Serving Your Community in the Age of AI with Ben Albert (285)
In this candid, curiosity-first conversation, I sit down with Ben Albert, host of Real Business Connections and founder of the GrowGetters community, to explore where AI, community-building, and genuine relationships intersect. We reflect on why the fundamentals that worked ten years ago still work today: serving people, building trust, and showing up with care and intention. From Ben’s evolving “custom cartoon” branding lesson to the power of thoughtful, physical gifts, we unpack how AI changes not just costs but meanings and how taste, context, and human touch remain irreplaceable.
We also get tactical: when to draw the line between AI and human contact, why AI chat can be great for ecommerce support but terrible for cold outreach, and how automation frees you to deepen relationships. We tackle echo chambers and misinformation in the AI content era, the importance of fact-checking, and how to keep curiosity at the center. Trust is built by people through service, timing, and taste.
https://realbusinessconnections.com/speaker/
https://www.skool.com/growgettersonly/about
Looking for a podcast guest? Author Matt Rouse
Hook Digital Marketing | Hook Digital Marketing Canada
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Hello, everyone. This is Mahek here, and welcome back to another episode of digital marketing masters podcast.
Today, Matt is joined once again by Ben Alberg,
host of Real Business Connections and founder of the GrowGetters community.
And you know what? Ben's first episode with us called Ben Allbird's strategy for growth became one of the most listened to conversations on the show, and I think this one shows exactly why.
There is something really easy and honest about the way Matt and Ben think together.
It it doesn't feel like a scripted or technical marketing conversation.
It it honestly feels like two people thinking out loud and trying to make sense of where business relationships
and AI are all heading.
And that's really the heart of this episode.
So let's dive right into it. Welcome everyone
to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast
with your hosts, Matt Rouse and Mahek Anam.
And now,
it's time to put your hands together
for the Rochester roller,
the legend of New York State,
the man who put the Ben and benefits,
the original
grow
getter,
Ben Albert.
Ben Albert.
Ben Ben Albert. Albert. And now on
with the show.
My guest today is Ben Albert. Ben, how are you doing? Good, Matt. Good to see you again. It's good to see you. You're a second time on the show. Also,
I think it's good to note that Ben has the second most popular episode ever on our show. True? That is true. I've been listening to myself a round of applause. That's right.
Thousands of people listen to that show.
And
you know what's kinda funny is, I don't know if it's the title of it or what, but it was way off the chart compared to most of the other episodes. What do you remember the title? The title was
Ben Albert's Strategy for Growth,
episode 253.
So this needs to be called Ben Albert's Strategy for Growth two.
Ben Albert's strategy for growth at the age of AI. We talked last time
about
kind of growing communities,
how you got started with your podcast, your local podcast
in Rochester,
and so you were talking about how serving the local community is really how you got started.
And you still have the GrowGetters community,
which I go to. We were just meeting with the group earlier today.
I think serving communities
in the age of AI that we're in now is changing,
and I wanted to get your opinion on how you think
serving our communities and our customers is changing.
Yeah. And
I'm not anti AI.
I love it. Like, you and I were just talking about, I'm putting all my medical records into it. I write posts with it. I have make music with it. Love AI.
I think the one thing that isn't changing
is all the stuff that already works and worked five years ago and ten years ago and a hundred years ago.
It's building community.
It's building a tribe.
It's surveying the community and serving their needs.
Again, preshow,
I was talking about contractors.
It's such a great example.
If you're a roofer,
maybe we're gonna get to a point where, you know, the AI robots can build roofs, but currently, we're not there. We don't have the robots doing home remodels quite just yet. You can tell me if we're we're probably a lot closer than I even think.
But
it's that local roofer that everyone trusts
that we're
welcome them in their home.
They get their hands dirty.
They service the community. They do something
that works and has always worked.
And
at the end of the day, like, building relationships,
adding value,
like,
actually serving
is the key.
You want to deliver
service for people.
