we pull in, we figure out a place to live. And I start with a startup company. And of course, a few weeks go by pretty soon as a few months now. It's about six months that we're into it. And I was focusing mostly on the technology so I really wasn't thinking much about others. things right in terms of running the business certainly wasn't thinking about the finances. One day though, I happen to take a look at the finances. And so I, I opened it up, and it there's this number, and I do the quick math and realize we've only got four weeks to live. And so I approached the owner, and my partner and I said, Is this true? And he's like, Yeah, it's true. We are actually about out of money. I'm like, Wow, man, you know, if I'd have known that four months ago, I would have made some different decisions. Right. So looking back at it, I realized, wow, I would have operated differently, if I would have known that right if I had access to that or been aware of it. So for me, this was just one of those first realizations in business, right? Just coming out of college where I realized Not only do I need the data I need, I need the transparency of the data. I need to be able to see it and you know, In small to medium businesses, you know, we're all taking on different roles, and we're busy and so forth. But running on intuition alone isn't sufficient. So augmenting it with data makes a lot of sense. Now, of course, it depends on your role, right? So the CFO or the CEO, obviously, they tend to look at that more, quite frankly, though, in today's world, technology and business is blended so much doesn't make sense, especially in small medium businesses to keep those separate. So as a result, we ended up having to make some pretty drastic decisions. We I was only there another week, because I realized we don't have enough runway to actually turn this thing around at this point. And I really like the guy I was working with and wanted to give him a chance to survive even longer without me being involved. I think he stayed on for another year with it eventually ended up shutting shutting it down. So here's the point. We got to have this blend of not just data on its own, and not just intuitive Now lots of times as you know, startup companies or small to medium businesses, it's intuition that gets us to the point where we get an operating model where cash is flowing and people are, are making money in the business is growing. But there's a point where that becomes risky, where we actually can't just run the business just on intuition, we actually need the insights that data can provide. Now, lots of times that data will come from things that you're already doing, right? Like, it might be your CRM system, or you know how you're capturing the transactions or the sales. It's not that you have to go do a whole bunch of extra things. But one thing is important, the need to start being intentional not only about tracking the fact that transactions are taking place, but then stopping to extrapolate from that, do some analysis on it and figure out do we need to adjust course, what are the patterns that are working that are while are those things that are bad? So Who needs data? You know, it's interesting. Sometimes marketers don't always need data, right? So when you think about if you got a small to medium business, you got the CFO or a CEO, you've got maybe technology people, you've got marketers and people who are doing sales. Lots of times, the marketers are thinking about, hey, how do I improve conversion rates, right? Or how do I better serve the customers, things like that. And they're often not looking at the data. Turns out that when we get data into the hands of marketers, they're great intuition capabilities that can build these businesses. They're great intuition capabilities actually can be amplified when we can augment their strong intuition with good data patterns, good data analysis, I would dare say, with artificial intelligence. So it's critical to augment the powerful capabilities of people in our small to medium businesses with well informed data. That's teaching and And providing insights to you. So who needs data? Heck we all do. Hey, thanks again for joining. My name is Grant Larsen and until next time, go get some data. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

"What do you mean we only have 4 weeks of money left in the business??!!!"" Do we need data transparency in our small-to-medium business...?? You bet we do... All right. Hey, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. So all right. I was thinking about data right how important data In data is and I was talking with one of the one of the entrepreneurs that I know, he's been running his business here for several years, doing a fantastic job knocking it out of the park. But I was doing some AI work with him, right. And, and he was pointing out something I thought was really critical, which was He's like, Hey, you know, Grant, he's like, a lot of us, you know, small to medium business owners. We're just trying to keep the lights on, right? We're trying to get stuff done trying to keep things going. And the fact of the matter is, we don't always have the ability, or the opportunity to go back and really look at our data. In fact, lots of times we're making a lot of decisions by intuition. And I thought, gosh, you know, that's, I think he's spot on. And so it prompted me in this particular episode to talk about the need for data, not not to replace intuition, but to augment it. So let's talk about that. So years ago, When I did my very first startup company, gosh, this was almost hate to say it. This was in the 80s. So my, my wife and I had we had just come out of college and, and, and we were going to move to Chicago Actually, I had my first job offers with a large technology company. I don't even think they're in existence today. Actually, they're not 30 plus years later, but anyway, so I had received an offer from them. I actually accepted it. And then about a week later, I'm up on campus on at the college worth college and I'm working through and I see this entrepreneur opportunity on the board there. And I look at it and I'm just drawn to it. And I'm like, No, I actually think that's the route I want to go. So I go home to my wife. I'm like, honey, I got, I got, I got this great idea. How about we leave the you know, hey, here's all this security Sort of job opportunity, let's go after a startup company. So it took a lot of convincing of eventually, we did it. So I went, I turned down the sort of for sure deal with the big company with a startup company in Chicago. So at the time, we had our first child. So this is a big decision, right to go at the higher risk, sort of opportunity. So what I did was, you know, rented this truck got my wife and my little baby in the in the truck, we drove across the country. We ended up in Chicago, I remember pulling in thinking, Man, where in the heck am I gonna live? I mean, it, it pivoted so quickly. It's just shocking to me how fast you know, our trajectory changed. So we pull in, we figure out a place to live. And I start with a startup company. And of course, a few weeks go by pretty soon as a few months now. It's about six months that we're into it. And I was focusing mostly on the technology so I really wasn't thinking much about others. things right in terms of running the business certainly wasn't thinking about the finances. One day though, I happen to take a look at the finances. And so I, I opened it up, and it there's this number, and I do the quick math and realize we've only got four weeks to live. And so I approached the owner, and my partner and I said, Is this true? And he's like, Yeah, it's true. We are actually about out of money. I'm like, Wow, man, you know, if I'd have known that four months ago, I would have made some different decisions. Right. So looking back at it, I realized, wow, I would have operated differently, if I would have known that right if I had access to that or been aware of it. So for me, this was just one of those first realizations in business, right? Just coming out of college where I realized Not only do I need the data I need, I need the transparency of the data. I need to be able to see it and you know, In small to medium businesses, you know, we're all taking on different roles, and we're busy and so forth. But running on intuition alone isn't sufficient. So augmenting it with data makes a lot of sense. Now, of course, it depends on your role, right? So the CFO or the CEO, obviously, they tend to look at that more, quite frankly, though, in today's world, technology and business is blended so much doesn't make sense, especially in small medium businesses to keep those separate. So as a result, we ended up having to make some pretty drastic decisions. We I was only there another week, because I realized we don't have enough runway to actually turn this thing around at this point. And I really like the guy I was working with and wanted to give him a chance to survive even longer without me being involved. I think he stayed on for another year with it eventually ended up shutting shutting it down. So here's the point. We got to have this blend of not just data on its own, and not just intuitive Now lots of times as you know, startup companies or small to medium businesses, it's intuition that gets us to the point where we get an operating model where cash is flowing and people are, are making money in the business is growing. But there's a point where that becomes risky, where we actually can't just run the business just on intuition, we actually need the insights that data can provide. Now, lots of times that data will come from things that you're already doing, right? Like, it might be your CRM system, or you know how you're capturing the transactions or the sales. It's not that you have to go do a whole bunch of extra things. But one thing is important, the need to start being intentional not only about tracking the fact that transactions are taking place, but then stopping to extrapolate from that, do some analysis on it and figure out do we need to adjust course, what are the patterns that are working that are while are those things that are bad? So Who needs data? You know, it's interesting. Sometimes marketers don't always need data, right? So when you think about if you got a small to medium business, you got the CFO or a CEO, you've got maybe technology people, you've got marketers and people who are doing sales. Lots of times, the marketers are thinking about, hey, how do I improve conversion rates, right? Or how do I better serve the customers, things like that. And they're often not looking at the data. Turns out that when we get data into the hands of marketers, they're great intuition capabilities that can build these businesses. They're great intuition capabilities actually can be amplified when we can augment their strong intuition with good data patterns, good data analysis, I would dare say, with artificial intelligence. So it's critical to augment the powerful capabilities of people in our small to medium businesses with well informed data. That's teaching and And providing insights to you. So who needs data? Heck we all do. Hey, thanks again for joining. My name is Grant Larsen and until next time, go get some data. Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.  

