10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40,
40,
40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40,
40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40,
Well, I heard two men talking on the radio.
Here
You know, most people blow their New Year's resolutions, statistics show, by the second Sunday of the year.
I love it when you're bringing the statistics.
I try.
The economist in you.
That's right.
I can't stay away from him.
Well, we got this.
2025.
Everybody relax.
We got this.
Yes, we're four days in, for goodness sake.
As my grandpa Jimmy used to say, if you've got something to worry about, tell your grandma Edie and she'll worry for you.
That's right.
Grandma Edie was a famous worrier.
Yeah, real worry wart.
Hopefully you've got somebody to tell your problems too so they can worry for you.
Otherwise, call in and talk to us about
Wow.
They just cut out everything negative in their life.
I wonder how one does that.
I can't even imagine.
We'll post the link on our Facebook thing.
Oh, what a pain, but we'll do it.
There I am.
Negative.
Alright, you're off.
I'm cutting it out.
I can't help myself.
Well, you're off
Okay, you're back on.
Thank you.
It was too much dead air.
All right.
It's all welcome back unicorn rainbows from here on out 2025 we're here.
We've arrived.
It was a quarter century ago that we went through 2000.
Yeah, why 2k?
Who's coming up on the show this year, Paul?
Oh my gosh, we got a big list of guests.
It's gonna be better than ever.
We got Charles Skinner, owner of granite peak.
He doesn't own the mountain.
He owns the ski resort.
He owns the peak.
Yeah.
Also, Mr. Ron Clemish.
Oh
owner of Wausau Supply Company.
Yeah, I think he sold the company to his employees now.
It's an ESOP, but we'll hear all about that.
Doesn't he have something with a private jet situation
We'll hear, we'll hear all about it.
Okay, can't wait.
How about the East Bay story from Art and Rick and hopefully Harry as well, the three guys that really took that company to great heights.
Art, Rick and Harry, can't wait.
How about this one?
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Top Gun Pilot of an F-16, Mr. Ryan Gaffney.
Oh, wow.
Pretty sure his code name is
Stalker.
I think he flies after 35 now.
Nicholas Butler, New York Times bestselling author.
Shotgun Love Songs was his number one bestselling book.
And it's loosely based on Nick's relationship with global rock star Justin Vernon, who goes with the band Bon Iver.
Bon Iver.
Bon Iver.
Bon Iver.
Bon Iver.
wrote us a text after that episode aired, and it was the nicest compliments that we've received in 2024.
And he said, wow, that interview was in great company with Monocle Magazine out of London and the New York Times.
Thank you very much.
It was his text.
And hopefully he'll come back on the show and talk about his new book.
Yeah, I can't wait to read it.
Coming out just between now and Valentine's Day, speaking of Valentine's Day.
We're going to talk to the second contestant that is officially signed up.
Right.
We'll talk to them next week.
And we want to thank our sponsors, Stonebridge Wealth Advisors and Greenfire, builders of the future.
Thank you very much.
And Rocket Industrial, of course.
Thank you, Rocket.
Sponsors of the friend of a friend competition for $10,000.
That's for first place.
Right.
And second place, it's official $2,500.
You get.
So we'll have the leaderboard up between now and June of 2025.
All you got to do is recruit people to move and live in the greatest city in America, Washington,
Yeah.
Who's coming up on the show this week, Paul?
Ryan, this week we have Marcus Nelson, a former employee in Silicon Valley.
He worked with people like Facebook, Instagram, and he's from Wausau.
He's a big guy in AI.
He was really high up in Salesforce for a while.
That's correct.
And his Salesforce wanted to buy
And yeah, now he's back in Wausau, Wisconsin.
Very interesting guy.
Looking forward to that.
He's ranked as one of the top B2B marketers in the United States and sits on the United Nations Board of Social Influencers.
And he's an adjunct professor at Harvard.
We had a Harvard connection a guy used to run rock water cyber cafe in wasa back in the 90s Yeah, so that's Marcus Nelson coming up.
It's gonna be a cool interview Yeah looking forward to it and when you are out there on the road for several weeks of shows and when you scan the radio I hope this song guides you home
Goodbye
2024 and hello 2025.
Can you be filled with higher ROI?
than the tower on top of Ribb Mountain.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Happy New Year!
This is the Wastau Business Show.
At Rooterware, we challenge the notion that sophisticated legal practices only exist in major metropolitan areas.
Our team chooses to live and work in communities where many people only vacation or pass through.
