Most leaders are sitting on their greatest undervalued asset, their own expertise.

But they treat it like overhead, something to be managed and minimized.

And Greg Smith, the legendary founder of thinkific, is the architect of a platform where entrepreneurs have used their knowledge to earn a staggering $3.7 billion.

He's reinvented the leadership model to show you how to monetize your own knowledge and transform it into a high octane revenue engine.

Education is becoming much less of a cost center in business and much more of a growth opportunity.

Trust, revenue.

Those are two great components that creates.

Ongoing revenue and ongoing trust and engagement with customers or potential customers even to continue to engage with them and learn with them.

And in fact, in many cases they're paying to do the training.

So you've got a revenue line there too.

In this episode, Greg reveals how to capitalize on the knowledge you and your organization have already built.

We'll discover the effective way to drive transformation in the customer's life and the exact mechanism for turning standard communication into a product line that customers actually pay to join.

And the strategy for bringing a scrappy revenue first culture into a rigid organization.

Education is a growth lever, not a cost center.

Stop managing costs.

Start monetizing your leadership knowledge.

Here's a masterclass with Greg Smith.

Let's Lead the Team.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host Ben Fanning and this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out.

It's not just a podcast, it's a positive movement to build better leaders and you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple.

This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive.

Enjoy, Greg.

How do we stop treating our own expertise as a cost to be managed by and start using it as a weapon for growth?

It's been a shift or a continual evolution of education over time and what I'm seeing now is more education is becoming much less of a cost center in business and much more of a growth opportunity.

And so we're seeing businesses educating their customers, partners, teams, obviously teams has been something for a long time, but now moving outside the organization and businesses really educating their customers, whether it's in a big way, often as a revenue producing asset, but it also just builds a ton of trust with customers.

It gives you a whole new product line, a new way to engage with them, goes beyond your conventional marketing and allows you to build trust with them while also building revenue all right.

Trust, revenue, those are two great components.

Do you have a greatest hit so far that you'd like to focus on?

Where maybe an organization was not taking this focus, made the decision and then, wow, you know, they're already seeing results.

Yeah, I mean we've seen so one, one we're working with, they produce a lot of heavy equipment.

So which is, I love this example because it's not where you'd think you'd go with it, but they make forklifts, among other things.

And they're training people in forklift certification and operation.

And so rather than I sell you a forklift and you know, relationship done, call me in 20 years, uh, now we're teaching you how to use it, certifying you and how to use it, certifying others in how to use it so they can put it on their resume, get jobs and then probably then come and purchase your forklifts because they know how to use them, but also teaching others how to and partners how to maintain this, the machinery.

And so we're building an ecosystem or this company is building an ecosystem around their product that creates ongoing revenue and ongoing trust and engagement with customers of, or potential customers even of this product to continue to engage with them and learn with them.

And so it means that they trust them, they see them as a thought leader and they're often then coming back when they need more machinery or that next forklift.

Wow.

So it's really sticky and it sounds like people are actually doing it, which to me, I grew up in corporate.

Right.

And work for organizations.

And let me tell you, I've been through some mega boring training, like so bad.

Like if they weren't making sure I took the test at the end of the training, there's no way I would have done this.

How are you thinking about this?

Because a lot of these organizations, I don't know which one you're talking about, but they sound really corporate and they've probably got a lot of bad corporations corporate training.

And now you're asking people who don't report into the company to actually get educated.

So they've got to have something so engaging, so easy and so interesting that people who are not getting paid to do the training are actually voluntarily going to sign up to do it.

Yeah.

And in fact, in many cases they're paying to do the training.

So even more so.

Yeah.

I mean, are you kidding me?

Got a revenue line there too.

What world is this we're living in?

And how is thinkific coming to this?

Well, you, you, I've been through those trainings.

I know what you're talking about.

I've watched my wife go through them in her career and I've had to do it in mine.

As a lawyer.

I had to do a lot of mandatory training where you're kind of just going, clicking the boxes because you know you need to occasionally maybe opening the video in like a different tab while you're not paying attention.

Yes.

You're cooking dinner.

You're cooking dinner and yes.

So how are you tackling this?

I think the big difference is the promise of the result.

What's the end game?

Why are you doing this?

In a lot of those cases you're doing it for compliance.

I have to do this or else I have to do this because I got to tick the box, I got to meet my education requirements.

Whereas if you really want it to work, especially for customer training where they may be paying for it, you're promising some sort of difference in their life.