And AI, I know, you know, podcasting is an example.
It can level audio. It can write show notes. It can create clips.
It can
write the copy for the clips.
Where is the human involved? I think we wanna find a partnership there because you still wanna come in a place of service. I'll give you one small example and we'll pause here. When an episode goes live, I text my guest.
Yeah. There's an automated chain that goes out, but I text them and I start a conversation
because where we started with this rant here is what worked ten years ago still works in the a age of AI.
It's building relationships.
It's,
doing work from a place of service, solving a problem,
and building community around that, building friendship,
building peer to peer support, so on and so forth. And as your podcast shows,
AI just makes doing that kind of stuff that much easier.
I think you got a good point there, and it reminds me of, you know, in the pre AI era,
no one wanted
to have a relationship with that that was based on, I'll have my people contact your people. Right? It was the relationship is between you and me, not with
your assistant and my staff member. Or nowadays,
it's like, oh, my AI chatbot,
your AI chatbot, that's not a relationship.
Like, the chatbots might be built in relationship.
You know?
I see this weird thing happening. I see it everywhere. And let me know if you see the same thing.
Is that there's a lot of assumptions being made by people where they say things like,
stop using AI to make images for your posts because people only like real photographs.
Mhmm. And
that may be true for the person who's posting it and the people who comment on it, but that's not everyone.
And also,
people say, well,
everything on my social media feed is AI now.
So if I see an AI that was used in an ad, I'm not gonna buy that product.
And
on the contrary though,
when I look in our ad accounts
and I see places where AI has been used
and I see the amount of purchases,
and I'm like,
wow.
Is that true?
So I think that there's definitely
a place to build community and a place to build trust, but I think we also have to make sure we're not making untested
assumptions.
I I got a fun example that I just discovered yesterday.
If someone were to check out my podcast, Thrill Business Connections, and look at the episode arts,
we create a custom cartoon
of each of our guests.
And this has been going on since, I think, I started doing the custom cartoons in early twenty twenty one, so five years of it. And when we I have a
AI took their job, spoiler alert. I have a cartoonist that would actually take a headshot and turn it into a custom
sketched cartoon that we would use for these episode arts.
And way back in the day, like, we did a,
I did a a campaign for charity
and, like, sold those cartoons, and people bought them for their family.
I've done it for every single episode for years now. It's become part of the brand,
and I've been thinking about it more and more like, do I wanna still do the cartoons
still?
Because what once used to be people would update their Facebook profile picture with these cartoons.
They'd be thankful.
I'd put them as a gift in my emails. People would be excited.
No one responds anymore.
Maybe I'm not, like, promoting it well, but no one seems to care about the custom cartoon anymore, and I haven't actually asked anyone this. I guess I should probably do some,
surveying
to better understand.
I think that when a guest receives their custom cartoon,
they just assume it was done by AI.
They don't necessarily know that an artist went and, like, custom drew the headshot,
which is okay. It's just like good content, like a custom cartoon can be done in seconds.
So guess what I did? I took 20 of these cartoons,
I uploaded them, and then as a test, I uploaded a photo, a headshot of me,
and it did a better job than my
artist
in
five seconds once it understood what I was looking for. So instead of scratching the idea,
I like that it's still part of my brand, but maybe I don't lean into it as this special added perk. It's just something easy peasy that the AI could do in seconds now.
Okay. So what I find fascinating
about Ben's cartoon stories that nothing about the cartoon itself changed. It might actually be better now, but the meaning of it changed completely
because
I think the meaning was never really just in the image. It was in the fact that someone sat down, looked at your face, and drew you. And once people know that anyone can get the same thing in, like, five seconds for free,
the emotional way just disappears.
And and I think that's the part about AI that doesn't get talked about enough. It's heartbreaking
because it doesn't just change what things cost. It it actually changes what things mean.
