1281: theCLICK: Future-Proof Your Business with AI Tools and AI Marketing Secrets for Entrepreneurs with Russ Henneberry

Robert Plank 0:04 Hey, we're here with Russ Henneberry, who is the co author of digital marketing for Dummies, so that alone should get you to sit up and pay close attention. But even better than that, because that's the past, now we're talking about the future. Russ is an AI powered digital marketing consultant. He's a speaker, and he's the founder of the click, which is an AI marketing training and community platform. They are at joint the click.ai Russ consults and trains employees to increase marketing efficiency and ROI using AI technology and tactics. He's worked on digital marketing projects for dozens of small and mid sized businesses. He certified 1000s of professionals in content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization. And if you're the kind of person that's overloaded, overwhelmed, just on learning overdrive with AI and you say, hey, you know, I need to start applying this. I need to start experimenting, using it, having fun, seeing results. Russ, is your guy. He has a lot to say about AI prompting tools, the future of it, and how marketing and marketers can use AI to better their business. So Russ, glad to be speaking with you.

Russ Henneberry 1:13 Robert, good to be here.

Robert Plank 1:13 Yeah, great to have you. And so, I mean, what's your focus? Like you're you're this guy, like you've been around the block, you show up on podcasts, you help a lot of people. There's all these different, like, kind of sub sections of AI. But what has you the most excited jazz about it?

Russ Henneberry 1:33 Well, I think it's application and business. I mean, we can talk all day long about its ethics and its morals and all this stuff, but the fact is, it's here, and if you're not learning it, I don't know what you're doing, right? It's sort of like pouring the internet for the personal computer when it came out. So smartphone, that kind of thing. It's, it's, it's so fundamental to everything that we're doing, and it's going to find its way into every little nook and cranny of business, and so learning these tools is the only decision to be made,

Robert Plank 2:10 yeah, otherwise you get left behind, like you just think you could have bought apple stock at $5 you could have bought Bitcoin at 10 cents, any.com domain name out there at One point, you could have bought it for 50 bucks back in the 90s. There's time after time when it's like, you see some trend and you let it pass you by. You say, Oh, well, that's not relevant to me today. I have better things to do. Well, we'll find but if you only you devoted a little bit of time to staying on the cutting edge and using this tool, then you could have, you know, rode that wave and brought your business to where it should be. And so as far as, uh, getting our dipping our toe in the water, playing in the sandbox, like, what do you think is a good, uh, kind of starting point for someone to get awareness on AI with all like, there's always some new tool, right? There's always, like, deep seat, Claude, Poe, all these different things. Someone says, Where do I even start? What's the answer?

Russ Henneberry 3:04 Just start with chat. GPT. I mean, it's, it's what 80% of the people are using. It's, you know, it's, it's got, you know, these guys are really good product company, and they are releasing new things weekly. You know that that are advancing the usability the multi modality, in other words, like whether it can take in video or audio, or create audio or video, like these things are evolving on a weekly basis. And if you're just getting started, the the idea here is just to get in there and start playing with something. Then it's chat GPT. And then from there, you can start playing around with either other models, other big, large language models, like Claude or Gemini or something like that. And then you can start playing around with more niche tools, like hey Gen or 11 labs or things like that that do like very specific things with AI. Another tool I love is descript, for example, is a great little video tool to play around with that uses AI So, but start with chat GPT, and if you want something super tactical to do, like drag some file in there and attach it to a thread in GPT and have a conversation with that file like, you know, doesn't matter what it is. It might be a market report, or it might be some performance data from, you know, maybe a Facebook account or something like that, and just drag it in there and start asking questions about that document, and you're already going to be using AI better than what I think most people are using it just by dragging some content in there, or file or something in there, drag a drag a piece of content in there, put it in a PDF or something, or paste it in there and have a conversation. Like, how could I improve this? Like, just start playing around with those tools in that way.

