The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

[00:00:00] Welcome in everybody to the Authority Podcast here on the BE Podcast Network. As always, such a pleasure to have you with us. Really excited to bring you this conversation about AI, artificial intelligence, how we're applying it industry wide, how we're applying it in education, kind of the potential, the realities, what's happening.

We've talked about it here with respect to how teachers and students are using it, how it's transforming writing how some of the startups in the space, some of the things they're developing, and they've always been popular episodes. So definitely want to keep exploring it. Have a great guest to do so.

It's a returning guest, Erik Huberman, who previously joined the show to discuss his book, The Hawke Method, to catch you up and refresh your memory. Erik's the CEO of Hawke Media, which he [00:01:00] launched in 2014, growing the company value to over 150 million. And I believe now working with more than 4, 000 brands worldwide.

He also has expanded the business portfolio with Hawke Ventures. And Hawke AI and Hawk AI in particular is helping lots of companies benchmark their analytics, improve results. So, he's been doing this work in this space for a long time. It has some great insights for us. Eric, welcome back to the show.

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we'd love to just have you fill people in on kind of the work you're currently doing in the AI space. Cause I know there's a few different things with respect to companies you've invested in with respect to things that you've been innovating in house, and and I think that'll give folks the lay of the land to kind of your familiarity with the technologies.

Yeah, no my, so thankfully I was introduced to this whole AI concept like eight, nine years ago in terms of like practically what was coming, not obviously, I think we all saw Terminator 2, like AI has been a thing for a long time, but I was introduced to Ray Kurzweil's sort of writings and predictions and [00:02:00] who ended up being the head of Google's AI.

And frankly, called it pretty correct so far, where he said by the beginning of 2023, we'd have something that resembled artificial intelligence, wouldn't be real artificial intelligence, but it would feel like it. And then by 2029, it'd be real artificial intelligence. And it's well, 2020, ChatGBD3 was, I think, November of 22.

So missed by two months. I think we can let that go. It was a solid prediction so I started going, okay, well, I believe this. I think this is real. I think this timeline is real. I think this theory is real. So I should be building my answer to it so that in again, this is eight and a half years ago, so that in six years, when this happens, we have.

a platform that can be our moat, our advantage in this space. And so I knew that I wouldn't build the node, the chat GPT. I wasn't going to build the AI piece. Similarly, if I knew the internet was coming, well, I'm not going to invent the internet. I'm not Al Gore, but I'm going to come up with the What my business looks [00:03:00] if the internet exists.

Same thing with this. It was like, oh, say if AI exists, how does that change my business? And what I realized was the huge advantage to be had wasn't on generative AI. And I still believe that. I think that'll come and it's just going to take a lot longer. I don't think that automatic creative or blog posts are compelling enough.

I think it's the people that love that are people that make shit content. And now they can make tons of shit content. It's not good. And so. To me, it's that wasn't really what it replaced. What it did do was it allowed all the data and analytics side of things to become automated. Because when I look at it, I'm like, okay, so you can teach a computer to make decisions based on logic.

Well, creative isn't logic, though. Let's be real. There's a and maybe some point there'll be enough nuance to be had in AI that it will be. But for now, it's Legal decisions, accounting decisions, data decisions. That's just straight, that should be objective. Should be there's a right answer. And so with that, I went, okay, so now what I want to do is we're going to digest as much marketing data as [00:04:00] possible and plug in insights to educate AI on this is what good marketing looks like.

So that then it can look at an individual company and go, Oh, this is what's wrong. This is what you're supposed to look like. This is what you look like. These are the things that are broken. Focus on these things and eventually can make those fixes. That's what we, I predicted would happen. And thankfully it was kind of pushed to be like, we'll go build it.

And we tried to build it three different times, failed, had bad tech teams, all sorts of stuff. And so it didn't go anywhere. And then finally we ended up meeting a team that had built a really great visualization and dashboard platform called Morpheo. This is early 22 or actually that was at late 21. I was really motivated.

I was like, this is, it kind of fire got wet under my ass again. And I was like, no, this is going to happen soon. And it's going to disrupt everything. We got to get in it. And so went to hire a few developers, but then met these guys literally two days later. And cause I was at this UT Austin program called Birthing of Giants that was basically a week of just focusing on how can we hockey stick our company.

