Audience-First Marketing

Tom Nixon (00:01.304)
All right, Curtis, I will remind listeners that they are listening to this in the future so they can’t spoil the reason for the hat. Last time, you and I were on camera. Our beloved hometown tigers were dispatching the Cleveland Indians or guardians, should say Cleveland guardians. And now here we are. You’ll know what day we’re recording this. are on the precipice of a game five with Seattle. So I wore the hat last time. It brought us luck. I’m wearing the hat this time. You wear a hat every time.

Curtis Hays (00:29.343)
I do. We’ll see how this story transpires, right? The tigers are writing a story here and we’ll see where it ends up. Hopefully it’s got a good ending.

Tom Nixon (00:34.446)
That’s right.

Tom Nixon (00:38.71)
We did. we exactly. Yeah, we shoehorned that into our last topic, which was all about storytelling. and speaking of storytelling, we’ve got one of the best storytellers in the business. he is, he doesn’t know this, but he’s one of my mentors from afar, but his content is the one who mentors me. And we’re to get into that quite a bit today. Please welcome everyone. Brian Clark to the podcast. Brian. Good to have you here.

Brian (01:05.092)
Hey Tom, good to be here. Thank you.

Tom Nixon (01:07.48)
cool. Yeah. So I am a, a member of the tribe, a paying member. should disclose that. but huge fan of everything you’ve done going way back to, copy blogger, which is probably how I discovered you. but I don’t recall discovering Brian Clark so much as I recover or discover, remember discovering copy blogger. And now today fast forward, I’m a, do all I do is content for content marketing campaigns and agencies like Curtis’s and,

So this is a thrill. So for people who don’t know what copy blogger is, just give us a quick refresher and why that’s relevant to today.

Brian (01:43.269)
Yeah, that goes back almost 20 years now, which blows my mind. But I actually, to go back a little bit further, in 1998, I started publishing online. I left the practice of law, which I did not enjoy. And those were very early days for, know, essentially I was a frustrated attorney who wanted to write for a living, which is a very common affliction among disgruntled attorneys.

But I didn’t want to go necessarily to New York publishing or LA screenwriting because that just seemed another set of gatekeepers and people you had to conform to, which I seem to have a problem with authority, or at least I did. so, yeah, back in 98, all the rage at the time, believe it or not, email newsletters. And now…

what, 27 years later, still email newsletters and still the content that makes the difference within them. And yet we were 11 years away from the thing we now call content marketing having a name. But essentially that’s what I was doing. I was using content to attract people in order to effectively build a business to at that time sell them services in law.

And in real estate is what I succeeded with. My very first business was like a traditional media concept because who knew any better? you know, media and content were monetized by advertising and you know, the ad industry, the digital ad industry at that time was just being invented and they had some crazy ideas during the dot com days. Like, you know, business.com

would sell things at a loss and make up for it with advertising and just all these crazy ideas that didn’t work. But that’s what you do when you have no playbook, right? We were all making it up as we went along. Anyway, you say that very kindly, by the way, that I’ve been your mentor through content. Well, Seth Godin did the same thing for me. Years later, we actually became friends and he would actually take my calls and put up with me.

Brian (04:09.647)
But it was, you know, it was his books, right? So I read permission marketing in 99 and he had one line and he said, the internet is the greatest direct marketing medium ever devised. And I was like, is that what that is? And so then I was like, well, then you have to learn copywriting and you have to understand how to sell things to people that solve problems effectively. And so I did that with a small little law practice just to pay the bills while my first company failed. And then

I was like, okay, this worked. I could actually build an entire law firm out of this, which I don’t want, but it was still tempting. So I said, how can I take my expertise and apply it in an industry that’s not law, but is relevant and makes lots of money? And honestly, that was my motivation at that time to succeed monetarily outside of the practice of law. So I was like, real estate, you know?

And this was right when the MLS was allowed to be published on websites. 2001 was when they announced this and there were some pilot cities. One of them was Dallas and that’s where I lived at the time after bailing out of Austin when everything collapsed with the dot-com crash. And it worked, you know, before not too long, I was making six figures, then a little bit longer, I was making more money than if I would have.

made partner in that law firm that I left. that should make me happy, right? But of course, I didn’t really, I wasn’t really into real estate for any purpose or passion. was, it was a way to make money. And that part, you know, it was kind of a proof of concept that if you publish valuable content and you take a unique position, all these things we know about marketing now,

It worked amazingly. yet at that time, lawyers and real estate brokers, they just think you’re insane that you would give away free content. And I’m like, but I’m making all this money by giving away that free content. mean, should I publish a book that would make me no money or should I give it away and have a successful business? Anyway, that was what I knew coming into the second half of 2005.