Yeah. I think when something becomes commoditized,
like image generation,
it's really hard
to
sell people on the ID, even if it's free, to sell people that this has value at that point. If you have something that is,
you know, so easy to get anywhere,
it's so available that it's even lower than a commodity. Like, there's almost no cost to it whatsoever. It's probably pennies if that
then the value of that thing is pennies. Right?
If it had to be drawn in hand by a person and they thought, well, that's probably costs $20,
$50, whatever,
then
that was the value of that thing at the time, and that's probably why people don't care about it now.
It's not that it was created by AI. It's that it could be.
It's we've seen it before. It's no longer longer standing out. But one thing that's on the line, I I this is something that I think can make it novel is,
for example, we're recording this on a Tuesday. You've got your Taco Tuesday shirt.
Maybe instead of a
just a cartoon of Matt when I'm giving a gift, it is a cartoon of Matt, but in a Taco Tuesday shirt
with his holding his book, Will I Take My Job Too,
with all these different things based on our relationship together, and then it goes into, again, service and community and over delivering.
Yes, and AI made this image,
but it's my thought
to prompt it with chickens and a Taco Tuesday shirt and the book to bring Matt to the scenario instead of just a quick little image. It's a whole banner.
That, I think, I I just discovered this on this podcast, Matt. That's what I'm gonna do for my guests going forward,
create something a piece of art, something you and, yeah, it's AI, but it's the thought that counted more than anything.
The other thing that you can think about is potentially
having an artist sketch it and,
like, physically mail them the sketch.
Right? Because a physical object has a lot more value now
because the AI can't draw it.
Right? It could make it look like a sketch, and then you could print it. But that's not the same as, like, a pencil drawing because up close, you could tell something has been drawn with a pencil versus being printed on a printer.
Okay. There's something really interesting happening in this conversation in real time.
Ben literally figured out a new strategy for a show while they were recording.
And that's the thing about having genuine conversations with people whose brains work differently from yours.
The physical
object point Matt raised is also worth sitting with. So think of it this way. In a world where,
let's say, digital is infinite and free,
physical becomes rare. Right? So a hand sketched portrait mailed to someone is remarkable now in a way it wouldn't have been, like, 10 ago. So that's like scarcity flip,
and that is opportunity
if you are paying attention.
I think if I'm looking for a big time client, and this is a whole tangent for marketing, but if you wanna get in the door with big time clients,
have a artist hand sketch and send them something. That probably they haven't received one of those in five, ten years. But even for a podcast guest, let's say you do a weekly,
podcast,
I could do the AI generated image for $0,
pay shipping, and send them,
you know, something they can put on their wall or something they can frame, and just think about different ways that we can stand out. And it goes back to where we started. It's really just about building friendships, community, and serving.
I think
the idea of kind of the marketing term of gifting
has huge value. I mean, that is
essentially our referral plan
for our clients is we give them thoughtful gifts, physical gifts,
and we stay in contact with them. Obviously, we can't afford to give every client that we have a physical gift,
but the ones who keep the lights on,
they're the ones that we're sending things to.
And
I remember
our client that we still have now, but they're in Texas,
and
the owner was buying a new house. I think it was. He was talking about getting a barbecue for his new house. And so we sent him a book on how to make different kinds of barbecue sauces and a barbecue
apron
that had a big map of Texas on it and, like, a bunch of new set of barbecue tools.
So we're listening to him telling us about stuff that has nothing to do with this business,
getting the idea, and then sending them that stuff, and he opens it up and excited about it. But the other thing that we do is
trying to stay
top of mind with our clients in a a natural, normal, you know, friendship type of way. If something comes across my plate
that I think would interest my client, I send it to them. Like,
there's an unsolicited
email that says, I saw this article about this thing that I know interests you. We'll go way farther than you would think. Right?
Okay. So this Texas barbecue story is the one that gets me because it has got nothing to do with the client's business,
but everything to do with keeping the relationship human.
Matt wasn't listening so he could upsell him. He was just listening,
and then he acted on it.
