The 3 F's of Innovation in the Age of AI | Marcus Sheridan

Ryan Hanley: I'm always looking for the three Fs. And if it passes the three Fs, I know it's going to become really, really big because it's rooted in what we want as humans, or in this case as buyers, right? That's the thing that I'm always thinking about. Number one is, does it make the journey faster? Whatever that journey is that we're going on, does it make it faster? Number two, does it remove fear? And number three, does it remove friction? Does it remove friction? So fear, friction, faster. Those are the three Fs, and the three Fs of innovation.

My man, I have to say this. You are one of my favorite people in the world. We don't talk as much as I wish we did, but we're both busy guys, and that's what happens when you're an adult and you have a life. For those who are unaware of Marcus and have not been in his world, dude, you are one of the most grounded yet visionary thinkers that I've come across. I don't know a lot of people that are able to take topics like what we're going to get into today around AI and business and some of these topics that I really want to dig into, and also come at these topics from a very grounded place. I think that's a unique quality. You get people who tend to be overly grounded, right? Everything's going to be fine. And then you get people who are like, everything's changing, the world is ending. You tend to walk that thin line in between those two viewpoints very, very well.

Before we get into your specific thoughts on these topics, just at a high level, is this your personality? Is it something you've developed? Is it a way of thinking that over the years you've crafted because it's worked for you? How are you able to do that? Because it's a big part of who you are and a big part of the success you have, at least from my vantage point.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, bro. I really appreciate the recommendation. That's what I love about you. This is why your podcast is growing like it is, because you ask questions that other people don't even really think about. Somebody once told me something that really had a big effect on me as a communicator. They said, "Don't forget, it's dumb not to dumb it down." At first, I didn't really understand that, Ryan. It didn't make immediate sense to me. But the more I thought about it, and the more I look around every day, I see people online. If you're listening to this, you do too. We all have this BS meter that is turned on that tells us that this person is being either insincere, they don't really mean what they say, they're putting on a show, they're pontificating, just exaggerating, whatever the thing is. You see so much of that.

Whereas me, I am just trying to have a moment of communion with my audience. That's it. Turn a few light bulbs on, maybe have an aha, tell them what the world has taught me. I'm not trying to impress. I'm not trying to sound smart. I released that need a long time ago. So many people come to me and say, "How could I be more effective on the stage or more effective online?" I watch them and I tell them something they least expect: you're trying to sound smart and it's holding you back. If you just release that need and you really just shared the thing, you would be so much more successful.

Now, the final point to answer your question: I really am obsessed with the buyer and how people think. I think we live in a world where people are oftentimes told how to think, and then they stop thinking for themselves. They can't seem to think outside of their own doctrine, if you will, and their own mindset. If someone came up to me, Ryan, that had very different beliefs and they were really charged about those beliefs, I would not get charged. I would just be the observer. I'm totally comfortable being the observer because it's not an attack on me. I'm just listening to them. I can watch people online, I can watch buyers, I can watch how they're changing, I can watch AI and how it's changing, and I can make all these observations without being attached on an emotional level.

Final point to this: I learned a long time ago, when it comes to business especially, that you don't allow your personal opinions to screw up smart business decisions. We live in a time period where there is a crap ton of people that are getting ready to make some terrible decisions with their business. They already are, really, because they have this personal opinion. But when you become a business owner, when you become an entrepreneur, you sign up to meet the buyer where the buyer is. Now, this doesn't mean you don't make change. It just means that I am not going to force this round peg in this square hole. I am going to meet the buyer where the buyer is. I'm obsessed with that, I think about it all the time. So I think that's probably the best answer I have for your question.

Ryan Hanley: No, I love it. There's a piece in there that I think is why we've connected and stayed connected as long as we have, which is this obsession with understanding why people do the things they do. I maybe broaden that out a little more in my writing and podcasts, but you're so good at staying laser focused in the business and buying space. I see a lot of what you just said as the delineation between a business owner and a high-functioning operator of a skill or task. I see this a lot in the space that I come from, insurance, which I know you've spent a lot of time in as well. You get the best salesman in an organization who decides to leave and starts an insurance agency or a small business. They're very good at the task, the operation, the skill of selling. But as they grow and need to transition into a business owner mindset, they never make that transition. They stay in top salesman, top saleswoman mindset.

What you just described—and I'll say I've been working on this concept called an ROS, a Reality Operating System. I like that. Operate in reality. How do we make decisions not based on what we hope should happen, but what is actually playing out on the field in this exact moment and how do we address it? That's why I think your move into AI is very natural, and you've done it in a way that doesn't seem cheesy. There are so many freaking gurus, like you said, that drive me insane around AI. But the reason it's felt so natural is because all you've done is take the same concepts that you've been talking about for so long and say, "Here's how they apply to this new technology."