Brian (06:33.923)
And I’m looking at the emerging commercial blogging scene, right? So you remember blogging was very idealistic and even the business aspects of it were this changes everything. And I’m like, yeah, it does, but it’s really just what Godin said. It’s having a direct relationship with an audience of prospects, winning their trust and letting them know that you can help them.

with whatever their problem or desire is. So it’s basic fundamental stuff, but it was just in an entirely new context. So that’s what prompted me to start Copyblogger, which is a weird name, I know, but it made sense at the time, because you had like my friend Darren Rouse had started ProBlogger, and there was this concept of professional blogging. And again, they were trying to monetize with advertising. And I was like,

Tom Nixon (07:16.782)
Thank

Brian (07:29.637)
I already made this mistake seven years ago. Let me tell you what you need to do. So it was basically adding elements of direct response copywriting to content to make it more engaging, headlines, openings, know, metaphors and analogies, all of the stuff that copywriters use to persuade and keep attention. I said, this all works for normal content. Now, fast forward to today, everyone understands engaging content.

Everyone understands that rage sells. That was not what we were talking about back then. It was more on the positive side of things. And then the second half of it was don’t try to make money with advertising. You need a massive audience to do that. But if you have a small engaged audience, you can sell them products and services. That became known as content marketing two years later when my friend Joe Pulizzi, who coined, wow, he had

Tom Nixon (08:05.966)
Mm.

Brian (08:29.017)
He popularized the term, right? It had been around for a while. But he said, Brian, this is what you’re really doing here. Let’s call it this. And I’m like, I hate that name. And he said, well, it’s the only one we’ve got and it’s gaining traction. And at the time I was the biggest site that talked about content marketing. you know, talked it over with Sonia Simone, who you are familiar with as well, who wasn’t yet my business partner, but she was helping out.

Tom Nixon (08:39.182)
Thank

Brian (08:57.155)
And we’re like, okay, we’ll adopt the term. And she immediately wrote a post that we tried to rank at number one for the term. And it succeeded much to Joe’s consternation, but he ended up doing fine with that conference that he started. It’s now a what’s I see numbers like 600 billion a year. It blows my mind. Whatever it is, it’s many billions of dollar industry that started.

Tom Nixon (09:08.12)
Hmm.

Brian (09:24.111)
basically from bloggers, you know, and then it expanded into YouTube came along and then podcasting and it all, all the rest has evolved since then. Now things have changed drastically, as you know, from those days, but I think the fundamental aspects of it are still the same.

Tom Nixon (09:42.639)
What are the things that’s changed and is changing Curtis? I don’t know if you’re comfortable sharing a frustration of yours that you just as recently as yesterday expressed, in terms of the platforms by which we get our content out into the marketplace of ideas in things have changed and going back to what you said about gatekeepers, right? It feels like there’s now an additional set of gatekeepers, are algorithms on say social networks.

Curtis, your frustration was or is.

Curtis Hays (10:14.961)
I think I’m going to express this correctly in what you’re talking about, but correct me if I’m wrong. But one of my frustrations that I’ve been expressing is that we’ve been taught. I’m analytical, data minded, been known as an SEO guru and those types of things, but came at it from the technical perspective. And we’ve been taught to write for an algorithm.

What keywords should we use and how frequently should we use those? And are we using schema markup and all these other things? And nobody is talking about the audience, the end user who actually reads it. We’re assuming we’re writing. now it’s of course, instead of writing for Google, we’re now talking about writing for AI. How do we get ranked in AI? And I still feel like people are missing the boat that at the end of the day, your core mission is to write for people.

your audience, the algorithm comes second to who your audience is. Because even if you get one or two people to that page and your content resonates with one or two people, they might become customers. But if you’re writing for a search engine and that search engine may not bring you the right people, what was it all for anyway? Or you’re ranking well, but you’re not using the things that you’re talking about, Brian, like persuasion.

in the art of writing to actually convince somebody you’re the right company to buy a product or service from, right? So is that correct, Tom, and what you were after? Okay.

