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Interesting people, insightful points of view and incredible stories on what’s popping and not popping in marketing, tech, and culture you can use to win immediately. Brands, Beats and Bytes boldly stands at the intersection of brand, tech and culture. DC and Larry are fascinated with stories and people behind some of the best marketing in the business. No matter how dope your product, if your marketing sucks your company may suck too. #dontsuck
DC: [00:00:00] Brand Nerds. Brand Nerds. Brand Nerds. We are back in the building, LT with another regular episode of Brands, Beats and Bytes. Brand Nerds, the name of our show is not coincidental.
We have these three B words because we cover all of them across our podcast. We talk about brands, we talk about beats, culture is another way that we talk about beats, and then we talk about bytes, B-Y-T-E-S. And today, Brand Nerds, solidly ensconced in the B-Y-T-E-S, the tech of it all, we've got somebody that's going to give some wisdom and drop some jew-els.
Not only is this [00:01:00] dude in the Bites area, he also knows marketing. He's in the Silicon Valley area. He knows something about AI and we love ourselves, people who have either been founders, co-founders, or early stage because you, you got to really hunt when you are in the early stages of something for founders.
And so with that lt, can you let the Brand Nerds know who we have in the building with us today?
LT: I sure will. DC we have Dave Prager in the house today. Welcome Dave.
Dave Prager: Hey guys. What's up?
LT: What's up today? Great to have you. Really great to have you. So Dee, um, and Okay. Brand, before we go into Dave's fantastic background, DC and I believe there are gifts the universe has for you.
If you have your [00:02:00] mind open to it, Dave is actually one of those gifts. Please allow me a tangent to explain, and I promise Mama Cobbin I will arrive at a point. Do you want to give Dave the, the quick what that means?
DC: Yeah, let, let me do that quickly. So Dave, my mother, Gloria Cobbin, she's passed rest in power Mom, when I was making friends as a young shorty in Detroit, so we're talking seven, eight years old.
She would say, baby, these friends of yours that you're beginning to make, make sure the audio matches the video. Okay. That's what she, yes, that's what she taught me. So, uh, she used to also give me another quote where she would say, when I would drone on, on about something, she would say, uh, baby, are you arriving at a point?
I would say, yes ma'am. Yes ma'am. I am arriving at a point, so this is why Larry is referencing my mom. Alright, go [00:03:00] ahead Larry.
LT: Yes, so please. So again, allow me to make that tangent. So our wonderful dog of 16 years, Bo passed away last summer. We also have an amazing 3-year-old black lab named Josie. After Bo died, my wife Sherry and I knew we would get another rescue dog and my ask was to wait until the end of the year.
Dave, you don't know any of this, so this is a good backdrop for you. So Sherry was looking before then, but started to get serious after the new year, mid-January. Sherry soon found an awesome mini goldendoodle that was three named Zuma, who's on the screen right now kissing me, who was temporarily living in a foster home since we had applied for another dog with this rescue organization where the foster parents actually decided to keep the dog. Our application went through very quickly and by the end of January we were told that we had passed the process and Zuma was ours. We had a Zoom meeting with the foster mom, Jenny, and then had to go pick up the dog from Jenny and her family. Jenny has been amazing through the process, and we [00:04:00] met Jenny at a park where we had an easy conversation on a variety of topics, including Jen. Jenny telling us it was way too emotional for her daughters to come to the park and drop Zuma off to for us to take because they love the dog so much. So Jenny continued to give us a download on Zuma, who we have decided called Zoomie, while also meeting our black lab, Josie. In this conversation, we naturally moved to discussing what we all do for work, and when I mentioned this podcast, Jenny said her husband has been working and marketing his whole career and is in the midst of starting a new company with AI at the forefront.
My ears immediately peaked and then traded texts and a couple phone calls with Dave. And this is how Dave Prager's on our podcast today. So because of Zoomie who we completely adore brand nerds, you will quick, quickly see that with all our amazing accomplished guests with many fully leaning into AI, no one has more experience at the confluence of AI in marketing is Dave.
With that long context, let's walk you through his [00:05:00] fantastic background. So Dave is a native of Colorado and decides to attend Syracuse University where he earns his degree in advertising. He directly leverages this degree and goes to work in the industry ending up at Wonderman, where he is a copywriter based in New York, working on accounts that as Microsoft B2B products nationwide and Sirius the name a few. Wonderman, then taps Dave to become creative group head in New Delhi.
Transferring global best practices to this young, rapidly growing agency in India. As group lead, he manages day-to-day direct marketing and relationship marketing copy for the Microsoft India account. While mentoring copywriters and training creative staff and craft and presentation skills before moving back to the states.
He also works in Singapore as copywriter for the possible agency working with clients such as SAP, VMware and Motorola. Dave then moves back to the states to help his dad, where he leads the marketing for his dad's B2B bookkeeping company, while also consulting for the likes of SAP VMware and Google.
Dave then moves to [00:06:00] Silicon Valley joining Intermedia a B2B Cloud software company. First, his content lead. He is then promoted to director of content and comms, followed by another promotion to director of Corporate Marketing, where in his four total years there, he helps the company triple revenue, to more than $200 million.
Triple EBITDA launch a dozen new products and they grow from 350 to 750 employees while tripling the paid user base to more than a million and position itself for a successful acquisition. After this success, Dave joins SAP as their Director of Marketing Communications, and he is soon nominated for SAP's 2017 Hasell Planters Founder, founder Award for his work on the Work Connect by SAP Product Launch, which includes ensuring consistent positioning and messaging across every customer facing touchpoint.
It is now 2017, and when you are successful Silicon Valley marketer, you make moves. Dave joins dte, an AI computer vision company from manufacturing as [00:07:00] employee number three and their global VP of Marketing, where Dave is a member of the founding team. Dave builds the marketing P practice from scratch.
This begins with brand and category creation from pre-seed through series A and transitions into demand generation, pipeline building, digital marketing as they shift into growth mode. Post series B, he helps drive the company to a triple digit employee base and double digit customer base. That includes some of the world's most respected and renowned manufacturers.
His team's excellent work is validated through numerous rewards, just including a a few Nvidia, the top AI company in 2020. 2020 Forbes AI 50 and 2021 CB insights AI 100. When Dave chooses to leave, DTI has 110 people and still growing, and the company is eventually acquired by Apple. Dave then joins Front as their head of business and product marketing.
Front is an AI powered customer service platform helping companies deliver smarter, safer [00:08:00] automation with without sacrificing quality. At front, Dave and his team successfully ensure the brand is anchored in the value they deliver to customers, and that it resonates deeply with their buyer personas after success with Front, Dave joins Stampley as their VP of marketing. Stampley is accounts payable automation software helping customers with procure to pay P two P process. At Stampley, Dave spends three years overseeing a 10 person marketing team where they are very successful with their extremely broad mandate to raise awareness, generate demand, support their high performing SDR team, while supporting the launch of new products and features.
Okay. It is now the end of 2025, and Dave comes to an interesting conclusion that might sound strange coming from someone with two technical AI patents. The conclusion is most of the technology that is supposed to make sales and marketing better is actually making it worse. The automation error gives us more emails, more sequences, more personalization at scale, [00:09:00] quote on in quotes, and buyers learn to tune all of it out.
Meanwhile, an entire generation of marketers and sellers have been trained to chase algorithms. Instead of building real understanding more impressions, more touches more content, but less actual insight into whether any given pro prospect is ready to buy and why. Dave believes we're living through a generational shift with the old playbook of volume driven outreach has quietly stopped working and most teams haven't caught up yet.
The frustration led him to build Inner Pitch a boutique prospect intelligence service, helping B2B revenue teams figure out the accounts actually ready to buy, and the optimal messaging for set accounts. This approach centers on what Dave calls quote, inferred signals, the strategic pivots, product launches, and an organizational shifts hiding in plain sight that reveal when a company is feeling a specific problem, but require genuine reasoning to make useful, the signals are hiding in [00:10:00] plain sight.
