Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Mason, who's going to introduce himself and his company and tell us a little bit about his expertise and why we should trust him as a Gotcha.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on, Jeremy. Name is Mason McCumber. I'm originally from Houston, Texas, all the way out here in the. The crazy South.
I'm a SEO and AI expert and I've put together hundreds of tools for individuals and users to use and actually learn some of the new stuff for AI and for SEO.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: What's it like being a cowboy in a desert that is changing every single day?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Oh, this is. It's definitely interesting. More on reference to being in Texas.
The landscape here, definitely people set in their ways and there's some challenges when dealing with clients and doing services and filling services and trying to get everyone caught up to speed. So I love teaching about obviously, all this SEO and AI stuff, and I've been using this to. To help really leverage and help business owners level up.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: So what is the baseline for business owners at the moment when you're encountering them? Is it just they're not with that AI do stuff, or do they have wrong preconceptions about what it can or can't do?
Or are you finding they, you know, they come into you and they've already, you know, plunked in a bunch of prompts into Claude and done a bunch of stuff like, what are you running into in the. Why?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: So, so what I'm running into is people not understanding agentic agents. So I'll give you this analogy that it really explains where AI is at and where AI is going ultimately and how you can use it. Thus. So where AI is and where AI is actually going is. Is for the longest time, if you think about everything like a car, it's been super powerful, like the engine inside of a car for the longest time. Even when we were on the GPT4 models or your Claude Haiku 3.5, the models have been extremely, extremely strong, assuming no hallucinations for this really long time. So if you were able to go back and forth, like you're working on something with coding, or you're working on something with SEO, or you're just trying to formulate an idea. You had that engine, but you were kind of the driver in the seat there. So you were kind of communicating back and forth with these agents, or not with the agents, but with the. With the chat, and that was your engine and you were kind of the driver. So if you think about getting from a destination, you have an idea in mind.
So you have to have the idea, which is point A to point B.
And you're kind of the driver behind the wheel taking the turns, the lefts, the rights, and just going exactly where you need to go to make it to your final destination.
Um, and people aren't realizing that with these new tools that are out now, they don't have to be the driver. So the new way that people actually do and use AI is they use that super powerful engine, whether that's Claude, whether it's ChatGPT, whether that's any one of the million AI models that are out. And I have specific things on that. But the driver now is an agentic AI agent. So that's either openclaw if you like a lobster, it's Copilot, if you like the distro, it's ChatGPT and Codex and or it's a crab if you want to use the Claude code tools. But that is the new way that everything gets done. And then the user only has to think about the A to B and then give some minor instructions on how to take the turns and how to do the driving to make sure they don't drive across the grass or doing anything too crazy and go out. But that's the simplest way that I can explain it. And people don't know necessarily that this is out there. They're still manning a lot of this. They're still talking to ChatGPT to make the website and produce code and do certain things instead of letting it drive the car and then correcting it and saying, hey, don't drive over that person's grass or don't do these certain things, if you can imagine the analogy. But they're a truck driver before and now you're more a kind of operator of the, the business and you're an operator of the truck. So you're, you're the driver dispatch instead of the driver. And people are just having such a hard time stepping out of that truck.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: I'm guilty.
And it's not that I haven't had conversations where three fourths of the words out of the guest mouth was agentix and agent and agentic.
I know that I, I can, can be doing more to automate it, but it seems to me, and I, I is it the, is the block between making that jump into leveraging that agent model, just not knowing of a specific platform to jump into that modifies your viewpoint of how to use that tool? Because certainly the UX UI Of Claude chatgpt is very similar to, you know, you go to Google, blank page prompt, put in stuff, right. And then it saves your chats and then you come back to it.
Is it just a lack of awareness or is it a, you know, you can do a gentic directly through the CLAUDE interface, but you have to do X, Y and Z, which means that you have to have some sort of meta knowledge that that is something that you could do.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Yeah, the being, being the dispatcher, there's, there's still, there is a good dispatcher. So there is a lot of skill in how you actually orchestrate your truck drivers to, to take routes. Like tell it, don't go down a certain path when you want it to do something. So you can send it on the back rocky roads or you can send it down a straight path and have kind of that, that goal there. But a lot of the problem is people don't know that the tools are out there. And that's what I put together over hundreds of individual resources for, not just AI tools. And I'm not just gonna share shell everyone AI because they don't need AI for everything, but a lot of resources for general business and leveling up your business. From my consulting time where I was working with like a startup and working with a private equity backed startup. So I put a bunch of stuff out there and then I continued to add on that with all of the new AI tools that people can now use. But there's a lot of people that don't know there's other ones out there and, and that's the main thing. Like Claude is one.