In this episode of the Trading Justice Podcast, Matt and Tim bring back the Market Skyline to analyze the broad markets from the top. Stock prices have started the year with a nice bullish move, and the most common patterns developing on charts are the V-shaped recovery. Contents Intro: Tim Justice 1:00 Market Skyline 36:30 Interview with Grant 59:00 Coaches Mailbag

Futures trading is not for the faint of heart. It is a very leveraged product that could have you sitting in the shade, or burn you like a day at the pool with no sunscreen. On episode 278 of the trading justice podcast, we invite a friend of the show, Mr. Grant Larsen. Grant does the stock report at Tacke Trading and also dabbles in futures trading. In addition, we bring you a Tackle Trading Half Time report. So, stay tuned for an outstanding episode with some very important announcements. Intro: Tim Justice 3:12 Half Time Report 46:15: Feature Presentation  1:02:45: Coaches Mailbag 

People always ask, "WHERE SHOULD I START"? Well... here you go :) What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I would love to hear maybe a new podcast intro. Now, I've not made one. However, I do want to know if you want to have a new podcast intro. If you wouldn't mind, reach out to me and let me know. We're almost to Episode 60, which is crazy, but I honestly, I wouldn't be ... There's been many times I fall asleep and the podcast intro that I currently have right now just keeps running through my head so anyway, super excited for this episode. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right, all right, all right. Hey, and I'm so excited for today and for what I'm going to share with you because I got some really huge news. Hope you guys had a great weekend. It was Memorial Day Weekend recently and my family was all out. We were having fun. We got up early. We went on a run. We went to the park. We hiked just a little, small little ... It was really steep for my little girls. I have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old so whatever they can handle, but it was really fun. It was awesome. After we went on this hike, right, a park was nearby and what we did is we went down to this park. We're playing and having fun and my little girl's 3 years old, she's running around and there's tons of people there, right. As a parent, you're on red alert. You're looking around like crazy all over the place, making sure everything's fine, making sure there's no creepers around. You know what I mean? Now, I am all for my kids getting their own scrapes and bumps in life. You know what I mean? I'm not going to let them get hurt on purpose, but it's going to happen anyway so, I might as well not be helicopter parent and rather actually go and just prepare them for those experiences. You know what I mean? There's a point to this story, I promise. I wasn't too surprised when there was some kid politics that started and these kids started getting in my little girl's face and just screaming at her. At first, I sit forward, I'm sitting on the side and it was crazy hot out so I was sitting in the shade, but I was watching her. I was watching closely, seeing what's happening, and this little kid starts getting off on my little's girl's face. She's 3, right. She's 3 years old. What are you going to do? She's a little girl. She barely understands what's going around her still. You know what I mean? She's barely becoming self-aware kind of. You know what I mean? My resting state is nice guy personally. Steve Larsen, I'm a nice guy. That's my resting state. That's how I currently am. However, there was this ... Man, there's few things that will set me off and make Papa Bear come out and I have no ... I actually like when Papa Bear comes out. I invite Papa Bear to come out whenever it can. It's kind of fun. Anyway, this kid starts almost physically getting at ... His brother was standing nearby and he started getting really close to my little girl. Suddenly, the brother is holding back this younger kid from, I don't know, hitting or tackling whatever my girl. My little girl is so funny. She's so much like me. In the face of danger whenever there's high stress or whatever, I tend to laugh and it's not always that it's a funny experience or whatever that's going on. It's literally just that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it so you just laugh like whatever and it makes really serious things calm down. That just egged on this kid, right. My little girl starts laughing. It just egged him on and I was ... Anyway, he starts getting too aggressive though with her. I'm watching from across the playground. I stood up real fast and I walked over there because he was trying to push her and shove her really hard and there wasn't anything behind her. She would've fallen off the playground pretty far into the ground. Papa Bear comes out, right, and I come out and I start getting out and I'm hoosh, I'm trying to be cool, but at the same time, I want to throw this kid through a window. You know what I mean? I get really pissed off about that kind of stuff. There's no reason to be a jerk in life. Anyway, I go over and I walk up to this kid and I was like, "Hey, chump, why don't you stop throwing my girl around, huh?" The kid started bawling and it shocked him so much that I was standing there and I guess you would say I was calling him names. I called him a chump, all right, whatever. There's worse things I could probably say to him, but the kid starts bawling loudly. I was like, "Uh, whatever," and I just walked around, I was like, "Come on, Brinley," and I took my little girls and we went into another part of the playground. It was a big playground. Two seconds later and I'm like, "Crap," and I can feel parents eyes on me and I'm like, "Uh, whatever," like I don't ... Anyway, whatever. We're playing around over this other part of the playground and pretty soon, this really heated mom comes walking up to me and she goes, "Excuse me. Did you just call my kid a chump?" I turned around and I was like, "Yes, I did." She's like, "Why?" It's like, "Because he's pushing my little girl around. He can't do that. You understand?" She just stood there for a little while and then, she just turned around and walked away. Look, there's no room to be a chump in this life, all right... If you're going to be a chump and if you're a chump and you're on my podcast, you can get out of my community. You know what I mean? That's my attitude about it. Life's too dang short to be a chump. Don't be a chump. Don't be a chump in business. Don't try and be all sneaky. I got people who steal from me. I can't stand people like that. If I ever find people who's stealing from me, I just block them out immediately and I ... I was talking to Russell about this, you guys. My mentality is to give and give and give and give and give as much as I possibly can, overdeliver every freaking time I launch anything, every time I put anything out, any time I do anything so that when somebody turns around and they come back to me and they say, "Hey, you know what, I think that you should've done this or you're not doing enough here or you're not doing this or you're not ... " I'm like holy crap, I am bleeding, bending over backwards, giving way more than I should, that sets me off. You know what I mean? I know that probably a lot of you guys are probably the exact same way if you're in this community with me, right, the Sales Funnel Broker, Sales Funnel Radio, stevejlarsen.com community. You know what I mean? If you're in this, we're very similar people is what I've noticed. Birds of a feather flock together. I actually truly believe that and it's one of the major reasons that I wanted to start a podcast thing was because I was tired of the people I was hanging around and I wanted other people who thought like I did in my community. You know what I mean? Anyways, the types of people out there who are going to steal from me and stuff like that, I do believe in an element of karma. It's going to come around. It's going to nip you in the butt. You know what I mean? The other part is that man, if that parent and the same is true for you as an entrepreneur, if you're not bridled enough to function in society or let's say parent ... Anyways, I'm not trying to get into parenting stuff, but what I feel like is that if my little girl goes out and she's doing something that's stupid, it's my job to correct it or else society is going to correct it for me later on down the line and they're going to be way less nice about it. You know what I mean? I feel like those kinds of thing ... Anyways, I'm not trying to get into a big ranting thing about that, but my gosh, I was laughing so hard. Finally, I was like man ... I was talking to my wife, like, "Alyssa, we should probably get out of here because these parents are going to rage at the fact that I just called this kid a chump and made him bawl." I don't really freaking care. Anyway, I think it's funny. It's the same attitude when people come to me like, "What? You gave all this stuff to me and it's super, super cheap, but you're not bending over backwards to make sure that I'm successful with it." I'm like, "Dude, it is not my fault if you can't figure it out. I have overdelivered. I've given tons of walkthrough guides. I have given so much stuff like crazy. If you can't figure it out, I'm sorry. You can hire me as a coach, but I'm not going to keep giving stuff away to you for free. My time is more valuable than your feelings." You know what I mean? It was weird for me to cross that threshold as an entrepreneur and as a business guy just because in the past, I was all about just giving and giving and giving and I still am, but eventually, I was like, "My gosh, I got to self-preserve here. I've got to create a way for me to still live, still have a family life." You know what I mean? Still do the things I want to in life or I will literally spend all day every day ... I had 100 notifications in Facebook just two days ago. It was in a single day. My email was at 200 a week ago. It's at 900 now in a week. You guys know what I mean? You all are going to be there. I know especially, you all are going to be there for sure if you're not already. Anyway, don't be a chump. Hey, I got some good news though. That wasn't the good news. I told you I had good news at the beginning of this episode. I got great news. I've been working ... Over Christmas, my dad and I, we got together and I flew over there a few days early and I did it for the explicit reason of sitting down with him and beginning to build out his webinar. He's got this cool software that lets him trade the futures market, E-mini specifically, and he's been doing it for about six years. He learned that basically for him to be successful, he's got to create this thing that didn't exist before and he's a software engineer so he could create it. He created this cool software that sits on top of a trading platform and it tells him whenever to get in and out of a trade and he wins like crazy on the thing. I can't tell you legally because I can't make any kind of income claims, but he wins a lot. He's like, "Do you think anyone would ever buy this?" I was like, "Oh, my gosh, Dad, yes." He showed it to me and my jaw dropped. I did some stocks and options trading for a while and I definitely understand what he was showing. When he showed it, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that's amazing." Anyways, fast-forward, so over Christmas, we were building out a webinar, putting all stuff together. He ended coming to what Russell and I are calling the FHAT event, the Funnel Hack-A-Thon, FHAT event. It's F-H-A-T. He came to this for a three-day intensive and he figured all this stuff out and then he's like, "Okay, Stephen, at the very last Saturday in May, I want to launch this thing." I said, "Cool. Let me help you." I slept probably three, maybe four, sometimes five hours every single night for the last week and we got this thing put together. It was really cool. If you want to check it out, you can. I'm not promoting it. It's just so you can check it out if you want to and actually, I know there's quite a few of you guys that are stock traders or financial markets traders in my community as well, which I think is really cool, super, super awesome industry there. Anyways, you can go to financialinvestingsecrets.com. It was a good webinar and I was so proud of him. We got out there and he went and he just launched it and made money and it was his first webinar ever. You know what? He did half of it wrong. You know what I mean? He just did it though. He just did it. He got out. He executed. He just did it. I was so proud of him. It was so cool. He wasn't expecting to make any money. I was wondering. It was his first time ever doing anything like this. He's just barely launching his own podcast, barely getting these things up and running. Super smart. You know what I mean? He's not a salesman, he's not ... but he's, oh, my gosh, such a smart engineer. He's created a lot of industry standards in the software world, anything from watches to NASA rockets. He's very smart. Much of how things are coded and as far as on a code sense architected is because of the way he has put stuff together. He's very, very smart... Anyway, he ... I'm just really pumped for him. He went out. We had 55 people register and about 13 showed up, which actually for the metrics that Russell always teaches is the exact same metrics that always will happen, about a fourth show up and we had ... I haven't looked at the final numbers yet, but then we had people buy. It was really exciting. His first webinar ever, it's so cool. A lot of people will sit at this point and go, "Okay, now what do we do next?" You know what I mean? It was from you guys, I asked you guys if you wanted to come and 50 of you guys signed up and 12 of you showed up or 13 of you showed up, which is what I was expecting. We were expecting. We're just testing it to see how it worked, right. What do you do next at this point? You do what we call the Dream 100. I don't know if you guys have ever been doing this. If you haven't been doing it and you've been actively driving ads, you are leaving so much freaking money on the table. I can't even believe it. At the last Funnel Hack-A-Thon event, it was the third day. I was on stage the whole day. I was speaking. It was really, really exciting and I really, really loved it, but one of the whole things we teach you guys about is this concept called the Dream 100 and we hope you guys go through it. What I'm having my dad do right now is he's got his webinar and we're continuing to make tweaks. We're continuing to make little adjustments here and there, but honestly, the thing that I'm having him do now is writing out a list of all the people who are podcasting in the financial market world, all the people who have blogs in the financial market world, all the people who have YouTube channels, who have live trading rooms, anybody who has an audience, anybody who has any kind of list or a following where my dad would want to sell to them. While we're getting Facebook ads up and running, we are starting to "date" or "court" these people on this Dream 100 list. We're starting to reach out to them. We'll probably send a package out to them soon. We got to smoosh them up just a little bit. You know what I mean? This is a relationship business. Internet marketing is still a relationship business especially, especially for the way you do sales funnels and the way we teach because what we're going to go do is we're going to go ... we want them to promote his webinar. He's got a great software that he personally wrote that helps him trade the E-minis with great success. You know what I mean? Anyway, that's what we're doing right now though. When you think about this ... I'm trying to think where to start on this because when you think about where we came from and this whole journey that he's currently on right now, a lot of times what people will start doing is they're like, "Okay, I've got this webinar, and I'm going to go build this webinar." Let's say they're just starting out, brand spanking new. They haven't done anything yet. They've never even put anything together. They've never even sold anything. They've never ... You know what I mean? Brand new. What a lot of people do we've noticed is they'll create what we call the value letter, right. They'll go, "Okay, first, we'll have low ticket items and it'll be in this whole funnel. Then I'm going to send them to this mid-range funnel and there's a whole funnel for that. Then I'm going to send them to this really high ticket thing and then the whole funnel for that as well." The tendency for people is to turn around and build a tripwire funnel or a low ticket funnel first, and I will tell you that is not the way we do it. That is not the way we do it whenever Russell and I build for a client. That's not the way I personally do it whenever I build for a client. There's very few circumstances where we actually start with a low ticket front end funnel, very, very, very few scenarios. The reason is because it's so much harder to make the numbers work. If I'm selling a $50 knickknack versus a $1,000 product, I can spend so much more money to acquire a customer, right. Now that my dad needs some sales, he can spend a good chunk of money to get one person to buy and I doubt it's going to cost us $1,000 to sell a $1,000 product, right. Now it's just the big rinse and repeat game... How much can we tweak it? How much can we get more traffic into it? How can we fill it up? Does that make sense? That's the reason ... I don't know if you guys have heard of the Two Comma Club Coaching Program that Russell and I are doing. It's so, so fun. My gosh, just oh, I absolutely love what I do on that thing. Anyways, we teach people though how to make $1 million funnel and we help them hit what we call the Two Comma Club, right, $1 million. We don't actually start with a tripwire funnel and I've had a few people reach out and ask that like "Cool, I got this sweet webinar. You guys help me plan. When do I start the tripwire funnel?" Like you know what? Probably not 'til like six months of it being successful are you even going to start thinking about that. People are like, "What? That's so crazy. Oh, my gosh. That's nuts. How is it that you can do that? How is that you ... You know what I mean? People will start to do that and they'll start to think that. I understand why that would be a temptation because as you read a book like DotCom Secrets or you read other books where it talks about increasing value or monetizing your audience, things like that, the tendency is to think I must start with this low ticket item and then I will go to this mid range item and then I'll go to this really high ticket item. I will tell you that the majority of the time when we actually build funnels, it's actually the opposite. We start at the top and we work down. Here's the reason why. It's funny. We had this four-hour Q&A last Friday with the Two Comma Club Coaching Program and a lot of these guys are out there and they're asking this very same question. They're like, "Why would you do it that way?" Let me take you through it. Here's why. Here's why. Number one, I already told you that the numbers are going to work better, right. You're just going to do better just simply by starting at the top because if you start with a high ticket item, how many people does it take to really start turning some revenue? One? Two? You know what I mean? You probably know where to find those kinds of people. You know where those communities are. If people aren't willing to give you that money yet, it means you haven't proven yourself yet. Go do it for free for a few people, all right. I'm talking about high ticket application style funnels where it's 10,000 to 15,000 to 25,000 to 50,000. You know what I mean? Higher than 10,000 is usually what I'm talking about when I say high ticket application funnels. People are applying to work with you, right. You got to go get crazy results, lots of great results, right. Either you're starting at that spot or you're starting one step down, which is what we teach at the Two Comma Club Coaching level, which is the webinar funnel, right. At the webinar funnel, what you can do is you start to get all these people in, right, tons of people, and you start tweaking the offering, you start tweaking the message and you start tweaking your traffic sources and you start finding out which ads convert the best. You know what I mean? You start figuring this whole thing out. What happens after a while, right? What happens after a while? What happens after a while is you're going to start getting a ton of questions, lots of questions. Man, you know what, I wish that the products from your webinar, I wish it did this. Or you know what, I wish it was this? What if it had this capability? Or how come this isn't here? You know what I mean? You're going to start to get questions. You'll start to get support questions. As those come in, document them because what's going to happen is very, very slowly, sometimes slowly or suddenly, whatever it is, but clearly, there will be this area that starts to rise up and you'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. You know what, I wish that I was selling something like that," right, and you'll go over ... What's happening is the market is showing you which product to create next. Does that make sense? If you are able to go through and massage out a $1,000 to $2,000 product offer and actually get it converting, get it selling, you've already laid so much groundwork for a smaller low ticket front end product funnels in the future. It's just the way it works. Because all of a sudden, what's going to happen is you're going to turn around and people are going to say, "Oh, my gosh, I wish I had X, Y and Z." What are they doing? They're telling you what they want and then all you do is you go create it. Why did Russell go make something like Funnel Scripts? Because people asked for it. He didn't start with Funnel Scripts, right. He made Click Funnels. He figured out his $1,000 webinar. He figured out how to sell something for $1,000 that sold Click Funnels, that got continuity going, right. That was the hard part. Once he got this hard part down, then he can turn around and he starts going, "What are all these [funnel 00:19:47] things? You know what? Let's build this thing called Funnel Immersion, Funnel Scripts. You know what? How about Funnel Graffiti." It's all these things related to the core offer, right, that eventually ascend somebody up into the Click Funnels level. It's the exact same thing that I'm trying to tell you to do. It's