And also working at Hook Digital Marketing with Matt, I have seen firsthand how much that kind of attention means to clients. It's like the difference between
feeling like an account and feeling like someone actually knows you. I think Ben said it the best earlier. It's the stuff that worked ten years ago.
So a thoughtful gift or a personal text or just an article you saw and thought of someone. AI didn't invent any of that, but let's just say that it can help you scale it, but only if you have the intention behind it first.
Agreed.
And I I like to text it to him
or her.
Send text. Again, I'm I'm kinda beating a dead horse, but it's stuff that worked five, ten years ago.
Ages AI just makes it easy that I can whisper flow the text. I don't have to type it. I'm still sending a one to one text.
You know, you were talking about tradespeople earlier and having someone come into your home.
And I think that
there's definitely
advances in AI combined with robotics that are gonna change the way that tradespeople do their work. And
the roofing example is an excellent one because I actually use that example in my book.
And there is a machine that essentially they bolted on to the top of the roof, and you fill it up with shingles.
And it goes around almost like a three d printer, and it just goes conjunct conjunct conjunct conjunct putting the the shingles on. Yeah. But it takes one person to set it up, manage it, and operate it. So now your team of four people could be doing four roofs
instead of one roof. Right?
It doesn't mean you have to fire three people and just have one person as a roofer. It just means you could be four times as productive as you were before. Or with some setup and takedown, so let's say three times as productive. That is a a huge, huge advantage.
Right?
But it doesn't mean
that you have any less time to
stand around and and shoot the shit with the homeowner and
shake hands and and all that kind of stuff. Get a referral, see if they might need gutters, see what else you can serve them. And that's it's another thing. There are scenarios.
For example, the new headset I just purchased, I just bought it.
I didn't need to go to RadioShack to buy that. Do they still have Right. RadioShacks going under. But
something like a roof, that kind of purchase,
I still usually
I and I usually,
100%,
I think most people are this way. I wanna sit down with someone, I wanna look at shingle examples,
I wanna see different colors, I wanna get a feel for things.
It's just I'd prefer to do business that way,
but I don't care if that guy who I know is a salesperson, he's usually not installing the roof anyways, I don't care if that gentleman
installs the roof. Have the AI do a better job
than the employee
might do, but I still want a salesperson
to help kind of and again,
maybe AI will take that over too because it'll give more of an objective
analysis,
but I think it's fun to shop around with humans.
I think that
you need to kind of decide where to draw the line in the sand for your business of
which things can be AI or automated and which things need a human touch still.
So
a lot of people
talk about how much they hate
AI
support systems.
An example you always get is they're on the phone, and they're, like, yelling, like, representative
or whatever.
But those are not AI systems. Right? Those are old algorithmic
phone systems. They just call them AI now, which they're not.
But an AI system
for example, we have an ecommerce store that our company runs,
and
we have AI chat,
and there is no live agent chat.
And if the AI can't solve your problem,
then it says, okay. We'll refer this, and it emails it to us, creates a sport ticket, then we figure out what the problem is.
Don't know how many people told us that that would be the worst thing that we could ever do.
Like, no one's gonna wanna work with you anymore and yada yada yada. Everyone told me it's the end of our business. Right?
But
it saved us a ton of time.
We've only ever had three people that it couldn't solve the problem,
that the AI couldn't solve the problem for. And those three people,
two of them had
essentially unsolvable problems.
Like,
why is my stuff not here? Because I typed in the wrong shipping address. The AI can't fix that for you. Right?
Yeah.
But it also has done a whole bunch of stuff like looks up your order, figures out where your shipping is, is your stuff arriving yet, which things should I get, give me suggestions, what are the top sellers, all of those things it handles.
So in that case,
the the efficiency makes up for it. But if I need medical assistance,
I need advice, I need design work, I need whatever, like, these types of things, I need a like, a trades person who's gonna come into my home.