Right.

And even though you might even be selling to a business, in a lot of cases you're selling a bunch of training to a business, you're really selling to the individual who's going to be consuming it.

And you have to sell kind of some kind of transformation.

How will your life be different when you complete this program?

It's not about the completion rate.

It's not really.

Did you complete every box in it?

It's what's different in your life.

One of the first online courses I took was learning how to edit videos.

So it was for my niece's birthday.

I'd shot a bunch of footage.

I wanted to edit a beautiful video.

Signed for this course on Lynda.com took this training.

I only got about 40% through the course.

So from your conventional did you finish it?

I'm a failure metric.

But I learned everything I needed to know to edit this beautiful video.

My sister in law cried, everybody's happy.

I'd focus on that.

What's that endgame result that that person wants to achieve?

So in the forklift training, right, it's am I certified?

Do I know where the brake is?

I can drive this thing really well and I can go get a job driving forklifts now.

I love that.

And it's so scrappy.

It's like, you know, I think corporate leaders over complicate this thing.

Like we need to have this big course and we're going to do all this and, and you're just like coming at it from hey, I remember that time I needed to edit a video and I was trying to get an emotional reaction and a response from a family member.

And like, if you start with the end in mind, it's like a Stephen Covey principle.

Right.

The seven habits begin with the end in mind.

It makes a huge difference.

It's like you're designing it.

And I think about a lot like I was reading about, and I really enjoyed preparing for this conversation because Thinkific is a scrappy organization.

You guys came, you know, you've worked with all these people that are scrappy and starting their own businesses and designing their own, you know, training programs.

And it's very entrepreneurial.

And I think it's cool that you're bringing this entrepreneurial culture and spirit to a corporate world that sometimes is the antithesis of that.

How are these conversations going with these leaders?

Do they get it when you come in and you start talking about the, like the, like the end result versus hey, which boxes we're going to check.

Yeah, it's interesting in that a lot of them do.

Now, when we first got started, of course, I had created my own course.

We were looking for people like me.

We initially thought, okay, this is going to be the individual expert teaching.

And it was a lot of that.

But surprisingly, very early on, even in our first 30 customers, we had many bigger organizations coming and saying we want to put together something to teach our customers.

And we see this huge opportunity.

All right, so I find the leading companies get it, they're seeing it and, and, and really open to doing something.

Yeah.

Entrepreneurial.

Entrepreneurial here.

Well, I love that.

Well, so thinking about your background, I mentioned, you know, you, the lore on Greg Smith is deep in terms of attorney.

You know, then you make your own LSAT course.

Right.

To sort of scratch your own itch.

Right.

Started selling it for $29, which in today's.

I don't know how.

What, what's the conversion?

That was it 29 Canadian, whatever the conversion is today.

But it was cheaper.

A cheap, A cheaper course.

Yep.

And, but, but so you're like an attorney and you were rewarded like for like mitigating risk.

Right.

Attorneys want to mitigate risk.

You're designing contracts and, and then you're also a risk taker, an entrepreneur.

What, where is your mind on this?

And how do you, how do you sort of have the best of both worlds when it seems like these two worlds should not exist?

And then I'm adding in a third one and that you're, you're working with these big corporate organizations too.

Yeah, it's, it, it's.

There was A real learning moment for me.

I was maybe a year or two into starting thinkific, my brother, my co founder, looked at me at one point and said, you're being too much of a lawyer here.

Because I was really fixated on the rules and the risk and what the absolute sort of perfect risk oriented thing to do was.

And I got advice from him.

And also surprisingly, because I'd only practiced law for three years, but from a much more senior lawyer who I is our lawyer now and I respect a lot.

So.

And what they shared with me is, is it's good to understand the framework, the test, the legal tests and, and to understand those frameworks or, or even the business test.

Right.

What is the framework around making this decision?

But then part of that decision is still, what risk are you comfortable with?

And so, you know, it's, it's not like law is always black and white, go to jail or don't.

Right.

A lot of times it's just, here are the guidelines.

You, you can go in this direction or this direction.

If you go in this direction, these are the risks.

And so sometimes you accept those risks.

Right?

Like anything, you run an experiment in work or you decide to take a certain strategic path, there's always risk involved and so getting comfortable with accepting some of that risk.

But the beautiful thing on the, on the law side and understanding the framework and a lot of times beginning with the end in mind is you understand what the possible avenues could be and then you get to choose the path you want to take.

