The Choice to Be Remarkable

Key Takeaways

um [Music] yeah for everybody listening obviously it's been a couple of weeks i think at this point uh we were both out last week doing something cool and you know full disclosure we were both traveling too so i spent the last four days driving across the country didn't have much to come here and talk about but today is kind of a normal work day for me so in the course of my research i stumbled across a couple of things that i thought would be kind of fun to chat about the first thing i want to do i just i just found something that kind of blew my mind and i want to talk about it here but in order to do it i got to set it up and there's like a slight visual visual component so for everybody listening i'm going to start like this for you tim and everybody listening i want you to imagine an apple okay now when i say imagine an apple what comes into your mind can you see like a full on high def apple i don't really see anything around it i'm just looking at like a shape of an apple okay i'm just i'll actually let me just walk you through this first time so apparently there are kind of there's like a there's like a graded scale in terms of what people can imagine when you ask them to imagine a shape or something like that and for everybody listening i'm looking at a screen right now and there's like five silhouettes of somebody's head just black silhouettes and i guess the ironic thing about describing this is if you fall on a certain part of this spectrum describing it won't really mean much but there's these five silhouettes numbered one through five and number one has like a full-on hd apple like an image of an apple in it and then two is like maybe a drawing of an apple with color it's a colored kind of animation or a cartoon of an apple three is an outline of an apple within like grayscale four is just kind of a monochrome blog a blob that looks vaguely like an apple and then five is blackness and this is supposed to signify the fact that certain people can imagine a shape in full on 3d hd color and then others when you have them imagine something they literally they'll see something else along this spectrum in their head ranging from maybe just a toned down version all the way to sheer blackness and it's just you know they can think of the concept of an apple but they can't see the apple looking at this skill where do you think you'd place yourself pretty close to a one but a two okay interesting me too i think it would probably depend on how familiar i was with whatever i was being asked to imagine but for me it's it's the same way it's mostly like you know you ask me to imagine even something random like a beach right and i pull on color sound like i can i can turn up and down the beach and see the whole thing in my mind and it's shocking to me to realize that some people not only can some people not do that but it's like shocking to them to realize that other people can yeah yeah i just saw this before we hop down here and the reason i bring it up is first of all i think this is fascinating but second i think there's a whole business tied up in this in this concept because this is i had no idea and there's really big implications of this right like if i'm talking to somebody and they happen let's say they happen to be one of these people who doesn't have this like they can't visualize something the same way that i do if i'm not aware of that when we're planning a project together or if maybe they're a client and i'm trying to sell them on something like there are massive implications to this gap in communication and i never even knew this was a thing i mean i i when you say it in retrospect maybe it seems obvious that this exists but to not even be aware that you could be talking to somebody who sees the world like this i think is a huge deal and so i think there's the whole business tied up in this and i think it could have like a couple of aspects one would be like employee uh personality type testing right like and there are other companies that do this like that disk analysis and stuff tony robbins company yeah yeah yeah yeah and that that's you know like what's the famous one myers-briggs that's what it is mars breaks yes thank you i'm like i i've taken this before i know what it is i know what it's called buyers breaks yeah and companies companies pay good money to have their employees take those tests and maybe you know it's kind of interesting like or are you introverted or extroverted or whatever the criteria is that they rank on but i don't know of anybody who is out there testing for this specifically and it seems like it would be a big issue among teams that are trying to collaborate right like if especially inside of a company because in a company your job is to build something that doesn't necessarily exist yet right and if everyone's kind of seeing a different version of that that could be big so i think i think there's an opportunity there and then i also think there's some kind of opportunity tied up in like audience research of some kind because again i think a lot of advertising sort of assumes that everybody lands closer to the one or two end of the scale where they can picture what you're talking about in like full color hd and it would be really interesting to run an entire what's the word i'm looking for agency thank you yeah that specifically focuses on like catering to the fours and fives in your funnel you know it's like hey how do you sell to somebody who can't even