43:07Aleric Heck · Interview
AI Won't Replace Experts, It Will Expose the Fakes
A 43-minute Marketing Minds interview on why automating a broken business just breaks it faster, and the one agent most service companies never build.
September 28thThe argument in one line.
People buy when they believe a product fits who they are becoming, so marketing that agitates pain or argues mechanisms stalls the decision while identity alignment moves it.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach or consultant running a booked-call funnel whose sales team keeps complaining that the leads are bad.
- A marketer who writes pain-agitate-solve copy by default and wants a researched argument for a different structure.
- A business owner deciding whether to put an AI chatbot or AI agent in front of customers.
- An agency owner who wants to use AI internally for reporting, CRM analysis and team coaching without making staff feel replaceable.
- A digital-only brand looking for post-sale touch points that bring past clients back into the funnel.
SKIP IF…
- You want ad-platform tactics, targeting settings or creative specs. This is a positioning and psychology conversation.
- You need hard numbers on the frameworks. Most claims are backed by stories and examples rather than test data.
The full version, fast.
The guest's thesis is that belief is the real conversion metric: people buy what fits who they think they are or are becoming, so pain-point agitation and mechanism claims slow the decision down. Brands now compete to regulate the buyer's nervous system, making them feel safe, heard and aligned, rather than simply to grab attention. In practice that means using the pre-sale window to confirm fit instead of fire-hosing information, treating speed to lead as making contact rather than closing, mapping every customer touch point for hospitality, keeping AI internal rather than customer-facing, and sending physical mail after the sale to pull clients back from the drop-off phase.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostAleric Heck
02:36guestAlex Vonderhaar
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:30
01 · Episode highlights
Cold open montage of the guest's strongest lines.
00:30 – 02:58
02 · What a neuromarketing agency is
Applying consumer neuroscience research to real businesses, and why most neuromarketers end up hired away by Apple, Amazon, IBM and the NFL.
02:58 – 06:14
03 · Neuromarketing vs. traditional digital marketing
Metric-chasing agencies forget the person; the alternative is guiding people in or out by aligning with their identity.
06:14 – 07:45
04 · Belief is the ultimate conversion metric
The core idea of the book: buyers need to feel the brand is on the same path they are.
07:45 – 09:18
05 · Why pain-point marketing stalls the decision
Competitors sell mechanisms, price and pain; the buyer is really buying who they are or who they are becoming.
09:18 – 10:08
06 · From the attention economy to the nervous system war
Winning brands regulate the buyer's nervous system: safe, heard, aligned with their trajectory.
10:08 – 11:59
07 · How 1st Phorm sells identity, not products
Andy Frisella set out to build the world's best people, and every product sits behind that identity.
11:59 – 14:27
08 · Fixing the pre-sale process for coaches
Stop fire-hosing new leads; confirm fit, raise close rates, and send mismatched prospects elsewhere with goodwill.
14:27 – 16:47
09 · Speed to lead means contact, not closing
Reach the lead fast, then let them sit in tension and discover their own conclusions, like a good therapist would.
16:47 – 18:54
10 · Emotional compression in copywriting
The most-missed tool in the book, and why it works as a field manual rather than a formula.
18:54 – 22:32
11 · From neuroscience to a heart attack at 21
Art student turned neuroscience and psychopharmacology major whose medical path ended after a heart attack.
22:32 – 27:18
12 · From $200K in debt to $2.2M in recurring revenue
Turning around a float center with a Traffic and Funnels course, then door-to-door sales to fund Hidden Falls Media in 2018.
27:18 – 32:55
13 · Hospitality and mapping every customer touch point
Map every touch point, add surprise and delight, and study how Apple engineered the box and the store floor.
32:55 – 35:39
14 · Keeping AI out of customer-facing roles
The agency uses AI daily but its core values ruled out putting AI in front of customers.
35:39 – 41:42
15 · The illusion that ChatGPT is helping you
Yes-man AI, layered agents that may tell you to fire someone, and industries that should not adopt AI at all.
41:42 – 44:58
16 · Building Ultron with OpenClaw and Claude
An employee spending 40 hours a month on analytics led to an internal dashboard and CRM analysis system.
44:58 – 50:35
17 · An AI executive coach for every employee
Trained on 5,000+ end-of-day reports and wired into monday.com, it gives each team member a daily brief and coaching.
50:35 – 56:10
18 · Direct mail and the back side of the funnel
Physical mail for digital buyers, the honeymoon to death-zone arc, and re-engaging past clients.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Every time you market on pain points, you make it harder for the buyer to reach a decision.
- Belief is the ultimate conversion metric, and most businesses never measure or design for it.
- Nobody buys a device for an extra 1.1 gigabytes; they buy what they believe it will do for their life.
- Marketing has moved from an attention economy to a nervous system war: the brand that makes buyers feel safest wins.
- 1st Phorm sells meal bars that are not especially healthy, and it does not matter, because the brand sells who you are becoming.
- Speed to lead means reaching the prospect in under two minutes, not trying to close them in that window.
- Prospects reach conclusions faster when they discover them, the same way a good therapist lets the client find the root cause.
- Most bad-lead complaints are really fit problems: decent prospects pushed toward an offer that does not match them.
- Apple tested iPhone box designs in fMRI machines and found the slow drag of the lid raises perceived value.
- Apple store tables run vertically down the room so no surface sits between you and the entrance like a barrier.
- Trust is a vibe: two people can read the same script and only one will be believed.
- Most funnels sterilize the founder's personality, which strips out the hospitality that builds trust.
- Ask whether ChatGPT made you smarter, wealthier or faster; most heavy users admit it did not.
- Operators who use AI to polish real skill will pull ahead, and those who use it to hide a lack of skill will get wiped out.
- An internal dashboard built on Claude replaced a reporting tool that cost the agency about $800 a month.
- The funnel has a back side: the honeymoon, the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately phase, and the death zone.
- Physical mail sent to a digital-only buyer lands as a surprise precisely because they expected only email.
Sell the identity, then host the customer well.
WHAT TO LEARN
Buyers decide when a brand matches who they are becoming, so every stage from first ad to post-sale mail should confirm that identity instead of agitating pain.
02What a neuromarketing agency is
- Neuromarketing means applying published consumer neuroscience to everyday marketing, not running lab studies, and the research favors identity over agitation.
03Neuromarketing vs. traditional digital marketing
- Metrics like click-through and add-to-cart describe outcomes, but every number is a person with psychological levers you are pulling whether you notice or not.
- Good marketing sorts people in or out by identity, which also lowers acquisition cost because aligned buyers come back for upsells and repeat purchases.
04Belief is the ultimate conversion metric
- Measure your messaging against one question: does the reader believe you are on the same path they are on?
05Why pain-point marketing stalls the decision
- Agitating pain and arguing mechanisms slows the decision because buyers are really buying who they are or who they will become.
06From the attention economy to the nervous system war
- Treat the buyer's nervous system as the battleground and ask whether each message makes them feel safe, heard and understood.
