Bad Data Causes More AI Failures Than Models Do with Richard Valentine

We talk about the real shift happening as AI moves from chatbot to teammate, and why persistent memory is the make or break layer for useful automation. We dig into governance, data hygiene, and practical workflow design so AI output gets better over time instead of turning into expensive noise. 

• moving the show toward YouTube and a more educational format 
• why memory matters when AI becomes a partner or agent 
• how regulated industry thinking exposes weak spots in business data 
• crystallization theory and remembering the path to the answer 
• coding agents, vibe coding, planning, and scaling constraints like throughput 
• governance basics including permissions, API calls, token usage, and QAQC 
• hallucinations as a human and data problem more than a model problem 
• using decay and forgetting to make memory useful 
• the agency paradox of standardized delivery with client specific outputs 
• domain expertise plus AI fluency as the new competitive advantage 

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: https://richardvalentine.dev/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-l-valentine/

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Transcript

Cold Open And Big Shift

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

Moving To YouTube And Education

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. I just changed my uh input for the mic, so hopefully you can still hear me. Um I am excited about where we're taking this conversation. I am thinking that the transition that we really haven't made to YouTube this episode might bring about that shift. We are up on YouTube. We are going to be changing the format. Uh, I do have a whiteboard behind me. We are going to be doing more education. I do need to change the intro. Probably need to change the name of the podcast. Um, I'm sorry, guys. I've been super busy. Uh we've been doing a lot of development work. Uh, we've we've been launching a number of things. I've had a lot going on. I do have another podcast out there, maybe launching another one. But what I'm really thinking is maybe rolling them all up into one because I think it's becoming uh like AI all the time. Um, and it's just eating everything. AI is just absolutely eating everything. And we were talking a little bit, and I've hented at uh persistent memory. And like as you move the shift from like a chat bot to like a teammate, um, I I've been reaching out to some people in my network, and uh I got one of the researchers that's really, really up there uh with AI and memory to come on. He has a couple of provisional patents, he's published some white papers, uh, he's uh dedicated some time teaching me some things, and so I wanted to share him with audience. Ricky Valentine, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Hi, thanks for having me. And you know, AI all the time, that doesn't sound like a bad uh a bad name to the podcast right there, you know?

Why Memory Becomes The Bottleneck

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Well, you know, the conversations that I'm having, whether it's at kids' softball or you know, at work or whatever, the conversation always kind of AI just seeps back into that conversation, whether it's people concerned about taking their job, about what it can do, um, you know, about like what they're hearing uh in the news, different industries. Like I can't get away from it. And people know that like I, you know, I'm pretty involved with it. So I I get pulled into these conversations. And you know, I I spoke at OTC offshore technology conference, um, and and we were talking about AI on physical devices. So like that transition out of IT, which where it's really lived in a developer community, and and it's being applied to actual assets and production, and you know, the internet of things, and like I mean, it was just really amazing to uh moderate a panel of some of the top experts and like where that conversation went, not on the panel necessarily, but in kind of little corners and throughout the conference, people having different kinds of conversations. Um, what was was really fascinating. And you know, as we move from uh you know using it as a chat bot to using it not just as a thinking partner, but actually actual you know partner or teammate, memory becomes really, really important and the data gets polluted and the the calls of what it remembers and the challenges versus like when you start working in an enterprise environment. So we've been shifting EWR digital to an AI first company where we're sharing all the like same skills, um, where everybody's connected in on like certain processes so we can standardize and scale. And um, you know, different people have different solutions for different things, and then they they you know, like what is the right solution? How do you standardize it? And you know, you and I have talked um for hours really uh at different times, and you know, different people are all gonna approach a problem differently and come up with the right solution for them, but AI just looks at that as like noise or like a bug. And so how AIs remember stuff and for you to be able to work with it and train it and you know set governance to this, I mean, memory's at the center of it all. Um so what yeah, what are you seeing? Like kind of I'm just teeing it up for you.