And so it was understanding that, that I wasn't tied to the path that was, say, most legally oriented.

Man, that's so good.

I, I worked for Honeywell for over a decade and some other organizations, and when I started my own business, that was the hardest thing, was I thought risk is bad, failure is absolutely, catastrophically bad.

And if I fail, like, there's no other.

Like, I didn't see the fact initially, like, oh, there are other options.

There are things.

There is a learning, like, I can't move forward unless I had failure.

I think that's the hardest thing, I think, to sort of train ourselves to think differently from the entrepreneur, you know, to the business, you know, or the, or the legal side.

It sounds like you've conquered that and found the perfect blend.

Yeah, well, plus, when you look at those, when you think, okay, if I try this and I fail, I find it's really helpful just to go through the what if, what if I don't?

What are all the different, like, if you, if you try this and you fail, sure this happens.

But how bad is that failure?

What's really the impact of it?

Right.

If it's the end of your business, the end of everything you're doing, okay, maybe don't take that path if it's high likelihood it's going to happen.

But you also got to look at the other way.

What if I don't do it right.

And if you get frozen into inaction and you don't take the other the some of these risks sometimes then the end result of that can also be the end of the beginning business.

Yeah.

So good.

And in tech especially, this is the way, this is the, where we live.

We have to be able to take those risk.

But, but yeah, you got to make innovate, try new things, have run experiments.

Do you've got one that you try looking back and you're like, man, that was insane.

I can't believe we tried that.

Like a favorite failure.

Oh yeah.

I mean we've had so many.

What's a good one?

We've had so many, I can't even list them right now.

Well, we actually spun up a team to just run experiments and we would really celebrate the failures of it.

And so they'd come out every week and say, here's the experiments we ran last week.

And to begin with the end in mind, they always had a theory of what success would look like and what failure would look like.

And then they would present and the fun thing they would do is they'd share, here's what we thought would happen, here's what we did.

And then they'd pause and be like, everyone in the audience would sort of vote, what do you think happened?

And then they'd share the results.

And so it was a really good way of removing the fear of failure for the whole company because you just got to see like there was no repercussion if we ran this failure.

But also, you know, we're talking experiments that took a day or two to run.

Right.

So it was also this sort of ROI analysis of we're not running a $5 million two year experiment that fails here, although those happen.

But really you're trying to run the quick ones to learn from before you make the $5 million investment.

So it culturally it really shifted things that it was, it was fun and exciting to fail and learn.

And, and then it immediately switched to the next slide was what did we learn and what are we doing next?

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That's BenLeads.com schedule thinkific sounds like a very fun company.

We have some fun.

Yeah.

Yeah, do that.

And I can imagine a lot of people would show up to those things.

They're like, let's hear what the failures taught us today.

And, and, but I think the key there, I love the fact that, hey, these are like one to two day experiments, so you're like getting immediate feedback and you're not running them forever.

And these short ones, you can really pivot and take chances on that, man.

Yeah.

It forces you to think of a creative way to do it because a lot of things, you couldn't build the whole solution or the whole product in a day or two.

So you'd have to do this sort of painted door experiment where you kind of faked it and showed it.

Like, what if we had this to a customer?

Wow.

Oh, man.

Very, very cool.

So kind of shifting topics a little bit.

You've been really open about what I'll call or what maybe talked about.

It's like a post IPO slump.

So you spun this thing up, you did this, this ipo.

And a lot of times people think about the IPO is like, hey, it's like we've achieved the mountain of success.

Like, the story ends here and you've talked about like a slump or maybe feeling a little burned out or experiencing some emptiness.

What did you learn going through that process that those of us that have never been through something like, could really like any key lessons that you took away that we could benefit from.

Yeah, I mean, it was surprising to me too, just to set the stage for it.

Typically an IPO will take a year or two to prep for.

We made the decision on one day and five months later we were publicly traded.

So it was a really short window from when we decided to do it to when we were actually listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

And.

And so that was five months of just running as hard as we could, especially the last few weeks where you're doing the roadshow.

Now it was a digital roadshow, which is better and worse because you're not planes and taxis.

You're just sitting in the chair.

But it was, you know, 14 hours a day sitting in the chair talking.

To people about your business means you can do more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

More meetings.

Like, you need a bathroom break.

What?

No, no, no.

We're going into the next meeting.

Oh, so.