But the insight, we always say this, the insight is not notably inner Pitch is a service, not a software platform. Dave has made a deliberate choice to deliver human judgment and finish work product instead of another piece of technology for sales teams to figure out on their own. It's deeply technical under the hood, but Dave is actually designed and built the AI pipeline himself.
But the point of the technology is to multiply Dave, not replace him. Every output reflects how he actually reasons about a prospect. The AI just lets him do it at scale. That would be impossible alone. In completing his intro, if you go looking for Dave online, you won't find much. He barely posts on LinkedIn.
His corporate web website is a single page that is not at all optimized for SEO. Neither of those are oversights. They're the same thesis that runs through everything he does. That marketing industry has become addicted to chasing, chasing algorithms, and Dave thinks the cure is to stop [00:11:00] playing this game entirely.
Dave lives in Silicon Valley with his wife, Jenny, two daughters and two dogs of their own that are not named Zoomie. This is gonna be a really good one. Brand Nerds, Welcome to Brands, Beats and Bytes, Dave Prager.
Dave Prager: Thank you. Well, so let's go back to the most important part, which is the dog. Uh, I wanted to have, uh, you, you have devastated my daughters, especially my younger one, Sasha, 'cause I mean, if there's an award for cutest dog in the world, Zoomie would win hands down. Uh, I wanted to have a photo of my daughter looking angry at you so I could show her how much she hates you because you took Zoomie. When I told her why I was taking the photo, she refused because that's how much she hates you for taking Zoomie.
LT: Oh no. I'm so sorry. But somebody was gonna, Dave, that's, it's not on us. It's not on us.
Dave Prager: It's not on you. It's not on you. It was gonna, she's gonna hate somebody. Right. So it just happened to be, it's, it's the way the universe works. You get a dog, you get an enemy for life.
LT: Right. [00:12:00]
Dave Prager: Well thank, thank you for the intro, uh, Larry.
That that's, you know, I, I, I know you guys hear this all the time, but, uh, to sit here and, and listen to your life story being told, uh, is, is amazing and, uh, you know, wow, I wish my wife were listening right now.
DC: You can have give it a podcast.
Dave Prager: I'm gonna have to, I need that adoring look I used to get 25 years ago.
Where is that? Maybe it'll come back.
DC: Okay. Now that I'm sorry, I, I can't, if it say that the podcast is gonna return that look Dave, but try it. See.
Dave Prager: Believe me, if it does, I'll let you know. Okay.
DC: Alright. Uh, Dave, Larry, it does an exceptional job of this. I get the joy of watching our guest listen to this and it, it feels to me as I'm watching you, and I've watched many others that.
You're hearing something [00:13:00] that you know is about you, but it sounds like it's about some someone else. It's like, oh wow. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. Because it is a, a life's journey, career journey. Anyway, anyway, laid out. So Larry, kudos to you, brother and Dave. These could not be as good as they are without the person doing it.
So this is what you did, brother. These are your flowers.
LT: That's right. I always get they feel good DC I don't like it because it's all about the guests. They're the ones who do this, not me.
DC: It is, uh, now I noticed, Larry, I don't know if you noticed this. When you got to the end of the intro and you talked about the dogs, 'cause this is all about the dogs really.
We're, we're just here because of the dogs that you mentioned, zoomie, and you mentioned the two dogs that, uh, that, that Dave has. He started like looking behind him for the, I don't know, you looking for the dogs or your daughter? I'm not sure what you were looking for, but you I'm
Dave Prager: looking for the dogs.
Looking
DC: for the dogs. They're
Dave Prager: downstairs though. They'll, they'll, they'll make a cameo at some point, I'm sure. Oh good. We'll get them [00:14:00] up here.
DC: Cool, cool. But I agree that uh, if there were an award for World's Cutest Dog, that that, that Zoom would, would probably get it. I mean that dog is cute. The Brand Nerds, you all aren't looking at this if you're not seeing this on YouTube.
This dog is just adorable.
Dave Prager: Not only is he cute, but he's affectionate. Yes. He jumps in your lap. He loves you, he loves to play with his toy. Like what, what, what could you ask for
LT: Exactly right.
DC: A beautiful dog. Okay, we are getting to the next part of the podcast, Dave. It's called Get Comfy and, um, Brand Nerds.
You will notice that I made an emphasis on the third B in our podcast name, which is bytes, B-Y-T-E-S. On this get comfy question, Dave and brand nerds. I want to get to a different type of A bites. B-I-T-E-S. Okay. B-I-T-E-S. Lots of [00:15:00] success. Dave, in your, um, in your bio, which Larry has elegantly laid out. But we understand there's a story behind a young Dave being fired from a quick serve, quick service, uh, restaurant back in the day, maybe having to do with bites.
Can do tell?
Dave Prager: I already forgotten. I told you about that. Uh, so let's say, what are they, 16 probably. I got a job at a restaurant called Tasty Freeze. Uh, or maybe it was Tasty Treats.
DC: I I know. Tasty Freeze. I know
Dave Prager: Tasty. Yeah. It's like a Dairy Queen kind of place, right?
DC: Yep.
Dave Prager: I do too. Uh, so, so my job was to man the counter, uh, take their order, get their ice cream, you know, get their tray full of hamburgers and whatnot and bring it back to them.
It was, it was a very simple job, right? I was, I was 16, uh, I'd just gotten my braces off and, and my, I just got my retainer on and my orthodontist said, you gotta wear it all the time. All the time. Oh. Like, Hey, Hawk with it in my mouth. I said, because, [00:16:00] so well take it out when you want to talk. Put it back in.
Okay, fine. You're the boss, you're the orthodontist who spent a lot of money on this, so I'm to do what you tell me. So I go to work at the
DC: You don't wanna lose these things 'cause they're very expensive.
LT: That's right.
Dave Prager: Exactly. So, so I put on my apron, whatever I was wearing, maybe it was a paper hat. If you could imagine.
I had hair back then, so maybe it was perched on top of my head. Uh, went to the counter, took the retainer out, put it in my pocket. Hey, welcome. Tasty freeze. Can I take your order? Okay. Corn dog, two ice creams, whatever. Great. Put it back in my mouth. Walk over, get their thing. Get their corn dog. Get their ice cream.
Come back. Here you go. Didn't think anything of it. Thought I was being a great teenager because I was listening to my orthodontist. Turns out that customers have a different opinion of somebody handling their retainer and your food at the same time.
DC: Oh yeah.
Dave Prager: So needless to say, it lasted about two days at that job.
DC: Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh. What was the conversation? The, the [00:17:00] exit interview. What, what, what happened?
Dave Prager: I, I mean, I, I tell you, the, the guy who fired me, I think he was the owner. It's been a long time. I, I was shocked 'cause I never even considered for a second I thought he was gonna fire me. 'cause I couldn't figure out how to make an ice cream cone without like, spilling it all over the sides.
Which is, even to this day, by the way, if I go to a machine and, and you know, pull the thing and make a cone that looks good, I'm proud of myself, right. Because I've overcome this adversity. I thought that's why he would fire me. But my, I'm sure my jaw dropped. What? That's what, never even thought it would be gross to anybody.
And I'm sure I objected. I'm sure you know, Hey, but I can, I don't have to, but whatever. Uh, I was gone, you know, there, that was back in the days when teenagers worked at restaurants and he had a thousand other teenagers to choose from. Right. Probably with better teeth than me.
LT: That's, that's a funny story,
DC: Larry. I don't think we've ever heard a get comfy.
LT: This is great.
DC: Like this. This is a unique one. [00:18:00]
LT: This is great. Well, you know what's interesting though? Like, you would've thought, I guess you, you answered what I was gonna say, like, give you a chance. Hey man, I'll, I'll make sure I tuck my, my retainer, but maybe that's 'cause you couldn't make the cones.
Well, and that was the excuse Dave. Who knows, right?
Dave Prager: I, I'm sure it was a, a whole bunch of stuff went into it all at once. Anyway, the, the, the part of, so that was like, you know, the second day of summer I got fired too late to find another summer job. So I spent the rest of the time like watching TV on the couch.
So in retrospect, it was probably the best summer of my life.