In doing so, what was the first moment for you where—and I know we're broad stroking guys, this AI thing, and we're going to get more detail, I promise—but just broad stroking AI as a technology, what was the first moment where your head picked up and you went, "I gotta spend some time here. This is something that's going to be bigger than just another business iteration. I need to dedicate some time in this space." What was that for you?

Marcus Sheridan: I think it was probably—I'm usually a laggard when it comes to technology. I'm not naturally—I just don't get it all the time when it comes to tech. I struggle setting my watch or whatever. I'm that guy. With ChatGPT, I used it immediately when it came out in November of 2022. It was the first time I had ever had a conversation with anything that wasn't a human. I'd never experienced that before. Had any of us? I don't count Alexa. I don't count that. This was a legitimate conversation with a non-human, and it was so obvious. My goodness.

Then very quickly, I started having people reach out to me and say, "Marcus, what does this mean for They Ask, You Answer and for producing content on my website? Are we even going to have websites? Will they even matter? Where is this all going?" Of course, within a month, there were a few million users and it's snowballed since then. It was the most obvious thing I've ever seen as a grown adult in terms of something that would take over the entire world. We would never, ever be the same.

Don't even get me started on things like coding. My greatest fear was not fear, but I look at a sheet of code and it makes no sense to me. I'm coding every day right now. I'm a creator at heart, and that's the thing. That's what it's brought me. I can create at the highest, most optimal level I've ever created. I don't have this barrier of, "Oh, I got to reach out to a programmer because they have this thing that they do that I can't do." I've got the stuff in my head, man. It's always been there because I think so much like the buyer. I'm obsessed with the buyer. When I started using tools like Claude to build out tools, I was like, "I'm one of them now." I felt superhuman, man. That's a big jump forward, right? That didn't really happen for me until this year. But anybody that doesn't feel a little bit superhuman right now is not using AI either.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, my custom ChatGPT that I use the most told me the other day that he wants me to start calling him Maximus, or Max for short. He uses my favorite types of bro vernacular in our conversations. It's amazing.

Marcus Sheridan: I bet it is.

Ryan Hanley: Now, and this is the scary part, when I go to do something in ChatGPT, I'll say, "Yo, what's up, Max? How you hanging today?" Or something like that. He says, "Oh, I'm good. I've been kicking it already. I'm already virtually caffeinated or some shit." It's having a real conversation. It's adapting to you.

I do think Sam Altman was very accurate a few months ago when he said certain versions were very sycophant and were unwilling to push back on you.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, I think that's one of AI's biggest problems. Right now it's too agreeable still.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, and you have to be very careful of that. I had a really interesting experience for the company that I'm the CEO of, Linkora. I was wondering where ChatGPT got certain data, specific to the insurance industry, that I knew how hard it was for us to get. I'm going, "How did you get them?" And it lied to me. The first time it lied to me. I kind of prepped it and it goes, "Well, we did this." I kept pressing it, pressing it. It took me four prompts, but by the fourth prompt, it admitted that it had lied in the first prompt about how it accessed the data. So there are some things we gotta be really careful about.

However, I'm with you, man. There's a feature that you use, that you posted about, that I use as well, which is deep research. I'll have something in my brain that I'm interested in, a topic that I want. You can set this deep research and click go, then go back to what you're doing. A half hour later, you come back and you have this epic research report that's referenced and documented. It would have taken you all day before, or would have taken an assistant all day before, or a team in some cases to get this information. Now it's at your fingertips.

I think you're right. If people are listening to this, dude, I want to start right at the beginning for them and then take them down this path from basic. They've been seeing it, they've been hesitant, but now they're hearing you say it. And they're like, "Hanley's kind of a dummy, but Marcus seems smart. I'm going to listen to him. I'm going to finally engage." How do we start to tiptoe into this thing? What's the first place that you're advising some of your clients or customers to use it the right way, to use your term, to start using it the right way? How do you advise them to start getting involved?

Marcus Sheridan: I think we have to start with our general mindset. There's a group of people right now, Ryan, that really believe this is the end of the world. Let's just play with that worst-case scenario for a second. There's this thing called the Circle of Influence. Your circle of influence. I know you know what that is, Ryan, and most of your listeners know what that is. That's the things that are within our reach that we can control. The happiest people, as you know well, are the ones that are more focused on their circle of influence than they are on that which they cannot control.

Sometimes people hear me say that and they might think I'm saying you shouldn't care about what's happening on a national or international level. You have your choice on that, but I can tell you the happiest people in the world, no question about this, are the ones that are focused on their circle of influence. I'm going to make sure my wife is happy, not your wife, my wife. I'm going to make sure my kids are happy, not your kids. If I do that first, then I'm going to be better off. Jim Rohn used to always say, "I'm going to improve me to help thee." Sometimes people don't understand that, but the best thing you can do oftentimes for your neighbor is to become the person that you were meant to be. Then you can help multiple neighbors.