And it just kept coming back to that. I was like, this is going to be the thing. This is [00:05:00] going to be the thing. Yeah. I gotta do it. So I sent a note to my COO and president, and I was like, we're hiring a senior developer and a junior developer, and we're just going to spend money on two people in house to build this.

The next, that was Friday. The following Tuesday, this Morpheo company hits me up. I get on the phone with the founder. I was like, wait a second, could we plug in all this data that we have? And by the way, I started collecting the data and education piece, the eight and a half year or six and a half years before that, eight and a half years before now, I was like, we started building this.

So we had that piece of if, can I combine this with what you do? And basically now create this visualization of this is what an individual company is doing. And this is how it compares to the market and start there. He's yeah. And the CTO said, I could do that in a couple of months. I'm like, Oh, so then I'm like, we want, you guys want to sell the company.

And that's how we acquired Morpheo and brought over the team. And that was two years and change. We then launched Hawk AI. He was right. Took him two months. Was shocked. That's a whole different story, but incredible tech leader. And we launched Hawk AI in August of 22. Chachapiti came out a few months later.

We integrated it and we're off to the races. And so now. The full picture is we're [00:06:00] digesting 8, 000 companies, marketing, media, and revenue data in real time, and then plugging it into an individual company so that we can train AI against what that company is doing right or wrong, make recommendations on where all their opportunities are in real time.

So we've now seen massive upside for the companies that we're using it with, because we literally can go, Oh, if you spend 10 grand more a month on Google right now, you will make this much more money. We know how that scales. We see the global numbers. You can do that. And when they're and now what we're having is case studies of they listen to us.

And here's what happened. It came true. So it's becoming really, really exciting, really fast.

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I think it's interesting. I mean, two of the things you clearly referenced one you know, making the case for the best use of AI technologies being how to make people smarter, right? Not how to make people smarter. Make people irrelevant and unnecessary, but to say, what are the things that we are uniquely capable of doing and how do we use this to help us make better decisions [00:07:00] to analyze larger data sets more quickly to do what we do better, more quickly.

And also that. Being less focused on the generative AI and more on other, because I think that was, I guess, from my POV kind of the, that's when the brand of AI and everybody's Feelings toward it sort of exploded and became widespread was with OpenAI and ChatGPT, as you said, like AI has been around a long time, I think some people thought of it as very science fiction y are robots going to have the intelligence of humans someday?

Other people, We're using AI tools in a variety of ways that I've been really thinking about it being AI because it didn't have all of that baggage associated with it. And then once people were grappling with mid journey and chat GPT and all those kinds of things, they started to have a lot of feelings toward it.

And I think a lot of people. You know, T2, right? That's what [00:08:00] they're thinking of as the Terminators coming to get us especially those who aren't involved in the day to day conversations, and I think seeing all the different aspects of what AI really means, what it already has meant to them, probably, what is being developed Are there like hurdles to bettering I think create that brand piece, right, of AI as what it is of sort of refining that, having more clarity around just the workforce at large, right, to, to getting toward number one, like better embrace of the technologies.

But I also think like everything I'm looking at it from the supply and demand side, okay, we want people to understand how them developing their skills with these tools can help them individually help their companies, but also to exert influence on developers to create tools that are actually serving real needs, right?

I

Yeah. And it's, [00:09:00] I think it's funny it's like anything else, people live in the hyperbole where it's like, Oh, AI is going to replace all our jobs, or, oh, AI is going to do nothing. And it's or AI should be used to augment jobs, or AI should be used to replace them, or whatever it is, it's at the end of the day, I think it's You know, there's also headlines that when Adobe Photoshop came out that no creative director was going to be needed anymore.

Well, that's not what happened at all. You know, there's the headlines that I've seen for 10 years about automated cars replacing all truck drivers, and there'd be no truck drivers by 2025. Well, it's mid 2024. Do we believe that? Because what I read last month was we're in a truck driver shortage. So, these The way these things work and the way they're adopted don't end up happening like we predict.

Human adoption is really slow. So, what was I just talking to someone? Oh, cloud computing. So here's a great example. Cloud computing's been around since prominently since 2010. It really started to proliferate and feel disruptive in 2012, 2013, versus on premise hosting and networking.