So there.

It was intense for sure.

And.

And I.

There's not exactly what you asked, but one of the biggest things I learned, I think, is how to do a great ipo.

Like, we really got the playbook dialed.

I'm grateful for the people who helped us with it really figured out how to do it.

So if anyone's thinking of doing it, there's a few key points that make it really successful.

Do you have a thinkific course on that?

I don't.

I should.

I don't know how many people would take it, though.

Like, the audience for how to do an IPO is fairly narrow.

Yeah, they'll be too afraid after doing the course to do it.

But it comes down to simple storytelling that people can understand and the data to back it up.

And one of the big shifts we made is when I look at.

I get a lot of pitch decks either to invest in or to buy companies, and they often always start with this hockey stick graph that goes up and to the right and looks beautiful.

But half the graph is make believe.

It's the future.

It's what we hope is going to happen.

So we really decided that we would leave all of that for the end of the pitch, end of the story.

And so we opened with the first half of the deck.

The first half of the pitch had to be factual.

It had to be historical things that happened.

Here's the data that has happened.

Because the idea was to move away from the disbelief that I think investors usually have towards everything we're presenting you now is fact.

There's no.

So for the first half hour that we're talking to them or 20 minutes, there's no, should I believe this?

Is it true?

They're just absorbing information and trusting you.

And so then when you get to the back half where you're like, and here's where we can go, one, you've kind of drawn a story in a line of how you can get there and it makes sense.

But you've also built trust because everything you've shared up to this point is truth instead of potential.

So that was a big learning on the ipo, on the slump after.

Yeah, that was surprising.

So we did the five months running hard listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

I remember the morning, you know, where you're supposed to there's the ringing of the bell that we couldn't do it because Pandemic.

But there was still the virtual one of just sort of watching the Open and the whole team was getting up to watch this early because I'm west coast and the exchange is east coast, and I wasn't even going to set my alarm.

I'm like, why?

I'm done.

And then I went through a week of being.

I'd say you.

Yeah, yeah, you could say almost borderline depressed.

I did get up.

I did get up, but I didn't really understand why other than people asked me to.

I never saw it as the end game or the top of the mountain at all.

For me, it was always.

I really tried to see it as not an accomplishment at all.

Is just like something you do along the way in service of the business.

Because to me, it was the accomplishments.

Are we helping customers?

Are they achieving their goals?

And are we growing the business?

And are we helping our team achieve their goals and career and grow?

Those are the things I always celebrated.

So it always felt really weird to celebrate raising money, which is really what the IPO is in a big way about.

So, yeah, I came out the other side of it almost in a state of depression.

I remember, very unlike me, just kind of sitting on the couch, a bit lost on what to do.

One point, my wife's like, you just gotta go for a walk.

So I walked to the end of the driveway, looked one way, looked the other.

I'm like, there's no point.

Went back inside, like, just so.

Not like myself.

So it feels like you're at the top, but you're feeling at the bottom.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh.

And it was just.

It's.

It was.

My wife actually sent me an article that kind of helped snap me out of it, which was the post holiday slump is.

Is.

And there's this whole thing psychologically, I guess, after just intense stimulation and build up to a moment.

And it happened sometimes around a big holiday, sometimes around a big sporting event.

Or post vacation blues.

But a more extreme version, it wasn't the best vacation.

Yeah.

So you put all this time and effort and energy and anticipation into a thing and you get a lot of stimulation and then it just shuts off the next day and there's this almost depression that can follow.

And really the only way out is you just gotta like dial back the stimulus and wait for it to pass and take a bit of a break.

And then it tends to go pretty quickly.

And then.

So I got to come out the other side of it and hit the ground running again.

Was there one thing you did to take a break that helped.

Helped you do it?

Because I suspect sitting on the couch more was not gonna be an option because the pressure goes up after the ipo, right?

Not.

Not after.

Yeah.

So the hard thing for me is usually exercise is my stress reliever, but that's more stimulus.

And I didn't have the motivation.

It's like robbed you of the motivation to go do it.

So your usual avenues are often not there.

And so what I learned, which was very.

Felt very counterintuitive, is just remove the stimulus.

So it's almost like sit in a dark room.

So I went to saunas for a while and just sort of sat in the sauna in the dark without stimulation.

And that was one helpful thing, but it was really like just dialing back.

And I do that now, actually.

So I try and sauna five, six times a week in the dark at night and just sitting there and basically meditate in the heat.

