Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

[00:05.4]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the show where we unpack what's real and what's just noise in today's performance marketing mess. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today's guest is a high energy disruptor who's not just building AI tools, he's building better relationships at scale.

[00:24.6]
Joe Apfelbaum is the CEO of Ajax Union and the mind behind evy.AI, an AI-powered engagement platform that turns LinkedIn into a revenue channel without turning you into a robot. Joe, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on the show.

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I love the way you said that. It was so smooth. It's all about having fun and what we're building, right? So there we go. So to kick off, I'd love to get into. Joe, you've built companies, you've scaled communities, and now evy.AI is helping 20,000 plus people show up smarter on social.

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What's the origin story there? Well, you know the famous saying, if you build it, they will come. I built it. Nobody came. I used to build websites for people, in my 20s, my early 20s. And you know, I would say, if you build it, they will come.

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I built about 100 websites per year for people and I built it for them. And then I said, I'm done, you know, and people will be like, come back to me and be like, all right, you built me this website. Now what, what do you do now? I was like, what do you want? Like, I want customers. Like, well, you didn't ask me for customers, you asked me for a website.

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I built you a website. We're done. But then I realized that they were willing to pay a monthly fee for me to get them customers. So I started researching things like SEO and SEM and paid advertisements and all that. And I got really good at SEO, and I started driving tons of traffic for people.

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And then that's how I built one of the fastest growing companies in the US: Ajax Union. We were doing SEO for companies. We serviced over 1,100 clients, generated millions of dollars in recurring revenue. Very powerful. And I realized that not every client is created equal. Most businesses go out of business in three years.

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And so I realized the faster I help somebody grow their business, the faster they go out of business because they're not profitable. So if I take your business, that's losing money, and I put fuel into the fire, you're going to go out of business faster because you're not going to handle the growth. And so that's what we saw. A lot of our customers are going out of business because we were accelerating their business.

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And then we were going out of business and we were losing customers and our churn rate was very high. So I try to ask myself, how do I get really good customers that have established businesses? And the answer was networking. And so I got really, really good at networking. And I realized that I can do really good networking on LinkedIn.

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Especially when Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn in 2016, about 10 years ago. And I got really into it, and people started asking me, Joe, you're so good at LinkedIn, you're generating millions of dollars in revenue from LinkedIn. Can you teach us? And I was like, I'm not a LinkedIn trainer.

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And then they're like, yes, you are. Teach me LinkedIn. And so I started teaching people LinkedIn. I got really, really good at teaching people LinkedIn. I made courses, generated over a million dollars in courses. And then I realized a lot of the people I was teaching LinkedIn were not executing. Some of them were, like Sarah.

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She generated $500,000 in revenue in the first six months from the strategies I gave her. But a lot of people were kind of like just buying the course, paying $10,000, and then sometimes just not executing on the things I would teach them to do because they had writer's block or they weren't sure what to like, they weren't sure, they didn't have the time or whatever it is.

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So I realized when I was in Mexico running in 2023, January 2023, I was running in Mexico and I was asking ChatGPT, I was like, hey, listen, I have all this expertise. I have an agency, I have a training company. I'm doing all this. How can I really impact a million people? And they're like, SaaS, build a software.

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I was like, I don't know the first thing about software. So I said, you know what? Before I build the software, let me see if people are interested. I have 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. I posted on LinkedIn and I said, is anybody interested in an assistant that's made out of technology? An AI assistant that will write up all your posts, comments, messages, and help you save profiles to lists and whatever ChatGPT told me to ask.

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So 500 people said they're interested. So I was like, wow, that's, that's a big. A lot of people need this. Made a checkout page on a Google Doc, and I said, buy it if you're interested and if I get a hundred people to buy it, I'll build it. I'm not paying to build it without getting people.

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That's the Liquid Death approach, right? How do we can water and we didn't can any, but we sold so much of it ahead of trying, right? And so I sold 100 and then I said, okay, hold your horses, we got to build something now.

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So I went and found developers and failed and found developers and failed and found developers and failed. And I realized, you know, it's really hard building software. Even in the vibecoding world, it's really hard building real scalable, secure software. That's why it's so expensive. That's why the software is worth so much money, right?

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So I went through the arduous process of spending a ridiculous amount of time, effort, energy and money with my business partner and we built a world class software that now has 20,000 users in 37 countries with amazing testimonials. And you're a client. So thanks for being a client.