Agents, Coding Assistants, And Throughput

SPEAKER_01 4:52

So I, you know, I guess kind of where where it all started for me, uh, and I won't go through the the life story, but it starts at a young age, and the fact of I started out in the medical field and I always hated how much healthcare it, you know, I I felt like once I got an understanding for like technology and stuff, I would see that okay, wait, we're we have data analysts that are like printing out something from a two million dollar system and then hand typing it into Excel. And so like that just made me like really like want to fix that solution and like have that desire at a young age. But as I as I grew older, I realized that the advantage was that when you're in healthcare and in a regulated industry, as you know, um you kind of have a crystal ball if you can look outside of your field because adaptation just takes so much longer. So, you know, if you're looking at where innovation is happening in less regulated industries, then you kind of seem like you're, you know, uh have a crystal ball because because I can see, okay, hey, well, you know, they've sped over there. That how can I incorporate this here? And that's just you know amplified by having AI because now I don't even have to do all the footwork of, hey, how do these two dots connect? I just have to have the wherewithal to go, hey, can you tell me how this connects to me? You know, and so that's really how um how all this came about for for me was I just saw the way AI was handling different problems and and the memory thing. And it was, you know, we've been able to Google something and find the answer at our fingertips for a long time that's really not new. Uh, you know, if for those of you, which I'm sure most of you are, uh in the day and age of just good old Google, you would type in something and then you fire up a form and you get two or three different answers. But sometimes, actually, more times than not, those three answers would all work, but they wouldn't work for you, or one would work for you. And so to me, it was like, wait, the great thing about having AI shouldn't be like I have a pretty good memory myself. I don't needed to remember the answer. I needed to remember how I got to the answer, or what made that answer the right answer for me. Um, and so that kind of you know pulled on this little piece of thread that uh that got me to crystallization theory, which is kind of where I started my journey. So I I didn't ever, I never touched a line of code until like 2024. I'd always been kind of the conduit and mouthpiece between business and technology, uh, but it was you know a lifetime of developers telling me, well, you can't do it that way, or it doesn't work like that. And so when this AI kind of revolution came about, I was like, well, you know, now's I now's as good a time as any to see like who is wrong, right? And it turns out we both were. Um so uh in I mean that in the way that uh it does work like that. You can do those things, but also shipping a product that lasts 15 or 20 percent, as you know, and you know the amazing work you guys do at EWR, um, it's it's a lot harder than than the internet is making it seem these days, you know. Um and so so kind of just learning from those things and and and going from not being able to make a login page to you know four patents and uh eight billion tokens on one platform, um it's been both humbling, but also just a lot of a lot of uh you know, hitting every branch on the way down and and learning from it.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that I think is important for people, like there's a lot of web developers that listen to the show, there's a lot of SEO people. Like when we start talking about agents, they're really like that's short for coding agent, right? It's a coding agent that developers use. So, like if you're not familiar with a lot of this stuff and it's really new to you, it's because you haven't been in the developer world, but the developer uptake on a coding assistant um is like over 90%, right? So, like dev heavy environments um are utilizing this technology at a rapid pace. And you know, for someone to go from like you know, understanding like analytics and business to to be able to use an agent and orchestrate like a system and all that, it takes some system thinking, it takes understanding how applications are built, like going to get some basic Python knowledge, like not saying you have to code it, but saying how it works, like what you're saying of how it fits together is really important. But the caveat to that is anything you can think of, this is what I believe currently, anything you can think of in your mind is now possible. So if you can map out a workflow, if you can map out guardrails, if you can um think through the problem and the second order, well the first order, second order, third order effects of like what you're gonna do and how that's gonna impact it. Like for developers, for example, you got to think about throughput, right? Like you're building, you're vibe coding something, right? And yeah, there's a bunch of people say it's just super easy to do it, and you vibe code this thing, but you can't necessarily go to market with it. And like once you start getting like a lot of users, all of the actions that are happening are getting processed one user at a time. That was like even when we were talking about big Bitcoin back in the day, like it can't process at the throughput of uh like a credit card, like right, like you can't do billions of transactions, so you got to think through this of what the end state looks like going forward. And there's been a lot of debate on can you vibe code something or do you have to do it the traditional way? And you know, I I was kind of watching that debate, and you know, again, I'm not a developer, but I've project managed some things, and I'm going, well, if you train your system to code it with the traditional like subject matter expert knowledge of how you're gonna build it, it's gonna assist you to build it faster. So it's not this or that, it's it's the same thing.

Governance, Compliance, And Token Costs

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Yeah, and you try and explain it to one of the two camps, and they don't because for the people that want to spend three months planning, like I'm like, no, like we got to iterate quick. And then the people that want to iterate too quick, I'm like, no, but you gotta have a plan. And so, like, I sound contradictory to both, but you're exactly right. And that's where I landed was you know, there's a famous quote it's attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but they say it's it's not really, we don't know who it said, but it rings true nonetheless, and that's uh give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I'll spend four hours sharpening my axe. And you know, it's it really is that way in this day and age is that yes, we can iterate quickly, and so we should, but at the same token, you can save yourself a lot of heartache. No, no pun intended on the token card. Uh, you can save yourself a lot of heartache if you, you know, really do think it out. And so that was one thing that I never like having worked with developers and stuff, I didn't come into this as somebody that like was like, oh, I'm gonna spend a couple hours a week and I'm gonna get good at this and I'm never gonna have to learn anything about code, uh, because I just simply knew that that wasn't true. I knew that I could, I knew that I could use it as a crutch, but I knew that, you know, from from starting out where it was just pattern recognition of, hey, I noticed every time I'm doing authentication, like I get messed up here. Okay, we need to tell it to watch out for that. Like, not even knowing what I'm really trying to watch out for. I just know that, like, hey, when we get to this point. Um, and this was back when we had context windows of just like 16,000 tokens, 32,000 tokens. So, you know, it does one file, and it's like, where am I? Like, are we building something today? It's like, yeah, we just built 200 files. What do you mean? Um, so and then also with the regulated industry thing, because of the fact I had a passion for healthcare, luckily I was able to get in the uh Azure uh Microsoft Founders Hub Program and have credits and be able to utilize a lot of their railing um, you know, a pipeline for I feel like that's one thing that a lot of people, um the the hybrids of of business and development, they're really finding the sweet spot. And I think it's because of things like because I didn't have the skill, I had to find, you know, not necessarily the way around it, but the way that I could get that, you know, uh HIPAA compliance without me knowing, you know, hey, like, okay, well, what's a pen test? You know, um, and so it was utilizing things like uh, you know, I now I still had to have my code be be solid. And so I kind of used myself as the uh the scout, if you will. So I would kind of like move forward and and make prototypes and things, and then I'd have, you know, my development team come from behind, and and it allowed us to kind of they could work at the pace they wanted to and really have things mapped out, but it it didn't constraint the freedom of of being able to try new things out. So um, and now it's totally different these days in the fact that like you really can um do a lot of things if you're willing to just spend some time planning. Uh and and so, but we still have a lot of things, I think, in the way of governance. And I know that this is something that even though me and you have known each other for a while, kind of uh where we where we started having a lot of really long conversations was on governance. Um, and you know, that's a dividend that's not not gonna really be uh be paid or or a uh a debt that's not gonna be collected for for probably another year for a lot of people because they don't realize what because things do appear so easy and and they're not, because like you said, with the throughput and everything, you know, it's really easy to make a a superbase backend and and you know uh mismanage API calls. And oh, I just had you know, there's one person on my platform and I had 15,000 API calls in a day, you know, like so you amplify that into something that's just uh you either have you know Richie Rich as a a brother or or you know um you're you're just SOL.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