And, There was this prediction that oh, that's it. [00:10:00] The on-premise and hosting, who the hell would do that? And today, would you, what percentage of computing in the US do you think is done through the cloud versus on-premise now? What would you think Ross is done in the cloud?

Yeah.

So you think there's still 80% of companies are running all their stuff in person? in internal infrastructure.

It wouldn't be my direct experience, but I just have a feeling,

Yeah. So fair. And you're not far off. The answer is yeah you're, you understood where I was going with it, which, yeah, it's 30 percent is the answer, but this hugely disruptive thing from 20, from over a decade ago that was going to change everything a decade later has 30 percent market penetration.

I think it's the same thing with AI. It's not going to be that five years from now, the entire world's different. It's going to be five, 10 years from now, 30 percent of the world is probably incorporated AI in some way.

Yeah, and I, and and we're certainly going to get into the education piece of that because that's looking to the future right? And looking to, okay, [00:11:00] the jobs of today the jobs of five years from now, ten years, etc. Needs to be happening immediately. , like within the next year in schools and in the, in just kind of getting familiarized with tools, the capabilities working through some of the.

You know, the risk reward calculations, right? The realistic measuring of, okay, there's data privacy, there's information literacy concerns, right? There's a lot of things that are rightful reasons to be cautious. And yet there also is if we're always operating from a you know, a status quo bias, right, to, to not trying new things, then we're going to be doing a disservice to young people who are going to either have the opportunity to create things in the future or are going to find that they're.

kind of [00:12:00] lacking in the skills and they're falling behind and things move so quickly Let's actually sort of go in that direction. So, so with respect to education, to kind of give our listeners some background on this. So, Hawk Media recently acquired PRP Group. So, our now mutual friend, Jacob Hanson's company, and then they're in the PR and communications and market intelligence space and education.

My, I believe that's your I know you have had interest in the education space, been involved with it in different ways, but I believe this is your first venture that's as specifically into education in that way. What what's some of the potential that draws you toward that space that you see as yeah, what, like what interests you in getting involved in it?

Yeah, I mean, education has always been my non profit focus. The simplest way to put it is teach a man to fish. That whole saying if I can help make education better in the world, I believe that our other problems become a lot easier because I'm [00:13:00] not going to solve all the world's problems, but if I can enable the world to solve the world's problems.

That seems more accomplishable. So that's always been my view of education. That's where you're going to get bright people. I've been on the board of a bunch of nonprofits on the education space. I've, we donate to a lot of them. We've always been involved. I involve I'm on the marketing board for my, I'm on the board of my marketing school at University of Arizona.

I'm on, I'm just always been involved in that side. And so the opportunity to help the, that industry transform, grow, encourage people. There's so much noise about not needing education now. And do I think that the higher education model is completely fucking broken? Yes. Do I think that there's an opportunity to pivot and change and develop something better?

Absolutely. But do I think that it's completely worthless? No, I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think the most transformative people in our society generally have some form of higher education. And so that's not everybody, [00:14:00] and there are definitely exceptions, and there are definitely dropouts.

But a good example is like, calling Mark Zuckerberg uneducated in that sense. He got into Harvard and went for a year, and built his business off of Harvard's back in the beginning, to be clear. And so, you can't completely discredit that, that there was both the aspiration and the academics and everything that took him to the point of getting into Harvard, which, by the way, I didn't go to Ivy League I'm at University of Arizona I, I'm not someone that's touting this Ivy League education as the end all be all, but I do think that there's a giant portion of our society that at 18 is not ready to hit the real world and could use that extra support.

step in education to go explore things, to go try things, to go learn and learn how to learn in a way that's compelling. And so seeing the headwinds of that, I think bringing our marketing chops to the companies that are doing a good job in education is a big piece.

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Yeah, there's tremendous I mean, need and opportunity to really modernize and rethink the [00:15:00] delivery models. And it's spot on to say that it's not the same thing to say that somebody who dropped out of an Ivy league school or Stanford or whatever, because they already started a business that was successful is not the same thing as saying that.

You know, the higher education is unnecessary in general. But as far as slow, slowness still to embrace remote opportunities and technology in that way, as far as the costs of it and it being prohibitive even if there may be a longterm ROI on it that you still need To get there in the first place.