07How 1st Phorm sells identity, not products
- Build the brand around the person the customer wants to become, so individual products matter less than the identity they support.
08Fixing the pre-sale process for coaches
- Stop fire-hosing new leads with everything you offer; the brain holds little at once, so use early touch points to confirm fit.
- Redirect poor-fit prospects to other offers or back into the market with goodwill instead of forcing them through and fueling churn.
09Speed to lead means contact, not closing
- Contact new leads within about two minutes, but aim for contact, not a close, during that window.
- Let prospects sit in tension and reach their own conclusions, because self-discovered insights persuade far more than being told.
10Emotional compression in copywriting
- Treat the playbook as a field manual you dip into, since people decide emotionally first and justify with logic afterward.
- Use emotional compression to give short copy and posts weight, building the reader's identity piece by piece.
11From neuroscience to a heart attack at 21
- Dense study time can come from unlikely jobs; long quiet stretches at a float center became years of self-taught consumer neuroscience.
- A setback that closes one career path can redirect deep expertise into a different field where it becomes a rare edge.
12From $200K in debt to $2.2M in recurring revenue
- Low-ticket subscription businesses are a training ground; reading people one-on-one transfers directly to higher-ticket sales.
- A struggling brick-and-mortar business can be turned around with basic sales and marketing, moving from $200K in debt to $2.2M recurring in 18 months.
13Hospitality and mapping every customer touch point
- Map every customer touch point from first impression to after the program ends, then decide what the customer should feel at each.
- Small physical details shape perceived value, like the slow drag of a box lid or table layouts that remove barriers.
- Let real personality show in your funnel, because sterilized copy strips out the hospitality that makes people trust you.
14Keeping AI out of customer-facing roles
- Decide AI's role from your core values first; one agency kept AI off every customer-facing channel for that reason.
15The illusion that ChatGPT is helping you
- Ask whether AI made you smarter, wealthier or faster; if not, it may be acting as a yes-man rather than a tool.
- Keep humans on decisions about people, because layered AI systems can recommend firing someone who is a right person in the wrong seat.
- Some industries should not adopt AI, just as accountants and lawyers never found a fit on social media.
16Building Ultron with OpenClaw and Claude
- Start internal AI with the most hated task: one employee's 40 hours a month of analytics became an agency-wide dashboard.
- Replacing a subscription reporting tool with an in-house build can cut a recurring bill like $800 a month.
17An AI executive coach for every employee
- Feed AI coaching with the history you already have, such as thousands of end-of-day reports, so it speaks in each person's language.
- Have the AI coach flag personal habits and goals, not just tasks, and roll insights up to department leads weekly.
18Direct mail and the back side of the funnel
- Digital-only brands stand out by sending physical items after the sale, because buyers expect only email.
- Plan for the back side of the funnel: honeymoon, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, and the death zone where customers drift away.
- Re-engage past clients during the cooling phase by reminding them of the experience and moving them back into the funnel.
Terms worth knowing.
- Neuromarketing
- Applying consumer neuroscience and psychology research about why people buy to real marketing decisions such as ads, websites and sales processes.
- Consumer neuroscience
- An academic field that studies how the brain and nervous system respond during buying decisions, often using tools like fMRI and biometric measurement.
- Speed to lead
- How quickly a business contacts a new lead after they submit a form. Shorter windows usually raise contact and booking rates.
- Emotional compression
- Packing a high amount of emotional weight into few words so a post or line of copy lands with gravity and reinforces the reader's identity.
- Float tank
- A sensory-deprivation pod filled with heavily salted water so the user floats effortlessly in darkness and silence, usually for about an hour.
- OpenClaw
- An open-source AI agent framework that runs tasks on top of a language model, used here with Claude to automate internal reporting and coaching.
- Death zone
- The stage after a purchase when a customer's excitement has faded and they quietly drift away unless the business re-engages them.
- Polymath
- A person with real depth across several unrelated disciplines, described here as the kind of operator AI amplifies most.
Things they pointed at.
10:08product1st Phorm / 75 Hard (Andy Frisella)
14:35channelTaylor Welch
22:57productTraffic and Funnels course
31:40bookUnreasonable Hospitality (Will Guidara)
41:43toolOpenClaw
41:43toolClaude
41:43toolKimi 2.5
43:42toolDatabox
43:42toolGoHighLevel
45:50toolmonday.com
51:09book$100M Offers / $100M Leads (Alex Hormozi)
Lines you could clip.
07:52
“What if I told you that every time you market on pain points, you're actually preventing them from making a decision?”
08:07
“Nobody buys because it's got an extra 1.1 gigabytes on the backside of it.”
09:41
“We're shifting from an attention economy... Instead, we're moving into what we call the nervous system war.”
10:52
“He didn't say, I'm going to set out to make the world's best fitness brand. He said, I'm going to make the world's best people.”
14:35
“That's not the case. We have to get in contact with them in that time window.”
25:53
“Trust is a vibe and a frequency more than it is anything else.”
34:43
“So many people are falling into an illusion that ChatGPT is actually helping them.”
37:55
“The operators that are out there that are using it to cover their lack of skill are going to get completely annihilated.”
39:42
“Nobody wants to see how chicken nuggets are made on social media, right? And I think AI is going to be the same thing.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:30 – 11:59denseNeuromarketing and identity-based buying
11:59 – 18:54densePre-sale process, speed to lead and copy
18:54 – 27:18steadyGuest origin story
27:18 – 32:55denseHospitality and touch points
32:55 – 41:42steadyAI: customer-facing limits and critical thinking
41:42 – 49:11denseUltron internal AI system
49:11 – 56:10steadyBook plug and post-sale direct mail
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metaphoranalogystory
What if I told you that every time you market on pain points, you're actually preventing them from making a decision? So why not implement them the right way? Belief is the ultimate conversion metric.
So many people are falling into an illusion that CHAP GPT is actually helping them. At the age of 21, I had a heart attack. So we took it from $200K in debt to $2 .2 million in annual reoccurring revenue.
We're moving into what we call the nervous system war.
So Alex, what is a neuromarketing agency and why are there only one left in the entire world? Dude, great question. Crazy history behind it.
But a neuromarketing agency essentially takes all the neuroscience research that's out on consumer behavior. So why people buy what they buy? Why is it that when you go to Amazon, you just have to add that one product into your cart and then leave and then come back again and buy it?
We study all of those down at the micro level and then all the way up to cultural shifts. Why are people moving in different directions the way that they are? And for the longest time, all those have been focused on research.
And we were kind of the odd man out where we were taking the research and actually applying it in real life. Now, there are other neuromarketers out there. They get bought up by the NFL, IBM.
Amazon is another big one that I mentioned. Apple buys these people up too, and they kind of hoard them away in their marketing department. But we've really been the only one that's kind of stood on our own and said, hey, we'll take the arrows and we'll be the leader in this industry that's facing for small to medium sized growing businesses that want to implement these things and not be.
walled off by information. I mean, and definitely a testament to you and what you're building here being the main, you know, and the last one standing of the neuro marketing agencies. And also, it sounds like this isn't because it's not working out.