And.

And it kind of removes most stimulation other than the.

The heat.

Wow.

So yeah, this.

The heat is enough stimulation.

Have you ever been in a sauna?

So you're just sweating like crazy?

Do you work out first or do you just go?

It's just part of your ritual.

Just sit in the sauna regardless of.

Working out, and I'll work out in the morning.

And then the sauna is like a pre bedtime thing.

Oh, right.

On infrared or.

No, just electric.

Okay.

Like, yeah.

Geez.

Great.

I love getting tips like that, man.

So good.

All right, so let's.

I have.

I have so many.

So many different areas I want to talk about, but we're not.

We're not gonna have enough time to hit everything.

But one of the things that's interesting to me about the business that you built is that you are known for.

I. I would say not just allowing side hustles with your employees, but encouraging them.

Are you doing this?

Is this just like an employee retention mechanism, or are you doing that because it changes how they think?

And just a quick side story, I had side hustles when I worked in corporate years ago, and I felt like I was better and I had more of an edge and I spoke my mind more.

I just was more creative when I really embraced the side hustle, But I felt like I had to keep it more of a secret.

Yeah, this one kind of came about a bit organically, and there's a myriad of different benefits and it.

And a lot of it even depends on the person as to why it, why it can work and be a good thing.

But it, it kind of comes down to the, the.

I think Lululemon has a thing on some of their bags of like jealousy has the opposite effect that you intend it to.

And so I apply that in a business sense too, right.

If you're so protective of people's time and you don't own them, right, it's their time, but if you try and control it too much, you lose them.

And so that's part of it.

It actually came about because my brother was doing a bit of a side hustle while we were working on Thinkific and I called him out on it and then he's like, man, you got kids?

I got my side hustle now.

He's got kids now.

So I was like, okay, that's a good way to put it in perspective, right?

No one's going to ask me, like, don't spend time with me.

My kids are my side hustle.

Yeah, I love it.

It's a full time job, man.

So I, over the years it evolved.

But really it's, it's.

People are going to do it anyway if they want to.

And if you really find a way to stop them from doing a side hustle and starting something on the side one, I think the anticipation of what it could be for them is just going to build until they quit because they're not allowed to.

So eventually there's gonna be like, what am I, what am I missing?

I gotta go do this often in reality and in practice, here's how it goes.

I encourage openness about it and, but I ask people to come and talk to me about it.

So they come and talk to me and they say, I'm gonna do this side hustle.

I make it very clear what the rules are, which is your time is your time, right?

I don't own you nine to five.

You know, you own all of your time, but the time you choose to spend on Thinkific and the results that you generate from that, really not the time, but the results you generate is how we evaluate and reward you.

If that slips because you're doing something else, well then your compensation, your opportunities, your promotions are going to slip.

So just so we're on the same page there, you're welcome to do other stuff.

I can even help you, coach you, give you some guidance.

But if this slips here, your opportunity here slips.

So let's, it's not just a free take all your day and go do a side hustle.

And then in reality I find some People go do it and they realize after a month or a year, they're like, ah, I don't really want to be doing this.

This is a lot harder than I thought it was.

Or it's not working out or maybe I'll.

And it always is harder.

And then I've had some people who, they go away and start a successful business and in some cases I've invested in it and been super proud to be a part of it.

And that's exciting as well.

Would you have stopped it if you'd said, no, I don't think.

I don't think you can crush that entrepreneurial spirit in someone if they were going to start something and go for it.

So.

And not that you'd want to.

And then as you said, it makes them better team members because they go learn stuff over here and they come back and apply it in their role at Thinkific.

So in so many ways it's great.

Win, win scenario.

Yeah.

And it really takes, you know the word.

You didn't say that, but that comes around.

Who you're saying is, hey, you got to accept the reality that we're living in.

They're gonna.

If they want to do the side hustle, they're gonna do it anyway.

You might as well have an open dialogue about it.

So we're not the hide every.

They're hiding it and all this other stuff.

And there may be a creative way to integrate that.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I integrated executive coaching stuff.

I was pursuing some speaking stuff, some other things.

I, I brought it all in and it was, it was a cool combination, ultimately.

Yeah.

And especially as we're more remote, if you create a culture where people have to hide stuff or it's not okay to talk about it, then they're gonna hide it.

Right.

It's like anything in, in relationships, if you create a culture where you can't talk about it, then it just gets hidden.