picture the benefit that you're trying to convey to them you know i think i think you could specialize in that i think it'd be like a million dollar business i think that's really cool what comes to mind for me here is it's so much the thing that you brought this out because it was just this morning i was having a conversation so i'm in the middle of a deal right now and the person i'm talking to about this deal is the marketing manager and if this deal closes i'm gonna have to be working pretty closely with this marketing manager and so she is used to having like a say on the website and the stories that are told on the website and she gave me this example hold on let me pull it up all right so i'm on thefarmersdog.com and it's dog food basically it's it's like home cooked organic dog food this is actually a really really huge business in case anybody's wondering it when i was looking at this not too long ago it blew my mind a little side note there was a thing about pricing that seth godin said that only stuck in my head where he said your dog doesn't care how much your dog food costs it's the person who cares how much the dog food costs and so i i always think about that when i'm when i'm pricing something where it's like who am i actually pricing this for and so that's a little side and that's how i went into like a rabbit hole about the pet food industry and like how much sugar is pumped into it and and all this crazy stuff anyway so if you're on the website just scroll down a little bit as a header that said you shouldn't be the only one eating healthy and as you continue to scroll there's a bowl of healthy organic looking foods there's like a steak and some carrots and kale and i don't know it looks like parsley and a sweet potato and as you keep scrolling down there's like a white bar that goes across the bowl and as you finish the scroll the white bar where you say like wasp swipes yeah swipes over the ball kind of like a a windshield wiper and she said i want to do something like this and use visuals to tell the story and so that that's the part that really got in my head because i've been thinking a lot recently about uh about jack butcher and how good he is at using visuals to accentuate writing and to tell stories and for the first time in like my career if you want to call it that i i've always sort of pushed the visuals aside a little bit and said like that's not as as important as the copy that's not as important as the copy like don't get stuck in the visuals but i i still believe that to be true but i'm at a point now where i'm thinking you know what and the hustle does this so freaking well like the means that they use and like that the stories that they tell with the visuals it always sticks in my head and so on my newsletter i've been putting a lot more visuals in so the the the purpose of this little tangent is to show that maybe the opportunity there isn't necessarily to say that we can appeal to these people that might be in the four or five maybe the opportunity there is to realize that people are could be in a four and a five and to say we know you can't visualize this we're just gonna make it so blatantly obvious for you and create like a whole agency around this you know this tells such a story in such a simple simple visual and what is this service called you know i mean it's not copywriting it's not graphic design it's like visual storytelling and when i look at that that's the huge opportunity that i see that's so interesting you know it's funny that you went this direction with it because i think this actually ties in with another a little thing that i i had kind of set aside that i thought you might be interested in but i had no natural sort of path into it so i wasn't sure if we were ever going to get there but i think you just created that i stumbled across a list of copywriters like somebody on twitter basically said hey post your favorite copywriters here and everyone dropped a whole bunch of links and stuff like that and i started going through a whole bunch of them and a lot of them were really interesting you know they did work for big companies but by and large 80 to 90 of their portfolios looked exactly the same like you get to their landing page and it's a series of tiles that says the name of the company they worked for and you can click through and you can see something about like whatever the you know whatever the the campaign was that they built then there were a handful that really stood out and what i think is unique about the ones that i bookmarked is that they combined visual storytelling and copy in order to do something that was really unique and again for i guess this is going to turn out to be a slightly visual episode but for anybody who's listening to this i'll just describe it as we go the reason i think these are so cool well maybe a few maybe a few reasons one like you said it leverages an opportunity that i think a lot of people are leaving on the table like a lot of people maybe focus on copy to the exclusion of everything else but just throw some you know stock images into a website in order to sell actually yeah yeah and i think that can work for a long time because the copy is so important but what i'm finding with these examples at least is that like one or two really great visuals can be an incredible way to set yourself apart and you know you may you mentioned the hustle we try to do a lot of unique visuals there in fact we got one guy zach who is kind of like our meme lord because