DC: Well, I, I'm gonna make a connection, uh, on the business front. And, uh, I remember one of my bosses, uh, said to me when I came to him with what I thought was a great idea, and he looks at me and he says, Hey DC this is a really good idea. Then he went on to say, Dave, Larry's heard this before.
What might be the unintended consequences of your great idea? [00:19:00] And I paused for a second because I had not pondered such, I was just focused on my great idea. And now I don't know if that orthodontist is still alive, but that might be a good question for him or her before they start giving this advice to, to their, to their patients.
Oh man. Alright.
LT: Yeah, yeah. There's like the if, if, if wear your retainer all the time. Except in these areas.
Dave Prager: Except, except when there's a confluence of food and mouth germs, right? Yeah. Uh, that's where you may wanna make a choice.
DC: I'm, I'm, I'm thinking at that point, you might wanna slow it down a bit.
Alright. Uh, that was funny. Y'all, we are going to five questions now. Dave, I ask a question. Larry asks a question. We go back and forth until we arrive at five. I starred this party. Take us [00:20:00] back in time, Dave, your, your marketing savant now, but there was a time where you had your first experience with a brand and it just blew your hair back.
You don't have any now. I don't have any now, but at this time or maybe a little later, it really captivated your soul. This brand or brand experience. What was that for you? Like a first love.
Dave Prager: Uh, I mean, spending some time thinking about this for the last couple days. Uh, I, I go back to eighth grade, so.
Mm-hmm. God, I don't know, 87 88, uh, air Jordans were like the thing
DC: Ah, yeah.
Dave Prager: You know, the, the Nike brand, uh, spike Lee's original commercials. Uh, is it the shoes, is it the, the, the shoes, the, was it Mars something? Mars Lockman.
LT: Mars Black.
Dave Prager: Mars Black. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Uh, I was not the coolest kid, and I'm gonna put [00:21:00] that as an understatement.
I was probably the least cool kid in this school. Uh, and, and, and I was convinced that all I needed was the right clothes and, and that it would change everything. Uh, and so, you know, I'd always begged my parents, I gotta get these shoes, I gotta get these clothes. It, it wasn't just the shoes by the way. It was a whole, like, there's a whole ensemble of Air Jordan, uh, you know, shirts and shorts and all jackets, wet suits and starter jacket.
Yeah. To have the starter jacket and all that kind of stuff. I remember, yeah. If only I could get that, then everything would turn around for me. I, I was convinced. Uh, and so one day we were at, uh, I grew up in Denver, so there was a, a, a department store called May DNF, uh, which, you know, I don't know what it is today, Dillard or who knows what, or if still even exists, but somewhere on the clothes rack, I found this matching Air Jordan, black shirt, black shorts, four, five sizes, too small.
It was like, you know, just, it was not, my parents were skeptical. It was on sale though. And if it was on sale, that [00:22:00] was the magic word for my parents. It's on sale.
DC: Mm-hmm.
Dave Prager: You can get it. And, and so I got it. I wore it to an event at school or whatever it was. Uh, if this is my waist, the shorts were maybe here.
Uh, if this is my waist, the shirt was maybe up here. It was just ridiculous.
DC: Okay.
Dave Prager: But it was Air Jordan, right? And so I walk in, uh, and I, I can remember they just started laughing. It did not look, it didn't work.
It did not work. The brand shine did not rub off on me. So I, I, I don't know what lesson there is here, uh, about the power of branding, but me, the power of branding is such that you can look in a mirror and not see how ridiculous you look, but only see how cool you think you look.
DC: Mm,
Dave Prager: I think that's probably the lesson right there.
DC: That is a good lesson.
Dave Prager: Still to this day, never own any Air. Jordans always one or two. Those original black ones, I'd love to have them. Uh, never did. Uh hmm. I wonder if there's like a trauma there around Air Jordans for me.
LT: A PTSD for you?
Dave Prager: Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to [00:23:00] think about that.
LT: Yeah. It it, it might be one of those things where you realize like, I can own this now. Like, yes. All the way of own.
Dave Prager: Maybe that's the way I'll justify it. I'll buy these thousand dollars first edition shoes and say, oh, it's for my own mental health.
LT: That's right. Sounds good.
DC: Well, if you, if you're talking about Jordan Ones the OGs, you're gonna drop more than a thousand dollars brother.
Dave Prager: Well, maybe I'll find it on sale and my parents will pay for it.
LT: That's, that's a very interesting story. Dave,
DC: You, you're, you're, you're a basketball guy. What are your thoughts about that answer?
LT: Well, I, I think what's embedded in that, it's, I, I feel, I feel for eighth grade Dave in that. But what's embedded in that is the power of brand, as Dave alluded to. Yeah. That, you know, that, that, you think it could have the power of, um, of [00:24:00] helping you externally mm-hmm. When in reality, you know, we all know as adults, that's just not gonna happen. It, you know, uh, but it is the power of brand. And I think that we as, uh, folks who are brand custodians, 'cause Dave, we talk about this all the time, even when you're working on a brand, the, the pe the ones who own it are the consumers, or in the B2B case, the customers, um, you gotta be the custodians of it.
And I think you have to be very mindful of the story that Dave told, because there's a way you can have it be aspirational, but um, not have it be something that, um, that can hurt somebody's spirit. And that's a tough line to, uh, straddle.
Dave Prager: You know, it got me even thinking right now, like, what was it about that brand that made me connect it to it?
And to me it was like, by wearing the brand, it signifies I know what [00:25:00] cool is.
LT: Right?
Dave Prager: And if people know that I know what cool is, maybe they'll recognize that the other aspects of me that they think aren't cool are actually cool. Because if I signify I no cool here, maybe this signifies I, you know, maybe I do No cool here after all.
Yeah. It was like, like at, at that age, like rolling up your pants or it's a certain way you rolled up your pants really tight rolls that like signified you were cool because you knew the trick of how to roll up your pants that way. I don't think I ever mastered it like they would come apart when I was walking down the, the hall at school.
But, uh, you know, may actually, maybe that's what went wrong with me. I could never figure out how to roll up my pants. Maybe if only I could, uh, it would all have been different.
DC: But I, I am thinking about, um, this fact, you know, this Dave and Brand Nerds, you've heard us talk about this before. Okay. Whether it is clothing, homes, cars, schools, people buy and also [00:26:00] vote for emotional reasons and then justify with logic.
And you went through that process. You said emotionally, this brand Jordan stuff is cool, super cool. Your logic to your parents was, it's on sale. Okay, it's on sale. Which got them to go. Yep. And then the logic to yourself was this correlation between if they see me in this and that I identify with this, then they will this.
It's almost like. Dave, given your chosen, chosen area profession, you are a marketer, but you happen to be a marketer in the tech field with lots of quantitative things. You were forming as an eighth grader [00:27:00] Gantt chart way of thinking in order to get to an outcome that you were, you were looking towards.
And uh, I think that's fascinating in it of, in and of itself. Then let me go to the, uh, next point. And that is, um, uh, brands are like things that we use as ways to identify, like, this is how I want to be identified. And you saw Brand Jordan as a tool to help you be identified in a certain way. This is the power of brands.
LT: Yes.
DC: Yeah. This is the power of brands. It doesn't mean that it always works.
LT: Right.
DC: But it also doesn't diminish the value of brands as it relates to self identity.
Dave Prager: Yeah. It's a really interesting mix of them. I, I see my kids going through it, you know, I gotta have this Kendra Scott necklace, I gotta have this certain shoes.
Yeah. Yeah. And as an adult now I can say that, that, that's silly. I, you know, yeah. We can get you Birkenstocks that [00:28:00] look that aren't Birkenstock, you know, whatever it is.
DC: Yeah, yeah.
Dave Prager: Uh, but, but man, they, they have to have it, it, it completes them. And I, I have enough recollection of my time to remember, to empathize with the fact that, yeah, you, you do feel completed if you get this certain thing, if you, if you wear this certain thing.
Uh, so, you know, fortunately for my kids, it doesn't have to be on sale sometimes. Sometimes. Mm.
DC: All right. Larry, next question.
LT: Yeah, that was deep. Thanks for sharing that, Dave. Um, okay. So when, who's had or has having the most influence on your career?