Robert Plank 4:54 There's something to be said about playing around, right? Because when you play around, it doesn't feel like we're. Work, or, like, learning, you're just kind of having fun seeing what happens. You embrace the randomness. And sometimes you have these kind of unexpected surprises, and then when it's time to go back to use that tool, you kind of have a positive association with that habit. And so you're reminding me of, like, when I was a kid, when you like, just play on the computer, right? You'd open ms, paint and draw whatever. Or you'd, you'd like use, like, the text to speech, or you'd get install some random program that would like, slow down your voice or deepen it, and you'd record stuff and play it back, and it would just be, like, a lot of fun, right? Just the good old days of just like, seeing what happens. And so with, with AI, yeah, that's a fun assignment right dragging a file and have a conversation with it. And I'm always playing around in different ways. Like right before we got on this podcast, I, like, searched your name, went on YouTube, click on the Show transcript button and highlighted it, put it in chat. DBT has said, break it down into the questions and answers, just to kind of show me what this rust guy is all about. And like, just yesterday, some guy told me to use it for goal setting. He said, like, say, you want to do this thing, be really specific and detailed about the final product. Break down how fast, like, how many weeks it should take, and how many hours per day you can put into it and have it give you these little, quick assignments. I was like, genius. That's a great way to break it down. And so it's, I can see the value in having, like, a second brain that, like, of course, it's not as good as your brain, but another brain can just kind of, looking at this file, looking at this data. And so you help all these people, right? You say, I'll help you get certified. I'll get you using chat, GPT. We'll start at the fundamentals. Like, where do people get stuck? Like, where is the resistance? Where do they give up? Where do they get frustrated in starting to get into this AI habit?

Russ Henneberry 6:48 There's two problems in AI that businesses need to be able to overcome. The first one's called the boiled chicken problem. So the boiled chicken problem is that you're using an AI and it's giving you bang average content, or it's giving you bang, average ideas. And the solution to that problem is that you're you need to bring more context into the conversation that you're having with the AI. So imagine that you're speaking with the the most brilliant business advisor on the planet. Knows everything like has has so much experience has brought all this knowledge into its head, and then you you walk up to that business advisor as a human being and say and say, You know what advice you had to grow my business, and they don't know anything about your business. They don't know you. They don't know who you serve, they don't know what you sell, they don't know when you were founded. They don't know your mission. They don't know anything. And they're going to give you some pretty generic advice because they have no context. But if you hand that, that same business consultant, the context that they need, like, this is the product. These are the Promotions we run. This is the customer we serve. This the history of the company, etc, etc, etc. That that that business advisor is going to blow you away with the level of recommendations that can make to grow your business. Well, same thing here we go into an AI system that's extremely capable, and we just start asking it very, you know, questions with no context. So you know, when I spoke about earlier, like drag, drag a file into an AI. As soon as you do that, as soon as you pull that PDF of an article, or, let's say, a YouTube script that you're going to use, or some performance that doesn't matter what it is, you're pulling that context into that AI's what we call context window, and then that AI is now aware of that is going to start using that as context in that conversation. So learning how learning to use AI well is, is to learn how to use context Well, right? It's really more about systems thinking, like, what do I What does this AI need to know in order for me, for it to really help me do my job. The second problem is called the Cold Start problems. The same problem, actually, it's the same caused by the same problem that when we start using an AI, it starts with a cold start. Starts with amnesia. It doesn't remember what what you talked about yesterday. It doesn't matter. Doesn't know what you said in that other thread and over there. And so companies like open AI know this is a problem. They're trying to figure out the right way to use memory, right? So Should an AI remember something that you were talking to it about over here in this thread, should it remember it? In this thread? Should it remember this over here? What should it remember? So right now, it works in a very primitive way, right? So it remembers a certain number of tokens, or let's just call them words to keep it simple, like there's a certain number of words, it remembers those precisely, but it doesn't remember anything outside of that context. Windows completely forgotten about. And. Things that you talked about over here may not transfer over here and there. Lately, even though it was the last week or so, I've been watching open AI start to play around with how memory works. But those that learn how to master AI are the ones that when they open up their chat GPT account, they log in and they move into a thread or a custom GPT, or something like that that has persistent memory, it has persistent context. And you just, boom, you're just off to the races right away. You don't need to drag all kinds of documents and give it all kinds of contacts and all that stuff. You eliminate that cold start problem by, you know, really, you know, open AI made it super easy to do this. Right off the bat, they created this concept called Custom gpts. It sounds maybe scary if you never built one, but it's the easiest thing on the plant to do. You just give it a name, you give it you can attach documents to it, you can give it custom instructions, and then that AI has persistent context, so that you don't have to start over every time. You can build these gpts to represent your clients. For example, you can build them to represent your company. So you can make sort of role based gpts that are more that you can sit there and talk to your client right, or a proxy of your client anyway. You can create more task based gpts that are feel more like a hammer or wrench or something, right? It just does this one thing. That's what it does. I don't have to train it to do anything. I just, I just open up that GPT, and it's always there ready for me. So the cold start problem and the boiled chicken problem both get solved by understanding memory and context of AI,