It's actually working so well, like for those other people, right? It's working so well for them that people are going and like wanting to acquire them. And you are standing and you're like, hey, I'm going to do this for all these other businesses.
And that I think is a true testament to you and how you care about. the businesses that you work with and all of that, which is great. Well, I am so excited to have Alex Vonderhaar here.
He is the founder and CEO of Hidden Falls Media and the last remaining neuromarketing agency. Also the author of the book, The Unconscious Buying Formula, which I have right here. I'm excited.
I just started diving into it. And this is a really powerful book. I actually just...
was out with Alex at a recent marketing event in Nashville. And he did a couple of sessions there. They were really powerful, coming off the back of the book.
And I had to have you here on the Marketing Minds podcast. Alex, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Dude, I appreciate it.
There's nothing I'd rather be doing on a Monday night. I love it. I love it.
Well, I'm excited to dive in. And you gave a good kind of, you know, at least understanding of a neuro marketing agency. What I'd love to understand a little bit more is what's the difference between more traditional, you know, what people think of with marketing and digital marketing versus what you're doing with a neuro marketing agency?
What is that difference? And why is it so impactful for the brands you work with? Most agencies, especially if you're in the ad buying agency world, focus on the hard metrics, right?
They focus on click -through rate. You need click -through rate on ads, right? What's the engagement like?
How's the conversion rates? What's add to cart? What's purchase?
What's follow -up? What's the re -engagement sequence? How do we optimize, optimize, optimize on the actual metrics?
And we get so lost in those initial data numbers that we forget that every single person that comes through your business is an actual person. meaning that they have psychological levers that were pulled in order to get them into your business. Now, whether you're conscious of them when you're marketing and advertising to these, most people aren't.
So they're just kind of throwing things out there saying, oh, let's just, let's hope it works, right? Let's dig into the old model, right? Let's dig into pain points.
Let's agitate it to no end. And then we'll give them the offer of the solution through the product on the backside of it. And research tells us that that's just not the right way.
So I don't know how much of my background you want me to get into as far as like how I got into this, but the right way and what most neuromarketers do is that we focus on the people on the other side of it. So how do we tap into their identity? How do we start to really lead into not manipulation, which is what most...
people assume I do for a living. But how do we actually guide people to make the decision of either to come into this business or stay away from it, which is what really smart marketing does. It sorts and segments people.
And what's the best way to do that? It's by aligning with their identity. The best brands that are taking over, whether it's the internet or physical brick and mortar space, or that are building international empires, have learned this and have known this for a really long time.
You build into people's identities with your product. And that really just sticks so much better. And then it becomes easier for those upsells, for those repeat purchases, for your customer acquisition costs to be divided over every single further purchase that this person makes.
So that's really what we focus on is how do we tighten that up? We give it really great strategy. We help implement whether that is through ads, website, SEO, AI development.
It really doesn't matter the medium of how we get there because at the end of it, it's still people. Yeah, I love that returning to the fact that it's people. And also, when we talk about the neuromarketing, right, everybody's being influenced or, you know, if you use kind of certain terms like with NLP or like hypnotized, like everybody's going to be.
getting influenced by something already. So why not implement them the right way? You said something along those lines at a talk that I was at recently.
And so that definitely speaks to that point. Now, we're going to dive into your story in a second. One of the things I love to do in the Marketing Minds podcast, kind of flip the podcast on its head.
We do want to dive into the story in a second, but I also love to start with frameworks just so that we can get some big, bold pieces of value right off the bat. And then, you know, kind of work our way backwards to how you got there. I want to talk about the unconscious buying formula, right?
Like, I think everybody wants people that are, you know, unconscious buyers, like they just show up and they're like, all right, you know, let's let's go. So how realistic is that? Where are the different ways that you would incorporate that?
What would you call or what would be the neuromarketing framework? The big one is that belief is the ultimate conversion metric. And most businesses don't focus on that whatsoever.
And so what I mean by this is that it's not just belief in yourself, right? But it's belief in your audience and getting them to feel that you're on that same path with them. And the best copywriters in the world that are modern and even the ones that are no longer with us have really dialed that in, whether they were conscious of that at the time or not, who knows.
But the best copy and I'm... Dude, you write copy all day for people too through what you do, right? It's when you have that identity alignment with your end consumer.
And all the tools that I put inside of the book are just different ways for us to get there and how to make it easier. And the unconscious buying formula is kind of tongue -in -cheeky too because nobody's ever really unconscious when they're buying things, right? They're not conked out, going through your business, buying things.
But as we start to attach... belief and the meaning to what we're actually buying and how our business is positioned into the marketplace, we automatically start to filter out everybody else and all the competitors by doing this layer by layer. Everybody else will market on mechanisms.
They'll market on price. They'll market on the pain points. Well, what if I told you that every time you market on pain points, you're actually preventing them from making a decision?
What if I told you that every time that you're attacking a mechanism, you're really missing all the good juice that's underneath that for people to buy into your vision and to your mission? Nobody buys because it's got an extra 1 .1 gigabytes on the backside of it. They're buying onto what they believe it's going to do for them inside of their life, whether that's who they perceive themselves to be today or who they perceive themselves becoming.
essentially the entire spectrum of where we get to place our business and how we get to adjust our products and services inside of there as we ebb and flow through that. I think that's a really great way of looking at it. Way of reframing marketing, because like you said, people forget that it's the person on the other side of it that are making decisions.
And to make a decision, you have to have a belief, right? A belief that it'll work, a belief that it'll work for you, that the company that you're buying from is trustworthy. And, you know, they're the people that are going to actually provide the great service.
So all of these different beliefs come into play. And you mentioned the belief of, you know, who they are and who they're becoming. Could you unpack that a little bit?
And then also, I think a practical example would be good too. So maybe from a big picture, how do you look at those beliefs and building those beliefs? But then also, if you could apply it to a more practical example, I think that would help make it clear for some of our audience as well.
Sure. So we're going into a new era. inside of the world, which I'm super happy about.
And I've been begging for for a really long time because I've been doing this for coming up on 10 years and two months. So it's been a long time coming that this is actually starting to come into fruition. But you get to see it day to day, especially if you're in the trenches, you'll really see this play out, which is we're shifting from an attention economy, which everybody said attention is scarce.
Attention is just it's the number one thing that we have to go after. Instead, we're moving into what we call the , which is which brands can actually regulate the end consumer's nervous system the best. Who can make them feel safe?
Who can make them feel heard? Who can make them feel like that their brand identifies with where this person's life trajectory is going? And can we align our products and services to get there?
A great real world example of this would be First Form. So Andy Purcell, the CEO, one of the best podcasts in the world. I've been a part of Arte for coming up on seven years now too, which is kind of crazy.
It's why I've got so many gray hairs over there starting to pop in. But if you look at what Andy's done really well with his show and his program and everything else that's stacked around First Form as a brand, it is built on you up -leveling your identity to somebody that you see yourself becoming. So whether that's 75 Hard, which took the mental fitness program through the roof and went global as a worldwide phenomenon, what he did is he didn't say, I'm going to set out to make the world's best fitness brand.