We enjoy a quality of life and have an excellent work-life balance, while still practicing exciting, challenging law in Wausau, Eau Claire, Green Bay, and Wisconsin Rapids.
Since 1920, we've been doing what we want and where we want to do it.
Find us at routerware.com.
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Thank you for being
incredible.
See, stop ringing with the balls in school.
Let your feet fly numb on the air.
Singing, hey, did you do it?
Just get it in the middle.
I'm swinging like I didn't care.
So I took a big change.
It's a high school dance.
I'm so missing who was ready to play.
Busted me shit, I'm fooling.
I knew what you was doing.
But you don't know how the world is made.
Told me to walk this way.
And all of this.
It's
coffee in there.
Sorry about that.
Tom and
So Marcus has been named the top 50 B2B marketing influencer by SAP.
He is of the top 70 digital influencers in the world named by the United Nations.
Wow.
Adjunct professor for Harvard related to AI for writing.
And he has an amazing career, but it started right here in Washington,
Johnson, USA.
All right.
So Marcus, correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the way that it started was you and your twin brother were cover models for J. Crew.
I was young.
I needed the money.
And that was while you were at Wassa East?
No.
After college, I went up to West Coast and I worked for a record company.
Which one?
It was called Metro One.
It was just some indie... Any artists that we would know?
Crystal Lewis was probably, she's the owner's wife.
She did
Well, no,
Okay.
Ensemble.
In an ensemble with like Kirk Franklin and Bono and whatever.
It was like a big hit back in 1995.
Oh, okay.
Good enough.
You go out there, Southern California, J Crew comes now.
Yeah, I got to work in the studios with all these crazy like rappers and I'm...
you know, as white as can be.
Yeah.
You're not a rapper.
Do you
spit at all?
Oh, Lonnie Donnie, we like the party.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Father, nobody wear just the men that's on the mic.
And when we rock up on the mic, we rock the mic.
Right.
I'm
They're the guys that produced Run DMC, Vogue, and LL Cool J. So I'm Simon Muffler is the producer.
So I'm hanging out with him and I'm meeting like K Supreme, the alcoholics, Fred to the head, who's this engineer who's done everybody.
They call him Fred 40 to the head or something like that.
I can't even remember.
But this is right out of East.
You just took it West.
No, I went to two years of Bible college.
Okay.
And then went out there.
So you went from Bible to Bible.
college to rappers.
One end of the spectrum to the next.
Yeah, it wasn't that glorious.
I did marketing and I learned how to do storytelling, which is that was like the thing I got to take away from all of that.
But let's back up for a second.
You went to Bible school right after high school.
Yeah.
And then you guys had a church for a minute here.
My dad had a church.
Okay.
But that was after that.
Yeah, that hadn't happened yet.
It's Thrive Church now.
I think it was Christian Assembly years
do
Dad,
school... Yeah, exactly,
don't want to go and do it.
Can my dad do what I
if I'm
miss that
Believe it or not.
It's
So then you go all the
California did all that stuff.
And then I had like offers to go work for LA Posse and all these other things.
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Were you actually in the studio producing the music with these guys or your assistant?
The only knobs I twisted were like open the door.
I was marketer for the record company.
Okay, got it.
How dare you write.
I was doing A&R for the studio.
So my
responsibility to make sure they had everything they needed so that when they're in the studio, they're optimizing their time.
And because we're a cheap little startup, basically, is we only could book things late at night, because that's the only time it was cheap enough.
The studio time.
Yeah, studio time.
So I would go to work at like 10 AM.
I'd work till like 4 30 or so, go home, grab something to eat, jump in the car.
drive through rush hour traffic, like two and a half hours up to LA, get to the studio, prep it, get everything done.
Artists would come in around 10, 10.30 at night and we'd record till four in the morning and then head home.
What were you doing during the day?
trying not to fall asleep.
No, I was a marketer.
So
I
You'd
or try to send them on the music.
And
Okay, cool.
Telling stories about these artists that made them give a crap about this person's background or something that would tie into that person to make them emotionally connected to the artist.
So they want to play them.
Cool.
Which is at the heart of marketing.
So then you're doing
How did it smell in those studios in the middle of the night?
I'm just curious.
Did it smell green?
I can't say that I remember.
Okay.
I was just trying not to get fired.
Okay.
I get chicken wings and forties for the guys and turntables and
let them roll.
on the cover of the
A friend of mine at Cliff, he was like one of my dearest friends.
He's like, well, you know, I was telling
I don't know what to do.
I've got like these four or five job offers.