the exact same thing I was trying to tell my dad to do. Don't worry about small ticket stuff at first. That would be my advice. Now, other people would tell you different, that's totally fine, but my advice, do not start with something small. Start with something at least $1,000. There was a lot of people on the call who were like, "A thousand dollars? You really think people are going to give me $1,000?" I can hear your questions right now as I'm saying that. The answer is it depends on if you charge $1,000. What's easier to do is simply just put down the price point, 997 and then figure out how you can justify that price point. What is an offer that is so ridiculously cool that someone would give you $1,000 for it? Does that make sense? Instead of thinking, "Oh, no one will ever do that," and killing yourself the other way around. Start with $1,000 product. What's funny is at one of the last events ... Actually, I'm sorry, not one of the last, the last Funnel Hacking Live Event, beforehand ... I think it's okay if I tell you this. Beforehand, Russell was trying to figure out something he could sell at the Funnel Hacking Live Event. What's fun for me is to sit back and watch ... You know when you're so good at something, you don't realize you're that good at it? I think that happens a lot for Russell and it's understandable why it would because he's been doing it for so long. It's fun with my fresh eyes to sit back on the side and be like, "Oh, my gosh, what a cool process you're going through." You know what I mean? Anyways, he's preparing for the event. He's putting together different presentations and he's about to put together a presentation and here's how he starts it. "Gosh, I just wish I had something I could see for like $3,500." That's how he started it. Guess what came from that? The Fill Your Funnel Program. It's okay to start with the dollar amount. I know it must feel like I'm all over the place right now, but the only reason I'm hitting this really hard is because there's been several people who reach out saying, "Where do is start, Stephen, where do I start," right? I've had tons of people come ... I don't know why, but definitely in the last month, there's been a lot of people that ask that, "Where do I start?" What I would tell you to do is to start by figuring out how you can charge $1,000 for something, turn it into a webinar or an invisible funnel or black box funnel. Then what I would do is I would move to high, high ticket, right, because there's going to be a percentage of the people that buy my dad's $1,000 product who want more one-on-one coaching, right. I would not put yourself in the fulfillment or inside of the offer of the $1,000 product. Rather make them pay you more to work with you more. Does that make sense? I would start with this $1,000 product in the middle and then I would go put you into this implementation and coaching area where it's done-for-you services, but it's more high ticket, like 5, maybe 10% of the people who buy your $1,000 product are going to be interested in that kind of thing. That's great. You're only going to sell one or two of them to really make a huge difference. You know what I mean? A really easy way to do that. You guys see what I'm saying? Should I trial close you? Are you guys getting this? Are you guys seeing this could work for your business? What would your spouse say when this actually works for you? Can you imagine what it's going to be like when you walk out and you've made that kind of money? You imagine when it's automated? Should I keep trial closing you guys? That's true though. Does that make sense? Then what happens is then we go out and we start going on tripwire funnels and we start going for breakeven funnels and we start to ... When you do it the other way around, you're totally guessing. It's so much harder to make a tripwire funnel breakeven if you do it the other way around. Instead, do it the other way where you start at the top or in the middle, right, and make the tripwire funnel last or last-ish. People will tell you what they want so then just go make that and the chance of success is so much greater. It is so much less risky to do it that way. It's pretty funny when I sat back and realized what was going on with that and that's the way we do it that it just blew me away because I remember the first funnel that I built, it was low ticket continuity. That's the hardest category I can even think of to sell ever. Continuity stuff in the front, that's wicked hard. That was crazy. It's more challenging as a category usually to sell continuity, especially low ticket, anyway, upfront. Anyway, so it just reminded me of all these different funnels that I put together and I think part of the reason why they would fail and stuff like that. What's funny is I have really low ticket free plus shipping funnels right now. I have also ... You know what's funny? It is just as much work for me to sell the mid-range stuff than it is for me to sell the low ticket stuff. The support tickets that come in are almost the exact same. It's so funny. When I actually go out and start selling $1,000 stuff, it's easier for me to do that than it is the lower ticket thing. For whatever reason, it brings in a higher level customer. It brings in somebody who's in a different position in their life, someone who I want to work with. Anyways, I don't know how to sell you on this. When I was thinking about my dad's webinar, when I was thinking about all the stuff going on, and those of you who are trying to make this business succeed, I'm not trying to tell you to abandon everything if you already have a funnel, a tripwire funnel on the front end. What I am trying to tell you to do is charge more money, just charge more money. Then what you do is have some person in the back end after someone buys your mid range product, your $1,000, $2,000 product, have somebody calling them up in the back end saying, "Hey, you want to work with Grant Larsen for 15,000 or whatever? He'll give you one-on-one coaching for six months," or something like that. You know what I mean? You only close two of those a month, that is seriously massive revenue boosters right there. Anyway, guys, I hope that what I'm trying to say is coming across clearly because the type of question that I've been getting recently, which by the way, I've been loving the questions. I hope you like the mass Q&A sessions I just did, the last two podcast episodes. Those were a lot of fun. As a by product of that, people have been asking more and more questions. It's been a whole lot of fun. Really, really enjoy that. Usually, the type of question is like, "Hey, where do I start?" I'm trying to tell you please for the love, from a guy who did it for years at the low ticket price thinking that he was serving better or thinking that he was making it more affordable, but in reality causing a harder headache and I actually had to sell it harder sometimes. It's not fun. I'm telling you, please start with something that's at least $1,000... I'm saying that over and over and over again because it doesn't take many of them to really change your life. It does not take many of them to have seed cash for your next ad campaign. It doesn't take many of them to really start figuring out also what people want in the next tripwire funnel. Start with something high ticket. It's so funny. There was a few people I was coaching this last week and they're like ... I kept telling them $1,000 price point, they're like, "Awesome. I'm selling for 497." I said, "Why? I keep telling you," and it came down to it ... Now if you have a legitimate reason like sometimes there's a legitimate reason and that's fine, but most of the time, there isn't one. You literally are just afraid to charge more money and I'm begging you not to do that... I'm begging you to get out and actually say, "You know what, I'm going to charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how I can charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how to sell at that price point," and when that becomes your focus, oh, man, it's so rewarding when $1,000 comes in. It's like, "Whoa." Just emotionally, it's so nice. Holy crap. How many of those does it take to actually cover the mortgage or rent? Not many. You know what I mean? I guess it depends where you live, but still even then, not many. That could fit a really wide range of households, but I guess it's on my mind because we're in a house now. Anyways, guys, hopefully that helps. Super excited for this week and what's going on here and I appreciate you all like crazy. Just gosh, I just love our community. It's so, so, so fun. I remember I was posting different pictures, what we were doing and things like that and just the engagement, I just really, really enjoyed it and I really appreciate all you guys are doing. Anyways, keep at it. Funnel on, my friends and I will see you at the next one. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. 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Hey everybody, this is Grant Larsen, thanks for joining another episode of Financial Investing Radio! It's another beautiful morning and the markets made some great moves this week. You know, I was thinking back to when I was a kid we lived in Northern California for a while. I loved that place, it was just outside of Sacramento, and we had a lot of fun with easy access to the mountains there, and the lakes and rivers in the area. One of the things my dad did was grow a garden. He was expert at this as he himself spent some time farming growing up. Anyway, one day we were in the garden weeding...which I hated doing. As we were weeding my dad asked me to something, which I didn't want to do...I mean I was already weeding, why would I want to do one more thing that I didn't want to do. So, I did something really stupid and I talked back to my dad. I was about 6 years old at the time. My dad patiently asked me to stop talking back and to go do the additional thing that I didn't want to do. Instead, I talked back to him, AGAIN. He stood up and started walking towards me. The thought entered my mind that I could outrun him! So, I stood up and started to run across the back yard. He tried to catch me. I realized that if I jigged to the right and then jigged to the left, he couldn't catch me, he couldn't turn as fast as I could! So I did this for several turns and it seemed to be working well for me. Then I had another thought, 'hey, if I can beat him cutting back and forth like this, I bet I can beat him in a full out sprint'! You know, when you are doing something stupid, often the next one or two thoughts in your head are often just as stupid! I mean, I just wasn't thinking about the consequences. Where was I going to eat later in the day, or where would I sleep that night? How would I fend for myself and generate income? But I wasn't thinking about any of that, so I started off for the back corner of the house and beat him to it. All I had to do was to make it to the front yard, and then off to freedom down the street! Or so I thought! As I turned the corner at the front of the house he caught a hold of my collar and picked me up off the ground. My little legs were still moving in the air and all my dreams of freedom vanished before my eyes! Wow...was I being stupid! The markets are a bit like that - when it runs back and forth, a quick cut up, and a quick cut down...it is hard to catch it. Once it stretches out into a direction it is a bit easier to catch. There are some characteristics of sideways/choppy action that can become profitable. But before we get there, we need to practice putting our mind into two modes. Mode #1: choppy Mode #2: trendy, or trending The skill we need to practice is successfully identifying each mode. I'm not talking about looking at a chart of some stock or other instrument and being able to see when it trends and when the trend stops. That's pretty easy to do. We make investment decisions when we cannot see what is beyond the right-hand side of the chart. So, a skill we need to develop and practice is identifying the current market conditions, and the probability of the continuation of that market condition. So, let's practice together, get a chart of something you want to invest in or trade. If you don't have a trading, or investing account and the trading tools, just open a web browser and go to one of the free sites, like stockcharts.com. On that site, towards the top of the web page, enter a symbol for a chart, let's pick SPY. Put SPY in the top of the chart and hit enter or click the Go button. This will bring up a Daily chart for SPY. What do you observe about trending days vs choppy/sideways days? Write down your observations. Here's three observations to add to your list. 1. On sideways days the highs and the lows stay very close to the previous day's highs and lows...can you see it? Stop for a minute and train your eyes to observe the behavior of choppy days, what else do you see? Write down your observations. For example, how many days does it go sideways before it begins to trend? 