And that could rule out a lot of highly capable people. And also as far as what are the skills I, the, one of the things that's happening so fast now, of course, is that the workforce, the economy, the the jobs that are out there are changing really rapidly. So it, it just extends.

If our goal in K 12, not [00:16:00] that we're always good at it, but if we describe it as teaching students how to learn, right, more than just what content knowledge and that, that extends into the higher ed space. Another piece of it that's interesting I think you called it out in that the press release about that acquisition as being the first.

Really foray in the PR space for Hawk Media. And that, that's always been interesting to me because I've noticed certainly over the past decade how those divisions have really They're not, they don't really exist as much anymore, right? I mean, there still is on one end. Yes, there is PR and there's marketing, but there's they're also blended now with the contraction in the media, with the ability to generate good in house content between content marketing, paid versus earned you know, versus the things you're pushing out you know, via digital campaigns.

It's all integrated, right? And and that's such an opportunity in that education space because so [00:17:00] many of the companies. are, they're not operating with the type of capital that consumer companies are. That's also something to get into as far as the incentives for innovation. But but they can be really good at storytelling.

They can be really good at creating compelling content and then getting it out there to people where, okay we can't necessarily compete just by throwing dollars at things. And we can't always but we know that we're doing important work here. And so by blending that skillset of the storytelling, the editorial focus, the PR and media relations know how and the ability to manage effective digital campaigns, right.

It's that end to end piece of not assuming that any one of those things is going to do the whole job for you, which That you know, I've noticed a lot of companies especially start to get stuck there because okay We only have enough money to invest in this or that And [00:18:00] then we have to put too much emphasis on that thing and it can't do everything we want So I love the potential of integrating in all those things and seeing it as this is what modern Marcom is, right?

It's across the board, all of those things.

And that's, yeah, it really is integrating everything. I think that's where people are having the biggest struggle right now is that it's such a wide landscape. There's so many moving parts and it's moving quicker than people feel like they can keep up. And so there's anxiety associated with it where people then by default, generally go fall into their own ways, which then you fall even further behind.

Thankfully, I don't know what, It is about me, but I love change, and I love friction, and I love, that challenge of keeping up, and so, we started investing in all this MarTech, as you mentioned earlier, and we're invested in over 100 pieces of technology at this point, on top of Hawkeye, but we're investors in, and we've got our venture fund, our second fund's 20 million bucks it's been a good ride there, But what that's forced is when we invest, we generally integrate it into Doc Media.

We're, that's what we're doing. We're investing in tools that we use. And so all of a sudden I look [00:19:00] up and we've been doing this for nine years of investing. And I'm like, Oh, wow, we're way more tech integrated than any other agency out there because these guys like, yeah, they'll use tools here and there and try to find, but we are. We are proactive on the tool usage, not reactive. And so we're once you, and this is cool about any entrepreneurship, any business building, any growth, when you spent, when you incrementally spend more time on something or you push just a little harder, it's not linear. It's compounding. So if I spend 20 percent more time on building my business, as an example, I found this early on, if I worked.

80 hours a week instead of 60, like my nearest competitor or whatever. That extra 20 hours wasn't 33 percent more production because after six months it was double and then after two a year it was 4x and there's something about the effort and attention that the gap doesn't go linearly where you're just like 33 percent ahead of them.

It's exponential. And so the same thing with technology by integrating a piece of tech every month or two, which is what we're doing. And versus our competitors are doing it like once a year. [00:20:00] We're not just like four X ahead of them. We're like 20 X ahead because the compounding effect of what that efficiencies that it creates and how much further that pushes you.

It's really been, and it wasn't by intent. It wasn't because I thought if we do this, we'll be so far ahead of everyone. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. And then you look back and you're like, wow, now we were right. You know, technology is really where we're winning and no one else.

Has kept up with that, which is fun.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that strikes me, and I mean, you can tell me if it's accurate, but it's just my observation from the outside. But it certainly could relate to we do a series here, the EdTech Startup Showcase, where we have a variety of different startups in the space. A couple are in AI, others are in VR and and or instructional and a variety of different technologies.

But having worked in that space for a long time, I'm always Reaching collaboration over competition. You get a lot further if you look for opportunities for partnerships, for people [00:21:00] who can connect you to new networks, who can make you smarter versus if you're just seeing it as. These are all our competitors.