And he said, why don't you just come up to Sun Valley, Idaho, this guy, this guy's life.
He taught windsurfing in Monaco at the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel.
Oh, how'd you meet him?
That was during the summer.
I met him in Bible college.
Okay.
The people you meet in Bible college.
Wow.
It's like band camp.
Yeah.
In Mediterranean in the sun.
Yeah.
Prince of Monaco's kids.
Wow.
You know, he's teaching him how to do stuff.
And so then on the winter, he goes to Sun Valley, Idaho and teaches how to
a ski.
What a life.
Right?
If I'm not mistaken, Sun Valley, Idaho is the home of the first winter ski lift chairlift.
That's correct.
Ever in the world?
It was a banana boat mechanical thing that they jimmy rigged.
to haul people instead of bananas.
It was the first chairlift.
It was the first chairlift.
It was a banana boat.
Well, no, not the banana boat, but the
technology that's got the bananas in the
Union.
No, so I'm out in California and he says, why don't you come up to Sun Valley and I'll teach you how to snowboard and just, you know, we'll chill, take two weeks.
you know, whatever, clear your mind and then make your decision.
I thought, well, that sounded pretty good.
Got there and never left.
I just fell in love with the mountains.
I would say I learned how to snowboard.
Eventually I did, but most of it was really just tumbling.
Cool.
Cool.
And out there is where the headquarters of J Crew are.
No, not their headquarters, but...
I got a job at a coffee shop.
So I've got a job at the mountains to get my ski pass, and then I've got a job at this coffee shop.
In Sun Valley.
In Sun Valley.
Cool.
And so all these celebrities are coming in and everything.
I got to have coffee with like Peter Sotera and you know, whatever.
Yeah, it's a real happening place to be.
Yeah.
And Demi Moore walks in, she's this big, you know, tiny.
I love Peter Sotera.
Chicago.
Tell
me what you dream
Yeah, yeah.
So.
All that to say is that these women were coming in and I'm being me, you know, flirty, whatever.
And they kept coming in every day.
And by the third day or whatever, I know what they're going to order.
Yeah.
And so I see them coming in through the window.
And so I just start making whatever it is.
Hey, Cathy.
You know, the double latte again.
But we were, you know, it's a small town.
That's what our whole
coffee shop was known for was
Yeah.
So these girls were impressed that I did whatever.
wasn't really a big deal.
Part and parcel to that.
We'll put that aside for a second.
My brother Angus, he's now moved to Sun Valley because...
That's where we are.
So he comes to and he's looking the newspaper and there's this, they call it a cattle call.
It's basically like magazines or TV shows will say, you know, they'll post an article saying, Hey, we're looking for backups or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And people will come in and they'll just, you know, literally a cattle call.
There's just a line of people and then they walk in the door, they get a quick interview, you know, a couple of questions and they shoot out the door and then in comes the next group and it's 150 people or whatever.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Wow.
door.
And I told Angus, absolutely not.
I'm not interested.
He had talked me into this once before.
When we were living here, we went out to Minneapolis to model for Paul Mitchell.
Oh yeah, the hair product.
Yeah.
And I thought it would be real funny to pretend a trip.
And nobody else did.
Nobody else thought it was funny.
But you don't have any hair right now, but at the time, didn't you have like long blonde
hair?
Beautiful
Yeah, okay.
There's no one for that.
So you go to this cattle call.
Yeah, go to this cattle call.
No, no, I don't want to go.
I don't want to go.
You go against your will.
I go against my will because he's driving.
There's a certain irony in a guy named Angus going to a cattle call.
Isn't there a little bit?
Or is that just a bad dad joke?
All
bad dad jokes.
I didn't make that connection till just now.
So we're up on the mountain.
It's like spring skiing.
It's a Sunday.
We finish just like noon, whatever blah.
And I've got my snowboard pants and like a sweatshirt and I'm just drenched and we're driving and we go by the place where the cattle call was and sure enough.
Yeah.
Like you said, the big old lineup.
There goes Angus.
Angus is like.
Yeah.
Anyway, we get in there and everybody's dressed up trying to be J. Crew.
You know, they got their khakis.
They've got their oxfords, whatever.
Everyone's trying to look the part.
Here we are in our snowboard pants and, you know, soaking wet.
Right.
I don't know.
It takes like 40 minutes to get in there, whatever.
The door opens and these girls are like,
I'm like, what?
Because they knew who I was from the coffee shop.
There's a regular from the coffee shop.
Yeah.