Robert Plank 11:39 wonderful. And it just go, it kind of reinforces this idea that we need to be experimenting with this regularly, hopefully every day or a few times a week, just to kind of absorb these concepts that you're talking about, right, with the custom gpts, and even the way you explain it, like you're kind of bringing the light a lot of things I've done by accident, right? Like, I mean, you mentioned about custom gpts. Like, I open it up, I have ones for, like, if I want to make, like, a YouTube thumbnail, or I want to make a promotional email or write a LinkedIn post or LinkedIn recommendation, it's like, all this repetition I got tired of, like, pasting the same thing, and I'm like, Hey, let me put this kind of persistent memory in here, some documents of how I usually do it. It was scary and awkward at first, but then you start using it, and then it becomes just built into you, and then the whole thing about and I also use, like the projects kind of as like the personalities, right? Like I have an attorney one and an accountant one, and then one for, like my podcast customers, I have audiobook customers too. And I'm like, hey, you know, I should deliberately make like a audiobook customer sort of Avatar, with all the marketing materials, swipe files, because Russ kind of just pointed out this, like these sort of stuff, best practices and so as far as what this leads to and the deliverables, right? It's great that your students kind of jump in and have fun and experiment and learn these concepts. But as far as what they end up with on the other side, what do they typically create? Is it all over the map, or is there like an 8020, as far as like, do most of them use it for a specific output?

Russ Henneberry 13:13 Well, so I think you know the myth here is that AI is a creation engine, right? So it creates things. And it certainly does do that. And it's pretty remarkable what it can create from scratch, right? You know, even when it launched, you know, people were doing things like, write me a Seinfeld episode in the voice of William Shakespeare, and it can do that, right? It's a, you know, give you a pre serviceable script for Seinfeld episode. And so people were like, Whoa, this thing's a creation engine. It can write reports, it can it can create blog posts. For me, it can create this and create that. But really, I think of that as only 25% of its capability, and it's probably its weakest capability to build things completely from scratch. Is not, is not its strength. Its strength is in the other three capabilities, which are to organize things. So that's number two. So you got create, you know, we know that that's how most people are using it. They're building and creating things like content, copy, things like that. But then you have organized and so any activity that you're doing where you want to change something from this to that, right? So you, you just mentioned earlier that you took a YouTube video and turned it into a basically a set of interview questions. That is an example in my mind, of you taking something that already exists and transforming it into something more useful, or organizing it in a way that's useful for you, right? So you took a prior interview with me, you let the AI chew through that in seconds, right? Like read the transcript, and then turn around and say, Okay, here's a set of questions that'd be super relevant for you to ask Russ. And that's an example of an organized function. And when you learn how to unlock that, right, the more you play around with this idea that AI can help you organize things so the. Real, low level versions of this, so things like summarize or distill or extract. Like, go find this from that, right? But what you did there was fairly, you know, more advanced version of what I call organized as its capability, which is to transform something. So, can you take, uh, can you take a transcript of this conversation and turn it into some LinkedIn content, for example? That would be an example of an organized function. Then you have number three, which is research. So you have create organized research, uh, research is, it's fantastic at research, it's, it's, you know, you're seeing it start to eat slowly into how we used to use search engines, right? So you and I probably live in more of a bubble, and the people listening to this call live into more of a bubble. But I don't know about you, but I use AI instead of Google search now, and I think more and more people will be doing that. And of course, Google is essentially cannibalizing its own search results with their own AI overviews. And so the wave of the future in terms of looking for new information and creating new insights and stuff like that is going to come from using AI tools, and so learning how to use AI for research. And by the way, right now, if your chat GPT Plus account, and you haven't played around with with open AI's deep research. Wow, is it powerful, right? You can give it a research task, and it goes out there for 10 or 15 minutes, 20 minutes, I've had it go as long as 3040, minutes and gather a bunch of information and analyze it and put it into a nice report for you. It's amazing. And then the last capability of pre organized research, and the last one is enhance. So I love to use AI to enhance things that already exist, right? So one of the best questions you can ask AI is, what is this missing? Because while humans are really good at evaluating things that are in front of them. They're not very good at seeing what's missing from a set, right? So you might create an outline for a presentation you're going to give, or something like that, and you just create that outline. And you created that from your brain. You might drop it into an AI and say, This is my goal with this presentation. Here's the outline. What is this missing? Right? So, using the AI in an enhanced function, you can use it to grade things. You can use to score things. You can use it to improve things. You can use it to clarify things. Like I just wrote this. It's, you know, maybe as a voice note, right? So you took a voice note, you're out, you're walking your dog. You take a voice note, you take the voice note in there, and you say, this is a really general, broad, sort of crazy idea that I had. Can you, can you clarify it the way that you might do it, and just get a second set of eyes on it. So there's great organized research and enhance and so most people are using only 25% of this capability by continuously trying to start from scratch with no context, right? So the AI doesn't know what you're trying to do. And it's like, hey, let's create some LinkedIn content about blank, right? And it's like, okay, cool. I'll do that for you, but I have no context. And by the way, like I'm not as good a writer as you are, you know, like you're probably a better writer. I would be better at punching up your writing or finding what's missing in your writing, or I'd be a lot better if you took the time to bring the context in as to how to write like you. Like do you have any brand voice guidelines? Do you have other documentation you can bring in here so I know how to write like you? So all these things are possible, and I think what we're seeing is there's a separation happening amongst business people. There's those that know how to use these tools properly, and there's those that are just playing around