Dave Prager: Yeah. So, uh, you, you said I could or couldn't, you know, didn't have to name names.
I'm gonna name the names. So there, there's a guy named Daniel Mallard, who's now the, uh, EVP and, uh, executive creative director at FCB wrote it down, FCB, New York Health, FCB Health New York. So, uh, he is, uh, very, uh, successful in advertising in New York. Um, when I knew him, [00:29:00] was my first job outta college, uh, was at a company called Digital Pulp.
So the, the idea was you're marrying digital with paper. Uh, this is, this is back like in 99, probably year 2000. Uh, yeah, I guess it was the year 2000. Um. When, uh, you know, the, the digital's just starting to emerge in a medium and, and to call yourself Digital Pulp was as cutting edge as you can make it.
And so Daniel was a copywriter, maybe a, a a a, a copy, you know, senior copywriter, something like that, uh, relatively early his career. Uh, I was a very junior copywriter, first job outta school. And, uh, what I loved about Daniel, uh, what I hated about it then, but I would love about it now, is he, he didn't coddle me.
He didn't, uh, pull punches. And I remember the first time I turned in some body copy for a magazine. They had magazine ads back then. Uh, first time I turned his copy, the, the customer is called Live Person, which still around today. They're like, chat bots and, and things like that, back then [00:30:00] it was like web chat where you could actually talk to a live person.
It was very clever. Um, but I, I, I wrote my first ad. I was super happy turning it into him, showing it to him first feedback, and, and he just savaged it. He just destroyed it. There's no, there's no rhythm. That was the thing that I remember him telling me most is there's no rhythm. It's just words. There's just words with no artistry to the placement or anything like that.
And it was just, I, I couldn't understand because I, I'd been a writer my whole life. My parents had always told me how, I wrote great stories. My teachers always told me how I wrote great stories. So I got this job as a writer, and here was the guy saying, you can't write. You're terrible. Mm-hmm. And, and you know, he was right.
So you, you mentioned the beginning, uh, the universe kind of makes these connections. And, and so that very day, that literally where, where my job was at stake, um, I was walking d so, uh, DC You're in New York, is that right?
DC: No, no, I'm in Atlanta, but I was just in New York over the weekend.
Dave Prager: Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry about that.
Um, that's alright. So if you go down to the East Village, go down to St. Mark's. St. Mark's is a [00:31:00] very kind of, you know. I don't know what you wanna call it these days. Counter, certainly at the time it was a little bit more counterculture, a little bit more crazy.
LT: It always has been.
Dave Prager: Yeah, it always, and then if you keep on Walking East, eventually it got more quiet, more and more quiet.
And then there's a bookstore, which I think is still there on, on the basement level. If you went into the bookstore and went all the way to the back, uh, you actually opened up into the garden and the garden were like just piles and piles or shelving shelves of books that were like a dollar each, just amazing.
And you'd find all the amazing treasures there. So, uh, I went in that very day wandering around at night, uh, because they were open till like two in the morning, by the way, which is incredible for a bookstore. And, and I found this book and, and it was called, uh, Style: 10 Lessons and Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams. And this is the book in combination with Daniel that changed my life because this book told you how to write with rhythm and how to write with style and how to read a piece of writing and look for the clues that it was clumsy, that you were using too [00:32:00] many words or that you were. Uh, not being, uh, I don't even know how to say it anymore.
Like, like just clarity and grace. It's right there in the title, uh, that book, reading that book, and actually the book was full of exercises and doing the exercises mm-hmm. Almost overnight changed me how I write it. It helped me understand a piece of writing in terms of the rhythm and not just the words and how to write with a way that that could be captivating, uh, to a reader, even if the subject was boring.
Uh, I don't know if it saved my job at Digital Pulp because I did end up getting fired from there. Uh, it doesn't matter. But that book changed me and so I, I can thank Daniel for priming the pump, getting me receptive to the need to change, and then the serendipitous book showing up and out of nowhere to help me change.
Uh, ever since then, every time, uh, a marketer or a copywriters come to me ask for my advice on how they improve their writing. Uh, I, I give him that book. I, I've given out so many. I probably kept, I probably, I've bought that [00:33:00] guy Joseph Williams a boat. By this time I've given out so many copies of his book.
Mm. Um, but, you know, it is really cool because, uh, I, I can look at a piece of writing and because of this book, I give all the credit to this book. I can just look at the contours of the words on the page and tell you if it's well written or not, even without reading anything. It's just something about the, the rhythm of the, it's like a programmer can look at good code, uh, look at code and tell you if it's good or bad, just from the contours of the code, just from the rhythm of the code.
It's the exact same thing. I can look at this, a piece of writing someone hands into me. It I can know in 10 seconds if it's good or not. And I, and I'm, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think I'm right. Wow. Uh, but part, part of the re you know, this, this has helped me in my career because, you know, when, just until two, three months ago, I was the sv, uh, I was the VP of marketing.
At a FinTech, and my job was part of it to evaluate all the writing coming outta product marketing. And, uh, they would hand it to me and I would give it 10 seconds. Is it bad for these seven reasons? Do it again, or, this is great, I can tell. Uh, and, and I [00:34:00] think at first everyone was very skeptical that I was actually not full of it.
Uh, but I think, you know, the people learned to, to, you know, come around to, to the way I did it. And I think that my team genuinely respected, uh, the way I did it. So again, like throughout my career, so I, I know that a lot of university students listen to this book, if you wanna be a writer. And by the way, um, in the age of Chat GPT, this is even more important because it's now so easy to spot AI writing or to get the feeling that something was written by AI and, and so to, to, to understand just from looking at a, a, a block of text, the contours of how an AI writes versus how human writes.
Uh, it's a, it's if you can disguise your AI writing as a human writing, which by the way. Part of what my new company does. Uh, you go a long way to convincing people. Um, I, I, this is kind of an aside, but, uh, every so often someone in my company, there'd be a question and the answer, they'd come back and say, here's the [00:35:00] answer.
It was clearly just copied and pasted off the ai. Yeah. And not, not only, you know, is that bad practice, but it immediately loses credibility because you can't trust anything that comes out of an AI. Everybody knows that.
LT: Yeah.
Dave Prager: And if, if it looks like the AI wrote it, even if it's right, I'm not gonna believe it.
And so as a, as a young person coming out, even if it's right, even if you fact checked it yourself, even if you validated every assumption that AI makes, you still need to put it in your own words. Because ultimately we're gonna trust the human more than we're gonna trust the AI when there's a, a judgment call involved.
LT: Ooh. This is some jewels here. D, you have any thoughts?
DC: I do. When, uh, Daniel Mallard ripped you apart, you go to a bookstore, you could have salt, you could have gone to a [00:36:00] bar and got hammered and said, I'm gonna be fired in a week, maybe tomorrow. What made you seek out a bookstore? Why were you walking to quiet and then arriving at a bookstore?
Dave Prager: It's a great question. Um, so when I first, so I grew up in Denver. Uh, I moved to New York because of Seinfeld because I thought it just looked like a really cool lifestyle they lived, uh, I had never been to New York until probably my senior year in high school. Uh, actually no until college actually. Uh, I just loved to walk around the city and, and even to this day, if I'm in a new city, my favorite thing to do is just to walk around the city.
Uh, and, and so at the time I had a, a, a film camera. This is before digital cameras, which I would go around and, you know, take photos. And so walk around the city with my camera looking for something to take a photo of some sort of urban decay or urban scene. Uh, that was fun for me. That was my idea of, of relaxing and [00:37:00] clearing my head.
And so I, I guess to be wandering the streets of New York City at two in the morning was not an unusual thing for me.
DC: Mm. Sounds like someone else I know.
LT: He's talking about me. And it's, it's funny, Dave. Um, I'm a born and bred New Yorker, native New Yorker, and there's nothing like walking in New York and walking in any city.
You, you just mentioned it. And that's how you really understand what cities are like, and that's one of the best parts of traveling. And obviously you've lived and wr written a book, by the way. I didn't even mention, uh, about living abroad. Um, so, you know, that's really cool. But what I'm struck with D, and we talk about this all the time, Dave honed in on the word rhythm.