I wanna have a discussion with a human about that before that happens.
So you would draw the line at a different spot.
I also I think the idea of AI,
like, cold outreach is terrible. It
never
gets the context right. I mean, some people might be making money with it, but I think that is a short term
position where they're just like, well,
yeah, my company made a whole bunch of money using AI Outreach,
but
we did also spam
600,000
people to make those six sales.
And so you pissed off 599,994
people, but you made six sales. Clap.
Clap.
That's not building trust.
K. So this cold outreach point is the one that gets me because I think I see it from both sides at Hook Digital Marketing.
The math on it looks fine until you zoom out and look at what it's doing to your brand's reputation in the background. Like, six sales,
600,000
people who now associate your name with spam, I don't think that's a trade worth making.
And Matt's ecommerce AI chat example is the useful counterpoint.
I think the difference is consent
and context.
So people expect a chatbot when they're tracking a package. Nobody expects one when they open a personal page in their inbox. Overwhelmed
with the amount of lead gen AI
pitches I get.
And I understand not everyone wants to sell a product. They have more of a SaaS solution. I get that. But I get pitched for these lead gen AI products
all day long,
and I'm like, if your system worked that good,
why are you reaching out to me randomly, one? I mean, am I really the hottest lead you can think of, or am I just Yeah. Blah. But beyond that,
why don't you just find a product of your own and use your system for yourself,
and then make as many sails as just
fly to the moon in sails. But I feel like they're it's not actually working that It's not it's because it's It's automated. Right? That's why they're reaching out to me in the first place because their system doesn't work well.
It's
it's like inverse meta. Right? It's
we have a system that if you sign up for our system, it'll show you how to make money by doing lead generation for businesses.
But all it is is an automated system to sell lead generation
to people who wanna sell automation for lead generation.
Like, it's Yeah. What it's like people selling courses on how to sell courses. No. It's where I was going. Like, coaches selling courses
on how other coaches can sell courses to coaches.
Was I that that was I called that the Tai Lopez effect. Right. Coaches teach Does younger Tai Lopez. Dress. Yeah. Coaches teach younger coaches how to coach younger coaches, and then you have a 16 year old life coach making reels from their car that they're sleeping out of because they're homeless. But Right. That was the peak Ty Lopes effect, but now it's lead generators
teaching how to lead generate
for other lead generators,
and no one's actually getting leads other than each other. Right. And there's someone at the bottom just getting burned. That's how it always ends up.
Okay. The Tai Lopez effect applied to AI lead gen,
I genuinely did not have that on my bingo card, Ben, but I think you are completely right. Like, when the product is the system for
selling the system,
at some point, you have to ask, like, who is getting helped here?
And the answer is nobody at the bottom of that chain. It just seems to be recycling
upward until someone runs out of money.
So what I'm getting from this conversation so far is that real lead generation means finding real people with real problem you can actually solve,
and everything else is just noise wearing an expensive suit.
Yep. It's like a multilevel
marketing
scam of just lead generation.
I think
serving an actual community and is more being of service.
Right?
And
the community that that we serve, though, you know, fairly small I mean, we're not a huge agency. We don't have tons of clients.
But the people we do serve,
we go out of our way to ensure that
they get the result that they're looking for.
Right? And,
you know, I was talking in in
one of the agency groups that I'm in,
like, Kwan's group, which is very good for agencies, by the way,
agency together.
We were talking about our company's kind of communication strategy with clients.
We don't have one communication strategy.
Each client has their own communication strategy.
So I have clients who don't wanna hear from us ever unless something's wrong.
What they actually wanna hear is
we found something wrong and we fixed it. Here's what we fixed. That's what they want. I've got other clients who wanna chitchat with us every day,
and we don't have time for that. So we have a strategy where, you know, multiple staff members maybe are sending them things. We have reports that we send. We have other stuff that gets sent that's automated.