2. For days trending up, the close of the day is above the close of the previous day. Take a minute and train your eyes to recognize that. What else do you notice about trending up days? Again, be sure to write down your observations. 3. For days trending down, the close of the day is below the close of the previous day. For these trending days, how many days does it trend in one direction before the trend stops? One of the key points here is to pick one thing to invest in and get to know it well; and to be able to answer these kinds of questions (and more) about it. Ok, just using the observations we talked about, take a piece of paper, it may need to be color paper, or maybe you can use your browser to do this...and cover up the majority of the days on the right side of the SPY chart we are looking at. Now, looking at the days leading up to the edge of your paper (or your browser), and using the three observations we wrote earlier...what would expect the next day or two days to do? Uncover the next day and see if you are right? Now for that day, apply the three observations and ask yourself about the next day. Continue to practice estimating the behavior of the days you cannot see. Are there some things you should add to your observations? If so, write those down. Do this over and over again; paper trading, not with real money, but practice alot and write down your observations. These will provide the basis for your rules in the future. Let's try some other observations...do you notice anything about the range of movement...meaning the size of the candles or the bars. When are the candles or bars larger and when are they smaller? Often the bars are smaller in their size when price movement has slowed down or is going sideways. This is important to note. So, get to know the general or average size of movement that the bars are when price is trending. And compare that to the general or average size of movement of the bars when price is going sideways. Keep a running average of the previous several days, 3 to 5 days is a good number. What you are taking an average of is the distance between the OPEN and the CLOSE on EACH day, for the previous 3 to 5 days. You are looking to understand how far price is moving. As you calculate this you will notice the average distance of price movement on any given day increases as it is trending and decreases as price movement slows down. But confirm this for yourself. This helps to quantify in our brains what our eyes are seeing. I use small tool to help me keep this running average. You can certainly use a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet for this. Now, there are other factors to consider besides this exercise before you actually trade or invest...but, this part needs to become second nature. And so we train ourselves and our minds to look quickly at current price activity and it sets the tone for other factors that need to be reviewed, which we will discuss later. But this is a first step in identifying choppy markets and trending markets; to help you know when to stay out and when to enter. As you see price move out of a choppy area, you will often see that it comes back to the choppy area and touches it just before it takes off in a trending direction. This is an important observation to make. Look for that on the chart. Developing the skills to recognize the areas where price is bouncing back and forth in a choppy range and when it moves beyond that range is a key step to catching the market. When I was a kid, as I rounded the corner of the front of the house I could see some clear spaces ahead of me to run to. My dad could see that too, and he was able to catch me as I was heading off for freedom...in a trending direction...as I broke out of my choppy action. Now, practice identifying the same thing on the charts! Until next time, avoid the chop, and don't talk back to your Dad!!

Welcome to Financial Investing Radio, where you'll learn the secrets for consistent, high probability returns in the financial market for additional income to change your life. Grant creates consistent, high probability trading systems for the financial markets, and has applied them over the past five years. He's only recently started sharing these tried and true market secrets. As a gift to listeners, Grant is offering his high probability indicators for free. Go to financialinvestingradio.com and download yours today. Now, here's your host and trading veteran, Grant Larsen. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. Thank you for joining. It's a Monday morning here and the market is not yet open, but the plan for the day is that I'll be looking for some choppy sideways action throughout the day. I expect there'll be moments of pushing in one direction or the other direction, but overall that's what I'm expecting at the moment. In the last episode, I shared some back story on my initial desire to begin investing. As I got to that point, I of course realized I needed a plan. Part of my growing up years was near some mountains in the countryside, and out there everyone had a dirt bike. My family did as well, and I think I must have weighed 85 pounds - I was a really small kid. Some of the other kids in the area decided to do a camp out on their motorcycles in the nearby mountains. So you'd put your backpack on with your sleeping bag, and off we'd go. So my parents said okay, and we headed off to a pre-defined location where all of our parents knew we would be. It wasn't too far away, but far enough out into the mountains to have the adventure, anyway. The key here was planning was not our forte, so we hadn't thought through the food and the other items. The parents left that up to us kids. The other thing we hadn't thought through was the weather. Who would have thought to look ahead of time to see what the weather's going to be. So during the night, a big rainstorm came in and it made all the roads super muddy and slippery. Of course, again I was about 85 pounds, so in the morning when it was so muddy, I could not keep the dirt bike standing up straight in the mud, it was that slippery. I'd stand it up and start to go, and it would go right out form under me. Heck, I could barely lift the thing off the ground, so aside from being cold and wet and hungry, we were faced with the prospect of spending a long, long time up there until things dried out. Ultimately, we hid one of the motorcycles back in some trees and I rode on the back of the motorcycle of the largest kid. So much for planning, or rather not planning. That was one of those life lessons where you sort of step back later and realize that could have gone better if we had done a little more planning. For me, investing in the markets requires planning in several key areas. One of those is planning for education. To get started there, you need to figure out which area are you interested in, and start your education there. Maybe you're interested in options, or stocks, or futures, or forex. In this industry I'm always learning and building my education. I'm not done, I'm still a work in progress. I think that it's a key part of what it means to invest, so if we're going to invest and be self directed in our investment, we also then need to adopt the willingness to be open to continually learn, and gather new insights. So that's the first area, which is plan our education, what are we going to work on over time, and give us the time and the license to do that. The second area is, let's say that you've already begun that process, you've already taken some education, or you're in the middle of that. Another kind of planning involves how you will invest on a regular basis. So think about today, when I first opened up this episode, I say "I'm anticipating a sideways choppy day with some regression to mean." Why would I say that? Well my education coupled with my experience now over the years leads me to say that. Leads me to say on this kind of day given recent activities in the market, and being a Monday, and other things like that, I'm anticipating that it will be a little more sideways. Doesn't mean there won't be any kind of trending, but be looking for more reversion to mean opportunities throughout the day. Of course we'll see if that's right or wrong. Stepping back, I use a two-phase investing strategy. The first is, I invest for cashflow purposes. So this is a smaller return consistent approach. You need to keep the lights on and pay for those kinds of things. So it's good to have a cashflow investment strategy. Then the second is, I invest for growth purposes. This of course is a higher return, but the key there is as you would expect, higher return is going to mean higher risk. So I need to know what the high probability situations are to reduce that risk so that you can still get the higher returns. So the key is to have a plan, and to build, and grow your learning, and plan your investment strategy. That's a key part of this, is to put that in place, and figure out where you are in it. Then accept the fact that you need to keep learning. So it looks like a great day for a trading here, the market opens up here shortly. To continue your journey, go to financialinvestingradio.com where I'm handing out some free items that will help you identify those high probability but with high return opportunities. My name is Grant, I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Financial Investing Radio. Until then, trade the high probability. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Remember to subscribe, and leave feedback. Don't forget to download your free high probability indicators before your next trade. Visit financialinvestingradio.com now.