And my observation is that you've taken a very partnership oriented approach. Of course, there's been a number of acquisitions that have I'm sure been opportunities to say, look, these people know what they're doing. Like we could try to do the same thing as them. And eventually maybe we could, or we could work with the people already know it, but even beyond that, right.

Looking at different partners who just augment the work you do and not. viewing it as, if we want to be the best, We have to just compete with all these people, right? If we already know people who are really good why don't we see how we could work together? But that's a real good lesson for companies of all types, but especially those who are, again, like making it work with limited resources, maybe a little bit of investment capital, maybe bootstrapped to say you actually can make it pretty far, but you need to look around you and say who can?[00:22:00]

You know, who can we work with?

And that's you nailed it with the partnership statement. It's like people can treat the world as com co competitive, everyone's trying to come for their lunch. Or you can look at I had this conversation this morning with a really solid company. They're frankly a lot bigger than us and it, they do some of what we do, but then there's like overlap.

There's complete, if you looked at the two businesses, you wouldn't think we're competitors, but it turns out we are competing on some things. And the conversation, because they're similar, was not, oh, well, we do these two things the same. Screw you. You're fighting with me. There's not enough business to go around.

It's a zero sum game. That's how some people think. Doesn't work that way. It was like, oh, but you don't do this and we don't do that. How do we drive that to each other? How do we make each other money? God forbid we compete on a couple of things with this piece of your business. We can go make us each other so much money here that this little piece Even if you end up stealing half my business, who gives a shit?

There's so much business to go around. That's the way you need to look at it. And that's on the work, like not worst case scenario, but that's the hard part. Then we've got almost 3000 channel partners that it's we're all going for the [00:23:00] same thing. Why don't we look out for each other?

And it's a constant, like we have a full time team of people that are just figuring out how to help our partners and how our partners can help us because that's where. Honestly, that's where I see longevity happen, like for a business like ours. It's if we have to go out and meet every client and be a cold calling and cold emailing to try to get clients for an agency like that is not a sustainable business.

And you do get word of mouth, but the best way to get word of mouth or who are the other people out there connecting with your audience? And how do you all work together? And it's the tide rises, all ships. Yeah, it's a big part,

Yeah, I mean, there's a I think a service. orientation there. And the fact that a lot of it, so much of it is educating companies on what would help them, right? It's the rare, it's the rare client that says, we know exactly what we need and we're right. And it's a matter of, should we work with you or you?

It's most who's saying, look, we know what outcomes we basically want, but we need somebody to help us. learn how to [00:24:00] get there. And if I have the mindset of, okay, I'm going to inform you about what are some of the strategies that may support you. Sometimes that's naturally going to lead to, and you know what?

The best person to help you is this other person. And let me introduce you. Sometimes it's going to be the best people to work with or us. But ultimately, right, that's what, that's how most of it takes place. And I think a lot of people, even if they've, even if that's been their personal experience, They seem to not realize that and say, it's not the competitive thing is under the assumption that it's like you know, McDonald's or Burger King.

I'm hungry and I need to eat here or there in marketing, sales, communications. It's rarely that simple.

and I totally agree in that, and I think people get, try to simplify things by nature, and it's not that simple.

Yeah. What You know, going, so we've been on this education and AI piece, and I I had this little formula that I just made up, but as I've been looking, but I call it like intent plus influence [00:25:00] equals impact, right? And I'm always looking at, okay where can we find the combinations of the people who really truly are invested in the mission of what we're trying to achieve via education and who have enough of a platform or enough a company that's a large enough size to actually be able to make some things happen.

And that's where the impact comes from. And often those things aren't in alignment. But I think that's where there's so much potential, especially with the AI piece to say, look, If we want meaningful innovation, we want tools that are really going to actually move things forward. We need to make sure that we have people who understand from personal experience, from being on the ground, from having seen what helps, what doesn't help, right?

What motivates implementation and what doesn't. doesn't. So things don't just sit on the shelf but also combine that with the right the right partnerships, the right you know, influencers who [00:26:00] are able to bring those solutions to scale. And what potential do you see in that way especially like all the different companies that you're in correspondence with right now, having even more insight into what's happening in education.