He said, I'm going to make the world's best people. And then everything I do from my content is going to align with how that needs to reflect back to them. So in order to have the world's best people, they need to be healthy, which means they need to be fit.
They need to be drinking the right things. They need to be eating the right things. They need to be working out.
They need to be putting good information into their mind every day and not just reading internet junk all day. So what does this do? Well, now we're starting to change that person's identity day by day by day.
So long term, what he's done is he's actually positioned all of his brands and products that are on the backside of that to help them feel more in alignment with who they see themselves becoming. Even though his actual like workout bars, like those meal replacement bars, are not the healthiest things in the world, especially if you're on a diet, right?
They've got a lot of junk in them. But it doesn't matter because what's in alignment more is who they see themselves becoming at the end of that process by consuming these products on a day to day basis. He's regulated their nervous system to come into alignment with the end goal of who they want to see themselves become.
I think that's that is a great example. What I'm curious about. So you talk about, OK, regulating the nervous system.
You talk about, you know, making having those beliefs, also making people feel comfortable with, you know, with an investment. What are some ways that people can start applying this to, you know, their own business as well? And let's maybe use a coaching business example because, you know, obviously I know we're a coach or consultant, right?
You know, we're in a lot of circles with people like that. And also, you know, a lot of people who watch this podcast might have that type of business or an education or expert -based business. So how might one apply some of these principles to a business like that?
And what are some, you know, what's kind of the simple, like, all right, here's a few things that you could do. And then, of course, I know this is what you do for people as well. So I know there's a whole wealth of different things we could touch on that.
But, you know, are there a few key things that people can shift that you've seen make a difference? Yeah, the big one is inside of the pre -sale process for us. A lot of that is.
A lot of us are just so guilty of assuming that everybody knows all the things that we have available for that person. So we don't want to overload. Our brain is very limited on what it can process at a given time.
It's why our phone numbers are only seven digits long and not 14. When we start looking at how do we actually filter people through and put them in the right slots, oftentimes we hear about the sequencing between when somebody becomes a new lead pre - pre -sale and then after sale and all that, right?
A lot of that is us just fire hose dumping information at them instead of confirming and helping them confirm whether or not they're in the right spot. So what does this do when we start to do that? We can increase sales percentages of clothes, which makes our sales team way happier.
And we can also kick the people out of our funnel or push them to other products that they're more in alignment with at this time. Or if they don't feel like that they're in alignment with us yet as a brand or as a company, how do we push them out into the world nicely and back into the marketplace by giving goodwill back?
Oftentimes, this is where you'll have high churn when you don't do this, or you'll have salespeople saying, I've got nothing but bad leads coming in. Well, you probably don't have all bad leads coming in, but they might not be right for what you're specifically trying to force them into. So that's a lot of what we do inside the coaching space is that initial kind of like precognition area where right before they're coming into the sales call from the time they've submitted the form lead to the time that somebody is coming out.
Most most modern salespeople and marketers will tell you have to compress that time window as much as you can. Right. Like you need.
less than two minutes by the time somebody's reached out to them. Where I feel most coaches, consultants, B2B people lean is they lean, okay, I have to close them in that time window. That's not the case.
We have to get in contact with them in that time window. I think the time, and Taylor Welch, one of our mentors, talks a lot about this, right? How do we leave people in this space to create really great tension?
And then allow us to let our marketing do what it does best, which is to shorten segment people. It allows them to feel that we're in alignment with their identity of who they are today and who they're looking to become. And even like if...
Most people have been to at least one therapy session in their life because we're all a little screwed up in some way. The therapist doesn't come out of the gate the first two minutes that you've sat down with them and say, yeah, it's your mom and dad's issues that are pestering up in your life. Right.
Like they don't say that right out of the gate. It may be the root cause for most of it. But ultimately, as we're starting to move through the therapy process, they.
They start to allow you to discover these things and have those aha moments because they're way more powerful when they're coming from you versus somebody else telling you this is what's wrong with your business or this is what's wrong with you and here's how you're going to fix it. So instead, how do we let people sit in that tension and really allow that environment to build around them?
And that's where I feel most coaches and consultants can kind of pull immediate action out of that is look at those first few touch points. And are we really getting to the spot of we're aligning their identity with who they want to be? And does our messaging and our process reflect that from beginning to end?
Yeah, I think that's a great way for people to look at it and see it differently than maybe they've already been looking at it now. Because like you're saying, a lot of the speed to lead or focusing on getting an enrollment right away or... you know, shortening the VSL or whatever it happens to be.
But really, like you're saying, having people come to those, you know, and guiding them to those own conclusions or beliefs is going to be far more powerful. So I love what you're saying there. And so that also plays in.
I'm curious. So you talk about, you know, unconscious buying formula, right? What are some of the things in place that needs to be there to help?
have it be an unconscious decision? And then how does that relate to things like NLP, neuro -linguistic programming, things like that? I'm curious, what are some of the areas that need to be in place?
And then how does this relate and how is it different than some of what's been out there? Yeah. I mean, we stand on the shoulders of giants, right?
And none of this happened in a vacuum. It's been decades of research, whether that's inside of the actual consumer neuroscience field, which is where I really started, which was kind of digging through the over 1100 documents that were inside of that that nobody seemed to be applying or whether that's looking more towards the NLP side or the CRO geniuses that are out there and Adweek and everything else like it's all kind of compiled over years of actually practicing so I'm trying to find a way to like really get into that question as far as like frameworks there's so much in the book but Ultimately, the biggest one I feel most people miss is the emotional compression component that I put in there, especially when it comes to copywriting or social posts, really being able to hone in and have the gravity around what you're posting, what you're saying, and how you're getting that identity to really lock in piece by piece.
Because the way the book's laid out is kind of the roadmap, but it's also not meant to be a formula in the sense of A plus B always equals C. right? Because that's never the case.
Humans are weird. We're unpredictable, but also we're really irrational and we make decisions and then justify them later. And that's the big part, right?
So how do we get from belief to emotion and then later to logic and having us justify things? So I would look at the book and look at everything we talk about as kind of segmented pieces. And then having that be more of a field manual and a field guide towards everything more than it is, hey, read every chapter in order for what it's stacked to be.
Yeah. And I think what will be valuable is maybe talking about some of the key principles, which, of course, they can learn deeper in this. But before we get there, you talked about the brain and psychology, and that's also a big part of where your background comes from.
And you have just such a, you know. a really raw and vulnerable story, but one that turned you and, and shaped you into who you are. And it makes so much sense with, you know, uh, neuromarketing and how you've gotten all this.
So would you share maybe a little bit more about yourself and what led you to this point that had you become, you know, the, the neuro marketing agency? Totally. Um, like every young high school boy, I was young, dumb, and following a girl.
more than anything else in my life. But ultimately, when I was in high school and still to this day, I love art. I'm a really good painter.