So um yeah, I I I mean I I think that um that's what I saw first, right? And and I think that what where you came from is really that sweet spot. Like you're you're interacting with developers, so you understand some of the vocabulary, and then you understand the business piece, and you're like sitting in the middle of it. Um, and so if people are on one or the other, they need to go try to build that vocabulary and understanding from that other area because that's that's really where we're sitting as like a human in the loop, as a bridge. We're we're a bridge between the the coding agent uh and what what the final output is and what the business or uh the goal is that we're trying to achieve. And you're you're the one that is gonna facilitate that. So if you're a solo operator or if you're working at a company, you're still building an operating system, right? That you're operating in or you're operating in together and you're coagulating like different um systems, and and then really it's about standardizing those systems. It was just like in in digital marketing, the biggest issue that we had previously was data fragmentation, like data was all over the place, and also the biggest issue right now in moving into like OT is um the data that is being produced is unclean. So even the div or or what you're talking about is is about the penance, or that's not the right word, uh of just not utilizing your data properly. Like anybody that's using a CRM, there's a lot of people here that are using CRM. Is your data pristine? Right? Would you trust your life on that data? All right. Um, how up to date is it? How current it is, and you know, like I know a lot of people that are using Salesforce or Hubstaff or whatever, but they're not using it the way that developers intended it to be used. And so the data is unclean and it can't be processed. Now you amplify that to using something on a physical device of like uh you know, a pump on a well, um, that data better be right, like because you're you're running all kind of math and uh heretic like that thing could blow up, right? Or something bad could happen. And so you gotta trust the data, and you gotta also the latency is a really big issue there. But like all of these, these uh like sins, or I don't know what the right like frame is to think about this, but they're all gonna come due. And and so from an operations background, the thing I zoned in on was like, oh my gosh, you've got to have the governance set up right, and everybody's got to agree if you're working in an enterprise environment, and okay, why why are these hallucinizations I can't even talk uh happening? Well, it's because of bad data or you didn't give it enough information, like it's not the AI, it's the human user. Um, and so I don't know, I doubled down on that, and then there's now regulatory laws that are coming down the pipe that people are not expecting. I'm going, okay, like why don't like there's a period, you know, says it's September, but they might have pushed it out a little bit. Um on Moto Point, I set up like a countdown timer because it's like it's coming, right? And and and so it's like get yourself ready, um, audit your tech stack, understand what's going on, map out your API calls, like bring your token usage down. Like it's it's gonna be a win-win all around if you set up the system properly from the beginning and get everybody onboard on that system. Because if not, the problems you're having, let's say just use the CRM as something that everybody can follow, is gonna get amplified. The problems are gonna just get amplified with AI and the noise and degradation, and like you're just trying to fill up the context window of all this information. And you know, you know, when you're talking to AI, after a certain amount of time, it like will compress the conversation, but you lose context and you were having this great conversation, and then oh, like now it doesn't even remember like what you said. And when I was using AI as a thinking partner a couple years ago, that was like the most frustrating thing ever. I was like, Oh, I was in like this really good place, and you like wanted to keep that chat that way, and you know, and then like I remember when uh uh uh chat GBT like 4.0, like they upgraded it and they took away the persistent memory, and that was when I switched to Claude.