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And people are loving it. And then LinkedIn took notice and they're like, we don't want you to be a LinkedIn assistant. LinkedIn is a trademark. You can't act like LinkedIn because if you Googled LinkedIn assistant, we came on top of LinkedIn number one on Google because I'm really good at SEO, right? And so we started ranking for all the keywords related to LinkedIn because we had linked the word LinkedIn 21 times on our website and everybody was linking to us with the word LinkedIn.

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So LinkedIn got really upset and they made us from, they didn't make us, but you know, they sent us their lawyers and everything and they said, if you don't remove this, we're gonna take action. And so we hired a law firm and they said, you don't have to remove it, but if you want to, we would recommend it. So instead of being a LinkedIn assistant, we pivoted.

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We're no longer a LinkedIn assistant. Now we're a sales assistant, right? So we work on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, we work inside your CRM, we work with ChatGPT. And it's like having a little savvy sales assistant that sits on the side of your browser.

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We used to work inside LinkedIn, we no longer work inside LinkedIn. Now we just sit on the side. And if you need us to write a comment on a post, whether it's on any social platform, including LinkedIn, we'll read the post and write a thoughtful comment for you within two seconds in your own voice, in any language, with any LLM.

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So we work with Claude, with Grok, with, with all the different, with ChatGPT, with Gemini, you can select and you get unlimited access. And that's kind of the origin story. I don't know if I went too long on it. I dig it. And I have to say, Joe, you know, I appreciate you going there.

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You know, one of the coolest things I've seen as a client of yours with evy.AI is the Alt+G comment assistant and that persona-based post writing. Right. So it just gets easier and easier and easier and easier because now you just press Alt+G and a comment appears inside the comment box and you're like, how, how did that happen?

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The magic wand. The magic wand. From your perspective though, what makes this feel different than sort of all the spammy outreach tools that are out there in the world? Yeah, there's really three reasons that we're very, very different. Number one: one of our core values is to be authentic.

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So when I say be authentic, there's a lot of spammy tools out there that will just like send out automations. And we don't believe in automation, we believe in agents. We don't believe in like things just automatically happening by themselves. If you're on LinkedIn and you have an eye on a post, you don't want AI to read the post and to automatically create a comment and post it for you without you even being there.

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That's not authentic. I'm sorry, it's authentic for you to show up, see the post of one of your prospects, or one of your clients, or one of your friends, and then not being sure what to say because you want some suggestions and for AI to know who you are and know your persona and to suggest a comment that sounds exactly like you as your clone and then you can decide if you want to hit submit, or you want to spend 2 seconds editing it and then hitting submit.

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That is how you stay authentic versus, you know, just using the LinkedIn AI that's built into LinkedIn or whatever. It's complete and total trash. Doesn't sound like you. It's not authentic. And anyone that just randomly does automations and randomly likes without looking, that's just like, ugh, you don't want that.

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You want to really be authentic. And that's what we truly believe makes us stand out where we're not there to replace you. We're there to assist you. You don't need to replace yourself. What you need to do is you need to get assistance; if you want to replace yourself you can get a bunch of automations, but it's not going to be you.

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And so, like, what are you doing? Are you really networking if you just have some robot out there just clicking on things and you leave? Like, that's not called networking. That's called spraying and praying. And you're not going to be able to build a real meaningful relationship when somebody says something happened to their father and then you have an AI respond congratulations, when the guy's father just died.

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And then you meet him on the street and he like, looks at you with a dirty look. And then you're like, why are you upset at me? You're like, what do you mean? You saw what you did under my post. It was terrible, right? You know, you compared me to the astronomer CEO...whatever. What do you think we're in a Coldplay concert?

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I love how you've always framed up Joe that personalization is the starting line, it's not the finish line. What's the next level once the AI cracks the door open? I mean, the reality is it all has to lead to a conversation.

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And you are having a conversation right now. If my AI clone came instead, you would not be happy with my clone coming here. You might be happy with watching a course of my clone teaching you how to use LinkedIn. You'd be fine with that. And by the way, somebody told me three years ago when we did this, when we, when we put up the.

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Two years ago, when we put up the poll, someone's like, yeah, if you're building an AI assistant for LinkedIn, you could for sure sell a hundred of those. But try to sell a course on LinkedIn. Try to sell a course on LinkedIn and try to get a hundred people to buy it. Well, I did that two months ago. I came out with a new course called 99 Hacks.