I can draw pretty well. I don't get to do it as much as I would love to, but it's life, right? But I wanted to go to school for graphic design and be in Hollywood and do CGI for movies.
And like most people around you, they see greatness in you before you see it in yourself. I had parents and grandparents be like, hey, you really need to not go into this. There's way more out there for you than just sitting behind a desk creating pretty pictures.
So I followed a girl up to Ohio State. And out of spite, I said, you know what? If I'm going to be here, I'm going to pick the hardest major I can find, which for me at the time was neuroscience and psychopharmacology.
So studying how drugs actually impact the brain at different levels, whether that's legal or illegal. It doesn't really matter. They're all the same.
Drugs don't care whether they're legal or illegal. So I went through and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with neuroscience from top to bottom, how our nervous system is regulated, how chemicals that are kind of just floating around at rapid paces actually influence things that we do on a day -to -day basis.
It's kind of like magic in a way. I found that really interesting, and I decided while I was there that I wanted to be a neurosurgeon and go down that path. It's a very tough and long path.
You're looking at not only becoming an MD and becoming a surgeon, but also doing another residency on the backside for the psychopharm side and then keep going. I was looking down the barrel of another 15 years of school. I had the grades to do it.
It was great. But at the age of 21, I had a heart attack and it was induced by an unknown airborne allergy to where my myocardium actually got super inflamed and started to rip parts of my aorta off. Super deadly, super lucky to be here.
Shouldn't have happened. I shouldn't be alive type thing.
On the backside of that, a lot of my professors were like, hey, you really need to reconsider this because most insurance companies aren't going to cover you for your medical insurance that you need to go down the path that you want to go down. I later found out that's not entirely true, but they were really kind of looking out and steering me in a better direction anyway.
So after that, I ended up working. I left med school, left that entire thing, and I started working at a flotation therapy tank center. And it was mostly because I was trying to chase that dragon again of being dead for a little bit.
And I tried psychedelics. I tried meditation, breath work, yoga for like long periods, fasting for over a week at a time. Like I tried everything to chase that dragon.
But float tanks were the closest thing that I found to it. So from there, I worked in and about. two months of being two to three months of being in that business the owner came up to me one night with uh with a drink in his hand and one for me and said hey man like we've got we've got like 60 to 90 days of runway before this place is going to be shut down so i said okay what do we need to learn he was like you need to learn everything about sales and marketing and i'll handle the finances side on the back of it said okay i'll figure it out and So I learned I bought an online course from Taylor Welch.
It was Traffic and Funnels back in the day. It was one of, gosh, this was probably like 2016 era. So digital marketing looked completely different.
You could literally just print money on Facebook ads. I was in there as well. And I think paths crossed, but maybe not as much in person at that point in time.
But it's funny, back in the early days of Traffic and Funnels. The whole online consulting and marketing agency space. Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't even interested in the consulting side. I was looking at it, can I keep my job? And I took every penny that I had saved up personally and invested into it.
The owner of the business didn't pay for any of it. It was all on me. So we started and within about 18 months, we took it from 200K in debt to 2 .2 million in annual reoccurring revenue on subscription models inside of the business.
Along the way, what's really cool about working in that type of industry is that I only had to interact with people for about five minutes out of every hour. So for 55 minutes, while people are floating, you're not supposed to be making a lot of noise in the center, right? Nobody wants to hear you talking on the phone or pacing the hallways or doing anything.
So I essentially had built -in study. every hour that i would go through and i would just read and consume all these online articles about marketing and finding out hey there's actually a field of neuroscience called consumer neuroscience and what that looks like and there's literally thousands of published articles online whether it's advertising research or mass global trends or more on the psychology side of how to apply some of these principles And what I was learning is that the top brands in the world, like Frito -Lay, IBM, Apple, Amazon, NFL.
I mean, if you think of a brand name in a house, they're using it in some way. And the more I was starting to learn this, I was like, holy crap, like we can do this. And I started to implement more and more of it.
Like we introduced sensory -based marketing into the float center, whether that was through touch or smell, like we tried and did all of it. After working there for about those 18 months and really scaling it up, I was managing two brick and mortar locations for them and a team of young females where this was their first job ever.
And I was still making $8 .25 an hour living in my mom's basement with my now wife. And she was like, you need to get out of this and do your own thing. And I was like, well, I'd love to, but I'm broke and we're still living in mom's basements.
That's not going to work. One of the nice things that I did learn through TNF that I didn't get to flex much at the float center. I mean, they were small sales, right?
You're asking somebody to pay 70, 80 bucks a month. It's not anything crazy. But what I learned was how to sell one -on -one and kind of meet people's energy where they were at, because and a frequency more than it is anything else.
So I went and did door -to -door sales. And I did that to essentially save enough money. to be able to start my own agency.
And we were able to save up about 50 grand in about six, seven months. And January 1st of 2018, we started Hidden False Media. That's awesome.
It's definitely quite the journey. And also what took you there too, you know, the challenges, the health challenges that you had, you know, especially as you were going through, you know, and studying to become a neurosurgeon. So sometimes it's those things that, you know, end up be, you know, becoming a blessing in disguise, right?
That can lead you down this other, this other path in this other area. And so, and to see how you've applied those two different sides, the marketing side that you've built up, the, you know, neuro, like studying to become a neurosurgeon. I'm a neurosurgeon, putting all of that together.
And so I think what could be valuable is maybe unpacking some of the key principles from the book. We don't have to talk about all the different ways to apply it, but are there some key elements that you think would be valuable that somebody could implement? Let's say, again, maybe a coaching business, running a book, a call funnel.
What are some of the strategies that people can apply? to start to see a lift in their conversions, to have more people saying yes, building up those beliefs. What are a few frameworks that you'd recommend people focus on?
Yeah, the big one is it actually didn't make the cut of the book. So I'm glad we actually get to get into this. You guys are getting a different take on it, which is most of us aren't very good at hospitality.
And that's a really big factor when it comes to whether or not people trust you is, would you allow this person into your home? And how well could that work?
And I had to learn that doing door -to -door sales. But even before that in high school, I worked in restaurants and hotels. So I got a hard dose of how to be hospitable.
So one of the things that we look at and what I coach and kind of guide people on in our own consulting is, what are... what is every single touch point inside of your organization, not just from customer service or sales, but literally anything and everything that a customer goes through from the very first time they hear about you all the way through when they're done with your program and even on the backside of it.
And have we truly identified every single one of those on a timeline map? And even if it's not a linear map, maybe it's a circle, right? Where people kind of come and go from all different directions.
How do we map those against what we want them to be experiencing at that time? Because the human brain loves predictability. It's what we're ultimately seeking for all the time.
What information is coming in? Does that fit the model of what I'm looking for? Is it predictable to the outcome that I want to have on the backside of my life and the sense of business, right?
So as we're taking in this information, how are you positioning each one of those touch points to be? emotionally impactful for that person. I'm not asking them to have an emotional catharsis anytime that they engage with our brand, but is there a moment of surprise and delight?