QA Matters When AI Forgets Rules

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Like, I was just like, I just lost my thinking partner and it can't remember anything, but it at least with Claude, like it would tell you hey, start a new conversation with Chat GBT. You know, you'd be thinking nothing was wrong, and then you'd be like, wait, you just got a lot dumber, like you know, uh and uh to your point. So I was actually uh with a good friend of mine, Hank, uh in and he's a uh a vice president of treasury at a at a one of the bigger, bigger bank bank brands. And uh we were out one night and I was talking about you know how look, we have to, you know, I've had been so focused on the viewpoint of like not making a a a world where where there wouldn't be hallucinations because I thought that that was the crux of enterprise, because you know. So remember that I've just gone through my like odyssey of like coding the past year. So I kind of lost touch with like a little bit of my business activate while I was in the hole. And uh and he goes, Ricky, they're not worried about the models hallucinating, they're scared of their own data. And just there was, you know, that's in the top five most profound moments that I've had in the past year. And then to him, he's like, Ricky, like what? Like, do you are you okay? Like, do you know, like, do you see something? And I'm just like, you know, molding this over. And I'm like, dude, I never thought of that. And so as I'm working through these problems, I'm thinking about, okay, now we have to go back and we have to look at ingestion, you know, and and and uh and backtracking that uh to the point where at one point I was like just convinced that, hey, okay, we're just gonna have like shadow hospitals and like shadow billing companies, and like all they're gonna do is like, you know, just uh basically sit there and be the like non-biased, like, okay, we're gonna decide what like has right authority and like what gets like saved is memory. Um, because you know, when you think about it, uh you know, there might have been that period of time where like uh Susan, you know, was out on maternity leave, and and so your books aren't, you know, like uh you, you know, you had a temp that was, you know, doing bookkeeping. And so, you know, those things that you don't really feel so much at the time when you have something that can remember all of this and it's using those data points to the T, you know, you you know, back then your CPA just came in at the end of the year, he said, Oh, I'm gonna fix these things, you know, did some you know magic with the numbers or got you some you know electric vehicle credits or something, and you were on your way, you know. But when when each data point, you know, and that's where really I got frustrated too, was you it was all or none. And that's where like my work has kind of been in memory is you know, you it's either shaving everything down to fit one answer or it's remembering everything, and then what's the point, you know? Um, and it's the same thing with context, you know, it's either taking everything too literal or like not remembering. I'm like, didn't we just, you know, uh, and so kind of threading that needle. Um, and that's where looking at that, and back to my analogy of the forms uh and making crystallization theory is basically as you compound those answers and as more people in your network um, you know, validate those answers, and it has to have human right, like a human is the only one with right authority. You know, that's another thing that kind of drives me crazy is I'm such an efficiency person, but even I can't get through my head like, wait, you know, we're saving all this time, so we can't use some of that save time to like double check the work and like you know, like we want everything to compound, learn, and just get smarter. I I like to say it gets smarter, but it doesn't get wiser, you know. Like, so we're just we're we're saying more, more, more, get it smarter, get it smarter. But it's I'll take you know, it being wise and being able to produce something, you know, that that has some merit that I didn't think of, or you know, that uh and so that's kind of uh kind of where where I I left with that. And I'm kind of losing my yeah, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

So there's two things that you said that that I want to uh highlight. We've started to change our workflows, okay? We've we've started to change our workflows where we have some power users that can produce a massive amount of output, but QAQC becomes critically important because as of today, like I can't trust the output's gonna be perfect every time. And like, unless you even set like uh like hooks, for example, if you're on COD, sometimes you set a rule, it forgets the rule because it gets lost in the context window because it doesn't reread everything all the time. Well, I think it it does, and that's why you use so many tokens, but it it doesn't weight them, like right to what you're saying, and what you keed in on, and and I believe this is happening to kind of bring some of this back to digital marketing uh for everyone listening, because this is a mindset shift. All of these platforms are already working on math, okay? They're already running formulas, like all the different social media platforms and Google uh are all you know already running these things in the background. And one of the things you're talking about is like the value of authorship, right? Like who's saying what, the degradation rate of when did they say it, like the importance of how current it is. You're seeing all these things kind of come to light uh when when you're using agents and when you're looking at memory. But like Google, for example, you know, uh a review on Google uh or a comment on a social media post, who the person is in association with the post, and typically in association with you, because sometimes they show it to people that like your uh content or they show it to your network, like so there's different weighting factors, but then what it is they're saying, right? Short, long, is it related to the post? Um and then when did they say it? You'll actually see on posts uh like there's a rating system, right? And so you'll see it on the post that the most recent post typically stays at the top, it gets uh auditioned, and then it falls to kind of where it sits. And so think about that with memory. And I think you you and I were talking about this uh before, like when someone goes to sleep, I think your brain is like compressing all that knowledge, and like what does it choose to remember and not remember in short-term and long-term memory? And even a lot of where all this memory stuff is going is the most elegant piece of equipment is the brain, right? And we're starting to replicate the brain in a lot of ways, uh, is what it like. I just see a lot of parallels. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Yeah, so you know, I uh I've lived a lot of lives, and in one of those, uh, I was working in brain mapping for personal injury cases. Um, and we used uh a really great machine that was uh quantitative EEG EKG and evoke potentials test uh that was able to see TBI but also be able to see, and I'm gonna circle this back to yeah, I don't know what you're saying, but uh anyways, so it was it was a great scan and it it allowed me to kind of like learn a lot about the brain, that you know, get just be very interested in it. And so one of the things that I put in my my memory program is is the ability to forget, you know, like that is the decay. So I use a weight formula um that has a decay, and then based on the importance, kind of exactly like you were saying, based on the importance and the weight of that is at what rate it decays. Uh and you know, when it comes to like the other day, I was thinking of things in terms of uh an agency, you know, for for digital marketing, and like, you know, people don't realize like how much governance is like it affects every industry. So, like, for instance, you know, you don't know if uh, you know, somebody might not know if their employee, you know, did as much work or that that uh that subcontractor did as much work as they say they did, or or what have you. Well, that's drift, you know, like that's uh you know, the uh is is the the digital truth.