Tom Nixon (11:49.323)
Yes, that’s part of it. We’ll we’ll come back to the other part, but you just touched on one of the things I wanted to, which is audience first. Tell us Brian. I read the two words, but it’s hyphenated audience first. I read a ton in your content. What are you trying to emphasize there?

Brian (12:05.337)
Well, audience first, I want to talk about what Curtis said because it’s so important and it’s an ancient problem. Well, ancient in Google years. But when I learned SEO in around 2000, I mean, it was so primitive, you know, just repeating keywords and keyword stuffing and the stuff that worked. I mean, what do think people thought when they got to that page? Right. It was just. And.

This is because SEOs were technicians at that time. They were technical people who didn’t really understand anything about marketing, but they just thought traffic equals marketing. Well, that’s not true. So along comes Copyblogger, and my definition of SEO copywriting was synonymous with the type of content that I was advocating for for one simple reason in that environment at the time, and that was links.

because we knew that the Google algorithm was powered by links. You can do all the positioning of the actual text on the page you want to, but you’re only going to rank higher than others when you have more genuine inbound links from other publishers. Well, that’s what bloggers did at the time. So people often ask me, did you know what you were doing when you entered the blogging realm? And I’m like, yeah, I mean, come on, it was a huge opportunity.

I think Tom’s next question about algorithms is going to be social media. And at the time they were our biggest ally or the lack of them, I should say. Those platforms like early Twitter and Facebook were just a publisher’s dream. And before that there was dig and delicious popular and all of this stuff. And people like me and Rand Fishkin and other early bloggers who also understood SEO were like,

Tom Nixon (13:50.199)
God.

Brian (13:59.395)
We are living in the golden age of marketing history. I don’t know that we knew it was going to change. Zuckerberg changed it in 2010 when he did debate and switch and said, you know that audience you just built, you got to pay to reach it now. And that was the beginning of the change. that makes things difficult compared to that time, but not different.

It’s just the context has shifted. You do have to battle with the algorithms. Google’s a whole nother story, Curtis. I don’t know what your thoughts are. I mean, they’re going to lose the AI no matter what. And I’m impressed with what Google’s done with Gemini because I thought they were dead. I was like, is no way you’re going to… Your business model is invalid shortly. It takes a while. We’re all trained to Google.

Tom Nixon (14:40.29)
Me too.

Brian (14:50.649)
but it’s been remarkably fast and Google has adapted. So I got to give those guys props for that, even if they are now evil.

Curtis Hays (15:00.021)
I have my money on YouTube. That’s where I think they’re putting a huge focus.

Brian (15:02.819)
YouTube is the greatest search engine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really is. That’s a good observation.

Tom Nixon (15:09.266)
A few minutes ago, I wasn’t sure which way to take it and you guys both took it both ways. So that’s cool. So, cause we’re talking about this audience first approach, but we are also talking about gatekeepers being algorithms. And so to quote my other, non-complicit mentor, Mark Schaefer, this whole idea of building on rented land seemed and still seems like it’s critical, right? To have a strategy where you’re out where the people are social media, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach them. That’s the other frustration, Curtis, right?

Right. Is the, seems like there’s an intentional throttling throttling back of what Zuckerberg pioneered in 2010. And so now I’ve built this audience. can’t even reach them on the platform that I built it on, which is why. When I read this a few years ago, when you said email is a non-negotiable, if you want to build and reach an audience, it’s the one modern platform that there is no algorithm separating you and your audience. It’s the quality of your content. And will people open and click? So,

Talk to the people who might think, Brian, that email is antiquated. What are you talking about? Something that came out in 1998 is going to be a modern content marketing platform. Why do you stick up for email?

Brian (16:20.281)
Yeah, you how many times over the years emails been declared dead and it’s been, you know, every couple of years for 20 years at least. But when we talk about building an audience, I’m not talking about social media. I’m talking about email. Email is the primary audience vehicle because you, you know, even though you use software, whether it be kit or

Beehive or even Substack, which is surprisingly has good terms, you know, even though it could be called digital sharecropping like we used to call it. But you own that list of people and you can move it to where you want. The other key component of whether it be a WordPress host or something like Substack is can you take your content with you? answer is yes. So,

That’s the criteria you have to live by. And people violated that with Facebook business pages and what have you. What are some of the other Tumblr? I mean, there’s been so many platforms that have either imploded or changed the rules and left people high and dry that it’s comical. And back when we sold publishing and website solutions,

I didn’t have to make up fear stories. They would just happen all the time. And we’d be like, well, Zuckerberg did it again. These people are screwed. know, it was just, it became predictable that if you didn’t maintain your own piece of land or you didn’t pay attention to the terms and conditions, then you were kind of setting yourself up. So I kind of got off track there with that, but that’s why email is not going to die. And

Tom Nixon (17:48.622)
you

Brian (18:11.301)
You know, my kids, know, in their early 20s, they use email, but that’s not their primary thing. So everyone points to Gen Z as that’ll be the thing that finally kills them. Well, not if they get jobs, which is debatable at this point, you know. But, you know, from my standpoint and my focus point, which we can get into, you know, all the people with all the money are over the age of 50 anyway.