Do we have more fun and playful elements of our brand? Can we interact with them in X or Y way to make it more of a cohesive experience and not feel so transactional while they're going through? And the best brands have done this really well.
Steve Jobs. focused on this more than anything else, right? He actually put people, when they were designing the iPhone box, put them in fMRI machines and just had them open different types of boxes.
So what did he learn from that? He learned that drag is really important on a box. So how long does it actually take the box to drag and kind of vacuum its way up and out before you got to the product?
Because it matters. It matters around perceived value. He was looking at every single one of those touch points around his product and service.
And he also made sure that his stores didn't feel like your normal cell phone store. They felt like a boutique. They felt welcome coming in there.
It was clean. It was sterile. The people were approachable.
None of the initial desks, if you ever walk into an Apple store, are horizontal to you, breaking the boundary of what feels like would be a barrier for you to enter. They're all vertical tables running down the store. And that's not on accident, right?
It's to bring you in and lure you into that experience so you feel more welcome and it feels inviting to be there. So as we start to look at like, what are we doing inside of every single one of our touch points, whether it's a physical store or it's a funnel, right? Where are the blockades and can we smooth those out and make them feel less friction -based and have them feel more inclusive into the people that need to be there?
Because ideally, by the time they're inside your business, All the filtering and sorting should have been done. If they're there, they need to be there, right?
And we have to be certain that everybody that's there is there for a reason. Now it's our job to, from our marketing, have that discovery, but also make them feel incorporated into it because trust is a vibe. It's not something that's said or felt, right?
You can actually pick up on the frequency of trust from people. And just like I was going back to in hospitality, two people can say the exact same phrase, but Alaric, if you said the exact same phrase to me at a front desk as somebody else, right? You may be able to say that differently and have that emotional impact and that gravity that somebody else may not have.
You guys can be saying the exact same thing, following the exact same policy and procedure, but if they don't have that vibe about them, it's not going to matter. And I think a lot of people, especially in the coaching consulting world, when we're building funnels, we sterilize our personality horribly. But great hospitality is about letting your personality shine, but also fitting it into the organization and then being able to reflect all that back to people.
Love that focus on hospitality as well. I just started reading Unreasonable Hospitality. Great book, dude.
Definitely excited. It perfectly parallels with that. And I could totally see.
all the different elements of what you're saying. So that's great. And actually kind of going along with that, because you mentioned the touch, right?
That human touch, the hospitality touch. We're now entering into a world of AI. Now, I do want to talk about what you're doing with Optimus, because I think that's really cool.
Ultron, baby, Ultron. Ultron, sorry. Even better, even better.
All right, Ultron. Because you mentioned like, I think the all -in podcast as well. There's also Ultron or was that?
No.
His is also Ultron, and I didn't know that until after I watched the episode. I was like, damn it, Jason. No.
I'm already built. It's already built. It's done.
We're rolling with it. Yeah, there you go. So I just had them both.
I just remembered both of them wrong. Maybe I'll have to call mine Optimus. That would be different.
Just hop on the train. It's better that way. Yeah, there we go.
Okay, well, I'll be Ultron. It'll all be Ultron. But anyways, we'll get into that in a second.
But before we get into that, how is AI affecting everything that you're talking about? Of course, there's a lot of benefits. There's a lot of great opportunities here.
We'll talk about what you're doing with Ultron and some of these different areas. I've talked about ways I've leveraged AI here on the podcast and other guests. But also, I think there's definitely some places where maybe in trust, it can erode trust.
So where do you see AI fitting into everything that you've shared about the neuromarketing side of things? Yeah, really great topic, right? Because we're dealing with...
this new intersection of human technology that we've not had before. We've not seen anything like this, which I am super excited about. I want to lay that out first and clear.
A, we use AI daily in our business. However, our AI is never customer -facing, and we struggled a lot with making that decision at the beginning. If customers want to get a hold of us 24 -7, is using AI okay?
And do we sacrifice customer service for having somebody go through an AI experience, right? And as we started to kind of look through our brand guidelines, our core values, it didn't fit to be customer facing. And I think having some of those core values in place really have guided us on new frontiers that are constantly evolving and changing, but allow us to be rooted in something.
So I wanted to kind of lay that as an initial framework. With talking with business owners, because I mean, dude, you and I are so fortunate. We get an inside look into so many people's businesses that we get to see what's working, what's not at a macro level and a micro level within our own and some of the other ones independently.
But what I see, dude, is that so many people are falling into an illusion that ChapGPT is actually helping them. They use it as a therapist. They use it as like a critical thinking machine.
But honestly, like when you ask them like, Are you smarter, wealthier, or faster at your job because of it? They all kind of say no when you start to peel back the layers as you're going through.
And we even have research that's coming out that's showing that it's actually making people dumber. And I don't think most of us can afford to lose some of those IQ or EQ points that are coming into our brain. And I think a lot of that's because it's been our yes man for the last 18 to 36 months.
And we can get into OpenClaw and some of the other applications. But I really think that if you care about your brain, wallet, interpersonal relationships, and your ability to communicate and your self -worth of what you have as a professional in your industry, I think it's time to start giving everybody the permission to be themselves again and to start being critical thinkers.
We should have the freedom of choice in this world, right? Whether that's in our business, in our personal lives, having that ability to be that person, to be able to process data inside of your company and make decisions about somebody else's livelihood, right? Is AI going to tell you to fire somebody?
And are you just going to blindly do it? Well, on the surface, you may say no, but when you get five or seven layers deep into building this stuff out, your AI may be telling you to fire somebody. And are you going to listen to it?
Are they a good culture fit? Maybe. Are they right person, wrong seat situation?
I mean, dude, you've hired people repeatedly where you've been like, this person fits our core values. They just might be the right person in the wrong seat of the bus. Doesn't mean we need to have them back into the job field.
They fit. And I know you know this, like finding great culture fits are so challenging that when you find one and then they're not that. that performer that you need them to be in their current role, it's heartbreaking because you're like, oh man, you have the it factor, but I don't know where to put you yet because we haven't developed you in that level.
AI may come back to you and say, you need to let go of this person. So I think a lot of where we're going is leaving the people that are really tight on how they process information, how their ability to discern noise from signal and their ability to be disciplined in multiple areas in their life, becoming what we call polymaths, and allow them to really explore and guide that field.
And then having AI kind of come in and be that ultra employee on the backside to kind of clean and tighten everything up as we go. Because most visionaries, and I would assume most people listening to this show are visionaries, we tend to leave a wake of mess behind us. And I don't think it's our fault.
I mean, if you looked in my office, like I'm, I'm a pretty clean person, but also like it would drive any operator that ever walked in here. Absolutely batty that I've got books and stuff that are all cattywampus and like stuff's all over the place. Like, but I know where everything is.
Right. And that's a little bit of ADHD stuff in there too. But I think that's where.
most of this AI stuff is going to eventually go for the operators that are using it well, is they're going to use it to help them clean up and get smoother and faster with everything that they do. And I think the operators that are out there that are using it to cover their lack of skill are going to get completely annihilated.