he's you know he'll design he'll design like his own memes or gif gifs for each story that he writes and they're always hilarious and they travel that's the other thing so it doesn't just stand out it's like a great image can travel around the web in a way that copy doesn't necessarily travel so let me show let me share a couple of these with you real quick okay so there's three i want to get to real quick and i'll just uh i'll start with this one so this is joe coleman shout out to joe and when i click when you click on his website you're basically brought to this very simple black landing page white text on it it's like one paragraph of text but what's so unique and it says you know hey i'm joe coleman i'm joe coleman i'm a freelance freelance copywriter i come up with words and concepts that help you win pitches and pick up awards basically a little bit of a pitch but what's awesome is at the very bottom of the page there's a slider and the slider is kind of set to the middle but at the far ends it says less hard sell and more hard sell and as you drag the slider around the copy on this page changes and what i love about this the the reason this is so unique from a copywriting perspective is because like this takes the concept of show don't tell to a whole different level exactly create copy shows people things right that's kind of what we're talking about here like it makes you visualize the benefits that you're gonna get and uh in a way that you may not get otherwise but when you're selling copy writing services there's this like matrix meta kind of extra level where you have to be able to show people what real professionalism does like why it's important to have somebody who's great at what they do writing copy so here as i scroll all the way to the to the left less hard sell the copy just adjusts adjust adjust and finally it's whittled down all the way to so yeah i'm a freelance copywriter what of it which is funny because it's basically tells you something about you know kind of the experience of a soft cell and then if you go all the way to the right here this is hilarious you're going to like this so like you go right in the the um the copy just gets more and more intense so you know maybe 75 of the way up the scale it says weapons grade copy for advertising and design and you know some of the the the the phrasing gets more and more intense and then you get higher up maybe eighty percent he's and the headline changes to book me before the agency you're pitching against does right so he starts incorporating fear into the equation and you get all the way up at the end the colors change all of a sudden there's like explosions going off on the page this is amazing angry cats and dogs skateboarding yeah at the very at the very top end it's just like a blinking flashing screen his number in huge red text it's like his number is literally covering whatever the sales copy is so you can't even read it and it's just a hand pointing towards his number so i love this this is so creative it's a great example of of you know showing your expertise rather than just you know putting some splashing some text on a page showing that you understand the nuance of what it is you do and how it exists on a spectrum you know what else i love about that is naturally everybody's going to go to the more hard sell just because they want to see it and then when somebody calls him every single time what's the first thing that they're going to say and it's weird how like we what's what i'm recognizing about that is i would never call somebody and be like hey i read the copy on your website you sold me but i would call somebody and say hey i saw that crazy flashing light on your website like oh my gosh that's so funny and you know every time joel gets that call he's gotta be like hahaha yeah like did you like it i'm sure you're taking that call a million times but man how effective such a great point yeah it's almost taking because like great copy you almost don't even realize you're being exposed to it it's just taking that and turning it into something else okay so i've got one or two other ones here this is a great one full stop new paragraph it's a company run by john ryder so you land on the page big yellow page and a small maybe sentence of text it says warning you're about to read some pretty dreadful copy when you're ready click here so you click there and then the page loads and it's like a full page of just in your face text probably five six paragraphs hundreds of words and uh the general point is like this is way too long in fact he says it right up front he says okay brace yourself because this is a mess for starters this copy is way too long so here's a bit of advice don't read it all you're better off just scrolling to the end blah blah blah blah blah the whole the whole page kind of talks through the art of copywriting but there's the it's kind of sprinkled through it there's these little highlights and i didn't realize this until i read the entire thing but if you just read the highlights it says we need to cut this by at least half cut straight to the chase get to the point and then it says press the right buttons at the very end and what happens is if you click any one of these this is why i love this i didn't realize this until after i'd read the entire thing but you click any one of these and the words format yep half the page disappears and what he's basically doing is editing live in front of you right so the second says right this is a little