Robert Plank 18:52 right? And so we have a choice of which path you want to be right? Are we going to be a hobbyist, or will we be a professional? And I'm, I'm loving this, like, recurring theme we have here of basically the AI can't think for you, and if you only give it a little morsel, it'll just do its best guess, and but you'll be setting yourself up for disappointment. And so we should be using AI for creation, organization, research and enhancement, and heck, that was in my little Q and A prompt that I did where I grabbed that other YouTube transcript of yours, and I'm like, Hey, he's mentioning the C, O, R, E. I'm like, that sounds familiar. And the other tab I on the other window, I like, search. I'm like, Cool. I'll appear really smart because I had this extra sort of cheat sheet right there next to me. And you're just just in this whole conversation, you're making me remember all these little things that I forgot. Like, there was a time when I needed to come up with an acronym, kind of like, you have the Create, organized, research, enhance. And I was like, well, here's all the this whole list, and can you help me make it? And I didn't really like, I liked, you know, half of what it made. And I was like, I like this and that, but. We try it back on that. And it's like a lot of people don't know to do this, right? They don't know to do the back and forth and to have the patience, and they kind of inch it along, because it's not just, it is great, it is magical, but it doesn't solve all of your problems for you. And so many times like I will do what you're saying without consciously realizing, I'll say what's missing, I'll say, here's what I've written. Can you ask me five questions to clarify, or can you give me like multiple choice to make it easy? A few months ago, I'm I can't believe I stopped doing this, but when I would make a YouTube video, I'd record the YouTube and then give it the transcript and say, Can you give me a hook to slap at the beginning and then a call to action at the end, and I'd film two other little videos and then combine it together. And like in the olden days, even a few years ago, that'd be an extra, like hour, 90 minutes of work, but now 510, minutes of work, because things are just so fast and so amazing. And so in our last few minutes of our conversation here, we talked about all kinds of exciting possibilities with AI. And I was, I was very impressed the other day when I called up. I don't I probably use Google, Gemini the least. I use chat G the most. And I was using their like screen screen streaming feature where, like, you share your screen with it. And I'm like, What am I looking at? Explain the software. And it's like, go. It like, could, like, say, like, click on this button, go to that menu. It was like a live tutorial of, like, how to use Photoshop. And it would just kind of walk me through, like, click this and that. And so, has there been anything recently like that that just blew your mind, as far as the cutting edge of AI, what it can do, what's possible?