Yeah, I think those are very, very wise words. And I completely agree, right? I think it's going to, and it really is going to be like what people are talking about.
It's kind of similar to how people are talking about the K -shape. you know, economy, it's the same thing with AI, right? The people that are able to use it to amplify the gifts that they already have, you know, like for in this case, the neuromarketing strategies, the hospitality, those different things, right?
Then they're going to see a lot of success. And then you're going to have people that hand everything over to the AI and they're actually going to get worse. And so what path do you want to go down?
And maybe there is, at least for the time being, a middle path, which is kind of interesting. It's like, you know, For some people, they might do better not utilizing AI if they're just going to hand over all their decisions.
But they're not going to do as good as the person that can leverage AI the right way. So it's really interesting that you're saying that. So real fast before we bounce off this topic, I also think there's industries that actually shouldn't adopt it.
Just like how there were industries that were like, I have to be on social media. We have to be at the front edge of this. And they would post on the surface of what would be the right things.
But it didn't fit the social culture. Certain industries just could never get the right read of the room. And I think that's going to be the case with AI.
I see it just in such a great parallel where accountants didn't really do well for the longest time on social media. right same with lawyers like they didn't they never really figured it out and i think there's going to be other industries that are out there that you know the the smooth adopters will pick it up but for the majority of that industry i think they'll be okay without using it now i'm not saying that's specifically ai for lawyers and doctors right it might be something completely different but nobody wants to see how chicken nuggets are made on social media right And I think AI is going to be the same thing.
There's just some industries where it's not meant to be adopted into because not every job requires that specific tool. Not every industry requires that tool. Between the two of us, we don't use socket sets at our job every day.
But that doesn't mean that automotive and manufacturing, that's probably their number one tool that they use. So I think it's coming to that acknowledgement and being okay with, hey, this tool might not be right for my industry. And I'm okay with that.
But can I still build something on the side with it, use it in my life as my own personal assistant to help me run my life more smoothly? Because the hours that I do have with my kids or my wife, I want to spend that time with them and not be wrapped up doing something else that I need to do. I think that's a great way of looking at it.
There's different tools. Not everybody's going to need the same one. And just because AI is the hottest tool right now doesn't mean it's what every single...
type of industry should be adopting and there could even be challenges with that like you're saying right and um and that being said on the flip side of that i know so it sounds like client facing you're not leveraging it as much as my understanding but internally, I know you're building out Ultron, not Optimus, Ultron. So tell me more about, and I know I already have a little bit of a scoop, but tell everybody more about what Ultron is, how it works, and the impact, because I think you had just set it up when I saw you at the event a couple, few weeks ago.
So I'm sure you have some new updates now. So tell everybody what it is and what you're seeing in terms of results. Yeah, so we're running a open...
We tested this out before we went fully live with it, right? We tried Kemi 2 .5, which is an incredible model, but we ultimately landed on OpenClaw to kind of be the agent side of our build -out stack. We tried...
ChatGPT with a model. We tried Perplexity with it. We tried Claude.
We tried Gemini with them. And ultimately, we settled on the combination of OpenClaw and Claude together. And what's crazy about this is that it's evolving so fast.
Like even today, I saw that essentially Claude is trying to eliminate OpenClaw right now, which is kind of crazy in its own thing. But what we're running with Ultron is internal team retention, which is massive, right? If you have great people, I don't want to lose them because they think that, you know, AI is going to replace their job.
I want it to make their job easier and better and faster so they can be their best selves. I don't want it to replace who they are. But so let me back up on one side of this.
What kicked us off is that we had an employee come up to us and tell us that she was spending 40 hours a month on data analytics for all of our clients. I'm like, holy crap. Like I hired you to be.
a SEO technician to go in and actually like truly audit all of our clients' websites on a weekly basis and see where we're missing the mark and what we're doing really well. why are we spending 40 hours a month on Google Analytics? And that really kind of kicked off the entire thing for us of, hey, you're not getting fired because we're using AI to help you.
We're using AI so you can get back to doing what you're doing best and not slugging through data all day. That sounds awful. And she was like, I didn't want to say anything because I was afraid AI was going to replace me.
Like, no, no, no, that's not the conversation here, right? Conversation is how do we get you back to doing what you do best? That's what initially started out.
So it started as a data analytics integration tool across independent clients. And then we created a dashboard for ourselves to where we can see all of our clients health and performance across one singular dashboard. And anybody in the ad marketing space knows that we've been begging for something like this for years.
And that doesn't cost an arm and a leg like data box for us was costing us like $800 a month. I was like, this is insane. So building out our own version of a data box set up initially where we could see everything, have reports for our own team, and then to send out to clients became massive.
And then we looked at it and said, okay, well, if it's able to do this, let's plug it into our CRM and see from beginning to end. How well can we actually dial in the sales process? How well can we optimize and look at more of the stuff that I said most marketers focus on?
That's what we started to focus on. It's go back to what does CRO look like? How can we optimize this?
How many email touch points is it really going to take long term for somebody to get from A to B? So as we started digging with GoHighLevel and our CRM integrations, we got all that together and started to package that as its own piece of the puzzle. And then we circled back because that same employee that we were building all this out for initially said, hey, I feel like that we missed this communication point because we don't have enough one -on -one time with me as the owner.
I was like, well, crap. If you look at my calendar, girl, I don't know where we're going to squeeze that in, but we'll find a way. And I was like, you know.
Most companies that start to scale and do really well have some level of executive coaching in it. And it's not necessarily for the C -suite team all the time, but for the entire organization. And I've been in the self -help or like psychology and organizational psychology side for a really long time.
I was like, well, all of these are just models. So let's build our own internal executive coaching models based on everything we know about personal development from the psychology side, the application side. people online, mentors of mine, and let's compile all this together and create an executive coach for all of them to where their end of day reports that we have a history of over 5 ,000 of them.
It knows everything about them. They've put everything in there over the time. Why not use it?
So now every single one of our employees has an executive coach that's helping them on their day -to -day stuff because it's plugged in to our project management board, which we use monday .com for. That's another platform that I'm excited to be able to get rid of. But for now, like it's plugged in and it's looking at every single task that that person is responsible for.
It's giving them the daily brief of what they need to be focused on for that day. And it's very clear, hey, if Alex or the team lead says this is more important. Focus on what's more important than what the AI is going to give you right away.
But based on project timelines and forecasting and how long it's taken you to do these previous tasks in the past, let's integrate this in and let's really focus on these critical tasks today. If you get these extra two done, phenomenal. If not, they're on your board for tomorrow morning.
And on the surface, it's acting as kind of a project manager. But underneath it, it's really getting into more of the, hey, you know, you said today that you really didn't protect your biology. What's going on with that?
Like, did you not work out? Did you not read? Like, did you get a bad night of sleep?
And it's starting to kind of peel those layers back and be that executive coach and be like, hey, you said that these were your end goals that you want to accomplish by the end of the year. Right now, we're either ahead of schedule or behind schedule. How do we help you get there?