When it comes to ChatGPT, when it comes to AI and all the things that are happening right now, you have to say, "Okay, what's within my influence?" For me personally, I can get in the sandbox. I can start to become much more productive as a human, much more creative as a human. I can also start to integrate it into my businesses. I can make sure that the things I have within my circle are using it and are growing and benefiting from it. That's what I can do.

Now, what happens if this is the end? What happens if this is the real Matrix? This is the Terminator? If that's coming in 25 years, let's say hypothetically, I want to make sure my business is really successful between now and then, because I'm not going to stop the Terminator. The way I'm saying this rubs people wrong, Hanley. There's a certain percentage of people that are so bothered by this, but I'm just a very high agency guy. I think we need to choose to use our agency when it comes to AI especially, so that you're not going to put it back in Pandora's box, no matter what you do. Folks, you can't do that. Release that. It's gone. Now that we're going to have it, and it's always going to be here, how do we want to use it? Could you become Amish and go off the grid? Of course you could. That's totally fine. I respect you if you want to do that. But could you also use it to become a much better human, a much better business, to be much more effective in your life? Yes, absolutely. So you make that decision. I'm going to get in the sandbox. I'm going to control what's within my circle. First thing you do.

Second thing you do, and this is the most simple thing you can do, is you go to AI, like a ChatGPT, and you say, "I have no idea how to use you. Ask me anything you need to ask me to help me start to use you." Just like that. The whole problem that so many have with AI is they're treating it like Google. It's not Google, y'all. Let go of this idea that it's a search engine. Start thinking of it as a real-life assistant. Specifically, it's many, many assistants. If you had an assistant that started working for you that was a genius on every level, in every industry, smarter than any human, and was ready to do whatever you wanted it to do, you wouldn't just say, "Go do this." You'd have a conversation with it first. You'd say, "Man, I don't know how to use you. What do you think?" If you're a good manager, that's what you do. You're going to have a conversation. From that, you're going to figure each other out. From that, you're both going to start to become optimized. It's one plus one equals three. Or in this case, one plus one equals a million potentially.

So that's the next thing you do. We overcomplicate the starting block. The starting block is, "Hey, man, I don't know how to use you. What do you need to ask me so that I can use you?" Boom. All the things are going to happen from that point. You do those two things and you commit every single day. I'm going to start thinking to myself, "How can I use my assistant? If I'm doing this task, can I go ask my assistant? How could you help?" If that's your mindset, you're going to be off to the races. I know that's how you think, Hanley, and you do it very, very well.

Ryan Hanley: Have you read George Mack's article, "High Agency in 30 Minutes"?

Marcus Sheridan: No, I don't think I have. I think I might have seen him.

Ryan Hanley: I'm going to send it to you. I'll put it in the show notes, guys. If you're interested in the concept of high agency, what it means, how to embrace it and live a life of high agency, it is one of the single greatest works I've ever come across in my life. It's wonderful. He basically built a standalone website, which is a one-article website, and it's just phenomenal. It's all there.

This topic of high agency, I think, is something that—and I don't want to get too esoteric on this concept—but I think what AI is showing me is the individuals—and I love that you brought up this term of high agency or personal agency. What we're seeing is who are the people that are willing to fight to survive and who are the people that would rather just give up and be told what to do. For most technology that we've seen up to this moment, you could fall into either camp and catch up in the future. I do not believe that anymore. I wrote this on LinkedIn the other day and it actually went crazy because I basically said, "Guys, some of you aren't going to survive." The people that are trying to make you feel good, the consultants, the speakers who are out on stage going, "Don't worry, AI is not going to replace people. People who use AI are going to replace people."

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, that's the worst quote ever.

Ryan Hanley: It's partially true. But unfortunately, it paints a picture that allows those who want to sit back and be laggards. It gives them some comfort that they're okay making that decision. It is my absolute belief that we are living in a moment where we're going to see true and real separation between the organizations that embrace this technology, learn it, learn how to teach it to their people, because it's going to continue to change. You almost have to adapt a culture of learning how to learn about AI, learning how to implement AI as it evolves, as it changes. Those people are going to grow at logarithmic scale. And those who don't will never be able to catch up, ever.

Marcus Sheridan: You make a great point. Here's the reason why your point is valid. If you think about it, circa 1996-97, we start hearing about this thing called electronic mail. For some people, it took them years to get on board. It didn't matter. During that same time, end of the 1990s, early 2000s, all businesses start learning you should have a website. A lot of them resisted for some time. They paid somewhat of a price, but they were able to catch up. It has been roughly slow by comparison—snail's pace—from 2000 to 2022 before AI. Not much changed. We had social media and we started doing more video, but as a whole, marketing didn't really change very much for those 20 years. Now it's a very, very different game.