Scaling Agencies With Standardized Variety

SPEAKER_02 30:14

What is that what is that? What is this? Like bar what where does the truth start? Like, what are you using as the reference? And then what's that deviation from that or that drift of of where it's going? Because you're like, okay, and that's like scope creep, guys. Like, that's basically what happens is you're like quote this and you're like, oh, everything's gonna go perfect, and I can charge this, and the feedback from the client's gonna be immediate. Like, you have to start building in, um, knowing that that there is gonna be that that scope creep, but how do you limit how much of that there is? And I I look hand hand hats off to all the other digital market. I'm going to a conference uh next week, actually, that's just for agency owners, right? Because I really want to see, I want to kind of benchmark too, kind of where we're at versus all the other agencies, what they're talking about, how people are dealing with the injection uh of of AI into their workflows. But to there's not a lot of really big agencies, uh Ricky. There's like you gotta really scale your business to get those efficiencies of scale. There's a lot of like a couple people and a dog, I say, like you know, there's a couple guys and a dog in a house, like agencies, um, uh, or there's a lot of freelancers. Um, and hopefully, if you're one of those people that has your dog right next to you, please don't be offended because sometimes my dog uh will be here as well. So uh so I I meant that I've met the stereotype I'm talking about myself, but um there's not a lot of agencies that can scale, right? And that are in that phase of scaling because there is so much governance and there's so much domain knowledge, and there's so much that has to happen. But the shift with AI is you can start building teams and agents that have domain knowledge that you can build governance around that can start to help you fill in those gaps and to get through that that area of uh like the scaling from the small company to the large company. But it's so much thinking that has to go into it, and you're not just building one brand, you're building multiple brands for other people based on you know the lead gen that if that's the focus of what you're doing for those clients. And uh, and so I I think and you're starting to hear it to talk about with AI, there's gonna be billion-dollar businesses um built with AI. I think the job of a digital marketing agency is like 10 times harder because you're not just building your business, you're building businesses for other people, and all the inputs and the workflows, and uh how that client likes to work, and the communication and the personality is constantly in flux and changing, and you got to plug in all these other systems to fit into your system, and and that's where I think you know, uh, like this agent economy is is gonna uh there's gonna be standardization of how businesses interact potentially. And and uh I don't know what are you what are your thoughts around that?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Yeah, yeah, it's I do have to say hats off to the agency owners because as I've been doing more, you know, uh me and you have been talking more, so I just you know I'm naturally curious. And uh I don't know what agencies did the AI, but like they do not see you as a tan, like like a market to go to. Like you did it, was it sounded personal. Like every time I would question AI about like, hey, making this solution or that solution, because because you're right, I guess there's just you know, there's there there's kind of like there's big agencies and then there's you know, kind of like mom and pop operations. But one thing that tipped my hat off in all seriousness, too, is that you have to standardize the result, but make it different for every customer. You know, talk about a paradox there, you know, like I need to have the consistency in my deliverability, but no two answers can technically be the same, you know. Um, so I know that just being uh uh WordPress was kind of like my my first love, so to speak. Uh and I know that that's really the hard time.

SPEAKER_02 34:36

Houston boy.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

That's one of the hard times that they're having over with at with WordPress with AI is yeah, sure, you can get it to do anything, but try and get it to do 200 SKU product product descriptions in the same way, and you know, like even if and so if you don't understand, uh you know, and and even me, and even then it can still take its own uh turn on it. You know, if you're not making those outputs in the schema, you know, outputs that like hey, this has to be like this. If you're just relying on a on a you know, a large language model to just hey, it's gonna come out this way every time, even with the prompt, um, there's gonna be some variance. Um yeah, no, I was just oh yeah, keep going.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

I was I was basically I was just saying you can do that with a harness, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Yeah, yeah. Well, well, and yeah, but even then it just uh it's you do that with with with you know to be honest, I don't know. I just I went through a lot of different scenarios that like I come from regulated industries, and after looking at like what a like mid-level agency because like first off, you're like you're in a you know, if you're kind of you know in the in the middle or or kind of higher up, like if you're higher up, like somebody's you're making a custom solution and like you already have had it for a while. Like if you're in the middle, you're not a big enough market for somebody really to build for you, but like you're building for everybody else. So then how do you build for yourself? You know, like uh it's so so I just I I I consider myself a like a man that walks between silos and solves problems. And even I was like, it's I spent a whole night just like, well, what if I used Docker profiles and and each cut client had a profile, and then it was like, Well, yeah, but then you know, permissions, okay. Well, then we're gonna make an MCP that then, and then I was like, what about efferennial containers, you know, like like uh and so making the client come to you instead of you logging into the client, and uh it it just it was a fun thought experiment, but yeah, I'll give you some tools that have gone down that path, and that has actually been like the scalable solutions to basically you know uh install something uh or they have to plug into it and they're working within your system, but then you get into data governance issues of like they're collecting everybody's data and process, and so there's a there's this is a tough this is a tough industry, and it's it's certainly tough if you're coming in to crack it.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

How I have perceived it today, and I've been bringing on different agency owners that have moved through this path. Um, and where I see them going is and this is how I view myself as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

I'm trying to build an elite team that thinks about AI because I saw how cool this stuff, and I won't I won't let the cat out of the bag, but I saw the cool stuff. Like you were kind of like the trajectory you're taking with EWR, and I was like, that's cool. I want to think about that for a little bit, and then I was like, No, I don't, that's hard. Like, I don't no wonder, you know, like uh that's that's a difficult, like I don't know how you put together so much you put together because uh yeah, I did that for one night, and I was like, Yeah, I'm going back to regulated industries like you can have that.