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And I put up a poll and I said, do you want to learn the 99 LinkedIn hacks? And 171 people said they're interested. 100 people paid. And I didn't even have the course. I just sent them a Stripe link and 100 people paid for the course. I don't have the time to create the course, Adam.

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So you know what I did? I paid $29 for HeyGen. I hired a virtual assistant and the virtual assistant created the videos in HeyGen that looks and sounds like me doing each of the 99 hacks.

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We're about 50 hacks in and we're going to be done at the end of the month and we're going to launch the course. It's going to be a $1,000 course. Wow, that's wild. Super valuable. If anybody wants access to it, just text me the number below, say I want access to it, and I'll send you guys access to it.

[11:21.1]
But it's just insane what you can do now. I drove four hours yesterday. I put up a poll just now on LinkedIn, but I drove four hours yesterday to go visit my son in upstate New York. He's like, once you get upstate, you drive two hours. You gotta drive another two hours to keep going further upstate to get to where my son is.

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I don't know why we put him up there, but whatever, he's having the time of his life in some camp near a lake. Anyway, while I was driving, I was having a conversation with a old employee of mine and we're just talking about what's possible. And he was saying he really wants to launch podcasts. And I said, why don't you create AI podcasts for people?

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And he's like, that's actually a brilliant idea. Because my biggest challenge with people is getting them to actually record normally. But if I can have clone their voice and record for them, right? They don't have to do anything. They just pay me a monthly fee and then I'll do everything with their podcast.

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We're on a podcast right now. This is amazing. But if you just wanted to do an informational podcast, that's super valuable, you can have your voice cloned and it'll sound exactly like you. Why not have someone do it? And he's like, you think you can get me 10 customers? I was like, I don't know. I'll put up a poll and see if anybody's interested.

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So we could look at that poll. And I already at least have one person said he wants to buy it, wants to pay for it. That's thousands of dollars a year in services. It's insane what you can do if you learn how to leverage LinkedIn properly. That's wild. You know, and I see that as tools like with what you've built and what you're talking about here.

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These tools help make people better at sales and marketing, not just operate faster. Yeah, yeah. I always say this, Adam. I say the right strategy will save you a decade. So if you want to spend 10 years just hoping for the best. I was talking to Mindy, who just became an evy.AI Pro client.

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We upgraded her to Pro because Pro, she really wanted agents that research each. She has 5,000 connections, and she wanted agents that can research each connection, and help create an about section for their LinkedIn with a click of a button. So evyAI can do that. evyAI can research all 5,000 people that she's connected to and then create an optimized about section for each person with a click of a button.

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And it doesn't cost anything. Like, it's free. It's unlimited with Pro. So I showed her how to do it, and her mind was blown, so she upgraded to Pro. She got the bundle, which includes $10,000 worth of training as well. So I was talking to her, and she's like, she wants to close another $25k account.

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So I said why don't we do a strategy session and I'll show you how to do it? Because that sounds like the only thing you're missing, your clients are sitting right there. You're missing a strategy. So my point is, she signed up because she needed the strategy. My point is, if you guys are not making a $100,000 a year in profit, it's just a strategy that you're missing.

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That's it. Nothing else. You're missing a strategy. Of course you need action after the strategy. Right? But you can. You can do energy. You can spend a lot of energy without strategy. You know, a lot of people in McDonald's are working very, very hard, and they're not making anywhere near $100,000 a year. What's minimum wage in your area right now?

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$15, $15.75 an hour? That's $30,000 a year. If that person did a side hustle, they would make $30 additional per hour with their side hustle. And they would just need a strategy while they're flipping burgers and McDonald's because there's a lot of downtime now because the machines are doing right.

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They could be making $30 an hour additional for the full eight hours they are working at McDonald's as a side hustle. Still keeping their $15. Then they could choose, decide if they want to. If they want to leave or just stay at McDonald's because they love their co-workers. But you can make double the amount, $30 an hour doing some side hustle if you learn the right strategy of how.

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And that's how I'm on a mission to doing that. So I really want to help people be able to make a hundred thousand dollars a year in profit. But it's going to take the right strategy. And that's why with evy.AI, with the approved version, we give you a free version, a free strategy session.