There's rhythms to life. There's rhythms to everything we do. Really? Mm-hmm. You can be conscious to it or [00:38:00] unconscious to it. Most of us are unconscious to it. And it sounds like the style by Joseph Williams made you incredibly conscious to what you do in your profession, which is at the time copywriting.
But it's, it's still the foundation to really all of us marketers in many ways. And, and so there's something about the word rhythm that I find really interesting because if we can find the rhythm of our lives and everything around us, we all, both in as people, as as, as a person individually, but then as a community, we'd be much, well, uh, much more well served.
Dave Prager: Yeah. It, it just takes someone to open your eyes to, to these things, to, to new ways of looking at things. Right. Uh, I have another memory, uh, of going, so again, photos in New York, uh, back when the trade center was there, I, I took a photo, black and white standing between the two buildings looking straight up.
And so the, the two buildings, you know, went up to the top.
JT: Yep.
Dave Prager: [00:39:00] And, and, uh, I, I showed the photo, uh, to my roommate Max. And, and Max was a very artistic kind of guy, and he spent a long time looking at it. I was like, well, well, what do you like about it? The buildings look really cool. Right. He is like, no, it's not the building, it's, it's the negative space between the buildings.
And up until that moment, I had never looked at a photo for negative space. Mm-hmm. Uh, for, for the shape that was created by the other shapes. And all of a sudden, like, I was seeing it, it was like for the first time my eyes were opened, a whole different way of looking at photos and looking for shapes. Uh, you, you just need someone to like, give you that little spark, uh, to, to open your way to, to new way of seeing, uh, and it changes everything.
DC: I'm paraphrasing here. Miles Davis, the impresario trumpet player, he has a quote, and I don't know it exactly, but he talks about or talked about rest in power, that, um, the music can be found in the [00:40:00] spaces between the notes
Dave Prager: and the notes you don't play.
DC: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Don't, yeah. And the notes you don't play.
Yes. Thank you.
Dave Prager: Yeah, I, I didn't put that on my bio too, but I, I was a musician. I lived in New York and, and did some jazz improvisation and Yeah. You, you'll learn like there's the obvious note. That sounds good. And if you skip it and go for the obvi, uh, the non-obvious one.
DC: Yeah.
Dave Prager: Uh, even if you, I think that's the other thing, miles said, or, or one of the, the jazz greats.
Um, I, and I tell this to my kids by the way, all the time, like, I want to hear you making mistakes. 'cause if you're making mistakes, that means you're trying something new and you're learning. Yeah.
DC: Yeah. What's your instrument or what are your instruments of choice?
Dave Prager: I was a trombone player.
DC: Trombone?
Dave Prager: Yeah. So actually, uh, there, there was a little niche in New York for trombone players in rock bands, uh, and jazz bands.
Um, so I was able to get out and I did a lot of playing around. It was pretty cool. It was a good time.
LT: So DC's a musician as well?
Dave Prager: Oh yeah.
LT: That's how we went to college.
Dave Prager: [00:41:00] Okay, cool. Great. What'd you play?
DC: Uh, percussion.
Dave Prager: Okay. Well if I, I haven't played in 20 years, but I'll get it out and we'll come over and we'll jam.
DC: Yeah. I haven't played in longer actually,
Dave Prager: and I, I won't, I did have. I, I did have one, uh, show. There's a guy named Rob Kent, who I don't know how I got connected with him. Uh, he wanted to do a show, it was like an Easter brunch at a restaurant, and it was me on the trombone and him on his like, acoustic guitar.
And, and I have to tell you, it was the biggest disaster, the worst combination. Uh, I, I didn't realize this until I got up in this quiet restaurant. I didn't know how to play quiet. I could only play loud. Uh, I could, it was just terrible. Like I must have ruined everyone's Easter brunch that day to listen to, to the, the stylings of Rob and Dave.
Ugh, awful. He never called me back after that.
DC: Alright,
LT: If you go to the next question, that was great stuff, Dave. Really good.
DC: I will, [00:42:00] uh, this question has nothing to do with your successes, although you did reveal one of your F ups earlier is when you got fired. From the, uh, Tasty Freeze. But this question is about in your career, your biggest F up, Dave, the one that you are the one behind.
So this is not Yeah. Oh, good. You can't point to someone else. This is on you. And most importantly, what you learned from it.
Dave Prager: Not my orthodontist's fault this time. You hear what you're saying?
DC: No. Mm-hmm.
Dave Prager: Yeah. Um, this one's recent. It's about about a year ago, uh, year, year and a half ago, talk. So my dad spent his whole career as a CPA and a CFO and, and consultant for small business owners.
And, and about a year ago, January of, I guess it was 2025 or December of 2024, having coffee with him. Uh, he, you know, he is older. Uh. Gonna be 80 in a couple years. He, he had started his own another business because that's what he does. That's what Prager men do apparently, is we start businesses. Uh, and, and he had a good business going pretty well that he started when he was about [00:43:00] 70, where it was consulting, helping CPAs learn how to consult like A CFO, learn how to think like a CFO.
Mm-hmm. And add value, like A CFO. And it was very successful. He actually recently just sold it, uh, successfully. So, so it was a good business. Um, at the time he was having trouble finding customer success people, people to help his customers learn his methodologies. Mm-hmm. Because he has certain ways of doing business.
You know, he has all these methodologies. He invented the seven key numbers, the eight keys, all these different, the, the six keys of ca, I can't remember all of them. Cashflow or something. He couldn't teach anyone his methodology. It was just too hard, too hard to invest in these folks. Uh, that would quit before, you know, right when they got, knowing what they were doing.
And so we're talking about ai. This is back again a year and a half ago when, you know, now it looks primitive, but back then AI was incredible. Can, could we teach an AI to think like him and to answer his customer's questions on his behalf? And so then from that point, we started thinking, well, if we could teach an [00:44:00] AI to think like him, why couldn't we just go straight to business owners and create an ai, Jeff, uh, that would interact with business owners, answer their questions.
Uh, we had the notion of doing it as a voice interface instead of a, um, text interface because we figured that small business owners, like construction guys or HVAC companies or whatever, they would rather talk to something than uh, uh, type, type at it. So that was the business idea. And so I spent probably six months and God helped me $40,000 getting this thing developed.
Uh, this, this tool to recreate my father and create a voice interface where people could talk to him. Mm-hmm. And eventually, after many, many months it was ready. And so I started doing some marketing and I got the first customer, got on a call with the first customer and I realized, oh my God, I gotta teach these non-tech people how to use ai.
This is the worst decision Ah, okay. I ever made. [00:45:00] And, and that was it. That was it for the business because I realized that as cool as it was and as as capable as it was in order to help. People who were non-tech people learn how to use a new technology and, and reinvent their workflows in many different ways was gonna require, I'd have to hire my own CS people and I'd have to build out a product team to build the product more.
And, and it was just suddenly like the, the investment stretched out in front of me to get people to learn how to use a new software that drove a new way of working was just so daunting. It was like, this is not gonna work. And it wouldn't, it wouldn't have worked. And so that was when I made the pivot because, and I guess like again, universe delivers, right?
The, the marketing methodology I invented in order to market this product was so successful out of the, the bat, out of the gate, that that's what became my company today, inner Pitch. This idea that I could use AI to research a prospect, figure out what they cared about, and then position my message against exactly what they [00:46:00] cared about.
That's the whole, I'm, I'm not trying to make my own pitch here, but that was it. That was the insight that suddenly changed everything for me. So if I hadn't gone down that path
LT: right,
Dave Prager: I wouldn't be here today. So yes. Great. But a, a very expensive lesson to learn, that's for sure.
LT: Well, interesting. So I have a couple, do you mind if I jump in?
I have a couple. Uh, absolutely, bro. A couple things here. So one is, um, was your dad say when you told your dad this idea, did he just be, just say, well, Dave, you're the expert here. Um, I'm going with you. Did he have any doubts about it?
Dave Prager: No. And in fact, um, he, he's. Still pursuing it, doing a little bit of different approach.