So they're getting something from us all the time. That's what they like. Right? So
I think being of service to your community is
finding ways to, you know,
be be of service to them, help them reach their goals, and and do the things that they need.
And you can use your AI or your automation systems to help you accomplish those goals. You don't have it you know,
it's not the speaker to them.
It's kind of your reinforcement.
It's like an extra staff person. Mhmm.
An executive assistant.
Right.
I think, interestingly,
a lot of people are finding that
the promise, the hype cycle promise of using AI in their business was like,
just get a chat GPT subscription, and it'll, like, run your whole business.
Or get this Clodbot,
and it'll run your whole business. And
and I think people are finding that it's a lot more difficult than that, and there's a lot more technical hurdles.
There's a lot of
you know,
some things are still in the the copy and paste world
of, you know, chatbots and things.
I think that
enterprises
are struggling to get adoption
of AI, and I think the problem is that people are using AI for the wrong parts. They've drawn the line in the sand at the wrong part of the business.
You know?
So you have you run a community.
So
you don't have a meeting where it shows up with the Ben bot
who, like, automatically
runs the meeting. Might be nice once in a while, but Yeah. Take a day off. Yeah.
I mean, what do you think
what do where do you think the line should be drawn for businesses with using,
you know, AI or chat bots kind of thing to have contact with their people.
Yeah. Why I mean, the community is easy. Like,
we I've never actually done this. Like, I could break down a simple system of the shoulds and shouldn't dos and how to show up and all the but really, just like when humans get in a room together,
they have conversations.
It's why love them or hate them, like Elon Musk is bullish on everyone needs to be in person in office because
that's just where the magic happens, through the conversation.
So it's like,
I think there's something to be said for artistry.
I think there's something to be said for taste.
I think there's something to be said about collective impact and communication.
And there's certain tasks like,
easy example,
Whisper Flow's done. Hey, I wanna make an introduction between Matt and Mark. Matt is the AI chicken wrangler.
He does a, b, and c. Mark needs help with a, b, and c. Will you make a concise,
you know, copy pastable message that I can send?
And then however long it just said for me, that ten seconds, boom, writes a nice paragraph, send that.
But I still want Matt and Mark to get together and have a conversation together. Right. The magic happens in
again, I feel like it's a whole another podcast,
but in the artistry
of creating something, and that's why people that just wanna outsource their entire business to AI without understanding marketing or SaaS or product or lead generation,
there's no artistry in what they do. They lack taste,
and it's hard to we'd have to actually microanalyze each individual role because it's hard to give just a broad stroke in every single category,
but when you're an engineer,
you have to understand UX and UI and user behavior.
And when you're a marketer, you have to understand psychology and sociology
and design.
And when you're a salesperson, you have to understand body language and micro expressions and
connection.
It requires taste that the AI
kind of has.
Like, it makes some great content, writes some great copy,
but I think if you don't have taste, you you struggle with it. You don't know what's good, what's bad. You don't know what works, what doesn't.
You just post it because that's what was generated for you whether or not it's the best quality item.
Wow.
Ben's
word here is taste, and I think it's the most honest thing said in the whole conversation.
Taste is what you develop when you've paid enough attention to your audience to know what actually moves them.
It's not just instinct. It's
accumulated
observation.
And AI genuinely cannot have it because it hasn't sat in the room and felt something land or just fall flat.
It generates based on patterns,
not experience.
So if you hand your entire content output to an AI without
developing the sense of what's good first,
you're not saving time. You're just producing more of the wrong thing faster.
And I say that as someone who works in creative every day,
knowing the difference between good and almost good is the job. Like, that part, you have to bring yourself.
Yeah. I think that I found
the
biggest advantages
that we're getting from using AI
is in
content production for one,
but I think another is
kind of filling in the gaps
that are missing between
the information and the content that
small to middle sized market brands have
and what they actually need to promote themselves.
And there's a huge gap there,
especially
in a world where,
like,
video at scale is probably the most important thing you can be doing for your brand,
and
most businesses have
almost no video, if any,
and especially not well shot video.