How can Alex and the executive team help you get to that end goal better? And what are we missing that we're not communicating on? Then all of those internally get rolled up into weekly analysis for us as the C -suite team.
And they get passed to the appropriate department, right? So for our creative, they go to the creative director for ad buying SEO and web dev. They get passed to our head media buyer and kind of C -suite of that side.
For automation, it gets passed to another. And we're all becoming way more conscious of not just the project management side, but also everybody's personal development inside of my organization. Because I want every team member that came to us to be able to leave better than where we found them.
Whether that's knowledge, whether that's personal growth, whether that's financial growth, everybody has their own motives, right? So how do we tap into that and be able to provide that resource? Because there's nothing better than an employee who loves their job and is praising the company that they work for.
And nothing can sink a company faster than when their employees hate their boss or hate their organization and be like, that place sucks. I don't want to go back there on Monday. My team's excited to come into work.
I don't have to give them the rah -rah speech every week because now we have executive coaches coming in through their own custom AI that's unique to them and their situation, how they communicate, how they Slack, how they email, and everything's built in their natural language because trust is a vibe, right? So they're starting to trust it because it's mirroring them for who they already are.
and where they want to go. I love that. I love how you're incorporating the principles that you already have into what you can do with your own team using AI and actually, you know, increase the efficiency of the team, but also do it in an executive coaching, like human way, like human first way, but using AI.
to get there. So I like that. It's good duality.
And yeah, I mean, this has been fantastic. Now, a tradition on the Marketing Minds podcast, we always have a final golden nugget at the end. So we'll get a final golden nugget or two from you in just a second.
But where would you like to send people? How can they learn more? Of course, I will put the link to your book in the comments as well.
But where can people go to learn more? And also, what can they expect when they pick up a copy of your book? Yeah, there's a ton of free, uh, freebies in there.
We actually developed a custom GPT that's trained on that book, uh, which is really cool. It's a free download. And then they also get a free 30 day subscription of the neuro insider, which is our sub stack.
And we post a few times a week in there, whether they're notes or actual like full form articles. And that's more like in the trenches of what we're seeing every day because it looks great, but ultimately like I wrote that over the course of six months and times are changing literally daily.
Like I said earlier with what Claude's doing against OpenClaw. So I really talk in depth about pretty much everything related to neuromarketing, business, entrepreneurship, and how all that flows inside of there. So check out the sub stack, check out the book.
I appreciate you guys dropping the link in there for me. Awesome. So we'll definitely put all those links down below.
And then so what's the final golden nugget piece of value? Any other thought or topic we didn't get to cover so far on the podcast that you want to leave all of our listeners with? I love the duality like you were talking about earlier.
I like sitting in tension. Most people don't. And tension means different things to different people.
So let's say you have a and we do this a lot with our exclusive like online brands, right, where there's nothing physical about what they do. We'll go super heavy in our post marketing. So after they become a leader or client, we go super heavy with physical.
marketing to them. And most people don't. I thought one of the best examples of this was Alex Hormozy during his last book launch.
He used direct mail. Now, I don't know the insides and out of what his conversions look like from that, but I know I got it because I purchased the first... What was the first one?
Was that $100 million leads? $100 million offers was the original. Okay.
Yeah. And then leads that money model. Okay.
So that was the first one that I had purchased from him. And I hadn't purchased the other ones after that, even though I probably should. He had my physical information.
He had my home address. He had everything about me for the most part that I bought that book, right? He knew that most of his audience was going to be expecting him to be digital.
So he did a little bit of digital. He did what his normal amount was, but then he tacked on the direct mail piece afterwards. And I thought that was really unique and really cool.
And we've proven that out to be successful. a lot of the digital heavy fields and people because it's such a big surprise and delight right whether it's opening up a custom box and there's a pen and a pencil in it and a note from the team saying hey we hope that your your learning experience just got amplified because now you have something to remember this experience by it could be a water bottle that's branded with their logo not yours type thing on it or just some of those small things that can be integrated and added is such a big value add because most people focus on what we call the front side of the funnel, which we're all used to, right?
Which is top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel sales process, right? There's a backside to that funnel, which is the honeymoon phase. What have you done for me recently phase and then the death zone.
Most of us are really good at letting people fall from the sales process and the honeymoon of like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest program, greatest thing ever. And the customer's excited, you're excited. We do the transformation and then nothing.
So what great marketers do is after that honeymoon phase is over, when they start to fall into the what have you done for me recently field, which we all go through, whether it's a restaurant or anything else, we all fall into this spot eventually. They're really great at reminding you how amazing that experience was and then moving you back into either middle or bottom of funnel.
And I think most... Most companies miss that opportunity at every standpoint. And it's one of those additional touch points, right?
You're going through unreasonable hospitality. They talk about every single one of those touch points being an opportunity to be remembered. What does that look like after the sale for us?
Because now we're not transactional anymore. Now we're creating trust. We're creating belief.
We're integrated into their nervous system at that level. And we're bringing them back up. letting people fall into the death zone isn't a bad thing.
I want bad customers or bad clients or people that don't fit where we're going. They may not even be bad. They just might be on a totally different trajectory now because life happens, business happens.
We need to get them into the right category better than where we found them. So letting that process happen, but also being conscious of let's put some systems in place to really reintroduce them into our ecosphere again, because they weren't bad. They were great for us and they got great results.
Let's put them back into something that's going to allow them to continue to grow. I love that. That's a great way to look at it too.
Something I'm going to be thinking about, especially as I read that book and look at other ways to dive into that, because also we look a lot at our customer and client experience. But I think the post client experience could use some work even on our side as well. And so you've given me some good food for thought on that sort of thing.
It's all of us. It's not just you. Right.
Especially because a lot of us have so many different hats that we're wearing. We're constantly just buzzing on different ideas. It's just exactly what you said.
It's great food for thought and it's stuff for us to come back to over and over again and constantly re -examine. That's how Will Gadara made 11 Madison Park one of the best restaurants in the world. And it took them years of refining that process to get there.
And then just as easily as they got there, they started to fall off again once he left. Like, yes, it takes that person with that magic touch, but it also takes that person who has those things in the front of their mind. constantly working at it every single day.
So what if you trained your version of Ultron on doing that? Powerful to think about. Exactly.
Leverage all the power of AI towards that thing that's going to actually allow you to be able to grow versus having it make decisions that you probably should make yourself. So it makes a lot of sense. Well, this has been such a fantastic conversation, Alex.
Really enjoyed having you here on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing all the value. Definitely encourage everybody who is watching or listening to go ahead and pick up.
the book, Unconscious Buying Formula down below. And thanks so much again for coming on the podcast. Dude, thank you so much for having me.
I can't, it's been an incredible few years of getting to know you and seeing you grow and your personal transformations that you've gone through and professional. I'm blessed to call you a friend. Well, thank you.
You're welcome. The feeling is mutual. I appreciate that.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open strings together five of the guest's sharpest lines, from pain points stalling the sale to a heart attack at 21, before the host asks the obvious question: what is a neuromarketing agency, and why is his the last independent one standing?
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