Welcome to Financial Investing Radio where you'll learn the secrets for consistent, high-probability returns in the financial markets for additional income to change your life. Grant creates consistent, high-probability trading systems for the financial markets and has applied them over the past five years. He has only recently started sharing these tried and true market secrets. As a gift to listeners, Grant is offering his high-probability indicators for free. Go to FinancialInvestingRadio.com and download yours today. Now here's your host and trading veteran, Grant Larsen. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. We've been talking about our investing journey, and some of our investing lessons come from the school of hard knocks. Most of us have felt that at some point along the way even after we've done some preparation and got some training. As a kid when I was growing up, part of my grown-up years was in California, up in Northern California. We played for hours in the sun. Our parents did a great job at giving us a balance of structured and unstructured time. I think one of the key things my parents did was they would take us on family vacations. Back in those days this was often done using the family car. Now my parents owned a station wagon. It was green with brown side panels. I think it was a Plymouth station wagon, but it had a V8 engine in it, and it could carry a pretty good load. My parents would load this car up with luggage on the rack on the top. Then they would put stuff everywhere on the inside. Soon it became a challenge for us to figure out where the kids were actually going to sit in this thing. That station wagon had a backseat that was reversed, so it faced the opposite direction of the car. My brothers and I would often sit in that seat in the way back. That was all good until another car would come up behind us, and they would linger for a while. Then it became a battle of how to avoid prolonged eye contact with the people in the car behind us. It was rather awkward staring back at these people. We soon learned that being on the freeway was awkward enough, but even worse we discovered was when we got into a town or a city, and there would be slow or heavy traffic. There is not a lot of options. You're pretty stuck. People are right there just a few feet behind you. We'd often to stare to the side or look down to the floor of the car. Just talking about it brings back some of those feelings back then. In my financial investing journey after initially being introduced to investing and seeing some of the potential benefits, I came up with a plan to get some training. Now for me the training started with options. I took a wide range of option courses, some that focused on cash flow, others that was more aggressive in terms of trying to get higher profits. Then others were focused on different kinds of patterns, so chart patterns, things like that. What happened was is unfortunately the training that I got didn't give guidance on the best way to trade the options in terms of what the right strike prices were because even if I ended up picking the right direction, I was still losing because of other factors with options, things like time decay and stuff like that, certainly won't go into that here at the moment. I felt like I was a kid again, like I was stuck in the back of the station wagon with only one direction to look. I felt like I had no options other than to trade options the way that I had been trained. Early in my trading journey I was very interested in options, but certainly was struggling with making a consistent return on it. Unfortunately, I was on the road to ruin as each trade slowly nipped away at my capital. It wasn't long before I realized that I needed to figure out what I should do. What I'm going to do is we move forward throughout these podcasts. I'm going to talk about in the next episode how I got passed this hurdle, the hurdle of spending the time, the money, the energy for not only the training and the learning but also even the investing part of it and still not having that come through, feeling like I had only been partially equipped or prepared for the material and for the right way to trade it. Again, the pun intended, I felt like I had no options at that point, that I was not being successful with it. Until next time, be sure to check out some of my free items on FinancialInvestingRadio.com. Until next time, my name is Grant, and trade safe like you mean it. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Don't forget to download your free high-probability indicators before your next trade. Visit FinancialInvestingRadio.com now.

Welcome to Financial Investing Radio, where you'll learn the secrets for consistent, high probability returns in the financial markets for additional income to change your life. Grant creates consistent, high probability trading systems for the financial markets and has applied them over the past five years. He's only recently started sharing these tried and true market secrets. As a gift to listeners, Grant is offering his high probability indicators for free. Go to financialinvestingradio.com and download yours today. Now here's your host and trading veteran, Grant Larsen. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. My name is Grant. Hey, on a previous podcast I had mentioned the term reversion to mean or mean reversion. Now one of my listeners commented on that asking for more information, so let me start with that. I thought I'd spend some time there, make sure we're all in the same playing field. Mean reversion is the theory that suggests that price will move back or eventually move back towards the average, all right? This mean can be the historical average of market price. We'll talk about the probabilities of that and so forth. Sort of thinking back, as we were raising our children, near our home there was a place filled trampolines. I think it was called Jump Street. Our kids loved jumping on the trampolines there. They had some trampolines that were horizontal. They even had some that were at an angle. They were up against the wall so you could run up to them and bounce in it. I'd throw you back to the horizontal ones. It's kind of like the markets, these trampolines, right? For example, when we bounce on a trampoline, we go below the static surface of the trampoline, and we propel up. Likewise, as we reach the apex, we fall back down. In the market though, prices don't always revert to the mean, but there is very often mean reversion, so a very key skill about mean reversion is to know how to spot those opportunities. That's because market prices go sideways at least half the time, but the real question is what does it mean in order to have mean reversion? In other words, it's the average of what? Like, over what period of time? I spent some time working through that trying to figure out, you know, do I do this on a five minute chart? Is it on a weekly chart? Is it a monthly? I mean, what's the average that you pick that's going to be most meaningful? Some of that has to do with what kind of investor or a trader we are, but I ran into something that was a huge impact to my trading, and that was to use something called channels, and to use channels in a way that helped me to spot those opportunities of mean regression, so let me explain it this way. A few years ago, we were in the mountains, it was in the summertime, and we were at one of the ski resorts. I don't remember the name of it, but it had something called an Alpine Slide. It's kind of like a bog sled channel where you sit on a sled. There's of course no snow because it's during the summer. You're in a slide or you're basically in a channel. It has sides that come up on the left and the right-hand side. It's open above so that you can see the sky and whatnot, but nevertheless you're in this channel. On the Alpine Slide there's a few things of course you want to know, right? You've obviously got a brake handle. That will help slow you down. As you go down the side of the mountain in this channel, you hit one side of the channel and it knocks you back to the center. Then you hit the other side and again it knocks you back to the center. The market prices, or I'll refer to that as price action, is a lot this way. There's a channel of price movement and what varies is the steepness or the grade of the channel. Now on the Alpine Slide, you would never want to break out of that channel for obvious reasons, right? You could certainly get hurt, but in the market it does this all the time, all right? A price comes along, bouncing along a channel, and then wow, pam. It shoots out of the channel for a bit, and sometimes it returns and comes back into it. Channels on charts is a personal favorite of mine. It takes some practice, but it builds on your experience with drawing trend lines. I'm sure you've already been drawing trend lines, right? As you know, when you draw a trend line, you're looking to connect two places where a price has turned around and gone the other direction. Lots of times we call these pivots, right? Let's say the price was coming down, then went back up, and then later it came down maybe a little bit further and went back up. Those two points where it turns around, each of those points are called pivots. When we draw trend lines, we draw those along those pivot points, right? We touch, we connect the dots, something we did as kids in the coloring books. Well, we do the same thing with channels, so we draw the channel lines that connect the pivots, and we only need two pivots on one side, and one pivot on the other side. Let's say that the channel is going down. Then I want to draw two pivots at the top first, and then I come down to a lower pivot where prices come down and headed back up. I connect the bottom part to that. Then what you start watching for is how the price action behaves within that range, within that channel, all right? Thinking back to this Alpine Slide, we can think of a downward channel on a chart. It's kind of like an Alpine Slide, right? Within that downward channel, price goes down for a bit, and then it actually hits the bottom of the channel and then bounces up, and goes all the way across the channel. Then it gets up to the top of the channel or somewhere near it, and then it turns around and reverts back to the center of the channel. This kind of reversion is more common, the reversion to mean within a channel. It doesn't necessarily mean that prices are going sideways, although that is certainly one kind of channel, no doubt about that, but more importantly it's to identify the channel, the steepness of it. It may be flat, but the steepness or the direction or the angle of the channel can be up, down, sideways. Before we go further, I'd invite you to make sure you practice applying this on your charts. Understanding the range of motion for a particular instrument that you're investing in, in trading is critical. That helps you understand opportunities, you know? If I've got a good opportunity or maybe a not so good opportunity, it's about the location and channels help us to do this, and knowing that when it hits the edges of the channel, then it has some higher probabilities that it will revert or go back to the mean, meaning to the center of the channel itself. Okay, now I want to share a few secrets with you that I've learned about channels and how they've really impacted my trading. I don't invest in trade without them, or to say it the other way, I always invest in trade with channels up, all right? I have a couple of charts and one of those definitely shows what's the current channel that the market's in or does it look like it's breaking out of this channel, and now it's going to create a new channel and go a different direction, but it's critical to know that. Okay, here's three secrets. Number one, one of the highest probability moves of price is near the third point on a channel. What does that mean? Draw some channels and test it out yourself, but let me see if I can draw a picture in your mind, all right? Let's say that we have the channel that's