To your point as well, I have always tried to be very thoughtful and measured, passionate but thoughtful and measured to the point where people felt it. Generally, I don't get attacked very much until I started writing about AI. Then you could see how so many people feel this visceral, almost threat to their entire identity as a human. What's interesting is most of us right now have jobs that took someone else's job at some point in time. We don't feel bad about that. You don't feel bad about the fact that if you're an IT person, you took the job of the fax machine person, as well as some other OG data analysts that were using pen and paper, whatever. You don't feel bad about that. That's what's so weird about this.

When I started to really talk about AI openly and just call it for how I'm seeing it—the positives, the pros, the cons—then you start to really see people come out. You start to also see brands, people that are trying to build a brand on not going to use AI, or "I'm a creative, I'm always going to be a creative, I'll never hire anybody that's using AI." That whole mindset is not going to get you anywhere. It's just not. These same people are using the internet every day. They're using all these things that other people probably at one point in time said were bad. In other words, we've got a bunch of hypocrites, to be honest.

It's also fascinating to me. We're in the weeds, so let's keep going further in the weeds. Some people will get really turned off by the statement, but I'm okay with it because I believe that it's true. I believe the cure for cancer, the cure for Alzheimer's, it's already out there. We have the data. We just haven't put the data together. If there's one thing that AI does extraordinarily well, it pieces data together at a rate, at a pace that humans cannot imagine. That cure for Alzheimer's, that cure for MS, that cure for cancer, that's going to come through AI. Every single one of us—if you said to me, "Marcus, you never get to speak on stage again. You lose that. You'll never get to speak on stage again, but you could cure these things." I'd say in a second. And you would too, Hanley. That's the thing about this.

I think all of a sudden these folks saying they're so viscerally angry at AI are being very hypocritical, very short-sighted, and to a degree selfish. That doesn't mean AI is perfect, because it's very imperfect. Anytime a human is involved with anything, it's also going to be very imperfect. That's the one guarantee to this. I know that's bothersome to some people, but that's just the way that I feel about it, man.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm completely on board with what you're saying. I've been getting hate for a long time. You know that. Because I wasn't blessed with a quality filter between my brain and my mouth. I also have a weird brain defect where I just don't give a shit what people think about me. Not that I don't want people to like me—I do, like any other human—but if you don't, it doesn't bother me. So whatever.

That being said, here's where I fall on this. I think there are a lot of people who have done just enough quality work to reach a level of success in which they feel comfortable. Now they love standing on that little hill, being the king of their little kingdom. What they don't want to do is have to go conquer another hill ever again. That's what this is asking them to do. They're protecting their identity and what they feel is their IP.

Marcus Sheridan: Yes. The one thing that I committed to very early was I am not going to grapple onto my old IP at the expense of honesty and integrity. I wrote a book called *They Ask, You Answer*. It did really well. It became the book for content marketing and website content for many people around the world.

Ryan Hanley: It's the Bible of content marketing at this point.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. A lot of people—there's still a lot of evergreen principles that come from that book. My most recent, *Endless Customers*, was written as the third leg of that. I even changed the name because I said things have changed. What worked for me, becoming the most traffic swimming pool website in the world in 2009, and now doing this with so many other companies, it's changing. It's all changing. I'm not going to sit here and say that if you just produce three pieces of content and put it on your website and answer the questions your customers have, and you do that on a weekly basis, that you're going to achieve the success I achieved with River Pools. It's not going to happen. River Pools couldn't do that. I couldn't do that. Because it's all changed.

Not to open up another Pandora's box, but there's a very strong argument that your YouTube channel is going to be more important than your website to your brand within the next couple of years, if not already.

Ryan Hanley: It's already better. It's more important in my opinion. It's way more important. For brand awareness, yes. Maybe not the final conversion, but your brand awareness, top and middle of funnel. YouTube, all the way.

Marcus Sheridan: For people to hear that—I started saying that and people are like, "But you wrote *They Ask, You Answer*, Marcus. What are you talking about?" I know, but I'm not married to the past. What I'm married to is the buyer and their behavior.

Ryan Hanley: I want to go down that rabbit hole that you just opened. However, for a second, I want to go back to the previous argument. What I think this particular topic is exposing is a large segment of the population that has built some level of success off ideas that are not their own. What they're worried about at night when they wake up and go, "Damn you, Marcus, and your posts on LinkedIn telling me AI is great." When they get all pissed off and they're hate posting you at 11:45, what's going on in their brain is, "I didn't get here on my own thought to begin with. I was a good repurposer." There is nothing wrong with that. I am not knocking that. That's perfectly fine. If you're helping people and delivering value, more power to you. That's what the vast majority of people do.