It was the
Kathy with
Double soy
OK.
So out of like 700 people, they chose two.
OK.
And that was Angus Margus.
Oh, wow.
And then we roped in some friends later.
But yeah, yeah.
And then from there, how long did it take before you were on the cover of Jay Crude nationally?
The spring of 96.
So we shot for the 97 catalog.
And you were literally, literally on the cover
And how long were you a model with Jay Crude then?
I want to say like,
I actually don't know.
Like 10 or 12 issues.
Wow.
And the only reason we stopped doing it, because we had an agent down in Chicago and whatever.
The editor had, I think she went to Land's End.
And they had a new editor came in who wanted a more, and I'm air quoting here, world appeal.
Okay.
So basically meant we were too American looking.
So she went a different direction.
So
two a month.
That wasn't
You
Okay,
Yeah, you get
Well, at the time it was really good money.
I think it was, I think we got $13.50 a day.
Wow, that's cool.
This is $96.
But you still kept going with all the other work?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And then eventually you come back to Wausau?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we had this idea for what ended up becoming rock water.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was this idea that wouldn't it be cool for kids that are kind of
like, again, this is going to the, I don't want to be a minister, but I want to help people.
How old were you at this point?
27.
Okay.
Yeah.
26, something like that.
Okay.
And so we... So what year did you graduate from East?
89.
Okay, got it.
And so we come back and we start kind of ideating about, wouldn't it be cool if there was something for kids?
Because we were thinking of ourselves because we grew up here, right?
Yeah.
And between 16 and 21, you're just getting in trouble.
I mean, we're cruising grand.
We're like, you know, toilet papering everybody's house and whatever.
A lot of things I probably won't confess to.
But, you know, we got in trouble.
And I was trying to think of some ideas of, like, what do kids do?
And all the culmination of everything I'd ever done, I'd worked in a coffee shop.
I'd worked in the music industry.
So I had context for
And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to create this safe space for people to come and hang out and do whatever?
And plus, I was getting myself into technology.
I'd taught myself HTML and CSS and Photoshop and whatever.
Well, we could offer some courses for that.
Kids, you know, plant the seed that kids can do more in Wausau.
than what they're expecting.
And this was before any other coffee shop in Wausau, except for something's brewing was going on at the time, right?
We were the very first cyber cafe in Wisconsin.
Because we raised about, I think, $300,000, $250,000 to build it out.
And then we were doing the music festivals.
We kind of hit it too big on the first festival and then pulled back on the second festival, but managed to get through all of that.
But we're trying to raise money to have our own home.
And simultaneously, I started a Citizen Wausau, which was our local newspaper that we created.
It was like a citizen journal.
Kind of like city pages.
Well, except that anybody could write.
Okay, cool.
So, you know, the idea was that people of the community would hear from people from the community.
And,
This was all online.
Yeah, yeah.
So we did that.
And then I started this company called User Voice.
It was this idea.
I had been in San Francisco at a party and met this kid.
He was like 10 or 12 years younger than me.
And we just started chatting about how hard it is to create product.
When you're building something brand new, you don't know what the expectations of your customers are.
You're guessing, right?
So you're thinking, well, I'm going to fix my problem, but I don't know if that fixes everybody's problem.
And so you do your best.
Out of that, the big thing then was dig and then Reddit was kind of coming on the scene.
And it was this thing where people could submit news articles and people could vote them up or down.
And we
Somebody could come back.
Because at that point, the way most companies got feedback was either you got a phone call and it disappeared in some black box somewhere.
Or it was email.
And how do you sort that email?
Who's responsible for that?
And who's
Email is so tough in companies.
gets lost in the shuffle so easily.
So we thought let's build a system front to back where we could gather feedback, give validation to the customers.
run it through production, and at the time that it launches, immediately, anybody and everybody who's contributed to the idea gets an email that says, hey, we heard you, we listened, it's live right now.
That's how markets hook off.
Yeah, I would imagine, and that kind of led, I would assume, that parlayed into Salesforce, and that should gig, right?
Yup, Salesforce tried to buy us.
Well, that's a compliment, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
I think we were nine months old, but we already had 7,500 customers, including Microsoft and Intuit and what, it just exploded.
I got called into Clarence Soh, who is one of the founding guys over at Salesforce, had gotten wind of us through Jeremiah Oang, who had been writing for Forrester.
He was an analyst.
Research company.
Forrester.
And he's the one that really wrote the first article about us, because he was practicing it on his own blog, that little feedback tab that you now see everywhere.