Russ Henneberry 21:38 Well, I mentioned earlier, multi modality, right? So the concept of multi modality is, what can the AI take in as input and what can it put out as output? So you have text, image, video, audio, code, data, numbers, like, you know, can you put a spreadsheet in? Can you put text in and get a spreadsheet out? Can you put text in get a video out? Can you do this and that. So those are the sort of the basic modalities that I think about are, you know, those formats, because that's the kind of stuff as business people we're working with all the time, video, audio, text, data, spreadsheets, numbers, things like that. But what's happening now is we're seeing more advanced modalities such as voice, right? So voice is something that is advancing. You know, every quarter or so it gets, it gets quite a bit better, right? So now you have chat. GPT is advanced voice mode. There's a few things coming together here in these advanced modes that I'm covering. So, you got, you got voice, you got vision. So vision is the AI's ability to see, whether that's through your camera on your phone or a set of glasses or just watch your screen while you're working. AI is developing vision, and that is improving again every month or so, it gets quite a bit better. And then you have another modality called computer use. So computer use is a agentic modality where an AI is able to actually take control of your mouse and keyboard and navigate the web. So you're seeing open a eyes operator, for example, is an agent that is able to, you know, use this modality of computer use you now have a new, uh, as at the time we're recording this, it's like, hot, hot, hot, which is Manus, right? It's a Chinese company that's built over the top of people think Claude 3.7 um, but it is incredibly powerful computer use, right? It's able to navigate, move around the web and click on things and close browser windows, and close the pop ups and and all that stuff. And what you're speaking about over at Gemini, where the AI is watching and speaking with you at the same time. So it when you play around with it, and you can play around with this it for free without joining Gemini advanced, or whatever it's called at AI studio.google.com, you can turn on stream real time. It's called stream real time, and you can just start talking through your microphone to the AI, and it will know what you're working on. And that's just an a form of vision and computer use and voice modality all coming together, and where this is going to go by the end of the year or so is that everybody that is working on a computer will have some form of an agent, like operator, like Manus, like whatever Google's going to put out with this technology to operate your computer so that it'll be doing things like watching you work, and it'll say, Hey, that looks like you're moving this from over there. And you just keep repeating doing that. You do seem like you do that every week. Do you want me to just start doing that? It's like, yes, you know. And and you know that that will just be taken off your plate, right? Like, so whatever that task was, you know, it'll just be. Like, well, now that now the operator handles that for me. So these advanced forms of modality are early stage right now. They're pretty dumb, they're pretty slow. They're, you know, lots of guard rails around them in terms of, like, Can I do this? Can I do that? It asks for permission all the time, and you have to keep telling it, yes, that's okay. Do that, do that, do that. But as as people get used to having something like operator, this is the technology to watch. Is operator Manus, what Google's got cooking up over there with stream, real time and the ability to watch your screen. You know, Microsoft's got it sort of baked into copilot, but you know, sort of everybody's kind of like shifting their feet saying, like, what's this look like from a from a security and reliability standpoint, and once we sort of get the the AIS to the level where they're very reliable, and we've got the Security or or, like humans tend to do, which we were just like, Ah, screw it. Just let it, let it do whatever, right? Like, let it, let it log in here. Let it do that. Let it do that. It seems fine. Like, what's the worst that could happen? See what happens. You know, we just throw security out. We're just like, Yeah, whatever. But, you know, we'll see how people adapt this stuff. But other some people will go all in and just be like, I let the operator, you know, log into my bank account like I, you know, who knows where people are willing to let something like an operator go. But it is the technology to watch. It is, in my opinion, the use of vision, voice, vision, voice and computer use that combination of those advanced modalities. When they get to the level where you can just say, hey, operator, I need you to go do blank, right, and you just speak it, it can see and it can use your computer, your mouse, your keyboard, all that stuff. It's going to be extremely disruptive for people that don't know how to use technology like that, or, you know, are behind on that.