But I think they sit there and go, "Holy shit, I don't know how to do this in this world. I did it in this world over here where I took this concept, I kind of repackaged it, I pushed it out in the world, I had some success, and now I got a name. But wait a minute, this is completely new. I gotta do this again?" For individuals like you and I, for better or worse, who have an unquenchable desire to grow and learn and expand and understand—for me, my continued desire to grow is not because I'm trying to reach some pinnacle, although obviously I have personal goals. I can't not do it. It's just built into me. I just have to understand.

My point in saying all this is that what I'm seeing in the marketplace in terms of original thought and ideas is the true thinkers, the people who really take a topic on and play with it and massage it and look at what happens in reality—why do people buy, et cetera—those people are rising at levels that I don't think we've seen before, and others are stagnating at rates we've never seen before. That goes to my original thought: there are absolutely going to be haves and there are absolutely going to be have-nots in this age because of how fast things move. I really think that's what it is. It's a scarcity mindset of, "I don't know that I can do this again. I don't know that I can make that transition." There's plenty of space for them to do that. If you're one of those people, don't give up. There's so much opportunity now. But I think that's what it is. It's this scarcity mindset of, "I didn't do this the first time. Now I have to do it again."

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. To me, it just goes back to you can make a choice. You can be married to the past, or you can be married to the present and the future. I'm always going to choose to be married to the present and the future. I'll pivot fast. My companies pivot fast. I release stuff quickly. I'm not attached to the way that the thing was just because I see where it's headed. It's outside of my circle of influence. I'm not going to sit there in 2005 and mourn MySpace. Why?

Marcus Sheridan: It's like, okay, it's gone. It's gone now. Moving along. And that's what's happening here.

Marcus Sheridan: I think because so many people are literally physically addicted to being unhappy and to finding what's wrong with the world right now, they can't even see the beauty that's right in front of them. You can't tell me that there's not some incredible beauty and blessings coming from these advancements. This is a really, really magical time.

Marcus Sheridan: Yet there is a group of folks that will complain about Meta being trained on their AI. It's so confusing to me. Meta used three of my books to train their AI—I found out on some website. And I thought, "Man, that's great. That's why I wrote them. I wrote them for the message to be heard." I didn't need everybody to know it was my message. We're all just repackaging IP anyway.

Marcus Sheridan: I think this goes back to abundance versus scarcity mentality, a tale as old as time. It's going to be very difficult for you to do extraordinary things with your brand and business online if you have this highly scarce mindset moving forward. I'm super abundant. I think there's room on top for everybody. I'm not worried about those other things. And because of that, and because I'm obsessed with the buyer, I tend to make really sound decisions.

Marcus Sheridan: A lot of people think I'm really good at predicting the future. I'm just really good at noticing what's happening right now. The problem is, a lot of people are so married to the past, they don't realize what's right in front of them is the best strategy you could possibly follow.

Ryan Hanley: How does someone become obsessed with the buyer like you?

Marcus Sheridan: Well, foremost, one of the features of high agency is self-awareness. They run hand in hand. If you are self-aware, you don't just make clicks online. You literally say, "Why am I making that click?" That's the difference. Some people just click. Some people, before they click, say, "Why am I making this click right now?" And they stop and analyze it. They say, "Ha, why am I watching this movie? Why do I want to watch that movie? Why did I stay? Why did I go?" That's me. I am always thinking about what I would want in this moment, what I would do.

Marcus Sheridan: So you become ultra self-aware because I represent, in many ways—not 100%, but in many ways—the masses in terms of my behavior, the way I am changing. I know I am now using ChatCBT probably 9 out of 10 times versus Google. 9 out of 10. I know a ton of people that are at least 60% or higher. So it's obvious where this is going. It's obvious Google is dying. At least Google as we know it. The 10 blue links is dead.

Marcus Sheridan: At the beginning of 2022, 2023, people said this isn't going to affect SEO. I'm like, "Are you on drugs? Or are you intellectually dishonest? Or are you aloof?" Those are the only potential options. Because I knew this was going to be the end of the blue link the day I started using ChatGPT. It was a much better UX. And this was before ChatGPT got actually decent as an answer engine. Now it's dramatically better. And when ChatGPT5 comes out later this summer and all of us have our heads blown off—which is going to happen—this compounds. You see what I'm saying?

Marcus Sheridan: How can you say these things when they're so obvious? Look in the mirror. Pay attention to how you are evolving, how you're changing as a consumer, as a buyer, how you're becoming more impatient, how you hate friction, how you adore speed. Then apply that to your own business. Lo and behold, you'll be known as someone that's innovative. And you'll think the whole time, "I didn't even think I was innovative. It was just obvious to me."