So
that is something that we use it for a lot. The other side of it
is it's definitely,
you know, a highly
improved the amount of code that we could write of quality code. And
we have a developer, a software developer on staff who's a trained software developer, you know, who's got a degree and all that kind of stuff.
So we have someone who can actually they're not just vibe coding stuff. They're,
you know, building proper documentation,
building out the stuff, helping it code, and then checking the code. Right? So we're building high quality stuff faster than we used to.
The other, I think, advantage
is not really AI, but people think it's AI, which is automation systems.
So
automating processes
is really important
and
automating repeatable
tasks that don't require
a human input.
And there's a lot of those, like sending reports and sending invoices
and receipts and all these kinds of things.
Ben, I had another question I wanted to ask you, and this is something that we talked about a little bit kind of before the show,
was
kind of about the idea of you know, I think everyone at this point knows about echo chambers within communities.
But I think what we're talking about now is that it's so easy to create content
with AI. Right? You got a few bucks on your credit card. You can start creating videos and and images of literally anything.
How do we know
kind of if we're in an echo chamber within our own community
or if there's misinformation
in our communities.
I think those are probably two big questions. Those are huge questions.
The how do we know question is tough to answer because you generally don't realize it when you're in it.
And I think your
your YouTube algorithm
is is a great example.
If everything
in your, you know, recommended algorithm, everything that pops up just reinforces
your current belief,
I presume there's a high probability you're in an echo chamber.
I
joked we're joking about sovereign citizenship.
I'll try not go on a long rant,
but, you know, these guys and gals think they're beyond the law
and it
stops. Just
could go on a long rant, but y'all just Google search or YouTube sovereign citizen traffic
stop.
Right. All always ends the same way.
Resisting arrest,
break they get the window broken in
Right. Torn out, and they get arrested because a sovereign citizen
through TikTok videos and YouTube
and community echo chambers they might be in. There's a lot of these echo chambers in Florida in The United States. I swear every arrest is some guy in Florida.
They think that they are beyond
the law,
and the officer will say,
you're driving without a license and you're not registered. And they'll say, I wasn't driving.
I'm traveling.
I'm transporting
my property from one location to the next,
and I have the right to do and it's just nonsense,
and it always ends in
an arrest.
And my only point in bringing that up is people can look it up and see some funny videos,
is
these people genuinely
believe that they have figured out the way that,
at least in The United States, like, how the common law works and how the
I'm
I'm blanking on all the technical term. But, basically, they think they understand the government perfectly. They understand the constitution.
They're constitutionalists.
They don't understand that there can be revisions to the laws.
None
of those people think they're in an echo chamber.
Right. But all of them
and I'm I'm painting with a really thick brush. When I say all of them, I can already tell what their YouTube and TikTok algorithm looks like. Right?
It's all like the the
people said,
wherein
in 1877,
the they signed the right for you to interstate travel without having to pay for license or you know? I'm not I'm not operating a
vehicle.
So Right. Not actually driving a commercialized vehicle. Yeah. I have the right to travel.
And it's like, yes, sir. You do have the right to travel.
You have feet. You have a bicycle.
But if you're operating a vehicle Oh, shit. You're operating a motor vehicle.
Well, that's definitely something people could rabbit hole, and I've seen some of that as well. I think one of the things
that I found most interesting was actually an older article that I read. It was a few years old from the BBC, and I just read it recently, and you've reminded me of it. And it was that
food science
information
is radicalizing
people was essentially what the article is about.
And what it's saying is that,
like,
somebody goes on TikTok and they say,
don't eat, you know, this because okay. Here's a good example. I I'm diabetic,
so I drink Coke Zero sometimes because it has caffeine in it and no sugar.
Right?
So on one of these videos,
they said that the British version of Coke Zero has one k cal in it.
That's one kilocalorie.
So they're like, oh my gosh.