Like even I could, I could list off a million that you can go out there and you can go try Open Claw is a really good one. And then there's a new one that people can also take a look at called Hermes that's like the simple out of the box, this is the better one that most people should be using. But this hasn't gone mainstream and this is like within maybe a month, maybe two.
I think it came out like March, March early. So it has, it's been out for probably 30 days.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: So Hermes is kind of an agentic view and approach that helps you more intuitively set up these sustainable processes.
I myself, I have you know, like a laundry list of what I do after say a podcast interview process with the transcript, you know, generating different types of content.
What are the guidelines, what are the processes that your intern get put into place? Because you know, here's an example, I told it to process the transcript and use as a strict editor and never remove more than 2% of the content.
And nine times out of 10 that works. But then I came back on the 10th one. I'm like, I remember I mentioned this person and it's not in the interview article that it spit out. So I asked it what percentage. It's like, oh, actually there's only 50% of the original content here.
Sorry about that.
What is your process or what's. What do you tell business owners that are concerned about, let's call it the habit of ignoring instructions for the sake of efficiency or whatever reason, but didn't do what it said it said it did something it didn't do.
What are your controls or processes to minimize that to?
It's because it's not hallucination, but it is in a similar vein.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it almost feels like a version.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: It's. Yeah, it's like a task aversion that it won't do the thing unless you're. It thinks that you're watching it.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So the, the way that you do this is you have kind of these persistent memory agents as well as like you staying on top of how human you manage the context and shape all of the messages. So part of the reason that people had trouble with openclaw, if you've tried this one out or even any of the other AI agents, like if you want to use Claude code or you want to use Codex or any of these, there's a million that are out there now. But the driver, in this analogy, the driver has a short attention Spanish. It is a. Like, it gets. It forgets so bad. Like you're telling it one thing and you could be feeding it, but there's not a consistent feedback loop. So it doesn't ever. It doesn't ever know the, the driver's up so high in the truck and it just drove over someone's grass, but it doesn't know it just drove over someone's grass. It doesn't really have like a way to figure out that you just messed up. Hey, this is the. Here's your feedback. Your dispatcher just told you, hey, you drove over someone's grass. Please don't do that.
And so it has a hard time with that. So if you have good memory and able to keep up with kind of that feedback loop and constant improvement, you'll have a much better time.
I'm actually a little interesting on this though, for being such a big AI Shiller. I personally do not use AI to make a lot of my content and the reason for that is because of the fact that it'll do stuff like this.
But also sometimes I lack a little bit of the, the soul there. And I see very soon Google is going to penalize people for, for lacking that soul. Like, it's very hard for, for me and just for others. If you think about like a, a bounce rate to say stick, I, I'm, I'm going to bounce if I end up reading too much AI content on your website. Like, if it doesn't feel personal, it doesn't feel like it's any bit useful or anything there.
You could have a million different things about a million different things and it wouldn't inevitably matter to me. If I land on your website and I'm like, oh, I don't really care to learn this. This is like, this is so impersonable. This, this is like someone's copy and paste of their ChatGPT. Like, that doesn't actually benefit me. There's, there's human insights versus instructions that that ChatGPT gives you. And I think people lose that soul sometimes and they don't even realize they've copy and pasted something from AI and it has no soul. Like, it's very, very hard sometimes. Whenever you're just pushing a lot of AI content and these are like, it's a factory pretty much. They have it set up on an automation just to push random topics and random content and it's ranking, but it's slowly getting pulled in certain things there. So it's very difficult in that aspect. But I think the better way to do it is like consistent memory management and using something like Obsidian as well as using some of the newer stuff that has built in memory. So you got to do both, you got to keep storage of everything as well as have something to make sure that it keeps remembering it if it doesn't go and read the files.
So that's my way.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Matt, folks of SEO tech called it the hive mind hegemon of AI.