That's one of the things where I'm seeing look, this is kind of what likely needs to happen because there's definitely an inclination toward that authenticity. And especially in the school space, like we want to Kind of work with people who we really know what we're doing. But so many of them, like what they need to actually make those we know it's working, but how do we get it from five to 500?

one of the greatest fallacies in our industry, is to work with the basic, try I guess there's a problem in, and it happens in education, is you don't, when you end up working with a vertical focused, partner agency that only knows your industry unless they're like there are really big success [00:27:00] stories to point to currently that they are doing that.

It's wow, look at how much that's innovating and doing differently. You're making a mistake just cause they, like they've done it for years is not why you want to work with it. You want to work with someone that knows what's happening now and it has to be relevant now and has an idea of what success looks like.

And It's really rare that you find an agency that focuses just on one industry that can do that. Well, the reason is they have their playbook. They run their playbook. Their playbook doesn't change. Basically, most of those agencies do their thing as long as it can sustain, and then they're out of business.

That is how those agencies work. And so I, I've just learned because we work pretty industry agnostic, we get to pull all these ideas from different industries. What's very obvious in CPG wouldn't be obvious in education. What's obvious in education wouldn't be obvious in CPG, but it turns out the end customer is still just a consumer, whether it's a business or an individual or a student or whatever you're marketing to, It's individuals that function on emotions explaining logic, or sorry, logic explaining emotions, and [00:28:00] that's, it's human nature, and so you learn a lot about the tactics and stuff, and so I see this with like B2B agencies that are like, we're B2B focused, it's You don't sell, ever sell to a business.

There's no business that buys anything. Businesses don't buy things. People do. People at that business buy your thing. And so many of these companies like, and you hear this constantly that B2B marketing versus B2C marketing, and people love to talk about it. And the irony is. You're marketing to an individual either way.

So all the channels you use for B2C work for B2B. Now, it's different tactics, it's different messaging, sometimes the targeting isn't perfect to get the right person, but at the end of the day, you, differentiating that because you think that the buyer is different, it's the same person that buys Bomba socks buys enterprise software for their job.

And so, you need to actually look at how, what works for both, because Hawk Media, our best marketing channel is Facebook. Like for a business owners of hiring a marketing agency, you got, you realize like it's still the people and reaching the people in the [00:29:00] context they want to be reached is a huge part of this.

And so I, again, going back to these agencies that are like tried and true. It's but are they successful? Cause I think education as a culture of being legacy and protectionist and traditional. And that's what stops them from growing the way they could.

Yeah. Yeah. I love what you said about the playbook rings true to me because I've been in those situations where I'll be in somebody will ask me, well, how would you attack this? And I'll say, well, if if this thing's happening, then I'll probably look at it this way. And then I'll eventually stop myself and say, look, the reason I'm not giving you like this 30 second quick answer that you might be expecting is because depends on the context.

I'm not just running this playbook and and that works from a company perspective, also an individual perspective. I mean, we've probably all worked with somebody who uses their playbook. They go to this company, they work there for two years. They run out of all their ideas. They go to another company, do the [00:30:00] same thing for two years.

Like they're not really growing the organization they're doing enough to look like they know what they're doing, but eventually they run out of their playbook they get to the last page and they go to the next place. You know, and I, and there's so much more opportunity to do. Bigger things are to really advance especially meaningful innovation forward when we're willing to engage with the context of what's happening with the innovations and realities of the space, of the market and things are moving so quickly nowadays.

And also there's a lot of challenges in it. That's one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, particularly the education space is. How we incentivize this innovation, whether it's. AI driven companies or any other kind of companies, tech et cetera, but people who the underlying technology could be applied in a number of different ways and the [00:31:00] people have the ability to create good tech, right?

But we want to say, how do we incentivize? those who have an understanding of the challenges and some of the aspirations that we have within education to apply their innovation there when often the business case is stronger for going Direct to consumer or for doing more of a broader consumer focused tool because of the hurdles of the implementation process the procurement process the fact that Yeah, it would be great if we could go through extended trials all the time for efficacy and then go back and evaluate.

But by the time I've done that, I'm out of money. And if I'm putting together this tool, and I'm a startup founder I'm taking the risk here. So that's why I referenced earlier looking at it all from the supply and demand side and saying, if we want to achieve outcomes, we have [00:32:00] to be on the same page together and say that the end users and the product developers have to understand Have but I don't based on, I'm wondering if based on what you've seen with companies all over the place, like how we can incentivize the innovation to really focus in on societal needs with education being a big one, but there's others too, that may not traditionally be the easiest place to go to make a business case to pitch how we're going to get a quick ROI.