Tom Nixon (18:28.91)
you

Tom Nixon (18:40.078)
Thank

Brian (18:41.125)
You know, that’s the market that people need to think about, But anyway, for the near and foreseeable future, you need to be building an email list. Now, the heart of the matter is we used to build our email lists by publishing on social media. For example, early Twitter was my platform. I got something like 180,000 followers. I totally abandoned X, but…

Tom Nixon (18:43.746)
Gen X. Yes.

Brian (19:10.213)
The followers are largely still there. I don’t know what those people are doing. Anyway, and it was so easy. I worked really hard and I did things I would never do today like telling my existing audience to go to Twitter. Now, why would I do that? Because when my audience is over there on that platform and I publish a tweet with a link to content,

then they amplify it. And then that amplification gets amplified tenfold by people I don’t know. And then here’s how we build an audience of multiple hundred thousands of people. Doesn’t work like that anymore at all. You know, what drives me crazy when I see things, you know, as well intended as the whole zero click marketing thing, like they do on LinkedIn. Well, first you publish content, you only attract followers.

And then even though the algorithm is throttling you from sending them to your website, somehow magically they go to your website. I’m like, that’s like that equation where it’s like published content, question mark, profit. It’s like there’s a missing element there somewhere. And that’s why LinkedIn drives me crazy. I think it can work, but it’s a frustrating endeavor to say the least.

Tom Nixon (20:16.174)
you

Tom Nixon (20:24.514)
Perfect. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (20:35.352)
That’s what you’re alluding to, isn’t it, Tom? That’s my frustration with LinkedIn.

Tom Nixon (20:35.438)
That’s the space. He sent me a slack two days ago. So I’m done with LinkedIn. Let’s find something else.

Brian (20:43.845)
I keep swearing it off and now I’m like, maybe I’ll try it again, but I don’t know. We can talk about what I’m actually doing now, but LinkedIn is so frustrating.

Tom Nixon (20:49.229)
So.

Well, here is the case of point. This is interesting. I’ve told oops. I’ve told you this before. I somehow ended up on your further email newsletter list. I don’t remember signing up. I don’t remember someone sending it to me. I just remember being on it one day and I remember I can’t even tell you what the first article was, but I’m like, my God, this guy gets me. He’s writing about it seems like he’s writing to a gen X man who is in the maybe Twilight.

section of his career wondering what’s going to happen when he retires, but wants to stay healthy, wants to make sure his mind stays healthy, wants to make sure he has enough to retire. like, am I the only person on this list? Because on the bottom, there’s a reference to if there’s like a music video from the 80s. I’m like, I think I’m the only subscriber, but I’m cool. This is cool. So what you did it so now eventually then eventually, probably years later, I signed up for your program, which you can explain in a minute.

Brian (21:40.751)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (21:50.211)
but you got me just because you understood me going back to what I was saying, Curtis, this audience first, like there’s hundreds of thousands of people like me. share with if you don’t mind again, I don’t remember how I got on the list, but what was your strategy and has it changed over the years specifically with further?

Brian (22:10.105)
Yeah, so just before we get to further, it’s the same thing with Copyblogger, although I didn’t use generational labels, but I bonded with my audience heavily through pop culture references, and that’s what made my content engaging. And then years down the road, I’m like, my entire audience is Gen X because I effectively used references, and we are a generation that loves our pop culture references.

that were specific. remember once someone dared me to write an online marketing post using nothing but Depeche Mode songs as analogies. And I was like, I’m doing it. And I did it. And then everyone was like, my God, Depeche Mode, I can’t believe you pulled this off. And then one millennial dude is like, who’s Depeche Mode? And I was just crushed.

Tom Nixon (23:00.238)
You should have felt validated.