Like they did a study and it was some set of creative writing prompts that for humans will result in very diverse writing coming out of it. And they fed it to all of the different models and all of them ended up returning strikingly similar themes in tone. And of course that's an artifact of, it's a language learning model, it's based off of math, it's based off prediction, it's based off of the data that you based it off in the first place. So if they're all based off of a similar or same training model, then the output at the end of the day is going to have the same. Same.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I actually want to put in something on this. This is something big. People aren't realizing. They're like, oh well, I don't use Claude, I use. You can even use one of your, one of the models in China right now that are like absolutely have no affiliation to anything in the United States. But how AI is being trained is they're stealing data from other AI companies. So AI is just bad in general about stealing data, but they're stealing it from other AI companies to train their model. So how they train. Kimi is one of the really popular models right now for coding and other things as they just sent out like a million chatgpt prompts to learn everything it knows about coding. So it is ChatGPT like, it is the exact same model. ChatGPT is Claude, Claude is ChatGPT like they're all the same.
And yes, there's like, you'll have like a one off jump and there'll be an improvement where they don't post all of their workings in the background. Like Grok is coming out with Grok5 here soon and it'll be a big jump. But at the same time, once it gets published and users can use it and you can use it with the API, they'll just send a million prompts, learn everything that they need to know what the new secret sauce is and they'll use that to train their AI model. And it just happens so quick. And that's why this cycle is so interesting. It doesn't feel like really anyone has their, their secret sauce ends up getting leaked. And that's what makes all of this content so similar is you, you have to understand that they're training their model with other people's models. So there's absolutely no way that you can truly have something that is unique. Even if you use something that no one's ever heard of and you use some sort of AI model that's in. In a far off distant place in Norway or something. It's still being trained with ChatGPT and with Claude. So it gives you stuff from ChatGPT and Claude as simple as that.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: JS WordPress pace of change how frequently are you having to revise your sets of suggestions for your consultees?
All.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: All of the time.
It's a constant battle and I'm encouraging more people to use it, but it's definitely something that you're still having to baby it and monitor it. Any, anyone that has something that's kind of set it and forget it. It's doing well. Like, there's some people that, that have some models that are, that are tuned for some specific things. But if you wanted to actually work and be a growing and long term employee, I am one of the people that is just constantly monitoring. I don't. It is, it is like a, a employee. It is kind of a. The best way I can describe it is it's a teenager on steroids. Like, it's, it's hopped up on, on GeForce and it's, it's ready to go. But at the same time, like it's, it's, it's a teenager at heart. It goes in the wrong places, it touches certain things it's not supposed to touch. No matter what you do, it's just a teenager hopped up on something and it's a little troublesome. But if you want to really maintain it and keep up with it, you got to be on top of it.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: So I'm adding a segment to the show. If you've been listening for a while, I'm going to do something new.
I'm having you answer a question from my previous guest and then after that come up with a question for me to ask my next guest. So the question was from Brandon Moon. He's a business consultant who actually looks at the lifeline lifetime of a business and advises them. Hey, if you're going to start a business, you need to think about how it's going to end.
Are you going to pass it to your kids? Are you aiming to sell it? Or is this a lifestyle business and you're kind of setting up, you know, your job as a business for the long term?
But his question for you is, what's your biggest pain point in your business? What is the biggest obstacle that's preventing you from getting to where you're trying to go?
[00:18:00] Speaker B: I think the, the biggest thing, and this is actually one of the reasons I'm using some of these AI tools is managing, managing people and having it truly understand how things are, are working. Because like people, ultimately, yes, AI is great, but there's still some level of human element that are going into these businesses. So because I have like a team of blog writers and we have people that are consistently working on the SEO, we can use AI and get it to help us and do all of the fun stuff with that, but managing those people and keeping everything up to date and constantly up to date with what are all the tasks that we have right now? What are all the things we could be Working on, depending on how much people you work with, like it becomes more and more difficult at scale to make sure everybody kind of understands exactly what, what priorities are and where they should be on certain things. And I'm using AI and some of the meeting recorder devices like Plod, so, so that now I just talk to it on the back of my phone and it has a general context of like what things should be worked on, how important certain things are.
It's just continued to be trained and then it assigns tasks with priorities and tries to manage it that way.
It's very difficult for a human to remember in one specific stretch you'll have like two days. I had 60 tasks that I gotta get done to try and task switch. Task switching is terrible for your brain.
Humans do it at an exorbitant rate. And there's a lot of psychology on this that task switching will inevitably just hurt you so bad and you have to, to manage people at that some point. So I, I strongly recommend people, if you want to find one use case for it sometime soon, get it to manage some of your, your, your project management stuff. That, that, that is a huge help and it'll understand it because it can just task switch better than we can. So Even if it forgets 5%, we forget at a much higher rate. So it's worth it long term for a lot of people to set it up as like a project manager. That's going to be the best use case for everybody. If you have a team and you're managing a team, please set this up and use it in that way.