That's what I created, right?
I designed it.
from the
Shoot from the hip, right?
And when you're starting out that
can be helpful.
Yeah, fail forward.
Fail faster.
But because we had all these enterprise clients so fast, the other developer who was like a right 15 times launch once, he really refined the code.
And he was an excellent developer.
And so Lance, that was his name, he ended up leaving and going and he became the lead developer for a small startup called Kickstarter.
So he was the original developer for that.
Very cool.
He was on the founding team, but he was one of their head developers.
One of their first hires.
So where does the philosophy of MVP, minimal viable product come in?
Is that somewhere in the middle between the two of those?
Your minimal viable product is the first thing you want to put out the door.
That is bare bones.
But
you're not
you're just still a gunslinger.
it's a mouthful.
Yeah, I try to say that three
That's right.
Yeah, get it out the door.
So then it falls through at Salesforce because these guys are young and they just didn't understand the possibility.
But I went back to Salesforce because at this time now I have two kids.
So I say, you know, I could use the paycheck.
And so they introduced me to their CMO.
So I meet him and then I meet some of the team.
The first role they were talking about was VP of...
Service Cloud, which is their customer service product.
And I was scared spitless.
But they had confidence in me.
Yeah, they had confidence in
me.
we had about
Yay!
to do.
And then I
you?
Tell us about their campus.
Well, when we, in User Voice, when we got there, there was only like a dozen or two dozen companies in San Francisco, because everything else was in Silicon Valley.
And the whole thing was that we thought,
that's where our customers were.
And so that was kind of our philosophy.
To be in San Francisco, right?
And as it turns out, everybody else started realizing that San Francisco was a cool town, whatever, we could do this.
And Venture Capital had just started opening offices in San Francisco, because up until now, everything was on Sand Hill Road.
If you wanted to raise money, you were going to Sand Hill Road.
Or it was out on the East Coast.
Yeah, New York somewhere.
That's wild.
And so we go down there to raise capital or whatever, and then who was it?
Was it Peter Thiel, Founders Fund?
Sure, yeah, zero to one.
One of them that we pitched, and they did invest, but not from, they invested from their Facebook fund out there.
Founders Fund.
But I think that was the first one that we pitched that was actually in San Francisco.
Wow.
And you were in the room pitching to get more capital for Salesforce.
No, no, no.
I was raising capital for User Voice.
For your company.
And then that did not get sold to Salesforce.
Did they use any of the technology?
So they built their own thing called Salesforce Ideas.
It was very clunky and it was hard for them to sell.
Did Peter Thiel give you guys the capital?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in this case, Dave McClure, Dave McClure was part of the PayPal mafia.
Wow.
With Elon Musk.
Oh, with Elon.
Yeah, yeah.
You heard of that guy.
He heard of him.
So Dave McClure discovered us.
Okay.
And he was the one that kind of shopped us around and helped us get all the pinpoints together.
And that was 2009.
So we're starting in 2008 and we're running through October 10th hits.
Everything crashes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we're like,
That was the real estate.
Everything went sideways.
Nobody was investing.
Credit default swaps.
The very next quarter of 2009, only five companies in Silicon Valley raised money.
And we were one of them.
Wow.
And so how did you exit that company?
I'm still a shareholder in the user voice.
And it's still called user
You got out high, I hope.
I bought a house.
Oh, that's great.
So tell us about the campus.
Give everybody a little sense of what it's like to work at Salesforce as it's skyrocketing.
So I worked in marketing and at that time,
And actually, I would even say it is still true.
We used to joke around that Salesforce is a marketing company that happens to sell software.
And we had a different lifestyle than if you were in the R&D team.
If you were doing an R&D, that was just a lump for everybody that did development.
Some companies, R&D is like a special little elite group, you know, the SEAL team.
But where we were, it was just... It was 70% of the employees.
So you must have gone over there and realized what you were missing.
Oh my God.
Yes.
They keep it from you.
They had the quintessential Salesforce brick wall warehouse looking big, huge, open windows, lots of glass, looking out over Alcatraz.
And just as gorgeous, gorgeous, like you said, foosball, pool tables, snacks galore.
The espresso bar.
I will be.
perfectly honest, I had never been in that environment before.
And I discovered diet Dr. Pepper.
Oh, Texas.
I must drink like that first week or two weeks I was there, I was probably close to pissing my pants every moment of the day.
I was drinking so much soda.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
At some point we
So,
And then when Facebook, I did get to go to the Facebook campus and that place is off the hook.