moving down, kind of like this Alpine Slide, right? The Alpine Slide has got edges on both side. The price is going down, but it's bouncing back and forth. To draw the channel we start with the two pivot points on the top where price has turned down, and we draw the top part of the channel. Now we look for one or two lower pivot points to draw on the bottom part of the channel. Let's say that the price has just hit the bottom part of the channel. We just drew it down there. It's now moving up across the middle of the channel, and it's reaching the top of the channel now. When it touches, that will be the third touch at the top of the channel, all right? That third touch is one of the highest probabilities that it will revert to the mean and go back to the center of the channel. Let me say it again. When price comes up and touches either the top or the bottom of the channel, depending on each direction the channel is going, when it does that third touch, you be prepared for a higher probability entry to go the opposite direction, so even if you're trading on a daily basis, some stocks or some options, and you've got your channel set up, and it comes across and it touches that for the third time, you know you've got an opportunity that has much higher probability with you. That is reversion to mean. That is the most common reversion to mean that I've seen and this first secret is that if it's the third touch on the edge of the channel, you have the highest probability that it reverts to the mean. Okay, here's secret number two. The steeper the channel, the more likely the price action will move out of the channel, all right? If the channel direction is largely sideways, what I found is you can get four or five or six touches on each side of the channel. The more touches that there are, then the lower the probability of reversion because it keeps testing a particular area and finally it says, "Okay. I'm done testing this area. We're going to move past this now." The buyers and the sellers sort of wear out at the prices at that level, but when the channel is very steep, there's a much higher probability that price will break out earlier out of the channel. Think back to the Alpine Slide. Let me say it this way. If the mountain is very steep and you're going fast around a corner, and that corner represents the edge of the channel, the probability is much higher that you'll fly out of the Alpine Slide. In this case, you'll fly out of the channel. That's all we're saying here, okay? If it's really steep, if price is going down really fast over a short period of time, still bouncing back and forth within a channel, but if it's really steep and going fast, then it seems to take fewer touches on each side of the channel before it breaks out, and gets out of that channel and may ultimately go another direction, so in making investment decisions, be aware of the grade or the steepness of the channel. The steeper it is, again, the chance is for fewer touches, whereas the more sideways it is, there's a bigger chance that it will bounce back and forth for a little bit longer period of time. Okay, secret number three. When price breaks out of the channel, because price always eventually breaks out of a channel ... No channel is forever, all right? When it breaks out of the channel, it actually provides another opportunity to invest and maybe it might not be thinking in a way that you're thinking. Here's a scenario, okay? Let's go back to the Alpine Slide. You're going down the Alpine Slide. You go too fast and you shoot out of the channel, and you fly out of it. Let's say you don't get hurt, so what do you do? Do you walk down? Maybe. I suppose you might, but aside from all the other safety considerations, you get back in the Alpine Slide and you keep going. The market does that a lot. To say it another way, when price jumps out of the channel in the market, look for opportunities at support or resistant slides outside of the channel that will cause it to turn around, and come back to the edge of the channel. If that last part wasn't clear, I can cover that more at another time, so let me know because I've just said a lot right there that is actually very critical to investing in trading strategy. If you have your channel set up and price breaks out of it, and it moves away from the channel pretty quickly, there is high probability that it will actually come back and touch the edge of that channel again. That gives you opportunities for reinvesting or for buying or for shorting, depending on what your investing strategy is. Those three key secrets, don't forget. The first one is one of the highest probability moves is near the third touch on the edge of a channel. That is a high probability move that it's going back into the center, meaning mean reversion of the channel. That's secret number one. Secret number two, the steeper the channel, the more likely the price is going to jump out of the channel earlier with fewer touches, so be aware of the angle of the channel. Secret number three, when it breaks out, it provides an opportunity to invest. It generally comes out, and then turn around and comes back, and touches the edge of that channel where it came out of. Okay, so price action spends the majority of its time moving in a channel, whether it's trending market or a sideways market, so always, always be looking for the channel and you looking for the reversion to mean. That will make a big, significant difference to your trading. It really impacted my investing strategy when I discovered that channels are a fundamental part of this and they appear at multiple levels. They appear at very small timeframes. They appear, of course, at large timeframes. So it's worth your investing strategy to take some time to get to know it and understand what the mean to reversion is. It tends to work best to look for mean reversion across channels, all right? Give it a try. Draw some channels on whatever timeframe you're using, and look how that can benefit your investing strategy. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for joining. I look forward to a feedback and future podcasts with you. My name is Grant. Until next time, trade with your channels. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Don't forget to download your free high probability indicators before your next trade. Visit financialinvestingradio.com now.

Welcome to Financial Investing radio. Where you'll learn the secrets for consistent, high probability returns in the financial markets. For additional income to change your life. Grant creates consistent, high probability trading systems for the financial markets and has applied them over the past five years. He's only recently started sharing these tried and true market secrets. As a gift to listeners, Grant is offering his high probability indicators fro free. Go to financialinvestingradio.com and download yours today. Now, here's year host and trading veteran, Grant Larsen. Hey everybody. This is Grant and welcome to another episode of Financial Investing radio. In these podcasts we share lessons learned with financial investing. The real focus is on the activities involved for the self direct investor. Someone that is trying to take control of their own financial future. At least a portion of it comes through this avenue. I believe in a diversified approach. For our purposes we're going to look at investing in the markets and we'll look at several perspectives. We're going to look at futures and over time we'll look at options and stocks as well. Now, I wanted to harken back to an experience I had growing up. Part of my early years as a kid was in Minnesota. We lived right by the Mississippi river. One day, now this is in the early spring, so there's still ice along the edges of the river, but the water was flowing heavy. Our neighbor kid, we were down along the river playing by it, decided that he wanted to float down the river. He looked around for something to get out and float on and he ultimately began chopping the ice. He cut off a section of the ice and had a stick that he pushed out into the river. As he got probably 25 yards out into the river, some water started to get onto this chunk of ice and it got really slippery. He started to slide off of it and ultimately he fell into the water. Now, he had on a coat and boots and hat and gloves and he went under and started to bob up and down. Of course my brother and I were frantic looking for a large stick that we could grab to ultimately pull him out of there and get him into safety. That was a scary moment for all of us. Of course obviously we were shaken. He was, of course, shaken the most, as we pulled him out there. We asked him, "Why would you do this?" He said, "Well, I just really wanted to float down the river." He says, "Well, maybe there's another way." I've been investing in trading or five years and at times it felt like this neighbor kid who wanted to float down the river but didn't have the right tools or equipment or the training. I certainly admire the courage. The jump on to a self made boat. In this case it was literally a piece of ice, but we can drown financially pretty easily, as you've all seen, in the financial markets if we don't have that right equipment. Now there are many human needs and one of them that affects our investing is the need for certainty. As I talk with other traders, most people want consistent profits. I know I do. What really started me on this journey was desire. I saw a potential, as I'd mentioned in my previous podcast. I saw a potential for achieving returns that could impact my family and my life, but I could see the risk. Conceptually. I hadn't experienced that yet. I didn't experience it until I actually started investing. Until I jumped in the river and started trying to paddle down it. I did it without the proper training. I didn't have all of the right equipment and elements that I needed. I got some training and I'm going to discuss that more on some other podcast, but some of the training didn't provide the right equipment. Then I launched into the river, so to speak, and ended up experiencing the negative results which is, "Gee, I might drown here." It was the desire that served as the catalyst to want to achieve these results of effective investing and of consistent profits. To do this, we need desire but we need the training that's based on experience and based on a plan. Something that I've learned is to understand the relationship between how hard the engine in a car is working and how fast the car is moving right. You've all experienced that. As the car moves up the hill the engine works harder, but if we don't have any momentum with this then the car starts slowing down. Just the end verse also, going downhill. There's a relationship there, of course, between the energy going into the engine of the car and how fast the car is actually working. That principle applies to the market. Then in this particular podcast, over the next several podcasts, we're going to focus on that principle of how can I understand how the engine is working and what the speed is relative to that energy of the engine and how can I apply that to my trading. We're going to start with futures initially and we'll focus on the indexes initially, to get this started. Then over times, like I mentioned, we'll look into options and stocks as well. To continue your journey, and I'm so glad that you've joined me here. To continue your journey, please join me over on financialinvestingsecrets.com and there's several opportunities there for learning more information. Some things that I give away that you can pull into your trading environments and I give them for free. You can go take advantage of those and look into that. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Financial Investing radio. My name is Grant and thank you for joining. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing radio. Remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Don't forget to download your free high probability indicators before your next trade. Visit financialinvestingradio.com now.