Brian (23:04.069)
It is validating and everything I tell you is you got to run off the wrong people and keep the right people but to me that was like I never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know who Depeche Mode is because that’s my own little worldview bubble that I was in. But I think we have to operate that way and that’s a whole nother topic of conversation but audience first, who are they? Speak directly to them and don’t worry about everyone else. Don’t worry about if they don’t like you, fine.

You know, if they say ugly things to you, you can decide how to deal with them. I used to fight with people in the copy blogger comments. Now I just block and delete. Just like I’m too old for this crap. But that’s an aspect. It’s an inherent aspect of audience first because that’s good marketing, right? But audience first means something more than that, which means you build the audience before you build the product. Most startups.

Tom Nixon (23:42.466)
Yeah.

Brian (24:01.647)
come up with an idea they think is cool to build something, they get money, they build it, and then they try to find people to buy it. And that’s why 90 % of startups fail. So we were, Tony and I, who became my CEO, Tony Clark, he was well-steeped in agile development and lean principles and all this stuff before Eric Reese’s book came out.

So Copyblogger was practicing what we called lean content development, where you pay attention to what works and you discard what doesn’t work and you proceed that way until you get to the point where you launch something that you feel the audience actually needs because you’ve been paying attention to the pain. Not asking them, what do you want to buy? But like Steve Jobs says, it’s your job to figure out what they want to buy. And you do that by

paying attention to the pain points that they have, the desires and the problems that are left unsatisfied. So when you come out with that minimum viable product, it’s a lot more viable, right? And we went on this run from 2007 through 2017 of launching a product every year and never having one fail with that methodology.

And there are still people to this day who are just now going, well, that’s an interesting way to approach it. You know, I mean, so I don’t even know that it’s necessarily mainstream, but the idea of starting with an audience first, because you have no idea what the product is. That was me in 2006. I knew I would figure it out. That was about the only difference. I had the confidence that if I pay attention, I will know what to build these people. So that.

Tom Nixon (25:51.927)
It’s.

Brian (25:53.017)
That in essence is audience first. You pay attention to what you should create as far as a product or a service due to that specific audience, a specific group of people, not a market, not product market fit that you imagine or fantasize about. And then when you have the product, you have a built-in group of people who are just waiting to buy it. I mean, to me, that sounds like the best way ever.

to proceed in a way where you don’t fail spectacularly.

Tom Nixon (26:27.854)
So honestly, when you launched further, you had no vision for what the product could become.

Brian (26:34.109)
so now see what I said? I talk too much and then I lose track of where I’m at. yeah, thank you, Tom. So when we were at the height of copybloggers power, we had just crossed into eight figures and we’ve grown to 65 people. All the things I said I would never do. When I started copyblogger, I’m like, it’s just gonna be me. I don’t wanna manage people. Anyway, things happen.

Tom Nixon (26:38.574)
I’ll get you back on track.

Tom Nixon (26:56.707)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (27:03.477)
And I never really even envisioned that level of success, but every year there was a new product and the next thing and something about my nature is, well, we got to do that. anyway, that’s how we got there. But I was kind of burnt out. I was sick of talking about content marketing. I needed an outlet. So further started.

Right at what I call the beginning of the second email newsletter Renaissance, right around 2015. The hustle, you remember, was new then. Other publications that were mainly aimed at millennials. So further was almost by default going to speak to Gen X, even though it wasn’t until 2019 that I made that specific transition. But it was just a side project.

And the Gen Xer I was writing for initially was me, right? I’m like, why am I rich and unhappy? Why have I succeeded beyond everything? And then I started over time, you know, exploring my own curiosity about personal development issues and whatnot, kind of stuff I’ve kind of, you know, said was worthless when I was young. I started to realize I was wrong, you know, thank God.

I figured out I’m wrong, which happens all the time. But then I started to realize, well, you know, a lot of this dissatisfaction you feel in your 40s happens to a lot of people. It’s normal. And I was like, thank God, I’m not just a complete freak for being ungrateful. You know, because that’s how I felt. Like I have a great family, I’ve got great kids, I’ve got a great business, but I wasn’t really happy.

Tom Nixon (28:46.755)
Thank

Brian (28:52.003)
Yeah, they actually have it pinpoint down to like 47.9 is peak unhappiness. And that was right around the age I was when I started further. But then I discovered this whole other thing about the happiness, you shaped happiness curve. You hit 50 and you start feeling happier. Happened almost like clockwork for me.

Tom Nixon (29:04.675)
Mm.