I think anybody that does this, they will have much greater success than trying to give AI every single thing that you do in your business. And if you just give AI every single thing that you do in your business, you're going to have a hard time. But managing people, this is where I'm using it and it is challenging. It's still challenging even with all the help. Right.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: I have a question because Claude, obviously any particular chat that you're working on has a memory limit in your experience so far. What are the platforms now that are kind of structured to help you load in your institutional knowledge?
This is something several previous guests, you know, Matt Brooks of Seotek talked about it. Chris Tweeten of Spacebar Collective has talked about it creating more long term memory within your AI project so that you're creating, having outputs, you know, because he talked about the other side of the problem. Like if you're using the generic pool, then you're going to get Generic results. So obviously the flip side of that is, well then I need to load in my stuff, but at any given chat and only remember so much stuff at a time, what's the best way to build out a sustainable long term database of, you know, cleaned up, interview with the founder, so that you've got the mission statement that the description of the service product or whatever, what's your two or three products that you recommend or processes you've been using to kind of hold that institutional knowledge for use in AI.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: So, so one of the ways that I'm doing that, I mentioned it, it's Obsidian. So it's a markdown system.
How familiar are you with with markdown? I know this is, this is somewhat
[00:22:09] Speaker A: familiar, I'm familiar with it. But for the audience's sake, let's not assume they know what that means.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Markdown is just a different way to store text files that will ensure that long term everyone can have some consistency in the way that text is written. The way that we do it is we do it with Obsidian. Obsidian is a markdown platform that manages all of our files.
So we make logs of transcripts, we make logs of every single thing that we're working on and that we're doing. So if you're ever getting on a meeting or you're ever getting on any specific thing, or even if you're just talking into your phone, it manages that and saves that to a markdown file. So all of my conversations are recorded and they're kept in my markdown file. So that is the way that I manage it. So it submits it and does a database search to go and find the specific relevant pieces to that and they all connect together. So that's one thing. And then as the AI does stuff, people have not always done this.
You have to tell it to leave clear traces of everything it does because AI a lot of times will just go, it just goes. And then doesn't leave a good trace on how it got to the perfect destination. So repeatability is scalability and that's the number one thing people are forgetting to realize they're doing something and they're doing it once. And even if you get the perfect output from like ChatGPT online, I would still recommend using that in an AI agent because you can repeat that. The problem is right now, if we get the perfect output from like some sort of AI model and we can't repeat that, you'll, you're just kind of battling that, chasing that one high that you got that one time you did One thing awesome, it made that perfect blog or whatever article for you.
But long term, that doesn't actually help you because it can never repeat that again. So if you use the, the new, obviously the, that context stuff really, really helps with this. But if you make it actually write down the things that it's doing, it can repeat those same steps. If you always take the same. Like if you're going that destination, imagine point A to point B, you tell it, hey, go from point A to point B. If it wrote down it took a left turn, it took a right turn, it took a left turn, it took a right turn, it'll get to that same destination in roughly the same amount of time and roughly the same steps. But people are just saying go and they don't watch the driver, they don't see where it goes. And then it takes a right turn one time and a left turn the other time and then it gets to the destination. You're like, oh, this is completely different than what I had before. Took a different route. And you didn't tell it to like keep and maintain a lot of that. So the markdown system is just a text file system where H1 they're saved with a pound, H2 are saved with two pounds and then H3 are saved with three pounds and generally that's enough.
And then you ask it to just trace all of its exact steps on how it got to that final output and you'll get something relatively consistent over and over and over again.
And you just don't have to try and keep monitoring it, but you have to feed it back and be on top of it too.
It's not as set and forget as people like to assume it is. It really isn't. No matter how awesome it sounds that people are saying, yeah, I set it up that one time and I've never touched it again. It really hasn't been that way for me.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Now I can quickly see for like a digital marketing business, it's a very short hop, skip and a jump to, hey, I've been making blog content, I've been making marketing material, I need to distribute it here and there.