better still needs work but now you know that i write websites print digital marketing that kind of thing you can find out about my clients blah blah blah the second version is about i don't know 30 percent 30 to 40 percent as long as the first yeah and then there's a chance to click again and as you click again it continues to refine the text and you could you kind of do this over and over again until yep it gets it gets down to basically a five word pitch and what i liked about this is similar to what i liked about the previous one which is it's showing the art of copywriting live in front of you rather than just trying to say i'm a great copywriter so that yeah that's the second one that i really like it's just has my brain spinning like what are the visual opportunities for we need to like define this that's kind of what's going on in my head because we're not talking about graphic design right we're not talking about creating a picture or like a pdf and we're also not necessarily talking about in-text images you know like people love looking at graphs right those work really well within a text and people like looking at funny gifs or memes or whatever i mean i've been doing a thing and i you commented on it on my personal blog where my designer takes a stock image that's kind of ridiculous and then takes a screenshot of my face and like puts it on top of it and just like that that little that little thing has gotten me a couple comments which i think is funny but also i don't take it too seriously but that's not what we're talking about either like we're talking about the intersection between persuasive language and remarkable visuals right something's remarkable if it's worthy of making a remark about what is that you know like what is this service if i if full stop newparagraph.com i feel you said his name was if uh john ryder john ryder yes if john writer on here on this screen right here on the full stop new paragraph tell stories brilliantly hire a copywriter also had a button you know on the right hand side that said like this page hire me to do what you know like what is this what's this new thing that we're inventing it's like html5 kind of yeah it definitely is it definitely well i mean i i don't know for certain html5 but it's but that's the kind of thing yeah that you're leaning on it's like these websites have gone one step beyond a static page it's not even just incorporating multimedia what i'm thinking of i'm trying to i'm like i'm trying to turn this into a framework and the closest thing i can think of off the cuff is imagine your website like the frame of your website is actually just the frame of a video player what would that video look like if it could look like anything for you so it's almost like instead of imagining your site as a piece of paper which i think most people do imagine it as a television screen and then like what does that experience look like you know because something it's something that's that's not quite it but i feel like that we're getting a little bit closer to encapsulating this in a single rule for success but and then there's a there's another aspect of this which is like it's you know it's about conveying something to the audience that they can't forget through an experience you know and that's that's maybe that's kind of the word that i'm grasping for is like you're elevating the experience of your website and it doesn't have to be a website like i think what's really interesting about this is that the people who do this best find ways to do it in all sorts of mediums like there's a i mean there's a famous example derek sivers when he was running cd baby he had the you know the thank you email yeah and for anybody who's not familiar with that story the story the story goes when you ordered a cd from cd baby you'd get this like really ridiculous over the top thank you email that says you know our um our packing agents have put on white velvet gloves in order to pick your cd off the shelf and it was so remarkable maybe that's the thing it's remarkable that people started talking about it and so the website gets its own following not necessarily for the product or service they provide but for the way that they talked about it the way that they shared that message with the world if seth godin were looking at this he would probably say like what this person has done is they've they've cho yeah they've chosen to make their website itself remarkable maybe there's something to that still on topic when you said it's more than just a website that was perfect timing because in my mind um you ever really delivering happiness by any chance no this uh zappos right that's exactly story yeah exactly amazing book one of the books as i was like first dreaming about like hey wow maybe i can be a successful business person on my own where i got like hope from tony shay and he died last year and it was like really upsetting to me it hurt me for like a day or two because that book was so impactful and like his message and he designed his whole entire business and if you read the book this isn't an exaggeration all he did was count the amount of times that his customers said wow over the phone and he called it the wow factor and the idea with zappos is that it was fueled by service that's what they said he said that we sell shoes but it doesn't really matter what we sell it's it's kind of irrelevant like what we sell is a customer experience and if they still do it to this day by the way it's still very much