Brian (29:20.973)
I also sold the company right about that time, which certainly didn’t hurt. But the reason why I sold the company had to do with the shift in values. I wasn’t about to sacrifice. So I had a private equity deal on my desk to take Copyblogger to 100 million. That’s what investors want. So we would have to go from 12, 10 exit, right? And you see these kind of moonshots all the time.

And I ultimately just made the decision to not take the deal and then to start looking into selling the company, which I did. And then that process is when I shifted further specifically to midlife. And I’m like, these are common issues. I’m not the only one who’s having them. The only thing that is not as identifiable for me is

you know, the Gen X retirement crisis. A lot of people can’t afford, at least at this point, or in any projectable future, to retire at 65 or 67 or whatever it is. I had the opposite problem. I was what, 52? People were like, so you’re gonna retire now? And I’m like, no, no. I like what I do, you know, and that’s why Further became the business. I did take time off. I did take it easy, trying to figure out what the next thing was.

Surprisingly, I had a bit of an identity crisis that didn’t let me relax as much because you’ve got the money and everything. But when you take time off, you kind of fade from view. And all of a sudden I was feeling, wait a minute, I’m still me, you gotta pay attention to me. And that’s embarrassing to me to say, but I think it’s also a very natural reaction to the situation.

But yeah, now further is the main thing. It focuses mainly on defeating the lack of retirement funds combined with ageism in the workplace, right? We have the next 10 years, say you’re 55, you’re at your peak earning years. If you get laid off during that period of time, you’re done. I mean, it’s a travesty.

Brian (31:41.007)
take into account that also we’re entering what they call the longevity economy. We’ve got a lot of older people, not so many young people due to longer lives, dropping birth rates, and employers need to keep us, right? I mean, if they’re smart, but when are they ever smart? That’s the problem. And now you’ve got AI, right? Exactly, now you’ve got AI and they’re like, well, we don’t need your salary and whatnot, but it’s actually,

Tom Nixon (31:58.797)
Right. Especially now with AI.

Brian (32:10.475)
Expertise and wisdom combined with AI is the secret component in my view. But if your employer doesn’t value you, you and AI as a solo entrepreneur or solo freelancer, consultant, whatever you want to call it, you can do amazing things. So that’s my message. That’s my purpose. That’s what I’m here for at this point.

Tom Nixon (32:33.602)
Yep. That’s got to resonate with you, Curtis, because well, and you just gifted me Mark Schaefer’s latest book. So what have you learned in Mark? Do know Mark Schaefer, by the way, Brian?

Brian (32:45.059)
do, we go way back. Remember the content shock thing that he had? Yeah, like he was like, we’re at peak content. I’m like, no, we’re not. And now look at where we’re at now. But you can always break through, right? Because in a sea of sameness, the unique voice will still break through. It was the same when Mark talked about it then, it’s the same now. So don’t forget about how much slop there is.

Tom Nixon (32:49.57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Nixon (32:57.836)
Yeah.

Brian (33:13.637)
Think about how few vivid voices there are. That’s the opportunity. Because the rest of it’s invisible. No one’s going to see that.

Tom Nixon (33:22.796)
Yeah. Curtis, what have you learned from the book?

Curtis Hays (33:25.555)
Yeah. Well, well, first I’ll say I just learned from Brian. I just turned 48. So I’m now at the peak concern for happiness. So I’m going to have to get on this newsletter, make sure I’m getting some information to help me get through this. I’ve got a little anxiety now.

Brian (33:42.277)
Curtis, I hope it’s not true for you. It’s statistical, but yeah.

Tom Nixon (33:44.686)
He’s an outlier though, because he’s got me who’s already on the upswing for the happiness curve. I’ll bring you along.

Brian (33:53.135)
Yeah, see, your partner is more optimistic at this point, so.

Curtis Hays (33:53.17)
Yes, there you go.

Tom Nixon (33:56.366)
That’s right.

Curtis Hays (33:56.874)
Right. Dill, what I mean, what I heard Brian say is exactly what’s in Mark’s book. And what he’s saying is that the humanity and what we’re going to need today with AI, this is at least his latest book. And that’s exactly what you’ve done here, Brian, is you’re talking and writing about something that you’re seeing is important to you and likely through your writing.

You’re not necessarily just talking about your own experiences, but researching those experiences and sharing them with your audience in those types of… And they can see that humanity, passion, research, and those types of things that you’re putting behind it. You’re likely not taking a topic, putting it into chat GPT and saying, write me a 1200 word article on X and include these keywords in it, because your audience isn’t going to engage with that.