Uh, actually won't tell me what he's doing because he'll wants to surprise me and keep it secret. He, he, he just sold his business, like I said, and got, you know, he's not gonna sit around and watch soap operas. He's gonna get right back into it, even at 77 or 78 years old. Right. But no, no, he, he loved the idea.
We were, we were partners in that business. Um, he brought [00:47:00] the expertise that I was training using to train the AI. Uh, and, and then of course I brought the AI knowledge and the marketing knowledge and things like that,
LT: right.
Dave Prager: Um, but this, this new one, you know, it, it's just, it's just AI and just marketing.
So, you know, he's still helping me with my books 'cause he is still a cpa. Uh, but it's a little different for this one.
LT: Well, D, it strikes me my next, my, my comment before throwing it to you is that, uh, this seems like you were talking to folks, here's the metaphor I'm gonna use, who didn't know how to drive a car and ask them to jump into a race car.
Because they do, because we, with those of us who have used AI, there's a, we DC and I have gotten, I dare I say, adequate at it, right? But we've really embraced, we use it all the time. And I know that we're a lot better at it today than we were six months ago because you just, you know, like anything else, you know, you get the practice and you get the rhythms of it.
But you know, you [00:48:00] couldn't just jump into what you said. If they, if it's their first incarnation with even using anything like it, like you said, it was gonna be daunting to actually, you have to teach 'em the drive first before they can drive the race car.
Dave Prager: Yeah. There, there's two lessons that I took from that.
So one was this idea of the new way of doing marketing. Um, but the other one was, was something that I, I'd noticed a lot. So I've been doing software marketing my whole career, right? B2B software marketing since my early days in New York and, and these days. Selling software's gotten really hard because what you're really trying to do is sell a, a, a change to how you do business.
So at my last company, we sold accounts payable software, software to, uh, for, for billing, you know, accounts payable, procurement, very basic stuff. But in order to successfully use our software, you had to take what, like 15, 20 people at your company did and turn it completely upside down and reorient, reorient everything around this new software.
And at, at, at, at a, at the business standpoint, you had to [00:49:00] constantly fo worry about are they still using it today? Are they still using it today? Are they still getting value? Oh God, they, they just bought a new ERP and now they're logging into that dashboard, which means they're not logging into our dashboard, which means they're gonna churn like, like this.
Getting people to use software to try new software. I mean, I don't know if this is, this is interesting to you and your audience or not. Very interesting. It's like the, it is so hard. And so that was the thing that led to the other kind of philosophical shift I've had, which is I think there's a lot more success to be had selling services, just doing it for the person rather than building out a software, hoping they log in, hoping they use it, hoping they learn, hoping my people that I hire can teach them.
And so the, the other thing I've done with my business is I'm doing it as a service. I, I've got tens and thousands of lines of code that I've built using Claude, uh, and, and my customers see none of it. The code is all just to automate what I do so that I can sit there and say, look, what I offer is very simple.
You give me a list of leads, I [00:50:00] will tell you which ones are ready to buy, and I'll come back with all the information you need to sell them. I'll email to you. You put it in the hands of your salesperson and you're off to the races. No dashboards. No logins. Again, not trying to do it. The pitch. But I'm trying to say like philosophically, right?
This is where I see a lot happening is, is, uh, I think AI is enabling us. So we don't need software interfaces, uh, certainly to sell. Um, but I think that more and more we're gonna find there's gonna be fewer and fewer places you go on your computer, uh, and, and fewer and fewer things to learn about how to use these things.
And, and more and more just the service gets delivered into that spot. So the, the big guys like, like HubSpot and Salesforce and Google and Microsoft, the places that already own your computer, you're gonna have a lot of trouble displacing them, giving them a new place, right? It's really a, a threat to the SaaS business model, in my opinion.
LT: That's deep stuff.
DC: I'll say this before we go to the next question, Larry, for you. And that is what you're doing [00:51:00] in your current business is something that Larry and I talk with our clients about often. It's kind of corny, Dave. We have a picture. Of a a chair, it's a nice plushy looking chair. No one's in the chair.
And we say that's the customer, that's the customer's chair. You gotta put your butt in the seat of the customer to understand that's what you're doing with your current business. That's not what you did for your dad. That is not what you did for dad. Alright, Larry, next question.
LT: So we're, we've already gotten into some of this, but, and which is great.
So the next question, Dave, is regarding technology and marketing. And, uh, you've been living at the Confluence, as I said in your, in the introduction. Can you tell us where you think marketers should lean in or best leverage tech, or you can talk to us about areas that you think they should be leery or simply avoid?
Dave Prager: Um, I, I, I think that the, well obviously, you know, the, the answer to ai, right? That, that's the [00:52:00] answer to, to everything these days. And, and if you're not using it. Or, you know, it's not a little bit cliche, but certainly this wasn't as well known as a month, a, a, a year ago or whatever. But it, it, it's gotta be your thought partner.
You have to discuss with it what you want. You have to be very skeptical of what it tells you. You have to learn how to tell to, to realize when it doesn't know what the health's talking about. And it's answering confidently anyway. Uh, with, without, with so much. Uh, the other day I was listening to, um, oh, so, okay, so my younger daughter's getting really into Nicki Minaj, which, you know, great.
And also, you know, Nicki Minaj for that. She's a woman. New
DC: York stand up.
Dave Prager: Yes. Uh, there, there is a, a line, uh, in the song, super base, uh, about where she goes something like, uh, I'm slicker than the guy with a thing on his eye, and I don't, and, and I was like, okay, that, that sounds,
DC: That's Slick Rick.
Dave Prager: S Slick Rick.
That's slick Rick. Right. And that's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. So I went to chat GPT, that's slick Rick. And I said, I, I said in this line. [00:53:00] Uh, what, what does that mean? What is she talking about? Because I thought it was slick, Rick, but I didn't want to lead the AI by asking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, Chad, GPT, with all the confidence in the world says, oh, she's talking about pirates.
Pirates wear eye patches and pirates are cool. So she's
DC: not so much, and not so much
Dave Prager: not, not at all. And so, of course they said, listen, Chad, GPT, you're, you're full of shit.
LT: Right?
Dave Prager: Go, go look it up, man, because you clearly didn't look it up. And so then it went into the way, I was like, oh, you know what it's about slick Rick, who apparently wore an eye patch.
Uh, but yeah, man, you, you gotta learn how to be so skeptical, uh, of this tool, even as you gotta embrace it, like with every ounce of your being. You have to embrace it, but you also gotta learn that this thing is, is just very, very wrong at times. And you have to know when to tell the difference because it's, uh, I, I remember someone else said something like, the, the dumbest people you know in the world are right now being told by chat, GPT, how smart they are.
So you gotta be very careful because it blows smoke, [00:54:00] man. It, it really blows from smoke.
LT: Ooh, that's some great stuff. D you got thoughts?
DC: Uh, I, I don't, I just love, well, I'm saying I don't, but I'm gonna say something I do. Thought partner. Love that.
LT: Yeah.
DC: Love that. Alright, uh, Larry, anymore before I go to the next question?
LT: No, hit the next question.
DC: Brother Prager, what are you most proud of?
Dave Prager: This is another one where I just spent a lot of time thinking about it. Um, one of the things that I'm proud of is that I rescued, uh, Rishi, which was that startup I worked at with AI, computer Vision, rescued them from COVID. And, and, and I'll tell you exactly how I did that.
Um, this, we were a very early stage AI company. What we did, what we sweated over, what we earned patents for back then with computer vision and manufacturing. Uh, these days, ChatGPT can do it out of the box, which, so we were a little early, a lot early to market with this. Um. But in order to do AI at the time [00:55:00] there was this thing called annotation you had to do where basically we, every frame of video from a manufacturing floor, we had to tell the ai, this is the hammer, this is the product, this is the screwdriver, this is the guy's pers the person's hand.
All of it had to be labeled. So in order to do this labeling, we hired an army of 150 people in India who all day long would go frame by frame in the videos and draw a bounding box. This is the screwdriver. Now this is the screwdriver. Now this is the screwdriver. This isn't the hand, this is the hand. Wow.