Robert Plank 27:04 Oh yeah, it sounds like Star Trek, right? So in Star Trek, you just talk to the computer. And even in the when they saw a mouse, like an old computer and mouse, he's like, he's like, talking into the mouse, like, hello, computer. Like, that's how alien a concept it was to Scotty. He's just like, I'm used to just telling it what I want, and then it magically happens. So like, that is exciting, because, like, I was even showing my mom, like, the the vision part. I'm like, How many fingers am I holding up? I held up a book just for like a split second, and it was like, telling me all these things about this book. It's like, man, you combine that with then it's proactively using the computer and clicking and moving the mouse and saying, like, hey, we noticed you always drag this stuff. Can I do it for you? Like, that's some exciting stuff ahead. And so in these last couple of minutes here, I have a little bit of, like, a kind of a time sensitive, a little bit of a selfish question, because I always see the chat GPT Pro, right? I've been on plus for, like, since they've done it 20 bucks a month, but then the 200 bucks a month seems like quite a jump, and I'm always hitting my limitation, right? They're always saying, come back in two hours to do more prompts. And you hear about, like, the operators in pro so like, even though it's kind of makes our conversation less evergreen, talking about, like, chat, GBG, pro specifically, like, what's the reason to upgrade? Is there any like, as you as a Pro user, is there, like, anything, like, really juicy, enticing as a reason to upgrade to 200 a month.

Russ Henneberry 28:28 Operator is not worth at the time we're recording this. Operator is not a good reason to upgrade to pro except to play with it because it's cool, but it's still not there yet. It can't do what I would do is go over to Mantis and get on the wait list to play around with that, because it is more capable than operator is right now. But you know when, when, when, when open AI releases an update to operator, it might become the time when it's time to jump into pro at 200 bucks a month. Because you know my My take is, and what I'm teaching over at the click is that we are building digital labor forces, right? Like the companies that really know how to use AI are building digital workforces, like you, you have your human employees, and you have your AI in place. Like there's more than just human labor on a lot of teams these days. Like my team is a set of human people, but it's also a set of AIS that work on my behalf. And as this continues to evolve, the operator will be an important plate, because the crazy thing to think about is and maybe a little bit hard to really fathom what this what this looks like is that when I open a tab and I set the operator onto a task, and I say, hey, you know, I need you to start moving. I need you to go around and collect some research about X, right, and put it all in the spreadsheet, it starts going. I open another tab, and I have another operator go start to do X, Y and Z, and then I open another tab. And another tab and another tab and another tab. You know when you listen to Sam Altman at open AI speak, and when he talks about, yeah, well, you don't understand, you're going to have not just an operator. You're going to have hundreds of operators. You're going to have 1000s operators. If you want them, you're going to have a million operators you can fill out if you figure out how to use them. The cost of intelligence is so low. The cost of using these tools is so low. And right now, even right now, I can open up three four tabs of operator and have it working on four or five different things. It's just not that good yet, right? But the the thing you should not be doing if you, if you take my advice, is, is planning what your business is going to look like based on what the models are like today, because they are going to advance, and they will advance. And what's crazy is the most bleeding edge technology that's available right now, at 200 a month, will be free in one year. That's what that's the trend that we're seeing. So operator will be free in one year. Everybody will have it. It'll just be, you know, limited or something like, you can't just use Operator all the time, but like, but you will have access to an operator even at the free level. So it's coming, right? These agents are here. We've we've heard about them, we've heard about talking about them. But operator is the first time that I saw a real agent in the wild doing things for my company. It's, it's not good at doing it makes mistakes, does stupid things and asks too many questions. And then your deep research agents that you get access to through Pro. They dropped that down into the Plus account as of the time of but this is just an example of what I mean when I say the most bleeding edge technology, which was open AI deep research capability, was only available to pro for a while, and now it's dropped down into plus with a limited, I think 10 uses, or something like that. I have a pro account, so I can use 100 times, or something like that. And that's how this was going to keep going. And so I keep the pro account because whatever's the newest, most craziest, most bleeding edge thing, and they're going to drop it into pro first. And so, like, right now, if I could blink my eyes and not pay 200 bucks a month, I probably would, because I don't use Operator really that much. It's not good enough yet. And I probably don't use deep research more than 10 times, even though I do use it quite a bit, maybe I do use it more than 10 times a month, so maybe you know. But right now, I'm just waiting for the next thing that open AI is going to do inside a pro. And so if you're really into this stuff, and you and you want to be have the the most of it. But honestly, dude, just get a get a chat GPT Plus account, and you're you've got access to the most amazing tools do all the things we've been talking about today.