Brian (34:48.261)
No.

Curtis Hays (34:50.485)
But if you write something that’s meaningful to you that you want to share with an audience that you think would care about that topic, now you have this opportunity to connect with them. And that’s what Tom has taught me over the last two years. So this is all about connecting with somebody at the other end. And…

Brian (35:06.382)
Yeah, you start with yourself and your values and your experience and then you have long conversations with Claude like I do and you know, I’m just first of all, like Claude quit agreeing with me about everything and telling me I’m brilliant. Okay, stop that. Let’s hash this through. It’s amazing. I’m a writer. That’s what I wanted to be. So I don’t need that. I need someone to run.

Curtis Hays (35:21.099)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (35:21.272)
You

Brian (35:33.305)
to run things through who understands the entire history of the world and pop culture and everything, right? That’s what LLMs do. And to me, that’s an incredible valuable resource. I mean, I’m still trying to get used to the fact because I used to write content because I would read a book and it would be something completely unrelated to business and I would come up with a story and that story would trigger an association.

Curtis Hays (35:41.109)
Right.

Brian (36:02.329)
and that would become the basis, right? So it’s a very inefficient process, but it worked. I’m still trying to adapt to the fact that I could just ask for a certain kind of story. It seems to take the serendipity out of it, so I still encourage people, read books. Really, it’s your secret weapon. Read books of all kinds, watch TV shows, watch movies, read trashy stuff, read…

Tom Nixon (36:22.158)
Mm.

Brian (36:31.767)
intellectual stuff, because that’s where you get great ideas from. Then you can go to Claw and flesh it out or chat with you or whatever you have. Curtis, to your point, I can now advocate for AI within a context or a framework of humanity. And I think that’s exactly what Mark’s doing. Because again, Mark doesn’t need AI to write, but I’m sure Mark uses it, the tool.

Curtis Hays (36:55.315)
Right. No, but he’s using it. He’s using it and he’s surprised at what he’s getting out of it, but he’s trying to figure out that balance. one of the, you just mentioned reading, which was actually one of the things I got out of Mark’s latest book and one thing we’re implementing at home. So I have two daughters, teenagers. One’s a much bigger reader than the other, but both love books. But I realized what we’ve never done as a family, but families probably did in like my grandparents’ generation.

is we stopped reading books with them once they started reading themselves. So we read with them all the way up to a certain point and then stopped. And so we’re now implementing a no device, two hours on Sundays, no TV, no devices. And my idea was let’s read a book together as a family in the living room and then share that experience and what’s in that written word.

Brian (37:28.559)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (37:50.164)
might be Lord of the Rings or something like that. But it’s like, what are some good stories that really have meaning in them that we could share, right? And talk about and discuss.

Tom Nixon (37:58.831)
Just don’t, don’t, don’t let your kids read my books though. Not until they’re, I don’t know, 17 or 18, you decide, but.

Curtis Hays (38:03.275)
No, I had to put the second one down. was I picked it back up again, but the second one got me a little worried.

Brian (38:04.689)
Hahaha

Tom Nixon (38:13.602)
Okay, yeah.

Brian (38:13.797)
It’s so interesting because both of my kids were voracious readers. And then, you know, as it happens in the teenage years, it starts to slow down and then you start pressing them. You need to get back to reading. need to be in. It doesn’t really work that way. But just this week, my daughter, who’s 23, she’s out of school and working, watched the film version of Pride and Prejudice and asked me to buy her the hardcover book.

and I’ve never been happier in my life. She’s so excited about it. And so, yeah, the kids that come back to reading, I think, man, that’s gonna be an advantage that is so sorely needed because just the things you understand about outsourcing your thinking. I’m not one of these people that thinks change is inherently bad.

Curtis Hays (38:45.587)
you

Tom Nixon (38:45.634)
Yeah

Curtis Hays (38:53.546)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (39:07.839)
That’s the key.

Brian (39:11.843)
when the printing press was created, everyone thought it was the end of humanity, right? Like we always find a reason to think it’s the most horrible thing ever. But there are certain things about reading and literacy that can’t be replicated, for example, in an oral tradition or where we came from. And some people are arguing we’re heading back that way where you only listen.

Tom Nixon (39:16.899)
Right.