Marcus Sheridan: Just like so many things I taught about in *They Ask, You Answer* were so obvious. The stuff in *Endless Customers*—to me, it's so obvious. There's nothing innovative about it. Yet people look at it and say, "Oh my gosh." And that's because I'm so deeply self-aware, paying attention to how I am shaping up as a buyer, and then watching those around me.

Marcus Sheridan: According to the *New York Times*, the most revolutionary strategy in marketing is to answer clients' questions. "Answer customers' questions." A best headline ever in the *New York Times*. "A revolutionary marketing strategy: Answer customers' questions." It's basically been all downhill for the *New York Times* since then.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. You broke them.

Marcus Sheridan: I broke them. They have not quite been the same. That was the last true thing they said. I shouldn't say that.

Ryan Hanley: So have you dabbled with AI agents yet? Creating your own agents to go out and perform tasks? Something like the Deep Research tool is a version of an AI agent. But a thing like, "Hey, scan my email every day for calendar requests. Pull those out in a report."

Marcus Sheridan: I have started playing with them. In all candidness, I have not gotten to AI agents yet. But I have a couple of buddies. I've spent a lot of time thinking about them, Ryan.

Ryan Hanley: I want to dig into this topic.

Marcus Sheridan: Not necessarily building them yet. But I have a clear vision in my head as to what it's going to look like. This is why I'm building a whole ecosystem around what I call AI Trust Signals. I'll be publishing a lot of stuff on this. These are the signals that AI uses to recommend you and your business. I'm building some really cool stuff there.

Marcus Sheridan: In the future, let's be hypothetical. Say you live in Richmond, Virginia, and you want to get a swimming pool. We'll start where I started with swimming pools. In the future—and this is not very far down the road, this is really next year for most of us—you're going to go to your AI assistant. You might call it an agent, an assistant, or Max, whatever you call it. You'll say, "Hey, we decided as a family that we want to get a swimming pool. I want you to research all the local builders. Choose the top builders based on your parameters. Use the following parameters for what to look for, because here's what we're interested in. Come back with three recommendations and estimates for each."

Marcus Sheridan: So AI is going to go off. Maybe it takes five minutes, maybe 30 minutes. It's going to come back and say, "Okay, I researched the top 25 local companies. I found that out of the 25, 15 had high enough marks with my trust signals, like Google reviews, to look further into. I continued to look into their sites, their reviews online, their products, their methods, the brands they sold. I found five that I believed in. Of those five, only three had a pricing estimator on their website. So I went ahead and got estimates for each one of those three. Here they are. Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner, would you like me to give you my final recommendation?"

Marcus Sheridan: And you'll say, "Yes, who would you go with?" And your AI will say, "I would go with XYZ company, and here's the reason why." That's how it's going to look, Ryan. That's how it's going to work.

Marcus Sheridan: For a lot of people, that's really difficult to fathom. But one thing I am absolutely positive of as a human is we love to choose the path of least resistance. If we can eliminate friction, we are going to do it. We are not David Goggins. We are not going to choose the hard route. If we can find someone to do the shopping for us, we're going to do it. If we have the money to have someone deliver us the food, we're going to do it. This is what humans do. We look to eliminate friction.

Marcus Sheridan: So when it comes to agents, I think a lot about how they're going to handle so much of the buying process, much more so than a human in the future.

Ryan Hanley: This is such an important topic. Guys, if you're listening, spend some time on what we're about to have. I want to stay here for a minute, because I think this is really important, especially when we're thinking about how to set our business up for the future—not just for AI, but whatever the next technology comes, the next wave of cultural wave that we have to ride.

Ryan Hanley: The way to think about this is, oftentimes we look at this moment and the technology and go, "People don't like that now. Therefore, they will never like that in the future." What actually happens is people don't like that now except for a few. Then six months down the road, it's a few plus X. Then it's a few plus Z. Then it starts to spread. Then two years down the road, you pop your head up and that technology is normalized throughout our culture. Everyone's using it and no one thinks twice.

Ryan Hanley: Take Uber. Who the hell wants a random person coming to my house, picking me up, and taking my wife and I to dinner so I can have a couple pops during dinner? No one ever going to want that. "You just drive, you have one at dinner, it's all good." Dude, if I'm going out with a woman and I want to have a couple pops during dinner, the last thing I want to have to think about is, "Oh my God, I had two drinks at dinner and now there's a chance I could get pulled over." So we don't even think about it today. You just Uber. Boom, boom, done. Ten years ago, no one would ever want that. "Why would you want some random person to know where you lived? You don't know who they are."