Robert Plank 33:02 Oh yeah, and get started and start figuring out this very important skill for the future. Because, as we promised at the beginning, we wanted to avoid the philosophical stuff, because it does blow your mind, but it's like, well, how is that useful? But then us talking about the practicality of it, there seems to be a lot of just like incremental progress, right? So we have to kind of set our expectations and know that this AI stuff, it is sort of in beta mode, but it's just fascinating to think about their business model and the forward motion of it, right? Where, like, you think, well, the kind of the oldest way is like that the freemium model, right? Dropbox would say, like, you get a little bit of storage space for free. If you want more, you pay more. But then this the way these AI companies do. They're just like, hey, we've got this new feature. We'll start it at the top, we'll drop it down, we'll drop it down to free, and then by the time that it catches on, we'll have the new feature. And it's just like such a such a fast pace that they're currently going at, and all the more reason for us to be aware, because it changes so much, and we need to experiment, because if you're if you're so focused on separating the noise from the signal and making sure every last drop of productivity is useful, well, that you miss out on the play and the enjoyment and the experimentation. And so it's like, what you're saying, where this is all headed is that we will have all these AI employees, and you can look at it as the doom and gloom. Will we all be out of a job, or you be the person providing the job to the AI? And this change is coming, whether you like it or not, so you need to learn AI by doing AI and check out joint the click.ai which is an AI training community for marketers and entrepreneurs. So can you tell us, in these last few minutes here, Mr. Russ, about the click and why we should run and sign up right now?

Russ Henneberry 34:49 Well, I built the click because when I got jumped, jumped into this stuff. You know, I was digital marketer for 20 years, and very well established in. Content marketing side of things, like, that's my my jam. And so when I saw the AI come out, I was like, I've got to learn this. Like, this is this thing could write, you know? Is it going to, you know, it can create content and stuff. And so when I started to learn it all, all I kept hearing was people saying, like, Well, you got to go play with the tools. You just got to go use them. And I thought, that's probably true, and it's not helpful, right? So I started to do some trainings with with people that are on my email list. I'd say, Hey, I'm going to do a webinar. I'm going to show you some stuff. I'm playing around with, with AI, and I'm going to show you exactly what to do. I'm going to give you the resources, the prompts and all the stuff. I started creating these little trainings because that's what I love to do, is, is teach stuff and train people on stuff and consult and do all that stuff. And so it just started to catch on. I was like, I'm building a membership around this. And so I built, I built a whole membership around AI training that takes a sandbox approach, where, you know, I would say nine out of 10 trainings. We are not talking about concepts and different things like that. We are actually doing something, for example, well, so if you go to join the click.ai, the thing to do is either you can join for free. In the essential side, it's free forever, you can get access to the AI marketing jump start. AI marketing Jump Start is a 30 minute training that'll get your feet wet, and even if you've played around with AI tools, if you haven't really, if you didn't, if you're interested in some of the stuff we talked about just now, I start there, right? So I start by assuming you've probably played with AI and maybe even have some, you know, fairly decent use of it. But I jump in that in the Jump Start, and I start having you put prompts in there, and put resources in there, put context in there. I introduce the concept of context. And then the next training after that is called the AI training wheel essentials. And it's just a wheel of prompts and exercises that we go around the outside of this wheel. And there's the AI training wheel essentials. And then the next level from that is AI training wheel grow. It's for more advanced people. If you want to join the pro side, you can target, take a 14 day trial and see whether you like what I'm doing in there. But it's $348 a year after that, or at least as the time I'm recording this. But you know, it's either free, free trial, and, yeah, we're doing like, really sandbox stuff, from everything from just kind of getting you started with understanding context and custom gpts and all that, so all the way up to building automations and agents. And then we even have, like, a little mastermind group where we talk about the business of AI, like, how to sell services to businesses in the in the world of AI, whether it's consulting or implementation automations, things like that, there's a lot of business opportunity around this, because all the company the companies are out there, they're like, We don't know what to do either. So there's a lot of people building businesses around the fact that they understand AI and companies need that.