It's a kind of walking campus and you can walk from building to building, building.
and kind of courtyard are all of Mark's favorite foods.
So you've got Phil's coffee, which was his favorite coffee.
And then
I don't know how much money it was, but it was a lot.
But when you were out there, correct me if I'm wrong, fellow Wasone and Marissa Mayer was kind of at Google at that time, too.
Our ships were passing very, very frequently.
I'd go to the TechCrunch Disrupt, and I'd see her and whatever.
And I knew her brother, because he used to come to Rockwater all the time.
didn't really know Marissa because she was
a few
both
Hillary Ware.
She's
not?
That's
She was there for
in
USA.
Okay.
Dr. Natalie Pethoff.
She is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
She was a VP at Praise Waterhouse Coopers and a VP at Salesforce.
when she worked at the esteemed Forrester research firm.
She describes you, Marcus, as one of those rare people you meet in life that can see the future as bright as day.
So, what is the future, Marcus?
Wow, that was a good quote you captured.
In ChatGPT, we've got it all coming on, the scene AI, everything's exploding right now with artificial intelligence.
What is the future?
You've got a new book out all about how to write a book with ChatGPT, the ups and downs, ins and outs of writing with AI.
I think you, better than anybody, being on the top 50 B2B marketing influencer list at SAP, being part
of the United Nations, top 70 tech people in the world, and on and on, what's the future?
Okay.
Let's talk AI, since that was what you brought up.
Artificial intelligence is going to go sideways, probably within the next two years.
What do you mean by
the
Reddit.
Sucked it all in there.
Sucked it all in
But you've got all these biases baked in.
Yeah.
Right?
People being racist or people being sexist or, you know, having, you know, colorful language or whatever.
No filters.
No filters.
And so a lot of the filtering for creating your algorithm, these LLMs, language models, what they have to do is they've got to teach, like basically scold the algorithm to say, look, you don't say this or you're not supposed to do this or whatever.
So you're basically parenting this tool.
Computer.
And then over time, you're actually teaching the tool.
to teach itself.
So now it's happening in a black box.
So you don't even, you're the developer of the tool.
You don't even know how it's working.
And so that's where you end up getting what they call hallucinations and a hallucination for those who don't know.
It's like when the AI very confidently tells you, this is the answer and it's complete BS.
Very confidently though.
It doesn't with confidence.
I know a few people like that.
Dumb but confident.
Yes,
Sometimes confidence goes
along with.
So, yeah, it'll tell you something and it will, you know, on the face value, it will seem and feel like, oh, this is the right thing.
And if you run with it, you know, and all of a sudden someone's going to say, hey, I don't think that's right, you know.
But TRGPT told me it was a
totally
Right.
And so those are the issues.
I think what's going to happen right now is you're going to see, or what you're already starting to see is people are realizing the limitations of the current AI we have.
So everybody who's thinking the AI is going to take over the world, we're going to have Skynet and we're all going to die.
In today's iteration, I don't know how that ever happened.
But what I believe is going to happen, this is just like in the early days of the internet.
Right now, everything's frothy.
Investors are throwing billions of dollars into it.
Some are going to make billions.
Some are going to lose millions or even billions.
And what's going to happen is it's all going to topple over.
And just like what we saw in the web one world, web two world, both of them had the same sort of situations.
And then there'll be a law.
Two or three years will go by.
All those guys that lost their jobs are
going to be a
We're in a
to get
money.
and all those guys, all those sideways.
more
And out
MySpace.
MySpace.
And that was actually the hey Dave, Amazon too, because Amazon was still like bleeding cash.
But they started taking their own tech
and realizing, gosh, a lot of people could benefit from these flexible servers that we've built because they built these servers to be able to take loads and then peel back if they didn't need the load so they could save money.
So they thought, well, shoot, what if we kind of turn this into a product?
And that became Amazon Web Services, AWS.
And actually, today, that's the only way Amazon makes money today.
Yeah, they were unprofitable for their first decade or whatever.
They're still unprofitable on their product size.
Distribution business.
The distribution business, they don't...
make any money.
AWS is supplementing it all.
And makes
us
So AWS, they are the hosting platform for Netflix, for Dropbox, for every major tool you guys use.
So pretty much anybody in
everybody uses AWS.
That's where they make their money.
I think what's going to happen is you're going to see that same sort of thing happen where all of a sudden the technology we know today is going to not become irrelevant.
I wouldn't say that.
place for a lot of this technology.
But what I feel is going to happen is, you're going to see an implosion.