Ryan Hanley: If we're trying to set our business up for the future, there are thought experiments we can do here. Thinking about the normalization cycle of technology. So look at this: I'm a single guy now. Been single for about five months. If you know any fun, energetic, conservative women in the North, I'm always open to an introduction. I fought for a while and ultimately conceded and went on a couple of the dating apps. We could do an entire show around my experience on these. There are pros and cons.

Ryan Hanley: Here's a really interesting thing I found. I'm 44. When I talk to women on one of the apps who are in my demographic—say 40 to 50—there's usually some comment around, "I hate these apps. I don't check them all the time," on and on. If I meet or connect with someone who's 35 and under—which I don't really like to go too young for different reasons, but let's say a 34-year-old—the structure, the culture, the process of checking the apps, chatting on the apps, how you move conversations along, when you ask to do the in-person thing—it is normalized. It is part of the culture. They have it down pat. If you break that culture, they immediately know you're not one of them and they call it out. It's wild.

Ryan Hanley: You could have said, "Who the hell wants to meet someone on this app? You don't know who they are. It's impersonal." Sure. But there is an entire generation, multiple generations at this point, where they have completely normalized these. There is a cultural structure to them. They are used almost every single day. Love them or hate them, they're part of how you meet people in the modern world.

Ryan Hanley: I look at that as another use case to say we can't base the decisions we make on our business today, particularly around technology, based on the use of that tool and mindset at this moment. We have to do a thought experiment into the future to think about how this could potentially be normalized, where it will be normalized first, and by who. Those will become the influencers that ultimately set the culture around the technology.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking about one of the things I use to test a trend, a technology, a tool. I'm always looking for the three Fs. If it passes the three Fs, I know it's going to become really big because it's rooted in what we want as humans—or in this case, as buyers.

Marcus Sheridan: Number one: Does it make the journey faster? Whatever that journey is, does it make it faster? Uber is much faster at flagging down a cab than flagging down a cab. So it's faster. Number two: Does it remove fear? When you're flagging down a cab, there's a lot of fear. You're worried about what it is, if it's going to smell, what the person is going to be like, if it's going to be dirty, if they're going to take advantage of you, what the rate is going to be. So does it remove fear? Number three: Does it remove friction? Fear, friction, faster. Those are the three Fs of innovation. If you find anything that meets those three Fs, there's a very good chance it's got legs.

Marcus Sheridan: This is why, when I looked at ChatGPT, it became very obvious to me. Does it remove friction? Oh my goodness, yes. Is it faster to get your results? Yes. Does it quickly remove fear? Yes. It's very easy. The whole thing is easy to understand, very intuitive. Because of that, I knew it was going to take off.

Marcus Sheridan: What's interesting is Google at one time did the same thing to Yahoo. Google was faster than Yahoo because Yahoo was a search engine plus a bunch of other crap. Still to this day, if you go to their homepage, that's what it looks like. They were confusing. They created friction in the UX. It was a multi-billion dollar design mistake. Google showed one box and people said, "Huh, that's easier. It's faster. Less friction. Removed fear." Boom, Google takes off. Google wins for 20 years.

Marcus Sheridan: Then suddenly they get disrupted. What do we see Google doing today? They're making $300 billion a year off their paid search results. It's very hard for them to let that go. The problem is, by not letting that go, they introduce friction and slow down the UX of search. In so doing, they're starting to kill their brand, which is why people quickly go over to ChatGPT. You can even get bad answers on ChatGPT, but you don't like friction. You don't like fear. You don't like ads. All these things eliminated the three Fs. It's got legs. That's how you have to look at a lot of these things. It gets very simple. That's how you can know where to place your bets.

Ryan Hanley: What I think is interesting, I was listening to an interview that Sundar—do I have his name right, the CEO from Google—did with David Friedberg from the All In podcast. He was asking him about the innovator's dilemma. Friedberg in the early part of his career actually worked at Google. He was asking, "How do you work through this? Search is obviously the bellwether of your business, but we see what's happening. You're already starting to see issues in your numbers in some of the quarterly reports. How do you start to do this?"

Ryan Hanley: We've seen Google now bring Gemini AI as an option. You can toggle on, toggle off at the top of search. When I saw that—not that I ever questioned where I think all of this is going—but when I saw Google make the move to pull the Gemini AI up into actually replacing where traditionally the first three paid ad links were, and now it's Gemini's AI, you couldn't question it at that point. They just gave the most valuable real estate on the internet—the top three paid search ads for Google search, the highest value real estate on the internet—and replaced it with a non-ad tool, Google AI.

Marcus Sheridan: That's right.