Coke Zero has a thousand calories,
but that's not true.
All calories
on food products are listed in kilocalories.
They just don't say k cal in Canada or The United States. They only put that on the British version. Oh, okay. So when you get something here that has three calories, it has three calories, not 3,000 calories.
Right. That video has been watched something like 6,000,000,000 times.
And what it is is essentially it's saying that the government is lying to you. Look at the can.
And
what happens is all of these fake food science videos
are, number one, they're almost all wrong.
And number two, what they're telling you is the food system,
your medical people,
the FCC,
the FDA, all these places and f t a dot f c c. But
the Food and Drug Administration,
they're all lying to you.
And it it radicalizes
people against the systems that are there to protect them. Right? And I'm not saying every case. Of course, there's always examples of things that may or may not be true. But
it's this echo chamber because as soon as you watch one of those videos and you go, oh my god. Coke Zero actually has a thousand calories. And you go, like,
where you go comment. Oh my god. I didn't know that. Now you're gonna get 10 more of those.
You go to those 10 and you're like, oh my gosh.
Ramen noodles are an ultra processed food,
and then the next thing is like, well, what else is ultra processed? Like, flour.
Like,
there's all kinds of of these labels in in food and nutrition and stuff that are are put out as
demonizing
what the foods and stuff are. And I'm not a nutritionist, and I don't
claim to be.
But what happens is you get into that food echo chamber, and the next thing you know, you're at the grocery store, and you're like, I can't buy these vegetables because who knows what they sprayed them with?
Well, you're and you're not just saying it to yourself. You're telling the stranger to the left of you Right. You better be careful with these vegetables.
This Coke Zero example is wild because it starts with something so plausible.
Right?
Like, 6,000,000 people
watched it, and a lot of them didn't fact check. And now it's just, like, sitting out there in the world.
And the algorithm didn't really care whether it was true. It just cared that people kept watching and commenting.
See, now that's the thing about echo chambers with AI content generation that makes it so much worse.
Like, the volume of content is infinite now. So algorithm is only optimizing for engagement,
not accuracy,
which means responsibility
to fact check, question,
and talk to people who disagree with you is more on us than ever.
And you're Yeah.
Don't get those bananas because they spray them with poison to turn them yellow.
And go on YouTube and find out about sovereign citizens if you really wanna know what's happening.
I still think Coke should be clear, but that's beside the point.
That's right. Ben,
it's always a pleasure to chat with you. I think that we definitely have highlighted
that
being in service to your community is more important than spamming people with AI, obviously. That and that's a good way to end it. Like, you
don't always have to have a conclusion.
We don't know exactly where AI is gonna go, the algorithm's gonna go. But you don't have to have a conclusion,
but you do have to have curiosity
and conversations,
and then we can figure it out together. You know? And and maybe we don't figure it out. That's part of the fun of the ride.
That's right. And I think it's a thought provoking
ideas that we've had today, and I think people will have some conversations and go down some rabbit holes. So I really appreciate you being on show, Ben. Thanks, Matt.
Maybe we don't figure it out, and that's the part of the fun ride. See now that's
the most honest thing I've heard in a while and which is also why I really appreciated
this conversation.
It just doesn't try to give one final perfect answer on AI because honestly,
I don't think any of us have that yet. But what Matt and Ben do give us is a better way to think about it.
AI can help us move faster. It can
help us create,
automate,
organize,
and scale, but the part that makes people trust you,
which is the care,
the timing,
the taste, and the intention
behind the message,
that still has to come from a human being.
And maybe that's the real takeaway.
The future of marketing isn't about who can use AI the most. It's about who can use it without for forgetting the people on the other side.
On that note, you can go check out Ben's podcast, Real Business Connections. And if you haven't already, go listen back to his first episode with us. Alright. Thank you for joining us today. Follow the show for more conversations on marketing,
AI, business, and what it means to stay human
while everything around us keeps changing.