invaded in their culture even though you know like they say the the golden days of zappos i think um got eaten up by amazon amazon acquired them about 10 years ago but they kept their culture i'm just saying that they kind of dissolved into the same thing even still to this day you can call zappos and ask them to find you a pizza and no like they will stay on the phone call the pizza place order it for you make sure they have the address and deliver to you and by the way i've done it before and it's not miracle no i'm not serious you could do anything you can call them and just talk to them for an hour they will never push you off the phone the whole entire idea is how to get them to say wow they because i collect chuck taylor's and uh you know when i first started making a little bit of money like i guess probably nine years ago or so i spoiled myself and i bought three pairs of chuck taylors and i'll never forget it they delivered them overnight to my doorstep i bought them at night i got up early i caught the bus i was living in florida down congress avenue to this call center that i was working at i got home and there was a box of all of three of the shoes and a bouquet of flowers that just said yeah like this is the first time you've delivered from us we just want to know how much we appreciate you and you know you say what did you just say yeah good great point wow and here we are nine years later talking about it still like so did that investment pay off for them yeah it sounds like it certainly and he had all types of examples i might have talked about this on the pod before if i did forgive me for repeating myself but this woman was a lawyer in midtown manhattan and every week she was buying a new pair of like gucci's and uh i mean you know louboutins and louis vuittons and just balling out on shoes but zappos has a 365 day no questions asked shipping both ways paid for return policy so she would buy a pair of shoes and just ball out in the law firm with you know two thousand dollar shoes for a week put it in the box and then send it back and eventually what happened so many people in midtown manhattan all started asking her like where are you getting these shoes like where do you buy your shoes i love your shoes and the board at zappos was like this woman is robbing us blind we cannot keep doing this and he said look at all the sales around midtown manhattan over the last year and just this wow factor this word of mouth created such an influx of chatter basically which i guess bringing it back to what we're talking about is is what this is right it's like it's visual experiential guerrilla marketing that leads to chatter i mean how many times have we said these these guys's and and gal's names on our show right so we're on yeah choosing to be remarkable and finding those areas and i think that's kind of where it starts like finding those areas where people are not necessarily being remarkable yet like your homepage is one example but it's probably the highest contested like it's there's a lot of competition for a great website right but there's a lot a lot of areas a lot of places where people like have touch points with customers and they're just kind of flying by the seat of their pants all of those are opportunities to be remarkable can i show you one more that i think is pretty cool so this is a little bit different because it's not really the website experience that i thought was so interesting it was the product so this is a copywriter named trevor joplin and how the mouse turns into a piece of corn what is this hey i mean that's great that's actually another example i don't know i i didn't look into it but but yeah his whole website for whatever reason the uh the the cursor is a piece of corn and when you go to his home it just says corn eaters only and like apparently he's obsessed with corn said i'm addicted to corn the end the the whole his whole like front page video is it looks like a newsreel from mtv true life that was about porn addicts himself well it's slightly so this the mtv clip is about porn addicts but he every time they say porn yeah so he collaborates with this other copywriter named eleanor rast i love that and i'm not sure i'm not sure if they're a couple or if they just they work together with the dealers but they a lot of the projects have been a collaboration between the two of them and one of them is called her story so this is really interesting the whole basis of this product is it's an ar app augmented reality specifically designed to insert new content into the most popular history book that's taught on in west coast schools so they went to california they basically said well here's this what's that an academic history book yeah so they basically went to schools and there's not that many of them right the pretty small curriculum like at the junior high high school level basically found the most popular one and they said okay well here there's a problem with this book which is that uh almost 90 of it is about men and obviously men and women both made history so how are we going to help balance that out they made this ar app where when you point it at the pages of the history book it will pick up on photos in the book like like head shots of certain guys and then it uses augmented reality to overlay the story of a related woman right there so i don't know any examples because the the write-up wasn't very specific but like let's just say i mean i know there's one story from history where george washington