Building AI First Teams And Workflows

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Yeah, no, and AI what will like say, oh, this is not where you should be spending your time. Well, here's the thing I think with that knowledge and all the domain knowledge that I picked up from different industries, building an AI first team and building a leap like team of project managers, right? You can now take that and apply it to anything. Okay. And I think the whole game now is to take your business and add that AI layer and make as many people at the possible as possible AI first. And so that's why I think smaller teams where everybody can talk the same vocabulary and language and wear those glasses and look at problems their own way, and then also interact and understand governance of like, we're gonna, I'm gonna have like my enterprise, I'm gonna have my like individual, then I'm gonna have my agents, and then I have agents that have like different skills, like you need to understand that hierarchy or that structure and be able to have that in your mind's eye of how those operations work. And then you can just take AI and you can start applying it to different industries. And so one of the things that I'm actually working on, we were we were kind of talking about before this call, is I mean, I I just went through this Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business program. If you're uh a business owner, I I would encourage you to go look at it. It's a completely free program. Um, it's it's basically the same hours as NBA, but it's applied to your business. And um, I was like the only real true agency owner in my cohort, but I was also the there was maybe one or two other people that were using automation. They weren't maybe using like a gentic AI um or autonomous AI or whatever word your industry is is using. Uh it's a similar vocabulary, but but they all are asking me to do a talk about about this, and like they all understand the uh potential of what it could be their business, but they don't know where to start or where to apply it. And I was like, okay, let me do like an exercise to get your mindset right so you have the mindset shift. And I think we're kind of doing that with this call to to hopefully to agree you're you're grabbing on what we're saying, and you you can kind of uh see see the trajectory now and kind of see a better picture of where things are going. And and we can apply this. Like I have workflows to apply to social media and I have it to apply to paid ads, like Mantis, for example, uh has been ingesting all the data of Meta, right? And so, like, if you want to do um if you understand the basics, the fluency of AI, and then you want to apply it to to Mantis uh for paid ads, because really if you're gonna be running like Facebook or Instagram ads, like it has so much of the data set that maybe the others don't have that layer on top of the model, right? And so you can get more customized output. But if you understand this, you can pivot, you can change, and it's just what are you gonna put your focus on? And so what I'm trying to build is is an elite team that all speak the language and work together, and we can apply it to any business problem. And those are the businesses today that are winning, the businesses that have already gone through not just digital transformation, right? Everybody's like, oh, I just made it through digital transformation, sort of. Uh, and now you're like, now it's the next mountain or the next peak, is like you need to start climbing AI because the people that are already up there, they're gonna be they're gonna be so far ahead of you that it's gonna be really, really hard to catch up. And these moats are starting to shrink of these big companies that are utilizing their brand and their trust that they've had for 40 years. I mean, that's gonna go a long way, but it's getting eaten away at. And so you got a elite team of people that say we're gonna tackle this business problem and we're gonna extract value from this, that, this, this kind of arbitrage. Like it's just AI's eating the world, like what I was saying at the beginning of this call. AI is eating the world.

Talk To The Agent Like A Person

SPEAKER_01 42:34

And I think what's interesting and different about AI is you know, usually you have to you have to drag people into new technology because it's it's more tactical to practical. You know, it's more the more the you know, the the innovators or the really high-tech people that get to it first. But because we have this consumer component of it that has grown so rapidly, now it's like businesses and like you know, everyday people that maybe aren't so technically inclined, they know that they need it, but they don't know, you know, and the people that they're calling on, like not you, but like you know, they're calling on people that they think know AI, and it's like they don't in there. So, you know, one of the biggest things that I like to tell people, I kind of like had made this like almost like a daily devotional um on my website that like uh and I was just posting it because my like family, it really started with me like trying to teach my family how to utilize AI. Yes, it's like look, it's not in modules or like learning how to do it, it's in learning like look, just talk to the agent, like gone are the days of like I need a prompt, like you know, that's like people when they you would carry their uh like floppy discs, you know, and you had a a program on like you know, uh 200 floppy discs. It's like look, just talk to it and experiment and just talk to it like you would a person, like, hey, can I do this? Can I do that? Um, and and by doing that and just you know, getting comfortable with it because I see so many people it never fails. You you're you're walking them through utilizing AI and they want it so badly like they want every word like because the one of the first things I do is install like Whisper Flow or some sort of dictation on there. I'm like, look, you don't even got time. But they they focus so much on those first three words and they can barely get them out. I say look relax. Just talk to it like just talk. And then that flows into you know now I have my mom like she's running her whole business like from a folder on her desktop and Cloud Code and I'm like you're doing better she's like oh you know I'm sorry Ricky I'm like no I'm just glad finally somebody's like you know like all my tech nerd friends are like there you know or like people that uh that they think that they want my uh my advice that they they're more hard headed than more setting their ways but and that's where I think people that you might feel like you're late to the party you might feel like you're getting left behind but truly like you can be a thought leader in this place if you dedicate 12 eight to 12 months just you know a little bit of time each day and just you know compound interest um it's it's not pretty it's not vibe coding an app in a weekend and it's making money next week um it's not pretending like that and selling a course about it it's getting in the trenches getting like you've done you know all the education and uh you know I'm lucky that I just get to kind of like hey Matt like yeah talk to me about that of course you you know and uh so I between that and and you know get up I get I get but uh but yeah people don't realize how there's no one's we're all figuring this out you know it's kind of like when you're coming of age and you realize that like your parents are just trying you know they're doing what they can they don't know you know that's the same way with AI like there's nobody that we don't even know how these things and this is a conversation for another day we don't even know how they actually work like no one does so you can't uh you you know I wouldn't consider anybody an expert at this what if we don't know how they're made well okay so like here's what I'm struggling with right now okay so I have like a like I I didn't talk about AI I was certainly experimenting we were using it a lot but as as kind of you know a a thought leader or you know somebody that's out there influenced whatever you want to call it I didn't want to talk about it until I was super educated and to your point the the compound interest of the foundational knowledge and building and building and building like I think certain things are just well understood but when you talk to people if they don't have that depth of knowledge there's some gaps that you have to traz traverse to get to the next level right and um what I want to be able to do is help get those people into that mindset so they don't have to fall in that ditch and go through all that learning.