What's more of the thought process around like a hard business like delivering concrete walls to get put up in the real world to protect data centers. You're doing that thing in the real world. What are your, what's your low hanging fruits of going into that organization? You're talking with a business owner. Where's the soft underbelly that you're saying, hey, this thing, this is a Very quick win increase your efficiency to do this very simply.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Automation is another thing people aren't taking advantage of. So not everything has to be AI. Like it's just as simple as that. Like a lot of the certain business tasks I end up shifting from just being used in AI to two automations at the end. If there's a super repeatable task that always works in a certain way, you can if you have your server that's running Openclaw or running some sort of agent set up in 8 in it's one of the like platforms like Zapier make. It's just a connector of tools. You can set it up locally on that computer where you're already running your agents and then you use that as automation. So like a lot of these people have some sort of repeated task. Whenever they get an email by this person, they forward it or, or some something along those lines. Whenever you get a file uploaded to this specific Google Drive, send out an email and do certain things. But there's a lot of repeated task and effort and the more you can minimize the amount of time you're task switching and like juggling between too many different things. If you can use your creative mind and post really nice content and do certain things, I think that's going to ultimately be people. But if there's a repeated task that you have to keep doing, it doesn't have to be AI. Everyone's putting AI in everything. AI is not for everything. Make AI make automations and that's how you win. Because no matter what we say and what we do, I really have a hard time believing that everyone has it figured out that they never have to manage any of the outputs that they're getting by AI. It's for everything you see on Twitter and X. Everyone's got it figured out. They have never had any problems. It always is perfect every single time. And I failed to realize that is the reality.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Let's see, I'm going to give you a soapbox to stand on and shout at the people about what are people? What do people need to do with Aon that they're just not. That they're not adopting, they're not understanding about it.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: What people aren't using is for certain repeated tasks in the day to day business. And I'll give you some examples. So the main one that I'm telling people to use AI for is if you're doing a presentation and you Want to use PowerPoint or you want to do slides, you can use it for this, ask it to make A website.
Ask it to make a self contained HTML website that performs like a PowerPoint and ask it to style it how you want it, add images, but that's how you get it to make a PowerPoint. So it's really good at making code. So that goes and makes your PowerPoint. That's something that people are doing all the time. They're making pitch decks, they're making everything else. It can make a really, really nice looking PowerPoint or Slide for your presentation or if you're doing a meeting. And I've used it literally just yesterday we were performing some SEO statistics, we used it there. I spent 10 minutes on it, I gave it a prompt, I said I wanted a dark theme, Scandinavian Minimalist. I gave it all the data files and you can just export it from your Google search console. And I said, hey, make a report. How did everything go?
And then it made that and made like a nice little website. All you do is you just click through it with your key and it goes as well as like Excel. So another project that I'm working on right now is called Zaptime AI.
It's a time tracking and monitoring. Excel is so big for like accountants, lawyers or really anybody that manages large amounts of data. I know we definitely do. We're looking at like SERP analysis for certain things or if you're just in Excel often and you're trying to make formulas, please, please, for the love of God, use AI to make your formulas. Like there's a lot of accountants and people that I've talked to and the reason that we're starting this new project called Zaptime that AI is to help people manage their time and see where they can use AI in their life. It's something new that's coming out. I haven't posted very much publicly, but that is one of the big things. Like if you're using Excel ever, please use your, your functions with AI. That's, that's one of the big ones. But like some of those Microsoft Suite things that you're doing on a daily basis, you're making PowerPoints, you're doing Excel. All, all of those can be done with AI and people aren't using that.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: I love it. Give a shout out of where people can connect with you, what you want them to know that you're working on next. It sounds like they got that specific program. If there's anything else, you're putting out a book, if you've got a video series. How can people connect and find you? Mason.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: So people can find me out on LinkedIn.
There's a lot of stuff coming. Actually, right now we're hosting with A and M here in Texas.
One of the largest meetings for OpenClaw and entrepreneurship is happening.
So people are coming all the way from colleges in Houston as well as, like, general people. On May 2, if you're anywhere inside of Texas and you have the ability to make it out, there's going to be a meeting with hundreds of people all going over OpenCloud, getting it set up and kind of using it for certain applications and certain uses. And that's all posted out on my LinkedIn. It's just LinkedIn and then the username is Mason McCumber. All one M A S O n M C C U N B E R so you can check out that I'm always posting consistently on LinkedIn. I try and get to the blogs whenever I can, but working with clients, you know, it's. It's always, it's always on the back burner. But I'm always, always trying to stay up to date and post stuff on LinkedIn.
This is one good place to find me. And there'll be more updates about zap time and how people can use that coming out here soon. And then all of the resources that I was talking about for AI tools and certain things that are coming out can find that on our website and our blog. It's buildwithmm.com but that's where I'll stop.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Thanks for hanging.