We'll probably lose 80% of the companies out there.
There's a domain called there'sanaiforthat.com.
So it's a feeding frenzy
now.
It's all going to topple over.
And what you're going to see is that out of that, I believe you're going to see a lot of disgruntled developers who are going to find each other.
And ideas will collide.
They'll be at a co-working
They'll be talking, shooting the breeze and come up with a new idea.
And out of that is where you're going to see the rebirth.
And
that
we from there?
I'm going to say four to five years.
OK.
And that's where we're going to see medical breakthroughs.
That's where we're going to see assemblies.
That's where we're maybe even solves housing shortage issues.
We're going to see a lot of that type of stuff happen out of AI, where all of a sudden now we can figure out new ways to do robotics.
And those robotics will find new ways to manufacturing.
God forbid the way
mean, look at this.
You've
Huge 3D printers that
Yeah.
And I think it's going to start thinking for itself.
AGI.
And that's when you think.
That's the AGI that we're going to see.
Artificial General Intelligence.
And that's what everybody's kind of afraid of.
Yeah, should be afraid of that.
But they think that's happening now.
And I'm telling you, it's not.
So five years we should be afraid.
Are you afraid?
Here's the thing.
I think the best thing that has ever happened to humanity is capitalism.
The worst thing that's ever going to happen to humanity is capitalism.
And what happens, you're even seeing it now, OpenAI, which was a nonprofit organization, has just now switched to for-profit.
And then whenever we have people that are trying to go for-profit, they start making shortcuts.
There's no regulations.
There's no anything to keep them in a box.
So they're going to do try everything they can.
I mean, look at Lake Wausau.
The whole reason we can't eat the fish out of Lake Wausau is because there was nobody to say, you know what, maybe we shouldn't.
put chemicals in the water.
are old.
When
AI starts kicking in and all of these other displacements start happening, I was involved in the trucking industry.
We were working on AI.
And when I worked for Exos Trucks, the thing that we talked about is there's three and a half million truck drivers over the road, truck drivers.
God bless them.
And God bless them.
They make this
country work.
And they're great at what they do.
They get that thing from here to there.
What happens when those are all automated, those jobs?
What do we do with 3.5 million people who don't have an education, who do not have the ability, because whether it was their family situation or financial situation, they don't have the ability to just drop everything and go back to school?
Because you're assuming, and you're saying it as fact, that within about five or six years, that all of those trucking positions will fall away.
will fall away because there will be automated trucks that will drive themselves.
the street
But getting
So that'll happen.
You're also going to see customer service disappear.
Right now, you can actually go online and buy a customer servicing.
You take your knowledge base, throw it into the system,
And it will voice whatever it is and answer everybody's questions.
And you won't even know it's a human.
So
to
Because the days of, you know...
breaking your back over an assembly line are going away.
The idea that you can just learn how to code and get a job, that's gone already.
The last 18 months has proven to us, how many developers I know that are out of work right now is insane.
So
some
a negative feedback loop.
the one that I think is going to be Paramount.
is service jobs.
We're not going to see robotic plumbers anytime soon.
Well, somebody's got to build the 3D printer that the AI bot prints out for the new McDonald's that they're building or whatever, right?
And this isn't coming from just anybody.
This is coming from a Harvard adjunct instructor, United Nations top 70 digital influencer in the world, Marcus Nelson, author of How to Write a Book with ChatGPT that just came out.
We'll post this on our website.
I'm looking forward.
Thanks for bringing a copy of this.
I wish we would have got
that beforehand, but it just came out
last
I'm looking forward to digging into that.
Then the Executive Academy for AI leadership, can you talk about that that you're starting up?
I have this concept of, because AI is moving the way that it is, there are a number of, and I'll go back to what I said earlier about politicians, the threat right now that people understand is that AI is something.
That's about the extent of it.
They don't know
why they don't know what and they don't know when.
Somebody needs to sit down with these guys and they might be a vice president, they might be a director, they may be the CEO and they're hearing people talk about AI and all the things that it can do and they're just glazed over.
They're just a glazed donut looking at them smiling and going, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Hopefully staying awake.
No, hopefully staying awake.
They've heard of it.
They've heard
And so the idea is by creating exec academy, I'm going to ramp it up and there'll be different levels but there'll be
a starter level, which is the course I'm offering starting in January.
It'll be a Zoom and whatever, and I'll have assignments for you.