Domain Knowledge As The New Moat

SPEAKER_02 47:01

They can expedite it and and I people have been asking me to start a coaching program for a long time. And like I'm like like it's a lot to teach somebody how to do SEO or you know digital marketing. Like there's I mean I have like three well the first book I wrote I read 300 books before I wrote my first book okay like and I was like highlighting it up and I tried to cram as much in there as I could and I'm I'm working on another book by the way I that's how I process stuff. Okay like I talk about it you know I I I listen I read I write like like I just I I'm just like a like I it flows and and I'm ready now to to to teach people where they need to go like and I feel comfortable enough that I I do believe I'm somewhat of an expert on some of this stuff. I mean AI just told me I'm like top one percent I just did a post on Facebook about it but I'm like but then I also discounted why it told me that I knew and I was like it's like sycophantic like the these these LLMs are gonna be a mirror and tell you what you want to hear based upon the output you get it because it wants to give you the right answer. Right. And I'm like you got to know this stuff. And and I think that where everything is going and this goes back for me. So people that have been listening to this podcast know my mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft. I was there I watched it she was there for 30 something years and she was one of the first employees I was playing video games when they like before the Xbox when they were just coming out with online PC games I was playing multiplayer games with my mom's like teammates and she's like you can't talk to them like that like that's not somebody you should talk to and I didn't know like I was you know I was just like this is who it was and she said you know yeah and and I look I was gonna be a computer science major like like I I I went the business route but but I can tell you it it was a love for me that brought me back to it and I just love technology and I saw the writing on the wall I saw what happened right you put on your resume worldwide web I have experience with the world like I can read also when people put like AI experience on their resume I I know about like where their experience level is based on uh how they talk about it um uh and it's the it it it's gonna eat everything it's gonna AI is eating everything so if you have domain expertise in what you have like just apply AI to it be expert in AI like that's what I want my kids like understand how to use AI and then apply it to real world knowledge and your domain expertise and the more domain expertise you have and real world knowledge as soon as you add that AI layer to it it makes you really really powerful and if you work with a bunch of people and like I gravitate like right where we great you and I are like gravitating to each other with different kinds of experience and there's other people I'm gravitating to those people and those people start working together to achieve goals like you know it's it's gonna be amazing. It's absolutely going to be amazing.

SPEAKER_01 50:18

And and I do want to say for for you know I know a lot of business owners uh listen and and tune in and uh you know 10 000 uh 10 000 people a day are are of retirement age retiring and what you know some of those people might be feeling at this point in time that that that kind of they're oh yeah they're but they're up but they don't realize that like they have their value is so so like if you own a business today if you're looking at selling your business today look at the value of the data so we've the these without getting too technical about it you know these LLMs these these AIs they've learned everything they can from the internet the the the private data of you know let's say you owned a logistics company an SEO company or this was any for those of you that have been you know meticulous in record keeping it is your time they said they said it never you never need that well guess what they were wrong you can file each other to them uh and I saw a company actually just got like a$300 million dollar raise the other day talking about just this and it's that look like the domain in a world where the that technology gap is taken it's the domain experts and understanding the way the processes work you know the only the the real unicorns I think are going to be the people that are come from a development background that throw themselves into business into real world processes because then they'll have both and that and that'll just be an unfair advantage but it's it's it is you know and I hate when they talk about you know like uh junior devs are going to be gone but I think where it where they're seeing that is that the it until a certain level domain experience beats technical knowledge right now and then what you know once you get in the upper echelon to tech so I think that's where people may be feeling that disconnect or thinking that's gonna happen it's it's more so that look like you know right now you know but if a technical dev can just get some of that system thinking I think it's kind of it's kind of a freaky Friday situation where if if this side could do this and that side could do that you know that we're all we can all be successful. I don't know my true definition and I'll kind of like end on this my uh my thing about AGI is I don't see it I'm sure we'll get there but my definition of AGI is AI bringing the best out of people and being your crutch in what you're bad at and helping you identify that. And so I think that's because that's the way I use it. I mean kind of I know me and you share this kind of like ethos of it that uh you know use for good um like it really can be a powerful tool not on a like hey it told me to do this so I'm gonna go do it but on a just thought experiment of like hey we could you know just taking some inventory and and seeing hey like am I good at this can I get better at it like so so Ricky I want to give give you an opportunity uh to to kind of share some of your papers and um you know what you have out there but I want to end on this guys like Sam Altman started white well I don't know if he started white combinator but he ran white combinator for forever and he started a lot of businesses or got involved in a lot of businesses like Airbnb like you should go look at his businesses.