It doesn't go away.

So better to bring it out.

And I'm not, I don't want to suggest it's a bad thing.

I think it's a great thing when people do this.

But what you want is the openness to have an open dialogue and talk about how we should structure it.

Right.

What kind of time are we talking?

And you know, sometimes they say, I'm going to take one day off a week and we're going to pay them differently because they're investing less and they're going to have more time to do their thing.

Right.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

So good.

I want to let's talk a little bit more now about the pivot and the thinkific business.

It sounds like you had some corporate clients early on that I didn't even realize.

And so you'd already kind of got some experience versus the more like bootstrapping entrepreneurs who are starting courses and selling them.

Now that you're going harder into that space, how do you talk like, what's it been like?

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like recasting your vision in a new way or setting a new North Star for the company when you have had success and you've had, my impression is a rather cult following as thinkific in terms of what you were doing before.

So how, you know, what, like, what's been that decision like, and how have you been communicating it to your customers and your team?

Yeah, it's, it's an, it's been an interesting journey because when we first launched the Masthead, the website was create and sell beautiful online courses.

And we didn't really talk about for who it was.

We're going to solve a problem, we'll see who's interested.

And when I looked at the first 30 customers, it was a real mix of the solopreneur, the individual, the creator, all the way to the 2,500, 5,000 employee businesses, even in that first 30 customers.

So right away we saw we had quite a breadth, a bit of a confusing breadth of people who wanted to solve this, but they had the same problem they were trying to solve.

So we grew like that fairly broadly.

Well, not focused on the customer, the specific customer for a long time.

And where we've, and I think that where we're at now is you can still do a bit of both, but it does create some confusion with the team.

That's probably the biggest thing is like, wait, who are we building for?

So we still see tons of solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, creators come in where we're focused more on the brand.

And a lot of the solution building is on the higher end of bigger customers, 500 employees or more in many cases, or up to 500 as some different categories.

And the interesting thing is when we meet their needs, like they're setting the bar so high in terms of what we have to build for solutions that then a lot of these smaller businesses and solopreneurs and creators that come to us come and they're like, oh wow, you've built something I can truly scale with.

Because we see some of these solopreneurs scale to multimillion in revenue.

And we've got a solution that they can grow with as opposed to like a super cheap entry level thing that as soon as you grow to a million in revenue, you've completely outgrown the thing.

So it's worked well.

It's a bit similar to Shopify in that way.

Right.

Shopify still has their self serve offering, starts at 29 bucks a month and they have.

And a lot of the business though is at their plus level, offering of thousands of dollars a month and much bigger businesses.

So we're kind of growing like that.

A lot of our focus really is on building for the bigger and the scale.

And again, we've got everything you need to get started for anyone.

But as you scale up, you know, as especially if you're a bigger business, but even if you're an individual who builds a bigger business, we've got everything you need to have millions of students, thousands of courses and everything that goes along with managing all of that and even the community around it, which is a whole nother exciting thing.

How is AI affecting all this?

Because it's interesting, as AI learning tools become better, they can replace the teacher to some way, you know, potentially.

I don't know if that's necessarily like day one right now, but it's, but it's going that way because we see it with robotics, you know, we're seeing this.

What needs to be on, like what's the real threat and how do leaders need to stay ahead of that?

I think it's, it's using it as a helpful tool to augment, extend and in some cases replace yourself or your business at points in time.

So on demand exploratory learning, which is what say, going and engaging with an LLM and just asking it questions is, has always been available, right?

The library's already always been there.

Then there was YouTube where you can just go out and say, I want to learn about a topic, let's just search on it and see what I can come up with.

So I don't worry so much about that being a replacement at this point, but you can use it as a tool.

And so we've created our own AI tools for our customers where they train it, we train it for them on their own content data and then it becomes a representation of them.

Super exciting.

Doesn't totally replace them because the reason people are buying from these brands is they, they trust the brand or the face or the instructor and the promise they're making of the end.

Like where what's the transformation?

I'm going to get and so like, to the forklift.

If you're looking to get certified in driving a forklift to go get a job, do you want to just go to ChatGPT and ask some questions where it might forget to remind you about where the break is?

Or do you go to the people who made the forklift and say, yeah, you're going to certify me in this.

So there's a thing there of things like certification are one way of setting yourselves apart from the AI and offering something bigger.

There's the brand and the promise you have of what the outcome is you're going to deliver.