[15:20.8]
I love it. Awesome. What's your biggest challenge right now, Joe, in where you are right now? I would say, like right now, our community has 1,100 people in it. And getting leaders within the community to step up is a challenge.

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We have about 10 leaders. I'd love to have a hundred leaders within the community to step up. And so that's kind of like what I'm working through right now. And, you know, people need leadership training. And so, you know, you're already a natural leader. But, like, in our community, imagine having 1,100 people.

[15:55.1]
It's kind of like the same problem that Moses had when his father-in-law came over to him and he's like, listen, what are you doing? You have 6 million Jews that you just pulled out of, whatever, it was a ridiculous amount of Jews that left Egypt. How many Jews out of 600,000 men?

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So there were, like, millions of Jews that left Egypt. And Moses is busy dealing with all the people. Like, he's like, you got to get like 10,000 students to be the judges and to, like, help out with all the disputes and all the stuff that's going on.

[16:27.4]
You can't do this yourself. So his father-in-law was his mentor. His name is Yisroel Yitzro. He was his mentor, and he mentored him to kind of go create leaders. So now I'm in the process of creating 100 leaders within our community. And, you know, sometimes if you want gallons, you first need some leaders.

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Right? I mean, building the community is always the challenge also, right. You know what I mean? Finding those. It all gets into the tribes that we're all trying to bring together, right, in this modern world where we're evolving there.

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And Mindy. Mindy, when she signed up to evi.AI Pro, she said, Joe, you know, I came for the software, and I stay for the community, because the community is such a powerful, beautiful. We meet with our community every day. And again, we have 1,100 engaged LinkedIn users.

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When people start with the community they usually have one or two likes on their post. Now she has 40 comments on each post. Wow. That's the power there of what you help to showcase. Yeah. Awesome. Joe, this was such a fun breakdown of how to scale connection without losing the human.

[17:35.4]
And you've made the case that automation isn't evil, it's just the misuse of it that's evil. We need some automation. Like if someone texts the word demo and I said Texas, when we're in Texas, if someone sends the text the word DEMO to 973-841-8868 if you send that, there is an automation that will respond to that.

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Right. You know the automation is not evil, as you just said. I do believe in automation in the right way but if you're just going to overuse automation and not in an authentic way then it's a problem. Like if I want to if I want to leave 100 comments a day on posts, I can't do that manually.

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I can do that with semi automatic, you know what I mean? That's, that's a full time job to leave 100 thoughtful deep comments on posts every single day and think about not just LinkedIn, it's all the social platforms, all the worlds that we live in.

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Right. And you can do it now in any language. So for example, I speak Spanish. Do you speak any other languages besides English? You know, young, young kid language I guess is one and then dog language probably, but.... Maybe some sign language.

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Yep. What's. Oh, so woof, woof. Woof, woof. Yes. Understanding with dogs you have to use the eyes though more than you can anything else really. Are you a dog trainer? No, we have two dogs at home but. Oh, what type of dogs do you have? They're two rescues.

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They're both poodle rescues so. Poodle rescues, that's so nice. They are sitting with my wife right now. That's so cute. And do you have any kids or just the dogs? Two kids. Two, two girls, you know girls, nine and five.

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So. Wow. And I have three girls. Yeah. Wow. Very nice. My youngest just turned nine. So congratulations to you for having a nine and a five year old. That's beautiful. Trying to do all this at the same time. And that's where the automation, that's where the beauty of authenticity and genuineness is where I've always come from in the way that I've always built, my own network and I find it so critical.

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That's why you find me as one of your clients and yeah, someone who, I'd love to step up and become part of that tribe that you're building, that community that you're building. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would love to do that. I'm going to tag you on LinkedIn and I'm going to put in the Skool community link.

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Have you ever heard of Skool? I have been on Skool many, many, many different times. And it's a fantastic platform to monetize, if anyone wants to riff on that more as well. Well, yeah, and by the way, I built several Skool communities and generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue within weeks just to kind of see if I can and it was just incredible.

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I built an AI automation community. I built an engaged thought leaders community. Just kind of like as a test and it worked. And it's so easy to collect payments on Skool so it's so like fast. You just pay $99 and then boom, you just connect, they give you like a Stripe Express, which is a fast way to get Stripe.