Where To Follow Ricky And Final Ask

SPEAKER_02 53:57

He left to go run open AI if you look at his businesses all of them can use AI like all businesses can use AI but it's like a hub and smoke model. He's taking open AI and he's gonna apply AI to all of his businesses to get that unfair advantage because of how they're thinking and where they're at like that's that's what I'm seeing on a smaller level right I'm going I'm going there's a big transition of businesses getting handed off uh as as or passed down from newer generation but there's a lot of businesses that are going to change hands. You got to capture that domain knowledge but you can apply AI to these different businesses um and then apply capital to these different businesses and and build that kind of operational workflow between humans and agents and scale these businesses quite quickly. I mean I recently uh bought out my three partners at the agency because I wanted to take EWR in a little bit different direction and I already got uh a number of uh investors and people that want to uh do do different kinds of opportunities together that that know what we're capable of the team they've worked with us for a long time and I'm kind of going I'm I'm not kind of but I am going through that process I'm saying kind of because it's all new to me right I don't have the the the JV capital raise like I'm getting those domain knowledge people around me to okay take something public or to do something like that. And I'm assessing all the businesses I've seen over you know a decade plus and going what are the businesses that we could apply AI to and what industries that could move the needle the most and so I'm now viewing everything from that skill set and and we're we're we're starting to move towards that and we're I mean we're we're attracting companies like Circle like circle.com found us they hired us to to do some of this stuff and and like the world is just absolutely shifting and and I think your point on if you have that domain knowledge or you have that data you are in the cat bird seat uh if that I don't even know what that really means to be honest but um like if you're in the right spot and if you've now left mainstream you've been working for somebody for a long time whatever and you're stepping into consultancy like those are the people that are going to really move the needle if they get the basic knowledge in AI. And that's really where I think that opportunity is is that domain knowledge AI knowledge and apply those together. And hopefully this podcast has encouraged you to say hey I can do this I understand this this is new but I've learned a lot of new things and this is going to amplify whatever whatever I do. And I'm just encouraging you to take action now if you want to like or follow or reach out to us comment if you like kind of where I'm taking this podcast um please let me know. We are going to move more to maybe YouTube and some private trainings which I've done in the past but but really focus on AI. And I I just don't see any other future without it on the bad side though right cPanel which is based here in Houston it's got millions of websites taken down I think that that was probably one of the newer models that people are using it for nefarious things. There's gonna be a lot of that there's there's always going to be good versus evil sort of thing yin and yang and um you know like I I'm surprised more bad stuff hasn't happened yet but but I I'm I'm I believe humans are naturally good and are focused on good.

SPEAKER_01 57:52

And if we have more humans on the good side making the world a better place uh like the world's gonna look amazing uh in a couple years and I'm excited to see that so Ricky how do people get in touch with you how do they follow your work how they find more out about memory and kind of some of the other things that you're doing yeah so uh I have a website Richardvalentine.dev um drvalentine on pretty much every social uh so dr valentine's felt like the holiday uh and so yeah you're gonna be able to some of it's not gonna make any sense but then I also have like there's a whole page uh I think I'm on day 20 now of uh small like 20 minute daily devotionals to AI that like it starts you from like making a folder so we're gonna make you your own like brain like on your computer and walk you through the AI to uh and it's it's gonna be more of a teacher man to fish mentality because that's you know uh I to your point about the consultancy and stuff I know it might seem like a crowd space but you have to understand that all these people that that you that that the listeners might be seeing out there that are selling courses they're not really doing that consultancy there is so many small businesses that could use your help your expertise and um you know a lot of these things if you look at it from the the workflow level and not the in and solving a problem but but okay what is that problem actually made of uh you'll notice that all of a sudden that solution you made for one it dominoes and it can be used in so many other places um so yeah I'm LinkedIn uh Richard Al Valentine uh but yeah I'm sure you'll have the the links and always looking to uh provide value where I can uh I don't have a course so you don't gotta worry about that uh he's not selling anything I just asked him to come on because I wanted uh I wanted to share some of our conversations with you because I've I'm like after we get off a like a big session I'm like oh we should have recorded that you know and maybe we will going forward right and uh you know I I think uh a lot of people um are gonna need help and I think a lot of people want help right and I I think it comes down to like trust and relationships right because everybody can say whatever they want to say that's why I eat uh expertise authority trust Google added experience and they want to verify that in some way and authorship ways and like they're trying to say well all the information you said it at the beginning all the information in the world is out there but how do you use it what to do with it what's more important what's valuable to you these are all the things you got to get figured out and and I think if you had a guide to help you do that um you could get so much more done and I I mean I wanted to start a nonprofit honestly that could help people with data hygiene uh issues like we don't get taught that in school uh but data hygiene I think is where it starts and then viewing how to view everything from an AI first mentality um is is like an indoctrination to a certain extent and um we've had to do that one by one and I would love to do it in groups with people and you you find out with business owners and um different people in your network there's so many commonalities uh and there's so many ways to work together um and and you know the the the amount of people that are using AI really using AI versus the amount of people that aren't like it's it's a pyramid inverted right or if you understand that analogy if you're listening um you're you're at the tip of the pyramid uh if you get into it now and it's gonna be the tail on this thing is gonna be who knows how long uh and also when are people gonna stop learning and plateau um but it it's gonna be 10 years like why if you know where it's gonna be would you not get started now and and and that's I think the biggest thing I want you to take away from this is and I've been trying to get you if you've listened to this take action now because the people that are using it are getting better and better and more refined.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:21

And at a certain point it's gonna be really really hard to catch up right now I think you can jump in there but it's gonna be really hard to catch up. So um if you like this episode like I said please like it share it follow us let me know I'm doing a good job tell me not to talk as much uh tell me this sounds bad like I want to hear your feedback uh I I'm having AI look at all my comments comments and roll them up and let me know about them so I will see your comments uh it's hard on all the different platforms that people comment on a review would be super helpful um it it it's called Shaiko share like ball us if you've been listening for 16 years um but until the next time uh Ricky thanks for being on my name is Matt Bertram bye bye for now bye guys