So the idea is that we'll have 90 minutes on Tuesdays, and those 90 minutes will be 45 minutes of instruction
and
And then we'll have a kind of office working meeting on Thursdays, and that'll be two hours, and that'll be
come to me with your problems.
And then we solve them together.
You've got everybody on the Zoom call, and we're working through problems in real time.
Globally.
Wherever you are.
Wherever you are.
And
so the idea is that you're creating a community where people can learn from each other, from their peers.
And in that community, the value is that
they've got resources.
So out of that, I'll be creating a lot of these resources.
And in time, I'll have a staff and whatever, hopefully knock on.
That's close to what it is.
You've got
a proven
Yeah.
And
You know, something Mark Craig told me, and I've never forgotten it.
The wise Mark Craig.
The wise from.
What year did he tell you this?
This is after I was feeling really down.
because I was closing up the co-working space.
Oh, so this was like late 90s, early 2000s?
Yeah, this was like 2003, maybe.
So it's stuck
all this
we go.
so now
whatever.
And that's the
Oh my god, we have a sign up here that says, fail often and fail fast.
Yes, yes.
You are encouraged.
Even the investors will say, spend, go, do.
And if it doesn't work, we'll try something else.
Yeah, throw it up against the wall and see what sticks.
Because if you don't, you're not taking any risks and you're not moving forward.
Right.
And so in that moment, I didn't know that.
I didn't realize that.
I saw it as a stain,
you know,
Thanks, Mark.
Yeah, but failure is so great.
I mean, like we interview a lot of people, obviously, for jobs at Rocket Industrial, and oftentimes we'll be in an interview asking, well, where have you failed in your life?
Especially leadership and executive leadership positions, because if you have never failed in your life.
That's suspicious.
That's somebody that's not willing to take a risk or too adverse to risk.
And
Tom Marks.
He's also
Anyway, you run into Bob.
I'm
And he's like, look, Marcus, I have a house I'm renovating in Kronowitter.
You can have it.
Go live in it.
You can pay rent when you can.
Sweet deal.
And so then, you know, I've moved my family there.
I've got two kids and trying to figure out what I'm going to do next in my life.
And he's like, Marcus, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to give you $10,000.
He's like, if you're full of shit, it's going to mean nothing.
And he says,
But if you're for real, it's gonna grow wings and you're gonna fly.
Six months later, I was moving to Silicon Valley.
And what
year was
While I was telling the story, the gravity of that moment came upon me that I all of a sudden realized that, holy crap, everything I've gone through, all that pain, all that anguish, all that failure, all that feeling like you're nobody.
I mean, even to this day, as you're reading that, I'm like, well, I'd like to meet that guy.
You know, it's, it doesn't feel real to you.
And I think this is where people end up with that imposter syndrome in their lives.
They feel like they don't belong.
They don't feel like they deserve it, especially coming in a small town like a wasa where all of a sudden you're like, who am I?
You know,
and nobody wants to stick their head up too high because somebody else is going to come and knock you back down.
And so how do you get to a point where everybody wins?
How do we get it?
to where I want that person to win.
I'm not gonna be jealous.
I'm gonna be resentful.
I want you to win, because if you win, we win.
Yeah, rising tides.
Well, Marcus, now you're back in Wausau.
Correct me if I'm wrong?
Last I checked, yeah.
I mean, you're
living
was not
How long have you been in Wausau now?
Now it's been a year exactly.
Very cool.
Well, we should have given you this sooner, but we have...
We have boomerangs that we printed up here, official boomerangs.
It says, thanks for boomeranging back to Wausau.
Welcome home, Wausau Business Show.
Yeah, Marcus.
Enjoy that, Marcus.
There you go.
As he throws it to me, it didn't come back to him.
In conclusion, you know, you've said a lot of amazing things, and we've learned a lot about you and your career and the world here today.
So thanks for stopping by.
I look forward to keeping in touch.
You've got to come back and update us on how things are going and everything, because I'm sure the audience will
And if you want any more information about Marcus and his career and his offerings, what's the best way to contact you?
There you go.
You know, I don't know where your brother Angus is, but I still think back and we're going to post your J. Crew cover.
Prada
When was the last time you had a Day's Bolodome t-shirt on as a J.
crew model.
I'm just curious.
Ah, never.
We got to change that.
We got to get you one.
Well, thanks for stopping by.
Marcus Nelson.
Fascinating.
Full Nelson marketing and you can Google Marcus Nelson for more information.
Thanks for stopping by, Marcus.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Have a great
day.
Marcus Nelson, everybody.
No less in line, just keep chugging on, on, on.
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