Welcome to Financial Investing Radio. Where you'll learn the secrets for consistence, high probability returns in the financial markets. For additional income to change your life. Grant creates consistent, high probability trading systems for the financial markets and has applied them over the past five years. He's only recently started sharing these tried and true market secrets. As a gift to listeners, Grant is offering his high probability indicator for free. Go to financialinvestingradio.com and download yours today. Now, here's your host and trading veteran, Grant Larsen. Hey everybody. Welcome to the first episode of Financial Investing Radio. Well thank you for joining. I've started this podcast with the intent to share my lessons learned with the investing and trading. For me it's more about building community and collaboration. These podcasts are gonna be combination of interviews as well as personal experiences. Now if you have a lesson learned or a useful tip to share from your investing journey then reach out to me at Grant@FinancialInvestingSecrets.com, that's Grant@FinancialInvestingSecrets.com. Now investing and trading for me, has been a bit like some of our experiences we had raising our family in Colorado. We would ski with our children a lot and in one particular case our son, one of our younger sons ... I was skiing with three of our sons at the time. At that time the youngest son, as we'd ski down he took off really fast down the mountain so I sped up to him and asked him to stop. I said, "Hey. Now Jared, skiing is a lot more fun if you stay in control." He goes, "Mm-hmm (affirmative), thanks Dad." So we start skiing again and he takes off again, like a bullet. I speed up, catch up to him, "Hey. Hey Jared. Just a minute. Skiing is a lot more fun if we stay in control." "Yeah. Okay Dad. Yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative)." The third time, off he goes and before I could catch up with him, I looked down ahead and I just, you know, I see this ball of snow. Right? Skis everywhere, poles flying and so I ski up to him and I say, "Hey Jared." He goes, "I know Dad. It's a lot more fun if you stay in control." Investing has certainly got those characteristics to it, it's a lot more fun if we stay in control. That mantra has influenced my investing and trading strategies, which is to look for consistent returns, which of course we all want, but also to look for the high probability opportunities. So what got me started here? I wanted to spend this first podcast giving a little back story as to how I got involved in this. Now my background is in software and I've done that for a lot of years. I was working at home one day and one of my sons, not the skiing one, but another one, came in and invited me to attend a trading seminar. There was a three day seminar taking place. I'd always thought that the folks in that business were, you know, selling snake oil. Right? It was something to be watching out for and there is some truth to that, no doubt, but I was definitely not gonna go. So he takes off. He spends the first day at it and he comes back, you know, that evening and was like, "Dad you really gotta check into this or just give me your second and third day on this with me Dad and just take a look." So, you know, eventually I went for the second and third day, under a bit of duress I admit. I was thinking, "Oh okay. I'm being a good father. Right? I'm supporting my son." So we get there and I listened skeptically to the presenter. Right? By the end of the second day I realized that if I could create trades with probabilities in my favor, then the math would work out. So this appealed to the logic part of my nature. So I ended up buying some training on trading and at that time I was focused on learning options. Now, later I discovered that the options training encouraged the buying of, you know, calls and puts at strikes, which ultimately decreased my probabilities. You know if you've done work with options you understand that if you're gonna trade them directionally you need to make sure you get them just right because even if you get the right direction sometimes decay will still take away your profit. So I took some initial losses in options with some of the training that I got. So in time I learned about option decay, I didn't know about it at the time, and about the value of selling options. So I pursued some additional training focused on option time decay and using that approach, my probabilities improved a lot and it began to give me some cash flow but it was not enough to make a big income. So I was happy with the income, but I wasn't yet satisfied. I had heard about futures and decided I would take a course on that and look into and after that course I was hooked. Now it turned into a love hate relationship. I loved the leverage when it was in my favor and I hated it when it was not in my favor. What made matters worse was some of the training that I had received gave me some bad guidance on when to trade the futures market. So that, you know, the training talked about taking advantage of volatility at key announcement times. I mean wow, don't do that. Well I did it and, you know, took a couple significant losses and you know that just added to my pain. I wondered if I was ever gonna see a positive return on my investments and trading. From there I began to study order flow and I worked with some professional traders using that style, but I was still not seeing the results. I would see intermittent, you know, it would work intermittently, but I didn't get the consistent. So I felt determined, but I was a little discouraged at that point so I took more courses. In that particular case it was on the E-mini futures. I learned about the general cycle of the market and some of the key patterns there. So I started training with another professional who excelled at applying these market cycles and patterns but the challenge was that my smaller account size couldn't handle the big stop losses when the general market pattern didn't play out on any given day. So create these really big stop losses to get lots of windows. You're hoping and counting on the fact that a pattern is gonna work out. If it does then, you know, then you do well, but if not, you know, it's taking some decent losses on it. Then occasionally I'd get a win. I kept wondering, "All right. What can I do?" I needed to see smaller increments of success. I wanted to take profits when I could, while not relying on some pattern, but still be aware of what the market cycles were, but still trade the actual price actions. Right? That was the key. I wanted to build on a succession of small wins with high probability that was based on price action but still, again like I said, to be aware of the general market cycles and the patterns for context. So it hit me. One of the first secrets I discovered as a self driven investor, that if I could combine the high probability option thinking with futures. In other words, you know when you look at the option chain, right, and you've got probabilities of being in the money and out of the money and so forth, if you could look at that and say, "Wait a minute. If I could apply that style of thinking with futures, I could have a trading investment strategy that would bring cash flow and reasonable gains." In other words, like you use a combination of what options do best, in terms of, you know as far as I'm concerned, do great with the time decay, and selling premiums, and, you know, getting the value from that while using some of those techniques, but as it relates to futures; looking for what it means to be high probability on futures and to get the gauge from that. So I found a way to combine some small and simple things to bring about high probability gains in the futures market as well. I couldn't believe it. After all the searching and trying to find a solution, what it turns out is that the solution was, of course, overly simply not overly complex. So that's the good news. Basically, what I've learned in the last, you know, five years on this journey is that price action matters, there's no surprise there, and that that's what you trade, but you do it with a set of principles and with a set of overarching patterns and not just the patterns themselves but ... What I wanted to share with you is the experiences that I've had after all of my trading and attending courses and trading rooms and you know indicators, and systems, and lectures, and professional guidance, and so on. So it comes down to a few simple ideas that need to be pulled together, you know, in the right way. So when I started the journey on this I was expecting greater results sooner and perhaps you felt that way as well. Early on I was looking for the home run hits, right, with huge returns and I hate to admit it, but that was probably the greedy part of my nature. Over time, I refined my objective to look for a balance of high probability cash flow and high probability gains, mixing those together and taking base hits and consistent hits and letting those build on top and compound on top of each other. So I want to share with you my secrets to high probability returns. I'll talk a lot about the E-mini futures, but we'll broaden that conversation to be stocks and other instruments as well. So this can apply to other markets also. So I hope that you join me in the next episode, where we'll continue the journey. I'll be bringing in interviews as I said. We'll be talking with other people and hopefully you as well. So again, reach out to me. Look forward to getting to know you and thank you for joining me in this very first episode of Financial Investing Radio. My name is Grant Larsen and trade safe! Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Don't forget to download your free high probability indicators before your next trade. Visit https://FinancialInvestingRadio.com now!

Information concerning what people should know about working for small businesses--their obligations and those of their employers, plus rules governing Workers' Compensation are topics addressed. Panelists include Grant Larsen, Anchorage business adviser for Alaska Small Business Development Center; Kristin Knudsen, lawyer and faculty member with the UAA Justice Center; Jeremy Applegate, investigator for the State of Alaska Wage and Hour Administration; and Michael Monagle, director of the Division of Workers' Compensation.

The newest release of Rational Asset Manager (RAM) has been refactored to the Jazz platform to improve users' collaboration and governance of software assets. In this podcast, chief architect Grant Larsen explores how organizations are using RAM to harvest, locate, and govern any software asset, including reusable services, approved open source components, and purchased commercial assets.