Robert Plank 38:06 Well, wonderful. And I can definitely see the value in just seeing how someone else does some of this stuff right, seeing how you use the tool, seeing how you figure out the automation, seeing how you market the services to companies that need AI. And there's been you and I are probably both have so many moments in our life where I'm like, man, it's just seeing a few, seeing a glimpse of this person's flow chart, or seeing this document. I wish I'd seen that six nine months ago. It would have shortcut so much time, and everyone's business is different, and we don't want to copy. But just sometimes seeing, like, how someone did something, it's like, oh, man, that shortcut so much doesn't get me all the way there, but like, that's so helpful. So I can see the value in someone joining the click, which is that join the click.ai, there's the Join for free. There's that essentials package, and then there's the Pro for those that aren't dabbling with AI, there's the 14 day trial. So you go to join the click.ai, to see what all the fuss is about, to see what people are saying, there's also Russ Henneberry on LinkedIn, that last name is H, E N, N, E, B, E R, R, Y, and as you're checking out Mr. Russ Henneberry on LinkedIn, as you're going to join the click.ai, it's time for the scary part of the show. Mr. Russ at the very end here, it's where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot. It's where I ask for a fun or interesting quote or lesson that has served you in life or in business. So what comes to mind for you for a fun quote or lesson?

Russ Henneberry 39:35 Man, five years ago, I read a quote that I don't know that I have it exactly right, but it's the way I keep repeating it to myself over the last five years. Is only the disciplined are truly free. So I think the last one that I've learned from that is, is that, you know, we often think especially entrepreneurs. We think we think that we. Into entrepreneurship, because we want all this freedom, and some of us do, and some of us did, and we want to be able to do the whole go to Bali and work from the beach thing and and all these things. But true freedom comes from people that are able to master their their own discipline. Otherwise you are at the mercy of bad habits, of the bad things, the bad choices that you make. And you're not truly free. You are actually a slave to those habits. So when you learn discipline, so I've spent so much time in my career reading and studying habit and discipline and all these things. Because just like anybody else you know, you find yourself going through periods of time where you're in a lull, you're not working as much as you used to, or, you know, maybe you're partying too much, or you know you're you're not exercising enough, you're not, you know, not eating well, like all of these things are, are you know, you because at the end of the day, we all want to do those things like we want to be disciplined about our work and about what we eat and about our exercise and about, you know, our habits of all kinds, and when we're not able to master those habits, we aren't actually free. So I don't know, thought it was quite profound, and something that I use a lot to guide my day to day.

Robert Plank 41:25 I think it took me years to figure out that lesson, that it's not one or the other, and that, in fact, when you have more discipline, you have more freedom. But there's a time and a place for a lot of this, and we need to have these good habits, and it's so easy, as you said, for life to happen to you or for you to keep making compromise after compromise. Next thing you know, you're not living the life you want. So if things aren't working, figure out that discipline, get to your goals, get what you want, get that freedom. One leads to the other. Very helpful, very powerful as we go to join the click.ai check out what's on that page. It's a membership site trusted by places like Kajabi, smart marketer, zipify and so many others. Check out that AI marketing jump start. Check out the wheel, and that way you can begin to tap into all these things, like AI agents writing with AI before it changes again, which it probably will change again tomorrow. But in the meantime, we can become users of AI, that way we're not being left behind. Join the click.ai Mr. Rose Henry, wonderful speaking with you today.

Russ Henneberry 42:29 Thanks, Robert. It's great being on here, actually. Thank you so much.

Robert Plank 42:34 This is Robert Plank from dfy podcast.com. Forward, slash, free. Me and my team are super excited to jump into your podcast, whether it already exists, whether it's brand new, whether it's just in the idea stage, set up a call and contact us today. Claim your free gift at DFI podcast.com/free, and we will see you there.