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And then you could just start charging money and have a Skool community, which I love. But I really went into like the depth of Skool to try to figure out, okay, what's the best type of community to have and how do you launch it and how do you bring people together. So if you go to the Skool community that we have now, which is, we call it AI for LinkedIn because we just from the SEO purposes, you know, they can go to Skool for that if they want, they have a problem with that.

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But we called it AI for LinkedIn. But if it's Skool.com/evyvai and you'll go in there and you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of engaged LinkedIn users in there, we have 1,100. But like, it's just so fascinating that now you have like a little ecosystem of everyone that is kind of wanting to be authentic and wanting to support each other in a little co-community like that.

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That same intentionality is so incredible. The energy that it brings together, the conversation that it brings together, it's incredible. And now we do AI research on every person. So we have agents that will research every little component, every nook and cranny of your business and every nook and cranny of every LinkedIn connections that you have.

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So I love being able to just click a button and know everything about somebody; that saves me a lot of time when I'm doing what I'm doing on LinkedIn. So I'll push a button and CoPilot Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude. They'll go and gather all the detailed information about each person.

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And when it gathers the information it kind of just lays it out for me with conversation starter. So it says that you're an acclaimed executive leadership coach, energy strategist, and author. And then it tells me you work with executive and emerging leaders in finance, SaaS, media and high growth startups.

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And it tells me you provide them with leadership coaching. Agency growth consulting, Google Ads, profitability consulting, all this jazz. And then it gives me your email address and all your information. And then it tells me to ask you the following question. It says, how did your experience at Microsoft and Akamai inform you on energy coaching approach today?

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Wow. I have to go back, Joe. I was working at Microsoft when they bought LinkedIn, so that's a commonality there of the conversation. To tie things with the bow, I would say. Wow, wow, wow.

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And it also asks me to share a memorable story behind the Make Your Own Glass Half Full. Let's say, that book, "Make Your Own Glass Half Full: The Empowered Path to Optimism and Autonomy" was built on the fact that in my corporate career I was laid off twice.

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And I used those tools of optimism and autonomy to pull up my bootstraps and not just fall down and die and atrophy, but get back up and try again. You know what we need to do? We need to find the 9,000 Microsoft employees that were just fired and we need to give them a copy of your book, you know?

[23:34.3]
I'm happy to do that. Isn't that crazy? Do you know that they fired 9,000 people? Right? I do. I know people who are part of that. So that's insanity. It's so sad. You know, Microsoft is a big company.

[23:51.7]
I just went to Seattle. I met a Microsoft employee out in Seattle. We hung out, we had a great time, we had drinks. It was very fun. Now we're friends. But like that person's not afraid of getting fired because they're very senior. You know, when you're working with a company that's like the biggest company in the world, you know, like now Nvidia is bigger but like for market cap, like Microsoft is basically the biggest company in the world when you're working for such a company.

[24:19.1]
It's like its own world. Like, you can't know 1/10 of 1% of people that work there. Believe me, it's incredible. It was an incredible organization to be one of, you know, 300,000 global employees, be the tiniest needle in a haystack and still get that inspirational leadership from someone like Satya Nadella, who comes from that lift up the employee perspective versus the way, you know, say, a Steve Ballmer was a little bit more aggressive and maybe a little bit more unpredictable in terms of how they were leading Microsoft.

[24:55.0]
Still both effective leaders, but I was lucky enough to be under that leadership, that sage leadership strategy from someone like Satya in that role. Amazing. Amazing. Wow. You are such an impressive person. You have such an impressive background.

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And I would have never known that you worked at Microsoft. I would have never known this if not for my AI agent. And I just introduced you to someone pretty senior at Microsoft. I put it into the DM for you. So you look at it later. You'll have it.

[25:26.7]
Awesome. Who's a dear friend of mine who I think you should connect with and build a relationship with. Cool. And I'll tell you privately, details about that. I want you to know that because the AI agent that supports me that I'm able to then make your life and their life better as a result of it.

[25:46.6]
I love it, Joe. All right, well, thanks everyone for tuning into "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?, the show where we find the signal behind the noise. I think we definitely landed on that today, Joe. I'm Adam W. Barney. Subscribe, leave a review, and check the show notes for more and text DEMO to Joe at 973-841-8868.

[26:10.9]
That second eight was a little bit. A little bit hidden there. Sometimes if you don't want to eat a date, you should eat an eight.

[26:22.0]
Awesome, Joe. Well, thanks for joining again today. Cheers, everyone, and I really appreciate it.