This is the hand. This is not the, these were a lot like the 110 employees that the not, you know, this is, uh, an additional 150 people we hired to just do that all day long. We built this incredible tooling for them. Uh, we had that, we, we wanted, you know, there, there were services that could do this, but we wanted to have it in-house for, for, um, IP reasons, for security reasons, and for defensibility reasons.
So we had 150 annotators who every day would come into Bangalore, uh, and, and do this. Tedious work to [00:56:00] train the AI on our behalf. And so I'd been paying attention, you know, December, 2019, January, 2020, every day I'd wake up and look at the data. And you see now there was 10 cases in Italy and 15 cases in Italy, and 20 cases in Germany.
And this coming, it's coming. And by February, you know, I I, maybe it was even late January, I was convinced this was gonna be the thing it became. And, and so I, I marched into my CEO's office and I said, we gotta do something because in a month, our 150 annotators are not gonna be able to go to work. And all their computers are there in the office, and if we don't get them laptops, they are not gonna be able to work and our company will collapse.
And, and, and my God, the skepticism, you're crazy. You're, you're insane. This is just, they'll stop it. They don't, they know what they're doing, blah, blah, blah. So I don't know how I did it, but I convinced them to get. 150 laptops for 150 people, get them all set up, reconfigure the network [00:57:00] completely so they could do the annotation remotely.
Mm-hmm. And then sure enough, COVID shut everything down. India was about a month behind us in terms of the shutdown. Uh, but by that time they all had laptops and they could all work from home. And our company did not collapse the next day. So, very proud of that. Uh, and, and you know what, I've spoken to people at that company.
They'll, they'll recognize I was the first person to see it. Uh, it, it was, it, it was, uh, a very gratifying thing to know that my paranoia paid off in that way.
LT: I love this story, D.
Dave Prager: Now I was thinking about this though. I'll tell you a story about where my paranoia was very foolish. Um, back in New York, you know, I was there for 9-11 and not too many people remember this part, but a couple weeks after 9-11, all of a sudden there was the anthrax scare where Oh yeah, they were sent somebody we don't even know who to this day, was sending anthrax spores in the mail to people.
Yeah. And they would open it up and get sick. And, and I remember [00:58:00] like this always stuck with me. The, um, the note that this crazy person put in one of the letters that they sent to whoever was this is next. Like, okay, this is the next thing. You know, 9-11 is traumatic enough now that, so, so I did a bunch of research.
I, I had convinced myself that. We're all gonna get anthrax. And I learned that if you get this certain type of antibiotic, Cipro, obviously that was a cure and all you had to do is get Cipro and have it on hand. And so I went out, found this online pharmacy, this really sketchy online pharmacy that would give me a prescription to some pharmacy in the middle of Brooklyn.
Way, way far away from the subway. You know, 20 blocks of walking, got my anthrax medication, came home. Once I had it in the hand, I emailed all my friends saying, listen, this is coming. You guys gotta get anthrax medicine. You all gotta do it. You're all, you're all gonna die if you don't. And fortunately that time I was wrong.
LT: Yeah. So let's go back to your proud story about, about, uh, in [00:59:00] many ways, you know, probably saving the company, um, how far along. Like you got the 150 computer. So was it like by March, because again, it really started hitting in March. So did you just, you guys just not miss a beat? Were you able to have all 150 work from home and you just kept moving?
Dave Prager: Yeah. If I remember correctly, um, India shut down about a month after we did. Uh, so, and in fact another memory I have of that time was our, our CTO lived in India, uh, in February. He came over to the US to meet some investors or something. I said, bro, you're not getting back. You should not come here. And, and he like, you're crazy, Dave, whatever.
Sure enough, he got stuck here for four months because they wouldn't let him, they wouldn't let anyone leave. They wouldn't let anyone back in. Uh, but, but it was because we and only had the hardware, but the headstart on the software to, but to take something that was built for, you know, people to be in the office with high security protocols to suddenly make it distributed on laptops.
So it wasn't [01:00:00] just like, Hey, buy laptops for these guys. It was, Hey, let's rebuild our, our annotation, our homemade annotation engine
LT: Got it
Dave Prager: completely to support remote work. It, it was not a, not a simple investment and I'm, you know, so glad to be able to convince the CEO to do it. And
LT: did the CEOA few months later, or what did, did you get acknowledgement?
Dave Prager: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
LT: yeah, yeah,
Dave Prager: yeah, yeah. There it was. It was all like, Hey, you were, even when I see these guys, you know, years later, oh, you were right about COVID.
LT: Right?
DC: Ah, yeah.
LT: Interesting.
Dave Prager: Unfortunately.
LT: D, anything else before we, uh, move to the next segment?
DC: I do not.
LT: That's a great story, Dave. All right, so we are moving to the next segment and that segment we affectionately call what's popping, what's popping D?
DC: What's popping?
LT: So, uh, Dave, this is our chance to shout out, shout down, or simply Air something happening in and around marketing today that we think is good fodder for discussion and we understand you have something for [01:01:00] us.
Dave Prager: Mm. Do you guys go on LinkedIn anymore?
LT: Yes.
DC: Yeah, we do. Yep.
Dave Prager: And, and, and what do you think about the, the posts that you're seeing these days?
LT: Um.
Dave Prager: Maybe, maybe that's a, that's a, a blind question, but I'm certainly going somewhere with this.
LT: Yeah. I mean, I, I think I know where you're going. I, you know, I don't spend a lot of time there, which is interesting and, and, and full transparency, because of the podcast, we have posts and, you know, I spend the preponderance or of my time on LinkedIn in and around the show, um, and doing what we should be doing or need to be doing as it relates to the show.
But I'll tell you, it doesn't stick. I don't spend that much time other than that.
DC: Yeah. Me, me either. The posts to me are like noise.
LT: Yeah.
DC: I tune them out. And, um, there is a phrase that gets me every time. Uh, I, I, I just don't like it. But when I see a colleague or someone [01:02:00] else say, I am honored to announce or to, I just like,
so, uh, it's hard for me. That said. When, uh, something is authentic, Dave, and, uh, and others are commenting on it,
LT: yeah.
DC: Then I will engage. So I, I'll look at the comments and the authenticity of the comments before I go to the post. If they get me, then I go check out the post.
Dave Prager: That's interesting. I like that approach because it's, it's not authentic anymore.
It's no, so, so what, what I came in thinking about is, is what it's become, uh, is everyone's saying, I put Claude code on X and therefore all these problems are solved and my business runs on automation now. And by the way, if you comment here, I'll send you the instructions on how I did it. And, and, and all I can think about is like, it's like stock pickers who are like. [01:03:00]
DC: Right.
Dave Prager: I know the perfect stock you should buy.
And rather than buying it myself. I'm gonna tell you about it. Like it just become this, this idea that, that it's all people kind of ling a, a, a, a methodology, a get rich quick scheme. I automated my marketing team and fired all my salespeople in 10 easy steps. And you can too. I mean, I, I wrestle with Claude Code.
Like I said, I, I built something incredibly complex and it, it is not so easy and it's not so easy that you can just type your name, give me your methodology, and suddenly you're gonna automate your marketing. It, it is not easy to do this even with the, the a as amazing as AI is a, as incredible and capable of it, a as it is in, in building the code.
You still have to think and you still have to solve problems methodically, step by step. And, and you have to know what you're doing. You can't just, like, I, I had a customer, so I've, I've got a really, really great, I think marketing scheme for my business, which is, uh, I [01:04:00] go out, my system looks for someone who, a company that just made an announcement, like a startup just got funding or something.
My system will find it, it'll research this company. It'll say, well, they're selling X to Y. Let me find a company that fits the profile of y. I will send it to them saying, Hey, I found this lead for you. They're perfect because they're showing this need signal, this timing signal. Uh, here's why I think they have budget to spend.
Here's why I think they have, you know, this person has the right authority to, to spend that money. And by the way, if you like it, let's do business. I can give you a lot more. Um, I got on the phone with someone the other day who, who got my email and they said, well, you know, one of our SDRs built this system, built a system that does exactly what you do and, and you know, with all due respect, like there's no way.