like needed funding for something and his wife was actually integral in getting the funding because you know she was able to kind of confer with all the other wives of all the other congress people and obviously even if they fight in congress they got to go home to their wives at the end of the day so all the wives basically got together and got this thing through the idea of this app would be like when you look at the book and you kind of point the phone at george washington's face it would overlay with the story of martha washington and maybe one or two of those uh anecdotes and it's a it's a cool product but what it got me thinking about was how much this is a crazy opportunity yeah like i think a lot of people are excited about ar for obvious reasons but what i never thought before is how it allows you to capitalize on other people's success and popularity like just imagine this for a second like this is kind of an extreme example and i don't know if it would work long term but what might it look like if you were just creating ar augmentations for new york times best-selling books throughout the course of the year that somehow advertise your company or your firm like what ar allows you to do is basically pick something that's well known popular and say hey we're gonna add our two cents to this thing and i had never thought about that until i saw this implementation but i think there's a crazy amount of opportunity that's going to continue to play out and and frankly they're going to have to rewrite the rules on some of this stuff because i know mainstream authors and stuff are not going to be happy with like you know hey oh i disagree with this person's book well i'm just going to do an ar overlay so like everybody who bought whatever the four hour work week well i'm going to give you my two cents and like if you if you point your camera at page 40 of the book you'll get my blog post that like you know shows up on x y and z if you use this app there's going to be a lot of that as people catch onto this more and more like the advertising potential for ar and this was the first time i kind of realized it i agree with you totally and this is also remarkable and a little bit of a sidestep but it's one that is cool that we're talking about because i'm a bird watcher you may know that i post pictures of of the birds that i find and when i do that in like bird-watching communities you either need a picture or you need somebody that was there with you you can't just say like hey i saw this bird like yeah you might have but it doesn't matter it doesn't count this is kind of like a rule that we have and uh as i'm like scouring the country always on the lookout for birds i think to myself pretty damn often someone should make an ar app that as soon as you get a picture of a bird and i thought about this with google image search because sometimes i see a bird and i know a lot of birds but sometimes i think like i don't know what that is and so i get a picture and i reverse image search it to see if google can recognize the pattern and i can find out what bird it is and every single time that happens i think to myself why doesn't somebody create an app for bird watching in particular but they could do this with anything but bird watching just has like really tight communities i know it's like a weird thing but it's like a really passionate community and there's got to be some developers in there that think okay you got a picture of a bird let's upload an ar experience that could show this bird doing what it would do in nature or whatever so that you can actually get a feel of the behavior of this bird and so what i think to myself a lot when i think about ar and even like some of the metaverse stuff that is just inevitable that we we continue to talk about because it seems so inevitable that it is going to integrate itself into our society i don't think that we're going to be creating like new worlds i think that we're going to be creating like secondary worlds around the things that are already around us so take the example that i just said well now what if you do it with flowers right how many times do people walk down the street and say oh what a pretty flower let me take a picture of it and what would you normally do you would post it on instagram right but that's web 2.0 why wouldn't you like pop a button and say like oh wow like i'm immersed in this new world for a second so i know it's a little bit of a leap as to like where we were but as soon as i i see ar i don't think it's going to be like pokemon go where we create like a brand new world that we need to interact with i think it's going to be kind of like secondary things just like this is the actual world that you live in now let me create an experience to sort of like accentuate this world just one step further totally and i think bird watching is actually a great example for that because it does well there's a couple reasons one is because it does feel niche to anybody who's outside of it right so anybody who's not a bird yeah well so interestingly we actually wrote about this at trends and it's like the whole world of ornithology is way bigger than i ever would have expected yeah you'd be surprised man yeah man so i'm looking at it right now just to give people some some background in this like if you're outside if you're not a bird watcher you hear somebody say i'm a bird watcher and you're just like oh that's quaint like who else does that turns out a lot of people so here are a couple