How do we shift that to say, look, you should be able to be successful in this space. And these are the things that really need to happen. And we need to remove some of these hurdles from that.

Yep. A hundred percent. I mean, that's, But it's always a shift. That's always the case. I don't think that's like something new or different. I think you're always having to do that. Yeah. And

Yeah. I mean, it's it's been a systemic, challenge, I think, in that space in particular and it really is like I've [00:33:00] saw so many time for the best. product or the most attuned founder didn't necessarily have the most success because of financial factors or just the reality that there's, there was a little bit of still not always antagonistic, but not super cooperative or super understanding.

You know, relationship between the customer in that case and the innovator to say, look, if we want them to develop solutions that are really going to help us, we need to give them an opportunity to really get those solutions into use and to start generating revenue here so that they can keep developing it.

Otherwise I'm going, they're going to take their brain elsewhere, right? And say there's easier ways to do this. You know, and I've seen that sometimes too, the B2B versus B2C, while we were working in this space, we decided to pivot over here because we just couldn't get customers and not because the product wasn't [00:34:00] good.

But because there just wasn't that level of cooperation that You know, and then I'm the end user and I'm saying, well, somebody please develop something that's going to help me with this but then I'm not I'm not offering my support to the people who are trying to do that.

it's the, yeah, that's fair. I mean, I think it's the whole customer acquisition side and the growth side is always a moving part. And it is, it's not uncommon that a great product can't get to market and can't figure out how to get customers. And that's what ends it. That being said, I would say in vice versa, a terrible product, I don't care how good your marketing is.

Like you can't really market your way out of a terrible product.

And you shouldn't,

Yeah, that's fair too.

Right, you should but you should be in a, if you really are committed and dedicated to making a great product you know, and your customer wants a great product, then there's an opportunity there to create a strong relationship there to say, look, if somebody really is committed to creating something that has high efficacy that solves [00:35:00] Persistent challenges through a technology that makes things possible that weren't possible before.

Let's make it possible for them to make a business out of that. Eric, as we're kind of wrapping this up you know, for our listeners, maybe we're interested in kind of learning more about what's happened in the AI space or learning about what's working really well or what are some of the high impact areas?

Are there things you would point them to where they could learn more or just different? types of things they might want to learn about.

mean, we post a lot on our blog that it's hard for me to point to other people's expertise because honestly, generally, I look at what people are saying and go, they're full of shit. But if you want to learn about AI, Ray Kurzweil is obviously a brilliant leader. We post a lot about the marketing and AI side of things, but then just in general content in general, like we just, I wrote an article for Rolling Stone about it last week.

So there's, we put a lot of content out there, but you can easily follow me at or slash Eric Huberman. It's easy to stay in touch with me. Hawkmedia. com's the site. Yeah. And there's a lot there too.

Excellent. Listeners. Yeah. Check all of that out. We'll put the links in the show notes below so that you could check out those [00:36:00] posts. You can go on on LinkedIn, on Twitter and follow these accounts and you can kind of just stay up to date on a lot of what's happening and see see the good, see the bad, see the questions, right?

I've had interviews with founders in the AI space who are noticing some of the challenges that moving things forward and some of the areas for improvement. I've had great conversations with people who are non technical in nature, but who are really smart at determining where the areas of opportunity are and where some of the places where we really need to innovate.

So a lot of great thinking and dialogue. And the biggest thing is just Engage in the dialogue, right? Be a part of it, talk to people, learn more learn what's happening. And I think that enables better decision making around what we wanna really commit to and invest in. And an understanding, especially as organizations.

Everybody only has. So much budget and so many things you can commit to and so much financial budget and so much [00:37:00] time bandwidth, right? To make commitments to things and we want to make the right decisions. And the best way to do that is to be engaged. So, yeah, definitely do that.

Everybody, please do subscribe to the authority for more. author interviews, and then just a variety of great interviews with people who have, who know what they're talking about, as we say, or visit the podcast. network to learn about all of our 40 plus shows. Eric, thanks so much for being here.

Yeah. Thank you for having me.