Brian (39:38.493)
and watch instead of reading and it’s just not the same, remains to be seen. But for now, my number one hack is read books. Always has been, honestly.

Tom Nixon (39:49.903)
Yeah. Love it. Well, so I think my closing thought is going to be piggybacking piggybacking off what you started, Curtis, and that is when Mark started talking a ton about AI in his newsletter and he was tempted to write a book using AI. I don’t know if he caught that and I don’t think he did, but then I wondered he put out two books in six weeks. So maybe he did and then I started thinking, alright, you know, are my favorite authors all using AI and then I thought, you know what?

I really don’t care because I’m not reading them for the words. I’m reading them for the ideas and the expertise. And so people don’t want more words. They want more great thoughts. And I think they want to learn. So I’ll leave that back to you, Brian. You can wrap us up with that comes full circle to leading expert, which is the offshoot of further. And that is exactly what you just said, right? How do you become the expert so that people read your content and

It might not even matter if you’re using AI because it’s the ideas that are great.

Brian (40:51.183)
Yeah, that’s a great thing to end on because leading expert is really my reflection and ability or attempt to summarize how I did what I did, starting with Copyblogger moving forward. And what you just said is accurate and I hope I can communicate this in a way that doesn’t give people the wrong impression, but there’s something in social psychology known as the messenger effect and

The way we perceive content depends on who is communicating it more than the content itself, which is why celebrity endorsements work, right? You have an advertising firm that crafts a message and Brad Pitt says it and it works, right? You have speech writers for presidents and even people out on the speaking circuit, right? You have gurus in all the spaces.

Tom Nixon (41:32.312)
Mm.

Brian (41:48.453)
In the influencer market or whatever you want to call it Who don’t create their own content there are ghost writers? Who do this freelancers and yet people adore the influencer or? Whatever you want to call them It doesn’t matter who creates the content. It’s who you are To the audience and we do this through shared identity through shared values if you can interject

within a prompt or what have you, those core human unifying elements of humanity, then you can succeed and it doesn’t matter, right? Now I will say that I think to my own dismay that we can use AI to craft compelling persuasive human presentations that we deliver by audio and video. And this is gonna become more and more the norm.

Because forget the AI avatar. That’s the dumbest thing ever. You do not want to replace yourself with a representation by AI. You want AI to help you become a more connecting and persuasive human being. And that’s what matters. So it’s really kind of a red herring that, you know, authentically crafted content matters more than AI content, with one exception.

MIT did a study and when you tell participants that the piece of content was actually crafted by a human, they give it a bump. They give it the human bump. That’s a messenger effect as well, right? But otherwise they preferred the AI content, which is really, you know, a thought that you need to take to heart.

Tom Nixon (43:26.582)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (43:31.822)
Absolutely.

Tom Nixon (43:38.72)
Yeah, cool. Well, Curtis, you can finally meet the man behind the concept of Team Lance, which I’ve said over and over again and Curtis is like, what do you call it? I’m like, well, Brian Clark calls it Team Lance. So, Curtis founded Collideascope in what year on the Team Lance model? So, I don’t know. Is he ahead of his time, Brian?

Curtis Hays (43:55.947)
2017, yeah.

Brian (44:00.591)
You know, I didn’t coin that term, but I did repeat it. And there you go with the messenger effect, right? I’m getting credit for something I didn’t actually coin. But yeah, it’s a cool thing. And Curtis, that shows a lot of foresight on your part. Now I wonder like how big a team do you need, right? A team of three people with AI can do just astronomical things. So it’s really about utilizing the technology

Tom Nixon (44:05.72)
There you go.

Brian (44:29.221)
keeping the human element and still focusing on the audience and what they need from you in terms of that value connection, that trust. It’s a trust, it all comes down to trust. may not, we’re getting more and more to where we trust AI. At least some people are trusting it too much, but that’s not gonna change as it gets better. So we need to carve out our spot in the hearts of our audience.

where it’s us and not Claude or ChatGPT that they turn to.

Tom Nixon (45:04.622)
Great way to end it right there. So thanks again, Brian Clark, founder of many things further.net is where you go to get the further newsletter and you can probably find links to leading expert. We’ll put it all in the show notes. So just scroll down. I hope to be back next week, donning a tiger’s cap. Cause that means we will have advanced and we’ve got a new foe on our hands. Curtis until then we’ll see y’all on bull horns bulls eyes.

Brian (45:29.125)
Take care everyone, go Tigers.