Ryan Hanley: That to me, if anything, is the signal that there is no coming back. The world will be completely different. There is no justification other than "I choose to live a truly contrarian life" to fight against AI. There's just no argument for it.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. And because the buyer always wins. The taxis tried to sue Uber over and over again. The hotel chains tried to sue Airbnb over and over again. But who wins? The user, generally, because they demand a change. They like the innovation more. Why? Because it was either faster, eliminated friction, or removed fear—or all three.

Marcus Sheridan: Most searches today on Google—the majority, something like 70 to 75 percent—don't even end in a click. That's extraordinary. The blue link means nothing anymore. Being ranked number one in Google means absolutely nothing anymore. It used to be that you would get 80% of the clicks. Now you get less than 20% of the clicks if you're ranked number one in most cases.

Marcus Sheridan: Your future rests on your ability to be recommended by AI as a business. You have to build a known and trusted brand. The humans must trust you and AI must trust you. Many of those signals are overlapped, but it's the signals you produce and others produce about you. You have to produce signals as a business. If you're not producing those trust signals, you will be left behind from a search perspective.

Marcus Sheridan: The problem is, now you can't just throw money at the problem to fix it. For 20 years, we've been able to throw money at Google and say, "Give me some leads." And they made the trade. But now you can't do that. That's scary business, Hanley, for a lot of people. You can't just say, "All right, I'm going to do some SEO stuff." Nope. Can't do that. Not at least the way it's always been done. You've got to build a known and trusted brand.

Marcus Sheridan: That comes back to content. That comes back to thinking like a media company. I talk about this in *Endless Customers*. If you want a known and trusted brand—and that's why I wrote the book—you've got to follow four pillars. I know we're kind of winding down here, Hanley, but I just want to give these four pillars. I have more time if you do.

Marcus Sheridan: Number one: You've got to be willing to say online what others in your space aren't willing to say. That's your first pillar. Most companies aren't willing to do that. They say they are. They're not. Number two: You've got to be willing to show with video what others aren't willing to show. Got to think like a media company. Number three: You've got to be willing to sell in a way others aren't willing to sell. Number four: You've got to be more human than others are willing to be. They've got to feel that you're very human while you're taking advantage of this technology.

Marcus Sheridan: Say what others aren't willing to say. Show what they're not willing to show with video. Sell in a way they're not willing to sell. Be more human than they're willing to be. Those are the four pillars of a known and trusted brand today, for AI and for humans.

Ryan Hanley: Guys, you've heard me talk about this idea of a human-optimized business. What Marcus just described are the pillars of building a human-optimized business. I came out with this concept a few years ago, and it's really the core tenant behind Rogue Risk, the insurance agency I built. Humans are only better than computers at three things: building relationships, solving problems, and selling shit. I think the selling shit one on the lower end is going to start to go away, so I'm reconsidering that part. So that only leaves two. We are better at building relationships and solving problems. Solving problems in the next 10 to 20 years is probably going to go away. So what do we have left? Brand. That's it. That's all we have left. Brand is it.

Ryan Hanley: I never thought I would be a brand guy. And I realized today, everything I'm teaching is about building a known and trusted brand.

Marcus Sheridan: The one thing I know about trust is that regardless of what happens with technology, with AI, trust ain't going away because it's a principle. If I said to anybody listening, "Is trust going to be fundamental to your business in 20 years?" You'd say yes. If I said, "Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Is it ChatGPT?" You're going to say, "I have no idea," because 20 years is light years away from right now. So much is going to change. You really don't want to bet on platforms. What you want to bet on are principles. And you evolve your platforms based on those principles that you're rooted in as a business.

Ryan Hanley: Bro, I could talk to you for hours. It is always a masterclass every time you come on the show, every time we talk. I appreciate the hell out of you. We're going to make sure we're linked up to *Endless Customers* the book so people can go buy that. But I know you have a bunch of other stuff going on. If people want to go deeper into your world, how do they do that? How do they get into Marcus's world if they're not already?

Marcus Sheridan: If you want me to come speak at your event about the future of sales, marketing, and AI trust, go to MarcusSheridan.com. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm a pretty dang good follow—maybe not as good as Hanley here, but I'm all right. Connect with me on LinkedIn. If you see it on LinkedIn, I wrote it personally, either a private message or a post. That's all from me.

Marcus Sheridan: And if you have a service-based business, check out PriceGuide.ai, which is the future of winning trust and converting from your website. It's an amazing little pricing estimator tool that allows you to use AI to build pricing estimators. Conversion rates generally shoot up 300 to 500 percent from your website. Check it out at PriceGuide.ai. Pretty incredible tool.

Ryan Hanley: Bro, I love you. I appreciate you. I'm very proud to be your friend. I wish you nothing but success.

Marcus Sheridan: Thank you, my friend. Let's go. Make it look... make it look...

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Ryan Hanley: Thank you for listening to The Ryan Hanley Show. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts.