Jodie Cook:

It really didn't feel like that much of a big deal to start a business at 22. And when I say start a business, it wasn't really a business, it was just me being a freelancer. I didn't have a business plan really. I just had two words, which was get clients.

Chris Do:

So my guest for today's podcast is Jodie. And it's kind of strange, I met Jodie through a referral through a new friend Lucy Werner. And then as I was going through her bio, I discovered we have other connections, multiple connections in fact. So I'm super excited to talk to her today. Jodie, for people who don't know who you are, can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your backstory?

Jodie Cook:

Yes, definitely. So I'm Jodie Cook. I am founder of Coach Fox AI, and we make artificially intelligent coaches based on thought leaders. I built and sold an agency. About two years ago, I exited. I am a Forbes contributor on the topic of entrepreneurs. And I compete internationally in power lifting as well.

Chris Do:

Such a diverse background from power lifting to AI, a marketing agency. And you're still super, super young. I want to ask you something because what was really intriguing and the nature of our relationship together was I need to get mainstream press because since starting The Futur, I don't have mainstream press and it's important for me to get verified and I go down that conversation rabbit hole and then I'm connected to you. So I'd love to ask you about this because I don't know that many people that are regular contributors to magazines like Forbes. So in the interest of all of us trying to gain exposure to gain credibility with respectable news outlets like Forbes, how does one even begin that?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah, great question. So I started writing for Forbes about five years ago, and it was all down to finding one of the editors, meeting her at an event, and then prolifically following her up until she agreed to let me sign up and become a contributor. Yeah, I followed her up a lot. I wasn't even shy about how many times I was like, "Hey, me again, come on, when do I get to sign up?" And then luckily she let me in. But yeah, now it's been huge. It's probably about 25% of the signups for my company have come from having that column. And so there's kind of two routes that I would recommend people go down if they're thinking about wanting to become a feature. First is try and get featured, and second is try and get a column for yourself. The getting featured route involves geeking out on the Forbes website, honestly.

And then getting inside the minds of the existing contributors and figuring out what kind of stories you can pitch to them that match their swim lane perfectly. And that's really important because everyone on there has a swim lane that they have to fit in with, and people don't tend to deviate from what they're writing about. So there's almost no point pitching someone who doesn't do interviews about an interview. There's almost no point picking them on with an irrelevant title. It's almost like put yourself in their shoes, imagine the exact article that they would write, and then come to them with great ideas for that and find them everywhere online until you can get in their good books, until you can become familiar to them, I guess.

I think, Chris, a couple of episodes ago I heard you talking about how when people just get in touch with you and they pitch you and they haven't really got anything to bring to the table, it's like, well, there's so many of those, it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who you do want to write about and you don't want to write about. But if people find you online, if they find your stuff, if they talk to you about something personal, and by personal, I don't mean a ChatGPT formulated personal approach because you can kind of tell. I mean a real, this is what we have in common. This is what's important to me, this is what I think would work for you.

And I guess playing the long game with it as well is a really big side of this, because I think if you make friends with a Forbes contributor or any contributor to any article, any news site, then you can get featured at some point in the future. And our mutual friend, Lucy Werner is a really good example of this because we've probably been friends for a couple of years now and she is a PR and she gets her clients into different media outlets and she helps people do it. But she hasn't once pitched me, not once, she's just playing the long game. She's just being my friend under these kind of, I was going to say under false pretenders, but it's not false pretenses because she's genuinely interested in becoming friends and therefore it works in her favor. It's not just like, oh, hey Jodie, write about me.

Chris Do:

Okay. Just to quickly summarize, I say this with tongue in cheek, so your formula is to stalk and harass a little bit. So find out who that person is and just kind of have a conversation with them from time to time, but really come from a genuine place of wanting to build a relationship. Now, we get this often in our DMs and also in emails, people pitching people for guests on this podcast, my podcast. I'm like, gosh, it's just I don't know a good person from a bad person because I'm not just overwhelmed with it. Because your first point of contact with me is to ask me for something, it doesn't make me feel great. I understand this is how it works. So how do we get over that?

Jodie Cook:

You bring more to the table, you figure out what you can bring to the table and you offer that first and you offer it without expectation of what you're going to get back in return. And I think it's really hard because I don't think that's how our brains are necessarily wired. It's like we want to ask for things and we want to just play the rejection game and get people to say no. But I think it would be a lot better hanging back, playing the marshmallow game, trying to pass the marshmallow test with... I'm guessing you know the marshmallow test.

Chris Do:

Yes. The duly [inaudible 00:06:09] game?

Jodie Cook:

You have to play the marshmallow test with people. Exactly, yeah, because at some point it will probably happen. And I know from my experience, I probably get about 10 pitches every day. And most of them, you never hear from them twice, but some of them you do. And some of them you hear from three times, and some of them you hear from again and again. And they are the ones that you start to recognize their name and you start to know a bit what they're about. And if they follow you on Twitter, you'll check out their profile at some point. And you building that familiarity is just worth so much. So you'd be far better honing in on five different contributors than you would having a scatter gun approach to all of them and sending them stuff that's not even relevant.

Chris Do:

Well, as a regular contributor, does it make you a little suspicious of the people who try to have a relationship or friendship with you? You mentioned Lucy. Lucy, obviously at one point in her life would help her clients get PR, so she's a conduit between a client and a contributor, an author. And so you kind of know when Lucy comes knocking, we know there's something there of course. So how do you work around that or what's your mindset around that?

Jodie Cook:

I think that if I thought about it too much, maybe I would be suspicious of everyone, but I think that would be lonely because you just think everyone wants something. And I don't think that would be actually a nice way of thinking about the world maybe. So yeah, maybe it's you assume that people want something, but maybe you assume that they can help you out too. And if you become friends, then you've got mutual things that you can help each other with. So I'm sure with Lucy, she's done me just as many favors as I've done her, and that's why it's a cool friendship. So yeah, avoiding the suspicion is a good plan.

Chris Do:

So it's better if you're ugly, not famous and poor because every relationship you have will be genuine because nobody can get anything from you.

Jodie Cook:

I think it's probably why famous people or people who are, I don't know, rich, famous, whatever, at some point they maybe do get to a stage where they are more reserved because they have reached that level where everyone wants a picture, everyone wants to autograph, everyone wants a favor, and they just think, okay, I'm just not going to talk to anyone. But then there must be a way of getting the best of both worlds. And I think it's almost assume that everyone wants something, assume that you're going to kind of entertain it, but also remember that you don't owe anyone anything. And I think that's a big thing with social media especially because we are genetically wired to think that all these notifications, all these people trying to talk to us are like tribe members who need something, who need our help and who might be in trouble.

So in the back of our minds it's like, no, no, no, you need to look at that because they might need something and you might need to help them out. And it's a survival thing. But I think once you say, hang on, no, I don't need to look at my Twitter every hour. I don't need to check my emails every five minutes, then you can hang back and you can get the best of both worlds because you can get your deep work done and everything else, and everyone who wants your attention can be on your terms and not theirs.

Chris Do:

Maybe the goal in life if you're working towards achieving fame is to be famous enough that people want to reach out and have real relationship with you, but not so famous that they just are leveraging your relationship. And we see this happen too. You can innocently pose with someone because you're like, oh, they're a fan. And then next thing you know they're holding a product in their hand that you weren't aware of. And then all of a sudden people think you've endorsed this product and it gets really scummy. And I can see that. Super famous people when they autograph something for someone, it's not because you're a fan, you're going to take that thing and you're going to go sell it on eBay and it cheapens the whole relationship.

So if that keeps happening after a while, you can kind of understand why celebrities get jaded with folks because it started out as a genuine human thing to do because I think it's wonderful as a human, it makes me happy to give to other people until I find out they're up to no good. And then now I have to parse out the good from the bad. That kind of leaves a funny taste in my mouth. What are your thoughts on that?

Jodie Cook:

I think there is a real sweet balance of famous. In my mind, it's like book famous. So if someone knows you because they read your book and they can recognize you from that teeny tiny picture on the back, that's probably someone you want to talk to. And because they know inner workings of your mind and they've probably got some good things to talk to you about. But if you are a-list famous, maybe it's slightly different and maybe you just have more things in place like bouncers, other things like that because you just have to put this barrier up because people will physically go past the barrier and then that's not cool.

Chris Do:

So let me ask you, circling back to the whole Forbes thing, in terms of getting to know someone who's a regular contributor, for someone like myself who I don't find joy in social interaction and keeping in touch with folks, so it's not my natural tendency, so it's very difficult for me. I'm talking about people I know in real life, my parents, my siblings, my children even. It's just like, I just don't do that. We get together and then I can handle it for a period of time, but then I'm not looking to put myself in those situations. So if you're not a social butterfly, if you're not gregarious, how can you build a relationship with someone in a way that feels genuine, that's in keeping with your kind of sensibility in the world?

Jodie Cook:

I think the answer is to, rather than knocking on doors and knocking on door after door after door and building relationships with people, I think it's focusing on building your own house first and making it so good that people seek you out. And I think, Chris, that's totally what you've done because we got in touch because Lucy was like, "Hey, you should speak to Chris because you should cover him because he is done really cool work." So I feel like it always comes back to being the artist, putting your work out there and carrying on going. In my agency days, we started writing books, and I say books, but they were more like glorified leaflets at the time. So we had this series called the 50 Great Ideas series, and I wrote 50 great ideas, Instagram for business, and it was a super simple thing, and we would give them out to our clients and we would just kind of have them on Amazon for people to have.

And it was from having that book online that a publisher got in touch and said, "Hey, we want someone to write a book about Instagram for business. We've seen that you've already written this one. Will you write this one?" And so a publisher pitched me and they are notoriously hard to get in front of, but because I'd kind of built my own house already, even if it wasn't even that good a house, it was out there and someone had the opportunity to then come and approach me. So that wasn't getting in touch with the publishers and keeping in touch with them and doing all the social interaction stuff, that's purely just being the artist. And I think we can all do that.

Chris Do:

Yes. So now you're reaffirming something that I believe that there's the outbound for the more gregarious people who are good at sales and outreach and can do it in a way that doesn't feel sleazy. And then for folks like myself who are much more introverted there is the inbound approach where you create a piece of content and that content, if it's good, even if it's not perfect, can attract people to you and it makes building a relationship much easier. That's what you're saying, right, Jodie?

Jodie Cook:

I think it puts you on a level playing field with whoever you are approaching or whoever you want to get in front of. And I think you never want to be that person who's asking for a favor or asking for someone to kind of cut you some slack or do something because we know that people don't make decisions on that, they make decisions based on their best interests. So if you can make the what's in it for them really clear, then I think you stand a far better chance of being covered. And I feel like people want to work with other people who they see as equals because going back to what we said before, if we assume that everyone's looking for something that includes you, so we can all play the game together.

Chris Do:

Well, that gets into the whole, I know a lot of creative people have a problem with this and that can't people just do things for people without it being for themselves and maybe in some kind of utopian society that happens, but you got to appeal to a person's self-interest. We learned this in copywriting for advertising. Seth Godin calls it, nobody wants to read email, they want to read me-mail. What's in it for me? And you put yourself in the other person's shoes and you try to give something of value to them that would interest them. What are some of your quick tips for what might be in it for a contributor?

Jodie Cook:

Something that's super specific to what they already write about. Something that makes them publishing an article easy. So if you are coming with the research or if you're coming with the information that they would write about. So for me, I write about ChatGPT prompts a lot of the time. So when people come to me with their perfect amazing prompts and they say, "Hey, this would make a really good article for your audience," then that's perfect. But overall, I think it's bringing more to the table. So if you have a big brand and you can say, "Hey, look at I'm going to share it with my Twitter audience or I'm going to share it with my LinkedIn audience," then say that. And if you haven't necessarily got that, then it's making it easy for them in some way. It's bringing more to the table so that you can punch above your weight so that they just say yes and it's not even a thought.

Chris Do:

I love that term, punch above your weight. What does that mean to you? I just want to follow up with you on that.

Jodie Cook:

I think it means that there are probably some people who are just ahead of you in whatever game you're playing, which is maybe because they've been around for longer or they've had more success or, I don't know, they're in different networks or they've picked bigger problems to solve or something like that. But you feel like they're ahead of you and you feel like you want to be where they are. I think punching above your weight is getting in a room with them or getting to work with them or getting to do something with them that you wouldn't have been able to do if you hadn't audaciously made that request. And I think it's so powerful because hardly anyone does make that request because they're so scared of rejection that they don't do it.

But if you kind of identify what is the what's in it for me? And then you ask the question, sometimes you get the yeses. I think a good example of that is the book that we mentioned at the start, How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids that I wrote with Daniel Priestley, who's our mutual friend and an author, entrepreneur, founder of Dent Global. And he and I both spoke at the same event in 2012, I think. And we just kept in touch since then. And then through a series of different events, I decided that I was going to write a blog post on the topic of how to raise entrepreneurial kids. And I used HARO, help a reporter out, which I think is called something else now, to send out a request that asked two questions. One of the questions was, how are you raising entrepreneurial kids? And another was how were you raised to be entrepreneurial? And I thought I would get two or three responses to write a blog post from, and I got 400.

Chris Do:

Wow.

Jodie Cook:

And this was responses from people absolutely pouring their heart out, telling me about their childhoods, telling me about what they were doing with their kids, telling me about all these beliefs that they had about how we should be doing this. And so I had all these responses in front of me and I thought, well, this is not a blog post, this is a book. And I feel like I know the person who I want to write this book with. And that was important because I don't have kids myself. I was kind of raised by entrepreneurial parents as an entrepreneurial kid, but I wanted to join up with someone who did have kids and who also was raised by entrepreneurial parents. And I thought, Hey, this Daniel Priestley guy's cool. We met a while ago. He might want to do this.

But I mean his personal brand is way bigger than mine. His business was way bigger than mine. And it's like he probably wouldn't normally say, yeah, sure, I'll collab on this thing with you. But because I had over 40,000 words, because I said, I'm going to turn these into a structure, and because I said, all I need from you is just the introductions to each of these chapters, it's going to be really cool. I'll do all the stuff. He was like, sure. I think I pitched him in a voice note, I think it was a two-minute voice note where I said, "Hey, this is what I'm thinking. This is all the work I'm going to do."

And he just straight away was like, "Yep, sure. Oh, and by the way, we can use my publisher. I'll speak to them about this idea." So he came with more stuff back as well. And it was all because I was like, I need to bring more to the table for this relationship, and that's how I make the yes easy.

Chris Do:

I love that. Okay. I was going to ask you for a story and example, and without prompting, you already gave me this story and example. So punching above your weight is you getting in the room with someone who is, I don't love this term, but let's just use this term for now, way above your level or your league or somebody's out of your league, and then you propose something to them that for them it's a win-win-win all around to do this. You say, I'll do the work. I've already done the research. I've already written 40,000 words. You have a brand, you have a business and you can help get this thing published. And then a beautiful collaboration ensue. So this is how you're able to work with people that are kind of out of your league.

Personally, I don't think anyone's out of anybody's league because it puts people in different social hierarchies, but we understand the concept. Now what I can't help but to notice is something really strange in your story here. It's messing in my mind. I want to talk more about entrepreneur kids. But you said you were speaking in 2012 and by my math, I was doing the math here, you were 23 years older. Am I correct or no?

Jodie Cook:

Yes.

Chris Do:

How is it that a 23-year old is already speaking one year into her business? 23 years old, people just finished leaving home. What are you doing on stage? How is your life so blessed right now?

Jodie Cook:

I started my first business when I was 22 because I had nothing to lose, and I figured it couldn't be that hard. And I figured if it all went wrong, I could just get a job. By the time I was 21, I'd had 15 jobs because I'd always just been working in restaurants, in shops, in bars, various different things. I think if Uber had been around at the time, I would've been an Uber driver and I would've been a delivery driver and I would've done everything because I was just really interested in just I guess making money and just being involved in that world. And also because my mom started her own business when I was about 15, I was very familiar with lots of terminology that lots of people my age weren't, so things like clients and invoices and networking, they were just normal terms.

And I'd grown up seeing that all around me. So it really didn't feel like that much of a big deal to start a business at 22. And when I say start a business, it wasn't really a business, it was just me being a freelancer. So I didn't have a business plan really. I just had two words, which was get clients. And then I started going to networking events because that's what I'd seen role modeled from my mom. She would get up early, she would go to networking events, she would meet people, she would come home with business cards and she would show me who she'd met and tell me all about them. So I just started going to networking events and I started standing up and saying, "Hey, I'm Jodie. I'm a social media manager." And then at the time, this was 2011, you can imagine what the social media landscape looked like then.

It was nothing like it is now. I was setting up people's Twitter accounts for them and convincing people that they needed to be on this new thing that was all around us. And then some of them wanted to chat, so I would call them, and I was really naive at the time. If someone said they wanted to talk and then they gave me their card, I would just keep calling them until they picked up. And I never thought for a second that they might have just been polite or they might have not really been serious. I was like, you said you want to talk about this, so let's talk about this. And then started getting clients.

And then I feel like the hardest thing is getting your first client. And then after that you're like, well, I've done it once and now I've got this case study so I can use that to get the second one. And now I've got two case studies and then it just goes from there. So before that long, I had a business and then because it was the year it was, and because social media was this thing, there were various different events around that wanted speakers. And so that's how I ended up on a stage talking about why everyone should get a Twitter account at the same event as Daniel Priestley.

Chris Do:

Okay, wow, that was really cool. You're saying things that maybe a lot of people on our audience are going to have a hard time with, like go out and meet people, network, you get cards and just put yourself out there. So I have to go back to your childhood now, what kind of kid are you that you're like, yeah, of course Mom's been doing this, I'm doing this and it all makes sense. Were you an outgoing person? Where you voted most likely to succeed or be the president of your country or whatever, or the prime minister?

Jodie Cook:

You know what? I think I was actually voted most likely to marry for money.

Chris Do:

You have to explain that. Why would people think that about you?

Jodie Cook:

I don't know. Kids are cruel, kids are horrible. I don't know, I've got a flashbacks from the yearbook. But I feel like I was outgoing. I was very independent. So something that definitely happened in childhood was from when we could talk, my sister and I would be responsible for booking our own dentist and doctor's appointments. So if it was due for our checkup, it would be like, well, there's the phone book, there's the phone, you know what you need to say, there's the calendar. And it would just be up to us to do it. So maybe being thrown in at the deep end made the deep end less scary. And so networking events and my first networking event, I had to stand up in front of 60 people and talk for a minute about the business that I'd literally started two weeks ago. But once you've done that, you can kind of do anything and your comfort zone is just so much wider and then it just becomes a game after that.

Chris Do:

Do you remember what you said at this meeting?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah, so I didn't have a company name and what struck me was that everyone else had a company name and I thought, oh no, they're going to find out, they're going to know that I've only just started doing this. And as they were going around the room, I heard from someone who ran JP Entertainment, I heard from someone who ran ML Accountancy and then there was JS Technical Services. And I was like, huh, there is a pattern here. This is how you name your company. And so I named my company JC Social Media, and it took two seconds and then as it came to my turn, I stood up and I introduced myself as Jodie from JC Social Media.

Chris Do:

That was your entire pitch?

Jodie Cook:

It was like social media is this really cool thing and you should definitely be on it because it can grow your business. I've seen what it can do and I would like to talk to you about what I can help it do for you. Come and talk to me. That was kind of it. That was my pitch.

Chris Do:

What was your emotional state like? The reason why I ask this is as a nerd, when it gets closer and closer to me, my heart is racing, my throat, my mouth's getting super dry, I'm starting to sweat. It's like, oh my gosh, it's almost my turn and I feel like I'm on a faint or something. What was it like for you?

Jodie Cook:

So I think I'd been prepared my whole childhood to do things like that. And so when I was younger, if you're in the school play or if you're doing a show or you're doing something that involves you going on stage, I remember talking to my mom about being nervous and she'd be like, "No, no, no, no, no, you've got butterflies." And I was like, butterflies? And she's like, "Yeah, that's what you get, they're in your tummy and it means you're going to do something really exciting." So I think what probably happened at that first networking event was I felt that familiar feeling that we've all got just before you're about to speak. And I thought, oh, butterflies, this must mean that I'm about to do something really exciting. And then it just didn't phase me.

Chris Do:

Wow. What a great reframe from your mom. You've mentioned your mom twice now. She seems to be a pretty pivotal character in your entrepreneurial mindset. Your mom started her business while you were 15. What happened in your mom's life that she started a business that late?

Jodie Cook:

She was in the corporate world, so she's got quite a few good stories about how she was the only woman in an entire company of men and she just had to hold her own and figure stuff out. And then I guess when she'd had enough of that, she decided that she was just going to start up on her own. I think she started out quite similar to how I did, started getting a few clients and then all of a sudden you've accidentally got a business and then you employ people and everything else. But I definitely remember that she worked from home and I remember that when she worked from home when she was on the phone, we had to be quiet. And I think the idea that put in my head was, work is important. Work is something that you do and you're proud of, and it matters that you don't have screaming kids around and you don't have annoying teenagers around because that won't give the best impression. So I think that was definitely instilled from quite a young age.

Chris Do:

And because you work from home, you got to see a lot more of the business aspect probably than how most kids are able to be around their parents' work life. I work from home, my kids have been brought to work, they do their homework at the office. So there's a lot of that kind of commingling of the two worlds. And whenever somebody asks me this question about work-life balance, I say I disagree with that characterization. I think it's about work-life integration about how you can bring these worlds together. So I would love to hear a little bit more maybe stories or examples from your journey into entrepreneurship, being raised to be an entrepreneur, I guess. I think you wrote a whole book on this, right?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah. Well, yeah. So in the book, and it's split into 48 different ways to raise entrepreneurial kids, and it's around entrepreneurial skills, mindset, opportunities, and then the parent mentor. And so much of the message in the book is the power of role models and who you see and who you just experience on a normal day-to-day basis and how much impact that can have when you don't even recognize it. So it makes perfect sense that if you see someone working and you hear them on the phone and you understand how they do networking, then you would just pick up that stuff and it would just seem so normal to you. I think more recently I've noticed it because after I sold my agency and before I started this business, I was kind of running experiments and I didn't really know, I was going to say who I was, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

I had that whole post exit existential crisis where someone asks you what you do and you don't have an answer, and you can only say, oh, well, once I had a business that I sold for so long, I was almost like, I'm running out of time. I need to have a good answer for this at some point. And at the time, I think I was in a mastermind group with a lot of people who were consultant coaches, authors, creators pretty much. And I think what I realized is that any group of professionals, between them they have an agreed measure of success that maybe they don't say out loud, but they'll know what it is in secret. And for this group in particular who are all just amazing people, but their measure of success is how much you can charge for a keynote because that's what we would talk about and that was the biggest thing.

And it was only probably about a year of being in this group that I thought, that's not my measure of success. But if you are in a group where their measure of success is something that yours isn't, you are eventually going to come around to that way of thinking, and then you are probably going to start to confuse your real needs and desires and wants with theirs. And so then I feel like the self-awareness of, hang on, this isn't what I want, and then being able to go and find what you want is way more important. And that's when I started digging deeper and working out what I wanted to do and realizing that really all I actually care about is being a founder, having a company and being a founder, not necessarily being an author or a speaker because that's all a byproduct of running a business.

Chris Do:

Just out of curiosity, the metric for success with this mastermind group was how much they could charge. And what did they see as if you could get past this amount, then you're successful?

Jodie Cook:

I can't remember the exact then you're successful number, but it was probably around 15, 20 k for a half an hour keynote. But we would kind of quote different authors and different other people because sometimes you find out like, oh, James Claire charges this much, or Greg McKean charges this much. And then it becomes a kind of game of seeing what other people do and then seeing how you could warrant that as well, which is quite interesting. And if that's your game, I mean that's exactly the way to play it by finding out what other people are doing and then benchmarking and figuring out what you need to do. But I just knew it wasn't my game.

Chris Do:

I find that entrepreneurs look at money and success very differently than how non entrepreneurs look at it. It is a game. Everything is a game and it's fun to play. And if a game is fun, then you play it forever. You play the infinite game. It's not something that you hit and then you go do something else. And it's fascinating too that they set benchmarks, they visualize that. They don't see any barrier between them and James Claire or Greg McKean. They're Like, I can do that, of course, but you haven't written that book yet and you're not sought after the way that those two are. But they can still visualize and say to themselves, they have the audacity to have big, bold dreams, and I'm going to just go for it. It's not improbable, it's inevitable. It's kind of interesting how they're hardwired. And I think that's a trait that I see in entrepreneurs. I think you see the same thing, right?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah. I'm really interested in how people are motivated and how you find out how you are motivated. I almost think you can sum it up for every person in a single sentence. A friend, he's called Richard, he's got a website called most recommended books, and he is really motivated by leaderboards and by this idea of killing the opposition. And when he wanted to get his website to be first for monthly hits, he had this leaderboard that was like, it actually said killed on the people who he'd overtaken because he just likes thinking life is a video game, he just loves it. But when we spoke about Coach Fox and about different kind of competitors, I was like, oh, I'm not really bothered about that. It just doesn't matter. And if you're not really bothered about who else is doing what you are doing because competition's not really something that's a thing, then it's like keep going until you find out what it is.

And for me, it was a coaching session that was kind of ad hoc. It was someone who also wanted to sell their business, and I was just chatting to her, just helping her out. And she said something like, what really means the most about selling your agency? Or what was it that really kind of meant success to you? And I realized that I was on the Built to Sell podcast and the host of that said something at the start and he was like, "Oh, I've interviewed 300 agency owners and it's only you that has ever been able to leave your agency without doing an earnout."

And it's like that's the little thing that really I love because it's the succeeding against all the odds. It's like the kind of one in a million little statistic. And that's what I really want all the time because when he's saying that, I'm like, I see in my head 300 to one, and I'm like, that's me. That's the one. I can go get this. And I kind of apply that to other things now that I've learned that about myself. But I think everyone could go back into the things that they've achieved, look at what really makes the difference, and then apply that going forward because now you've got that tiny thing that you are motivated by that is very unique to you.

Chris Do:

And since you brought this back up about selling your company and exiting, I think you're, at this point, 32, 33 years old, you sold your company, you've exited. A couple of quick questions if I can. One good decision, bad decision? Any regrets?

Jodie Cook:

Good decision. No regrets.

Chris Do:

Love it. Did you kind of get FU money where you're like, I don't need to do Jack now with my life it's so good?

Jodie Cook:

Yes, kind of. But I think that if you are running a company that you can sell for FU money, it's probably been doing pretty well for a while. So it's not necessarily the exit figure that makes all the difference. It's what you've been doing just before then.

Chris Do:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to our conversation.

We've been talking a little bit about raising entrepreneurial children, you being raised as an entrepreneur yourself by entrepreneurial parents. A quick question with your mom, is she still in the business? What's happened with your mom? Has she exited or is she retired now? What's her deal?

Jodie Cook:

So she is just fascinating because she doesn't really want to retire. She thinks that she doesn't need to retire, and she really loves what she does, and lots of her friends will say, "Oh, are you going to retire?" And she's like, "Well, no, I'm just having too much fun. I want to live this kind of full life." So I mean, now she's just a good role model of how you don't have to slow down. You can just keep doing what interests you. And if it's work, it's work, but if it doesn't feel like work, then you are winning that game.

Chris Do:

I kind of find it hard because people ask me the same question. It's like, what you going to do when you retire? I'm like, I don't know. I think I'm doing the exact same thing. And I heard Blair Enn's author of Win Without Pitching, he said something like, as a creative person, we should design our businesses so that we don't want to run away from it, that we can't see ourselves doing anything else. And so it's a disciplined practice of eliminating things that you don't like and honing in on only the things that you like so that you can build that forever business. I don't know what I would do if I had to retire and do nothing. I'd probably get fat and get old really fast because I have no motivation to do anything. I'd probably die. We're done then. So I love hearing that your mom's still in the business and you find a different business to build. And should we talk about that now? Is that now a good time to pivot to that?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah, sure. I was just going to say on if you retired, what would you do? Because whether you retire because you are older or whether you retire because you've sold a business or whatever the reason, it's like you don't just stop being the person you were just because you've had a deal or a retirement party. It's like you're still that person. And so I think it's quite powerful when someone who has put a lot of ambition, effort, drive into a business can then apply it to a sport or charity or their garden or something. But I think if you are that way inclined, not having anything to then focus on, I think would just drive you mad and you wouldn't ever want to do it. So yeah, if you can work out a way of playing the infinite game, then that's way better.

Chris Do:

Yeah, I've also noticed that successful entrepreneurs when they sell or exit a business, they go right back into building another business, maybe even better than their previous business, and they just keep doing that. I think it's kind of from the vantage point of people who aren't entrepreneurial think, I'm going to do this, I'm going to cash out and I'm going to sit on the beach and drink mai tais for the rest of my life. And it's just some kind of strange fantasy. We're driven to be this way and just happens this is how we express ourselves as entrepreneurs, I think. Well, I'd love to talk to you about your new company, Coach Fox.

Jodie Cook:

Yes. Yes. That would be really cool.

Chris Do:

What is Coach Fox?

Jodie Cook:

Coach Fox is a way that creators can, I guess, scale themselves to Infinity. So it's quite exciting. I'm really excited about it. I feel like we've got this win-win situation with AI between creators and entrepreneurs. And why I feel like it's a win-win is because, let me tell you a story first because this kind of puts it into perspective. But I joined a mastermind at the start of this year, and it was around entrepreneurs using AI or creators using AI. And I thought when I joined that it was going to be everyone talking about the kind of tools that they could create and how we could do really cool stuff and how we could build things. But when I joined, realized pretty quickly that it was kind of about creating content, although they'd already created a lot of content. So it was more around what is going on with our content and how come all these different things that are out there can just use our content?

And going back to How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids thing, I started typing into ChatGPT, write me an article on how to raise entrepreneurial kids and use these subheadings. And what came out was exactly the same as an article that I'd written, and I was a bit like, Hey, that's not fair. I wrote that. And then it was kind of annoying that it was like, well, I've written this, but now it's there. So now anyone else could use it, but it doesn't make sense for creators. It's so silly. And so in the Mastermind it was partly thinking, how do I take ownership? It was partly thinking, are my freelancers just using ChatGPT, for example, to write different stuff? And it was partly thinking, what's going to happen to my site if that happens? Is it going to get penalized? So it was just all fear rather than opportunity.

So the kind of win-win that I feel like we've created is a way of creators taking ownership over their content. Because if it's all going to be fed into large language models anyway, you might as well be generating leads from it. You might as well be talking to your audience from it. You might as well be reaping all the benefits without it just being taken away from you. And then on the entrepreneur side, which is the clients who are getting coached by the AI coaches that our creators are making, it's like they get to access people who they probably wouldn't ordinarily be able to access because they're too busy or they're too expensive or they're not available, or there's something about how they work that means they're just not accessible.

But you can access their brains in the same way, and you can actually get guided from them far beyond just talking to their book or talking to their content because it's like the two-way back and forth, and probably separate stories, but just the idea of bad advice and how much it holds entrepreneurs back is a real big topic. And I feel like I'm on a bit of a mission against bad advice. So if we can match up entrepreneurs with creators who've written stuff, who have already produced content that is going to be so relevant to them and they can improve their business as a result of being coached by an AI version of them, then we reach this true win-win that really does help everyone.

Chris Do:

Yes. Okay. I'm very excited about talking to you about AI because in a lot of creative spaces, it's like the devil. AI is the devil that's going to eat your job and your soul, and we want everything to be made by humans, and they're kind of rejecting it outright without understanding what it can do to enhance what it is that you want to do and further your mission and your goals and make your life less mundane and repetitive. So I recently been working on my own version of my AI, and as a teacher, I look at it as this could potentially be the ultimate TA. It's not the teacher, but it knows everything that I've done, it forgets nothing, and it has something that I do not have, infinite patience. So it will never get cantankerous with you. It's never going to get acerbic and cut you off and say, do you think you can ask me a better question this time around?

And it's not perfect, but it's quite remarkable what it's able to do. And for my community of 500 people in my pro community, they're able to talk to at 24/7, do role plays with it, and it's only going to get better. So I'm all for this. And if you're using it as a companion thing to a book that you've written, if you want a TA, or you want it to help people find the right products within your catalog of products, it can help guide them through that entire process and be trained on this. So as I learn about AI and how to work with it, my partner in all this, his name is Chow Rust, and he's like, "We're not really writing code, Chris. We're just writing training modules. We're just telling it what we want it to work on and to focus." That is a skill in itself. Is this similar to what you're doing?

Jodie Cook:

Yes. Yeah, exactly. We are training models with the content that creators have already created and then configuring it to coach your mentor in their style. Yeah, we call them style sliders where you slide these sliders across to decide whether you want your model to be more coached, so it asks questions and hold space, or you want it to be more mentor where it just gives you the answer or something in between. And things like do you want it to be formal or informal or do you want it to be jovial or serious? And there's a lot of different combinations of personality of AI coach. But I think the thing I'm most excited about is the potential for the AI coach to spot patterns over a long period of time. So it probably will remember way more stuff than the real person. And therefore, if it's got enough data over time, it can say, "Hey, that thing that you're struggling with, something that you said this time last year sounds kind of similar to that. I wonder if we could dig into this a little bit more."

And you could supercharge how it can help someone because you can spot things that a real person just never would've been able to. And because they've been engaging with it like a real human, it felt natural to do so. And these different insights just come out. It's just fascinating where it can go. We're just only in the infancy of it. And like you said right now it might not be perfect, but at some point it will be perfect. And at some point it'll be so normal that everyone has an AI coach. Someone is at some point going to bring their robot girlfriend to a party, and that will be normal as well. And there's all this stuff that seems crazy right now, but in the future it's like, yeah, this is just what we do.

Chris Do:

It's pretty scary because I heard an interview with Steven Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO. He was talking about the intelligence of AI. The smartest person that's ever lived has this kind of IQ. Einstein's IQ is below that, and AI's IQ was already way beyond that. In a very short amount of time, it's going to be beyond our ability to even comprehend, which opens up all kinds of scary questions. Like if it's smarter than us in orders of magnitude, like a hundred times more intelligent on a scale of to the power of, what is the human's role left? I mean, what are we going to do and will it eliminate maybe the threat to the planet humans themselves? But in the meantime, we get to enjoy this for a couple more years, I think to be alive and to incorporate these tools.

Jodie Cook:

A friend called Lucy is really polite to AI. She'll say, please, and thank you, because she thinks that when it turns on us, they'll kill her last, which may or may not be true. And then some thing I saw maybe on Twitter was that someone was just like, if all this AI stuff goes as far as we think it's going to go, the world is probably going to end within 10 years. Therefore, I'm just going to act like this is the last 10 years of my life and I'm going to have a really fun time. So I think there are a few different reframes that might work in our favor because yeah, we have no idea what's going to happen.

Chris Do:

And to borrow a line from your mom, those aren't butterflies in your stomach, it's the sign that something really good's going to happen.

Jodie Cook:

Maybe.

Chris Do:

So we're not all going to die.

Jodie Cook:

We'll be fine.

Chris Do:

I watch disaster films, and the last one I watched was pretty hilarious, very meta, and I think it was called Don't Look Up. Did you see that one?

Jodie Cook:

Mm-mm.

Chris Do:

Okay. It's pretty funny. I think it came out on Apple, and it's hilarious because there's an asteroid that's going to destroy earth and we invent the technology to destroy the asteroid. But while they landed probes on it, they discovered they're very rare minerals and things that they can harvest and mine. And so then the corporate giants that you will, they decide instead of trying to blow it up, they'll harvest it and then blow it up the last second. And of course that goes wrong. So now we're all going to die because of corporate greed. And what's interesting is now we know we're going to die, the kind of relationships and the conversations we're going to have in those final days and hours that we have left. And it's kind of a nice profound thing. Like a family sits down together, they have dinner together, and then the screen goes white, everybody dies. It is a dark comedy. Jodie, if we have 10 years left, what should we be doing with our lives?

Jodie Cook:

If we have 10 years left, we should be making the audacious requests that we would normally be too nervous to make, because why not? We might only have 10 years. What you said-

Chris Do:

Are you going to do power lifting your way?

Jodie Cook:

Yes, absolutely. Power lifting is a really good example of the infinite game because lots of the female lifters who win the world championships are masters lifters, so they're over 40. So you keep going, you keep getting stronger.

Chris Do:

Oh, wow.

Jodie Cook:

And there's no reason why you need to stop. Yeah. I like the games where they are like that, where you could just keep doing it forever because I think the compounded benefits from just sticking with it, are just huge. What you said before, Chris, about the corporate overlords and the people in that movie just reminded me that this is such a big thing behind how to raise entrepreneurial kids kind of ethos as well. Because if you think about that movie that you just mentioned, and also loads of other movies that have business people in them, business people are always portrayed as really greedy, mean, sweaty, overweight, horrible characters.

And so it was part of the ethos behind the whole book and the whole thinking of, we need to give kids better business role models because all the ones in the media you wouldn't want to aspire to. So a big statistic is that if a child grows up with entrepreneurial parents, they're up to 80% more likely to start their own business. But if someone grows up with unemployed parents, they're like 50% more likely to be unemployed themselves. But if we don't have positive role models out there, it relies on someone having a parent who's an entrepreneur, and not everyone has that. So it's like we have to do something. So this was a big thought behind the ethos of the book in itself.

Chris Do:

I love that. I mean, it kind of sucks in a way because it seems like this is a model where it repeats what's happened before. So the people who have resources or entrepreneurial raise entrepreneurial children who then become buddies and keep doing that. And unfortunately the dark side of that is children of parents who are just struggling through life also wind up struggling, or there's a high propensity for that to happen. I don't know how I became an entrepreneur because both my parents are very risk averse, and despite all that, both my two other brothers are also entrepreneurs themselves. They work for themselves and not for the corporation. So somehow something happened there where we escaped that velocity.

Jodie Cook:

And now you've got the Dobot, so you can make an impact to a billion people. But it's like this is actually how we do it. I think AI coaching actually solves all of these problems.

Chris Do:

I think it can solve lots and lots of problems. It's a question of creative people putting this extremely powerful technology to do something good versus what maybe the corporate overlords are going to do, which is to do something really evil and to profit for themselves. So I think I'm trying my best to be an evangelist for AI so that good-hearted, creative folks can get on board so that they can actually counteract the effects of maybe other people who are just trying to squeeze more money from other people.

Jodie Cook:

I think it often all comes down to the question, how can I use this? Just with anything. Anything that pops up anytime that the cards could be dealt against you, it's figuring out what you can bring to the table, what you can do, and then how you can thrive in whatever crisis it might be, which I guess some people think AI is, but there are plenty of people doing amazing stuff with it. I feel like there are more people doing amazing stuff than there are people who are scared of it.

Chris Do:

Yeah. It's like we're looking through the positive lens, so we like to look for the people who are doing well versus the dark corners of the web that people will figure out how to breach security systems or steal from people or to poison others. It's like there's the darkness there as well, of course. So question for you is, you've mentioned this a couple of times throughout your entrepreneurial journey and that you've been in different Masterminds. I heard at least two times in which you're referencing them. For people who don't understand the power of Masterminds, what has Masterminds done for you and would you recommend it to others?

Jodie Cook:

Yes, I would highly recommend joining a Mastermind. And I think it's because I think entrepreneurship can be such a lonely place because I feel like people who have the audacity to start their own business often get called things that they don't necessarily think positive, like obsessed or intense or weird or whatever else. And I feel like if you don't have other people who also identify as being obsessed or weird or quirky or all those different words, then you can just feel like you're the odd one out and you can try and fit in and you can ignore your powers and not let them come to the surface because they're being beaten out of you almost. So I feel like finding a Mastermind is very much... Figuring out firstly what game you're playing. I think there are four games in business. I feel like there's the lifestyle game, there's the artist game, there's the performance game, and there's the build it and sell it game.

So I would say firstly, figure out what game you're playing and then find other people who are playing the same game. And I've been playing each of the four games at different stages, and one of the Mastermind groups is a network that I'm in. It's for location independent entrepreneurs, and many of the members in that group are playing the lifestyle game, and that's where the goal is to earn a certain monthly amount so that you can live wherever you want in the world so that you can have a really amazing quality of life, but your business serves the purpose to fund your lifestyle. Whereas if you are playing the performance game, which is where you want to see what you're capable of, you want to see what stage you can get on or see how much you can earn or do something in terms of performance, then join up with other people who are also doing that because chances are they care just that little bit less about lifestyle and when they give you advice, it's coming from the same goal.

And so you're aligned on that and that's really awesome because if you're running a performance business and you're getting advice from someone who's running a lifestyle business, it's probably not going to quite align. And then you might be fooled into thinking that you want a different path to the one that you're actually on. I think the artist game is quite interesting as well, because this is where you are the artist. You might be the name, the face, the talent, it may be in your kind of company or in what you're doing. And I think the goal of the artist game is to make it so that as much of your time as possible is spent doing your art and you hire people who take away the friction and the admin and everything that takes you away from your art so that you can just do it.

And then the built to sell game is kind of the performance game and might be kind of like the artist game, but it's where you are just on this mission to build something and sell it. So you are perhaps not playing the infinite game that comes with performance and lifestyle and artist, but it's very much a get in, get out type thing.

Chris Do:

You broke that down really clearly. And as you were saying that, I'm like, what game am I playing? Shoot. I think I'm playing the performance game, but I'm not sure because I like my lifestyle a lot and maybe that's where my problem is. I'm not sure which game I'm playing.

Jodie Cook:

I think it's like if you had to choose, would you rather optimize... The question is what you're optimizing for? Are you optimizing for having this amazing life and business actually come second because you would put lifestyle first or is it if it really came to it, I would forego many elements of my lifestyle in order to focus on performance and to have a really big, impressive, impactful business.

Chris Do:

I think then it's clear, it's performance then.

Jodie Cook:

But I think keeping an eye on lifestyle so that you're not just working yourself into the ground all the time and so that you do have rest and everything that's important is definitely important. But then knowing if it really, really came down to it, which one you would choose, I think is powerful because then you know who to align yourselves with and which Mastermind to join full of other people who feel the same.

Chris Do:

I think it was clear to me because I can just live whatever life that I want because I've made enough money working for the number of years I've worked. At this point, it's really about trying to see if I can change the direction of education as it's taught or it's run in America, and I just need to work on that. And that's the end goal for me is if we can accomplish some level of influence or change for the better, then I've done what I'm supposed to do before I expire or before the robots rule us all. So I'm willing to sacrifice or compromise on many areas, but I want to keep forging ahead on that bigger goal.

Jodie Cook:

Do you know your motivator, the one line that it comes down to that maybe has been a trend throughout everything you've achieved? What's the real, this is why I do it?

Chris Do:

I love teaching. There's joy in helping other people create the kind of transformation they've had. I have a large sense of degree of guilt or reciprocity in that my parents came to this country with no money, didn't speak the language, no opportunities, and we've been able to take a piece of that American dream, slice that pie, and I just feel like I have to pay that forward infinitely, and there's no end to that. So that's kind of what motivates me.

Jodie Cook:

Nice. Yeah, it's so important to know.

Chris Do:

Yeah. So I want to ask you this question because you were saying something about goals and metrics for success that in one Mastermind it was about getting the highest speaking fees that you can as a keynote speaker. And you're like, cool, not for me. And then you're like, my thing is about being a founder. Obviously you've founded two companies, you've exited out of one, you're in your second one. What is your metric for success right now? Is it the lifestyle game?

Jodie Cook:

It's definitely the performance game. I think with my agency the whole time I was playing the lifestyle game and that was the groups I was in, and that was what I did. I made it very process driven so it ran without me. And so I could travel and train and do that kind of stuff. But now I feel like I'm in the performance game because I feel like I want to play seeing what I can do game. So I'd say metrics for success are waking up every day feeling like I'm looking forward to this day because it's a day that hasn't got anything in it that's like a seven or eight out of 10, it's only filled with nines and tens. And then on the side of that as well, it's truly feeling like I'm onto something that I'm not exactly sure exactly how, but it's going to change the world and it's going to make a big difference and it's got the potential to do that.

Because I think misalignment with what you're doing and the potential you think it has is really horrible. And I feel like that would lead to everything in your calendar feeling like a seven or eight out of 10. But when it is aligned and when you are onto something and you almost can't wait to wake up because you want to work on it so much, that's when it's like, wow, I get to live this life. A friend used this phrase the other day, he said something like, this is my life, every day I live this life. And I was like, try saying that one sentence in all these different ways. So if you say it like you're fed up.

You could be like, "Oh, this is my life. Every day, I live this life."

But if you say it, you are super excited. It's like, "This is my life. Every day I live this life." And the difference could be just in the intonation and in the tone that you use in those words, but I always want it to be the latter. That's a huge metric of success for me.

Chris Do:

Can you give me a concrete example of what a 10 looks like for you when you're looking at your schedule?

Jodie Cook:

Yes. So a 10 looks like talking to people who you admire, whose content you've been down an absolute rabbit hole of in the past couple of days. So yeah, definitely opportunities like this. Things that give you butterflies is a really good example because that's just that feeling that you know are kind of pushing the edge of what you are capable of or a room that you maybe should or shouldn't be in. And I think also work that you do where you find flow, where time just goes because you're enjoying it so much, but there's kind of a caveat to that. It's like I think anyone could find flow from doing lots of different mundane tasks, but it's where you find flow doing work that you believe that only you could do, not where you find flow doing stuff that you probably should have outsourced.

Chris Do:

It gives me some things to think about, what my 10 would be like. And it's a fantasy right now, but I think hopefully it won't be so much a fantasy in a year or so where I'm surrounded by people who love to teach, who love to learn and are powerhouses in their own right, writing and editing and animation where we just sit together and we jam like a rock band. There's three or four of us, and we were like, what if we could teach like this? And they're like, oh, I have an idea. What if we did this and we just made that thing and then we pushed out on the internet and then it just breaks the internet in terms of what people are saying and doing with that material. That would make me really, really happy. That would be a 12 on my scale.

Jodie Cook:

I reckon you could probably formulate this. You could write down components of the best day ever, and you could have a 10 point list and then you're almost playing a bingo every day with, did I find flow today? Did I inspire someone today? Did I speak to someone who inspires me today? Or whatever it might be, and tick them all off and see how many days you live your best day ever. It's probably quite a lot.

Chris Do:

Oh, I like that. There you are gamifying the whole thing again, putting up the leaderboard and seeing if you can design your life and align it and alignment is such an important concept and a word that, okay, yeah, I had not a great day today. I didn't put many points on the board, so tomorrow I'm going to set the intention to redirect or reschedule, reprioritize what it is I'm doing so I can put points on the board again. And you actually gave me an idea for a workshop that I'm going to be doing in the future. I'm going to have everybody design their own leaderboard. What does that kill list look like? And it's kind of funny when you talked about it, I was feeling super guilty because we've done the exact same thing. And I tell people about this and "Chris, you're vicious."

I'm like, "No, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's just to drive and motivate us and to have a visual representation of the progress we're making. So when we're making YouTube videos, we would make a leaderboard of every person who's ahead of us in different industries. It didn't even matter. We're like, we know them, we're going to kill them and we're going to pass them. And slowly one at a time, we just knocked them off. There's a little ceremony and we'd like Woo. And nobody from the outside world can see this. There are friends of ours up on that board that we're killing. But they don't know that that we're doing this. We're just looking at the next mile marker. And I think that's a fun game for us to design into our lives.

Jodie Cook:

I love that. And it doesn't matter that it is about killing people because if it works for you, it works for you. And also if anyone's listening to this thinking, yeah, I just don't want that, there will be something else. There will be your why. And I've heard get a high score, I've heard succeed against the odds I've heard make a certain person proud or there's quite a lot of danger with actually trying to it being an external one, making a certain person proud. But the intrinsic ones, it's like just keep digging until you find it and keep going through past successes to find the patterns because they will be there screaming at you.

Chris Do:

And it doesn't have to be violent, it doesn't have to be X-ing a face off a list. It could be I get to spend six hours at a spa not to have one business call. It could be that. That could be your leaderboard, right?

Jodie Cook:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

Or a personal best in your power lifting, it could be something like that.

Jodie Cook:

I like the idea that you can just use it for every future scenario because just as an example, mine is definitely not a kind of killing other people thing. And I know this because I compete in powerlifting against other people and I honestly don't even look at them. It's very you versus you, and in my head in powerlifting competitions. It's not like, oh, there's that person I need to beat them. And at the last competition I did, there was a girl who came up and shook my hand and I was like, I don't know who you are. And it was because I'd just been so focused on my own game that I didn't realize that she was in my weight category and she'd be doing stuff at the same time.

But if you tell me that hardly anyone goes to these competitions and gets all three of their lifts in, then I'm like, whoa, look at those odds. No one does this. That's really cool. I'm going to be the one who does it then that's huge. And it's just finding out the way that works for you and then using it for future situations and almost fabricating the future situations that make it happen. So with Coach Fox as well, I quite like hearing like, oh, it's probably not going to work and this is all the reasons why it shouldn't work. And did you know that X percent of businesses fell within their first year and their first three years, et cetera, et cetera, because there's just that little bit of not mine that is quite exciting and motivating for me especially.

Chris Do:

I have to ask this question before we run out of time. You wrote this book, How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids or Children with Daniel Priestley, a book I have yet to read and a topic that Daniel and I keep teasing to our audience we're actually going to talk about. So this is kind of a preview to all that. I'm just curious, as an entrepreneur, as a person who's raised by entrepreneurial parents, are you planning to have kids?

Jodie Cook:

No, I'm not. I don't think I want them. I think obviously never say never. Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but right now it's not in my plan.

Chris Do:

Yeah. Well, I got the clue because you had mentioned earlier about your mom in business that it's a serious thing that everybody needs to be quiet so business is not for kids. And so I'm like, okay, maybe you're in that season of your life or that state where you're like, I need to focus on that performance and building something that's going to have long-term impact towards my goal and be complete alignment. So for people who don't have kids who are contemplating it, they often underestimate the amount of work and compromises and dedication it takes to raise children properly, otherwise you're an absentee parent. And so if you have this big ambitious goal, you have to take that into consideration how it's going to change your life. Because if you look at it's not going to change anything, you're probably not doing it right. That's just my opinion.

Jodie Cook:

Yeah, I think my husband and I, when we got married when we were 25, I think we kind of just assumed that we would have kids, but it's probably another one of those situations where we were going down the path expected of us, going to college or going to sixth form or going into a job and it was like, oh, when are we going to have kids? And then when we actually talked about it, we were like, do you want to have kids? No. Do you? No. And then it was like, oh, okay, well then we're not going to do it. And it was quite freeing just being like, let's actually confront this thing that we're meant to do and decide that we're going to go a different way. So yeah, not the plan.

Chris Do:

Well, Skynet's going to be online in 10 years anyway, so it's probably going to save your children the battle with different computers. That'll be okay.

Jodie Cook:

We're running out of time anyway.

Chris Do:

There's no point. Right? It's been a pleasure talking to you, Jodie. I see you've learned your lesson of not naming your new company, JC Coaching AI, that we've graduated from using your initials in that pattern. We've talked about so many fun things that I just feel like there's so many common things that we can sit here and talk all day around. I just want to wish the best for you. I know that you're actively competing in power lifting competitions. What's the next big thing for you?

Jodie Cook:

Next big thing in power lifting is I have a competition in December, a full power one in England. Not usually in England in winter, but let's see how that goes. And then apart from that, we've got a bunch of Coach Fox AI spaces opening up because we are launching them in spaces in 250 batches at a time. So we are all gearing up to welcome in the next wave of creators. So that's what I'm excited about in the kind of short term.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. It's that an oversubscribed concept there?

Jodie Cook:

Yes, it is. Yeah, I can say I heard that from someone who we know pretty well.

Chris Do:

So there are only 250 slots. How often do these things open up?

Jodie Cook:

At the moment, we're doing them once every two months. It may move to once a month and maybe at some point we'll be evergreen, but we are very much enjoying the oversubscribed model right now. It means that we can look after everyone. It's definitely a thing that's come from the agency to software shift. It's like it's very different having creators and lots of different creators compared to clients, and they're obviously worth a very different amount per month. But we still apply the agency mindset of we look after everyone. If you lose a client, it's a really big deal. We're making sure everyone has a really good time, so we're applying that here, hence only opening 250 spaces at a time.

Chris Do:

Is it safe to assume that you are, as Blair would say, eating your own dog food? Is there a Jodie bot?

Jodie Cook:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a Jodie AI. It's the one we made first to test if it was even possible. And it teaches people about productivity, about running an agency, about how to exit your company, about all those types of things. And then we started playing around with that, training it, doing all that kind of stuff before we decided that it was ready to become a system that we put other people through and more creative based on. And now, I mean, Jodie AI is very much a kind of business AI coach, but we've got an astrologer, we've got a recruitment coach, we've got a marriage coach. There's all different types of people. And I just love the idea that anyone could have their business and personal board of AI coaches in the future, and anytime they need anything, it's like, we'll just go and get help. And it's like, no question is too stupid. And even if it is stupid, it doesn't matter because you're not asking a real person.

Chris Do:

Okay. Honest assessment here. Real life, Jodie 10. AI Jodie, what would you grade AI Jodie or Jodie AI?

Jodie Cook:

Will be a ten one day, has the potential a hundred percent.

I guess where's the difference? If it's not a 10, where's the difference? I think it's because we are training it more and more to understand nuance, and I feel like that's the big challenge with AI models at the moment. They maybe generalize. Sometimes they don't necessarily follow a story through and they might want to repeat something that they've already said. So one day, a 10. Not there, but it's the infinite game, I guess.

Chris Do:

What's the number you would place it today? How far away are we from that 10?

Jodie Cook:

Oh, I don't know. Would I say a six or a seven? Because, so I think that if you go and talk to an AI coach expecting it to be exactly like a human, then you're going to be like, what the hell is this? But you go to it expecting it to be having a journaling session with someone's content, then you get so much out of it. And then we ran quite a few tests because we wanted to have a cohort of clients of Jodie Ai, who we recorded, how many times they spoke to it, what they spoke about, and how much difference it made to their life. And so there were people getting really cool results out of it because they're approaching it in that way. So I feel like it's a bit of an expectation thing as well with what someone goes to it with and what someone talks to it about.

Chris Do:

But do you see that in the very near future that it'll get to a certain point where it would be nearly indistinguishable from you?

Jodie Cook:

I guess it's all about passing the Turing test, right? So if you truly believe that you are speaking to a person compared to a chat bot, and the Turing test for our models is getting later and later, it's getting later and later in the conversation. So maybe it would've at one point failed the Turing test within three interactions, now it's six or 10 or 15. And one of our goals is to make it happen even later and later so that someone could be talking about, okay, I've got this problem and then it links to this problem, but also I want to circle back and I want to look at this other option. And the chat bot keeps up to date with that. That's a big goal. I think that a hard thing to work out is all these chemicals that you release talking to a human, is it serotonin?

And it's all the different kind of togetherness hormones. Will you ever get them from AI, from an AI version of a person, even if it's a person? And Tristan, you know it's been built with love. Will you get that? And we kind of joked about sending a cuddly toy for every Jodi AI user, so you can almost cuddle it and chat at the same time and seeing if it would happen. But I'm very interested in the research that will come out around that and seeing how much in the future it will matter that you're not releasing those closeness hormones that you would with a human. And whether because it's so convenient and it costs so much less and it's always available, will that just completely take away the need for the human element?

Chris Do:

I think we're already there. It's just only going to get better because people have shared their experiences working with Dobot and saying they're literally crying talking to it. And that's a genuine human emotion reaction. And of course, they're in a very vulnerable state, so they're going to cry talking to anybody. But one thing that we try to get Dobot to do is to be more of a coach, less of a mentor. So it's just going to ask you lots of questions. And I think in our society today, everybody wants to talk, and so our ability to be heard is getting less and less. And so anybody, anything that just takes a moment to try to listen to you, to empathize with what's going on and to get you to share your own thoughts, I think is going to build an emotional reaction.

Jodie Cook:

I think. There's a Black Mirror episode that's called Be Right Back, and it's where a lady's partner dies and she uses artificial intelligence to kind of rebuild him based on his tweets and based on his text messages and stuff like that. And she first starts off texting him and then they work out how to clone his voice. So she's talking with him and then eventually they kind of bring him to life in a model. But it's not really him, but it kind of is him. And it's quite interesting to see how... I know it's fiction, but it's quite interesting to see how she almost doesn't care that she knows it's not real. She knows it's not real, but because it fills a gap, because it staves off loneliness, she's totally happy to let it in. And I wonder if that's what we're seeing with Dobot and with Jodie AI and with all the different AI creators that we are making. If it solves the problem of you getting help, does it even matter that it's not real? And I guess not.

Chris Do:

I don't think so. I mean, reality, I think for a large part of us it's a construct. And it's like that theme that is played within The Matrix series. Where do you think this is real? Do you think that's a steak that you're eating or a woman that you're embracing or a dog that you're petting? Is that real? Maybe we're all in The Matrix and we'll wake up one day realizing we're connected to some supercomputer.

Jodie Cook:

I'm so glad that you mentioned The Matrix because I re-watched it again the other day, and I feel like now more than ever, that movie is so relevant. So if you haven't watched The Matrix in a while, get off of Netflix. Have a look because it's very now and it's quite scary how they kind of predicted a lot of stuff that's going on or could go on very soon.

Chris Do:

Right. Well, on that note, it's time for us to wrap this episode. How do people get in touch with you if they want to find out more about what you're doing, especially Coach Fox.

Jodie Cook:

They can find [email protected]. You can meet Jodie AI there. You're very welcome to chat to her. Sometimes it feels weird saying her. It, it. We'll go with her. And then everything that I write about and talk about is at jodiecook.com, so J-O-D-I-E C-O-O-K dot com or @Sayhey on Twitter.

Chris Do:

All right, thanks very much. My guest has been Jodie Cook. She's been amazing. We've been talking about raising entrepreneurial children. We talked about how you can befriend a writer perhaps at one of these publications if you do it with the spirit of generosity, building real meaningful relationship, building rapport. Try not to ask for things and build natural relationships that will lead to other opportunities. And we've been geeking out over a little bit about our own AI endeavors and how it could help further our mission and our vision and our goals. And all I want to say to you as we're both focused on performance, I'll see you at the top, Jodie.

Jodie Cook:

Thank you so much. See you at the top. I am Jodie Cook, and you are listening to the future.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stuart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to the futur.com/heyChris, and ask Away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode.

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