quick facts i don't know where this currently stands this was written about a year ago but at that time the ornithology subreddit had grown 650 percent in a year from 20 000 to 128 000 people and in 2021 more people than ever logged their bird sightings in the uk's big garden bird watch three times as many 18 to 29 year olds participated in more than twice as many 30 to 34 year olds so like the audience is growing really fast and get this this is crazy bird watching is a big business there are 47 million bird watchers and they spend 41 billion dollars a year on trips and equipment in the us and that was in 2011. so right here in my office next to me i got my binoculars i can't believe this just happened like i was in oculus right next year because i got my window right here and i live in tennessee so hey there's it's a big bird watching state but there's also um eastern bluebirds around here which are really really cool and so if i ever see one i bust out my binoculars it's so funny that's awesome yeah so the point here is like even these things that you would probably assume from the outside or really small communities can be huge and if you can get in front of them in a way that like connect or or even if you like it's probably best if you belong to one of these communities uh you can build a business in those that's way bigger than most people would have expected like let me ask you this what do binoculars cost i mean assuming they're pretty pricey right they're not cheap they range for sure some of them are very powerful and some of them are even more powerful because they have uh photography attached to them so like the zoom is is also dubbed as a photography lens which is is the holy grail with with burning and bird watching they're actually two separate things if you want to get like super strict about it but if you get the picture you know it's it's like a treasure hunt those apps really within the last five years have what's made it so popular just because of the whole idea but i got one right um yeah yeah totally and like going back to my original point there is i i don't think that uh that remarkable products that are gonna be made need to be like so grand in this whole new alternate universe you know i really think the things that we were looking at today where it's just a slight a slight deviation of the norm a thing that just sort of really really sticks in your head i think those are going to be the opportunities in the next 10 to 15 years as people develop the the new internet more or less i don't even know what we call it yet i don't think the term metaverse actually applies because you know i'm repeating myself but we're not building like a whole new world we're building like a virtual layer on top of what we already live in and that virtual layer is going to be different depending on the ship that you're into and so i think that's pretty exciting definitely hey can i ask you one more question before we wrap this up sure have you ever read the book snow crash or listen to it has it ever crossed your radar at all no i i this might not be real but wasn't that the book that was just on tim ferriss podcast yesterday with mark zuckerberg is that like a sci-fi book it is sci-fi i didn't i didn't uh i haven't heard that episode yet so maybe i didn't realize that zuck was on tim's podcast that's pretty interesting yeah he's doing like a whole i'm not a bad guy i don't take down you know like civil democracy alone please like me see i'm just a regular person for well we should have mine all right zach if you're listening if you think it came up it probably probably was the same book because you know this is apparently pretty um foundational sci-fi it's written back in the 90s and i think i could be wrong about this but i am pretty sure it's the book that coined terms like the metaverse and hackers and maybe i could be wrong about that so if anybody can fact check me but i'm listening to it right now and the thing that gets me about it is i'm like probably 10 hours into this book at this point i'm just kind of listening to it like it's like a it's like a rage listen like i'm just listening to it to finish it yeah i'm sure it was great when it was written but right now living how i express this i don't get the point of the book it just seems like a pointless waste of time to me and the reason is because everything that he talks about that like was sci-fi back when he first wrote it it's just real now and so i have to keep like giving i have to keep reminding myself like oh this was really revolutionary back when he wrote it because now he just like there'll be a whole chapter about how he walks into a bar in the metaverse and like there's no legs on the tables because that would be pointless and blah blah and i'm like yeah we get it we've seen the metaverse like that's that's how it is and that's you know it's it's funny to me because i um obviously it was very ahead of its time when it was written and it's interesting to see how much has come true but i don't know there's like a version of our world where soon it's gonna like i kind of wonder if in the future they're gonna watch star wars and be like who even likes this it's like oh you're just it's like watching traffic footage for like for for two and a half hours yeah we get it people fly x-wings like it happens every day you ever read the book feed no what's that about uh also a very similar circumstance where i recommended it the other day and i read it when i was in germany i read it in one sitting because it was my first week in germany i was very jet-lagged i was very like culture shocked i wasn't quite fluent with my german yet and so i couldn't speak to anybody and i kind of had this day where i was like i don't know what the hell i'm doing here let me just sit and read this book which is kind of what i've done my whole life and uh it's about kids that when they're born have the opportunity to get little chips they call it a feed put into their brain and the feed basically just gives them access to a network more or less where they can talk to each other either through text and send each other data straight through their feed and there's this one girl that they meet that their parents were very religious like traditionally religious and said no we don't want our daughter to have a feed and this girl had this freedom that everybody else who had the feed like really envied and really wanted but you know ultimately uh i'm gonna spoil the book for you but by the end of the book ultimately like she was just so disadvantaged that the whole world left her behind so she was like this free butterfly flying around by herself and like an endless lonely void and jesus yeah and like that this was i was in germany so what it was almost 20 years ago i think i was in germany when i was 17. i'm 35 now so 18 years ago and um and this was before iphones you know like i still i didn't have a cell phone in germany and now you know we're all in the feed and to imagine the freedom that we get when we when we lose our phone for three days right and you come back it's like oh why do i even want this thing again i was so free but then you realize how disadvantaged you are and that was another book where like i i recommended it not too long ago and i remember like i wonder let me pick that book back up and i was just like i don't need to read this anymore because this is already true oh no yeah it's so weird let me uh find the title real quick just for people who might want to check it out it's um by matthew tobin anderson it's called feed it's really good i read it in one i read it in one session do you do you think you would do the neural link thing if they get that like up and running inside your lifetime i would probably do it in the same way that like my grandparents use an iphone where you know my grandmother's like what are you texting me for just call me like i probably wouldn't have the capability to see its utility you know i don't know maybe who knows like i remember when people first started having iphones very very specifically telling my friend i don't need that that's a waste of time i don't need to i don't need an iphone and now like there's no way i could live without it i can literally run my life with my iphone yeah and you know so who knows never say never but it's it's definitely uncomfortable to think about for sure yeah i feel the same way i'm i i'm very torn on it there's a part of me that says well if that's where society wants to go like i'm okay getting left behind partly because i worry about i mean just having lived through the whole rise of smartphones i know that you give something up when you embrace that technology exactly and to take it to the next level doesn't sound no matter what they say nothing's free exactly even with the metaverse i feel that way sometimes i'm like you know social media hasn't worked out great and like like so what's our idea just like make it more immersive that's that's the idea behind the metaverse like oh well yeah it's been great for everyone's happiness anxiety self-esteem let's take this up to 10 you know or 11. so there's a part of me that's like well just i'll i'll i'll bow out at that point but then there's another part of me and i i admire this in my my grandfather's like this like he would 100 do it right now no questions asked he's very excited about what the future holds in fact i was headed to his birthday party like two weeks ago and i noticed some i brought him some uh some programming books he's learning how to program raspberry pi and i was headed to the party i'm like you know i just noticed i'm going to my grandfather's birthday party i have no idea how old he is but i know that he's gonna need these programming books for like what he's spending his time on he's gonna be so jazzed about these so i admire that in him his ability to just continually um adapt to whatever the world like throws at you just like embrace it and this so there is a part of me that goes well maybe you know in for a penny and per pound just just go all in i don't know yet where i would actually end up on it but it's interesting all right man let's wrap this thing up what did we talk about we talked about oh god it is of visuals we talked about combining traditional copywriting with experience we talked about i guess what we're going to call experiential marketing whatever that means congratulations ethan you invented a new industry and then naturally we went into ar and metaverse because of course we did yeah everything ends up in the metaverse yeah yeah i hope you guys enjoyed this let us know let us know what you think i want to know i want to know if anybody out there is uh rip roaring ready to go on the neural link thing and uh that's it i guess if you like this go check us out on twitter i'm at damn ethan and tim is at i never remember yours tim stoddard or stop ken stotts uh and thanks for listening everyone thanks everyone really appreciate you and we will talk to you next week [Music]