Because you're not just promising, look around and learn what you want.

We're saying this is the end goal.

It's not about.

It's back to like the editing the video.

It's not about the did I watch a bunch of videos and spend four hours learning and tick a box that I spent four hours, it's can I drive the forklift?

Can I edit the video?

And so that's really what your promise is.

And the other piece that I find is really important more and more now to layer in is community.

So as opposed to sitting alone on your computer learning, as you talked about that really boring experience, you come often for the end result, the transformation, you consume the content and then what you really stay for is the community.

So a lot of these brands we're working with now are building communities around the content, especially after people have consumed it.

So now they've learned about this new skill and they're able to talk to other humans about it and share it and their next challenge and the next thing they're working on or even coach each other.

So you're so thinkific offers that community platform for those who have been certified.

They can interact with each other.

We do, yeah.

Yeah.

And that's a huge value added.

It's also something that people will pay for on a recurring basis because they can continue to get value from that relationship or set of relationships.

As a CEO, you're facing something, I think, that a lot of CEOs will be facing into the future, which is the dark side of these AI platforms, because they're going to get, like you mentioned the, mentioned the forklift one.

They're going to go in there, they're going to get certified.

It's not just that they're taking the course, they're interacting with your chat tool, asking questions or whatnot.

They.

It might say, it might tell them the wrong thing.

It might, you know, like, we've Seen the dark side of chat, the hallucination.

Get the hallucination question for Chat GPT.

Bad things that happen in that space, you're a little bit in a different deal where.

But.

But it's specialized right around that content.

How are you dealing with that hallucination?

Yeah.

And are you feeling immense stress and pressure from the possibilities there?

Well, the way we're training the models is different.

So we're.

When you see the hallucination in the.

In the big models, they are.

They're basically scraping the whole Internet, grabbing everything from everywhere, and then having to do a lot of kind of thinking and extrapolation to come up with answers to your question, there's a lot of creative thinking about it.

And when it gives you the hallucinated answer of, you know, the pyramids moved from Europe to South America in 1962, which is.

I'm sure it got that from somewhere.

Um, it's hard for it to even go back and tell you why it got that.

Whereas with our models, we are extracting the content directly from the course materials.

So it's a much narrower set.

It's not the entire Internet.

It's.

You're reducing your risk.

Yeah.

So.

And we.

We.

We.

We end like the.

The engineers can speak much better to this than I can, but we.

We index all of the content quite accurately.

And so when it's giving you an answer, it's referencing specific pieces of content in the programs that you've created or that our customer has created, and then it even references it so you can.

It'll say, hey, here's the answer and here's the lesson and the content where you can go learn more about it and where I pulled it from, so we can actually see where it's getting the answer.

So much.

Much less likely to have any level of hallucination because you're very focused on.

And it's a smaller data set that.

You'Re dealing with, so you've taken a lot of steps to preempt that.

Yeah, yeah.

These are the kind of things, like, we could have spun this up in.

It could have been one of those experiments you spin up in a week.

And we did start there.

But you're right, the hallucination is large for something like that.

So we spent the better part of a year building this in a way where it shouldn't hallucinate because it's pulling directly from the content you're creating.

All right, now's the time of the show where we get you to get out your crystal ball and Speak to everybody out there about where is this thing going with education?

Where's it going to be two or three years from now?

I think you look at the historical trend and the most important thing in education and the trend towards has been really around results and transformation.

And so everything is going to lean more towards results and transformation.

And if you're in this space and you're trying to offer something to your customers, focusing on how you can offer something, a change in their life, right?

Even if you're selling to a business, there's a person at the other end of that phone that's wanting a change.

They want a promotion or a career opportunity or an advancement in their skills or the ability to lose weight or, or, or develop a new talent.

Focus on that.

And so AI and community and that engagement with others, these are all in service of that as is just building great content.

So I think the evolution I see is it's going to be more and more augmentation with AI, but really also a lot of interpersonal human connection.

And I'm seeing more and more of this where people are, they bring three elements, their own exceptional content, where they're able to promise something, they bring AI to augment it and then they bring community, which is people around the content, others who are learning with you to help make it a funner and more valuable journey.

So I think we're going to see more, more of that and more revenue generation.

So more education is a growth lever, not a cost center.

All right, man.

Greg, it's been a fun one today.

Thanks for joining us on Lead the team and let's do a part two.

I would love to.

Thanks Ben.

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