So, so last night I spent, uh, probably over the last 24 hours, like. 12 of these hours wrestling with this obscure bug that was causing my system to fail due to the fact that it was making too many calls to the DNS system. Too many DNS calls [01:05:00] and it was just, uh, overwhelming. My Mac. Like, you have to know what a DNS call is.
You have to know how to think about parallel processing and concurrent, whatever the hell it's talking about. Even though I don't understand the lick of, of what the code is doing. I understand conceptually what's happening in the background. Uh, and, and then when it says, okay, we figure out the problem, we're gonna rate limit Gemini in this certain way.
You have to know like, oh, okay, so here's an example. When I send a a, a research, and by the way, everything I do, um, uh, is, is multiplied. By a thousand because I'm, I built a system to do this for a thousand customers at the, the exact same time. Uh, but it sends a research query to Google Gemini, and it says, go out and research company X and find out who the leaders are and try to figure out their con their, their contact information.
Try to figure out there's been any turnover, whatever it is, or, or, you know, try to figure out this about their industry. When it comes back from Google, all the citations pass through this domain called like vertexai.com or something like that. Turns out in the [01:06:00] background, Google has stored all of their, uh, uh, data, for lack of a better word, on this Vertex server, and it's no good for me because I wanna see the actual URL to believe the fact, so I have to resolve the Vertex server URL into a real URL, uh, all, which is to say it took me a long time wrestling with cloud code to figure out that this is the problem. This is what Vertex AI is, and this is how you resolve it into a readable URL. And it turns out that was at the heart of my DNS problem. And so when it started talking about this and started talking about rate limiting everything, saying, Dave, you can't do, you know, 20 concurrent companies at a time, you can only do three.
Then I realize it, it, so the point is like all, all these people who are pedaling to you, that your SDR can do it, that anyone can do it, that it's just so easy with quad code. That that's, that's the popin to me is just like, it is so much more complicated and so much more requires so much more of your brain than they're, than they're making you [01:07:00] think.
And so be skeptical, uh, of people who claim that they did it in five minutes and you can do it too. And that's all that LinkedIn is these days. That's all LinkedIn is I did it and you could do it too if you just subscribe to my newsletter.
LT: That's interesting.
Dave Prager: I get passionate about the nerdiest things these days.
LT: No, it's it, but it's true. I think, I think there's an overall point here and that is, uh, when you see something that people have a quick and easy recipe for, you ought to be skeptical about it. And, and especially if you don't know about it, it's probably smart to find out, do the research yourself or find somebody like you, Dave, who, who, who could maybe quickly discern yeah, this is BS stuff.
DC: I love this subject. Oh, I just love this subject. [01:08:00] Whenever something new that is based in technology that impacts marketing and communication. There is this thought that the whole world has changed. When radio came, oh my goodness, this is, the whole world has changed. When TV came, oh, that radio stuff we're on the TV right now.
When, when the internet came, oh, it's all about the internet marketing. Uh, they, when search became a big thing with SEO and all of this and, and ro roas roas, that, that became the thing. Now we're here with AI and um, somehow the human species gets seduced by the surface level things involved with technology.
And this is [01:09:00] why someone can say on LinkedIn. I am, I'm now making $10 million a month because I did these things. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you can make $10 million a month too. This is why it works. Why, why? People actually will give, you know, a, a $95 annual subscription to hear it. But here's the thing, um, I'm gonna go to a quote by, um, uh, Janssen um, I think his last name is pronounced Hung. So the founder, CEO of Nvidia. And his quote is, and you, you, you'll know it better than I, you're not gonna lose your job to ai. You're gonna use your job to someone who uses AI and what. What we don't do as marketers often, or just as business people, is we don't spend the time [01:10:00] trying to figure out how to use the technology.
We're looking for a shortcut for someone else to tell us how to use the technology. That's my first point. My second point is this. I used to be highly impressed, Dave. Uh, and I think this was the case, uh, for intelligence for 30,000 years, and that is whoever had the best answer was considered smart. If, if, if, if I were a Chm Magine man, and you were a Chm, Magine, man, Dave and I could give you an answer with a few grunts.
Of go over here and you can kill something to eat. Go over here and you will be killed and eaten with a few grunts. That's me giving you an answer. [01:11:00] Fast forward that to, to nearly modern times. It was the same thing. Oh boy, that Zuckerberg is super smart. That that kid, he's a whiz kid. He has the answers and they happen to be it presented in social media.
This is the way we have held up leaders, do they have smart answers? I now have a completely different point of view and it's, it's been the case for the last, uh, I don't know how long, Larry, I've been saying this.
LT: About two years now.
DC: About two years now. Now I believe the truly intelligent people have the best questions, prager the best questions, and when someone.
On LinkedIn or elsewhere are saying, Hey, I can do this and you can do it too. I am not thinking of their answer. I'm thinking of what are my questions to, to [01:12:00] understand the veracity and efficacy of what they are saying and do they really know anything that I can't fucking learn through? Some good questions.
Uh, one of our old bosses, uh, Dave, and then I'll get off my soapbox, uh, at uh, at Coca-Cola, used to say to us, don't be lazy marketing. Don't do, don't be lazy marketers. That's lazy marketing. He would say this to us, and I believe the problem that you have brought up is that we as a society have become more and more intellectually lazy.
That's my response.
LT: What'd you think, Dave?
Dave Prager: Uh, it sounds about right to me. I, I, I'm, I'm trying to think about now how do I explain to people, it's not the answers that you get, it's the questions. It's the questions you ask.
DC: It's the questions. [01:13:00]
Dave Prager: I like that a lot.
DC: Yeah. It is the que
Dave Prager: if you know the
DC: quality of the questions,
Dave Prager: it, it, it, it does remind me of like what I've told people about ai.
It, it's, it's, you, you gotta learn how to ask it questions. You gotta learn how to prompt it. You gotta learn how to use it to get the best out of it. Yes. And you can't just, it, it's got all the answers in the world. So now it's up to you to ask the right questions.
LT: Yes. And you gotta play with it and experiment.
Like, you know, again, to your point, I use Claude Chat Gemini, and I'll ask, sometimes I'll ask a couple of them the same questions. Sometimes I'll ask it a little bit differently. Um, and, and you gotta play with it. And, and to your point, uh, Dave, you discern when it's full of shit or not, also by a lot of these different prompts and the way, the way you ask questions and how you ask the follow-up questions.
And so DC has been saying it for a while and of he's always ahead of the, uh, ahead of things here. And, and that's something that, um, I'm really [01:14:00] cognizant of every time that we are utilizing AI, which we fully use all the time, um, daily really, uh, to, to do work that we need. So it's a great conversation.
Dave Prager: Good. Well, to round it all out, uh, I promise you a dog cameo.
DC: Oh,
LT: oh yeah.
Dave Prager: See we got Lucy White furry thing. There's Lucy,
LT: there's Lucy,
Dave Prager: Charlie, Charlie's over there somewhere.
LT: Here
Dave Prager: he comes. Yeah.
LT: That's awesome. That's, that's a great way to end the, uh, the what's popping segment, Dave, don't you think? Way to go, Lucy.
Um, so Dave, we're gonna segue into the show close. And Dave, I gotta tell you something. I remember talking with Jenny about you, and I'm like, I, and, and I think Jenny will back me on this, hopefully she'll listen this far, that I immediately knew, oh, this is somebody, this is the intuition. Like this is somebody we have to [01:15:00] have on the podcast.
And you've been better than, uh, than I thought you would, and that was a really high bar. So thank you really for coming. We're, I'm gonna do, uh, my learnings and, uh, throw it to DC and then we'll, before we, uh, drop the mic on the episode, we'll, uh, we'll, uh, you can talk about anything that you may have learned from this great conversation we've had.
So, I'll, I'm gonna go first and, um, I've got seven quick things here. Um, even going back to tasty freeze that Dave, uh, when he was fired for two days, Brand Nerd. Sometimes what looks like a bad thing, like getting fired has a silver lining, a a again, there's a silver lining in everything. That's, that's really what we're trying to say here.
Number two, as Dave found with the book Style, you gotta find the rhythm, not just in writing, which is uber important, but in life, there's rhythms of life. See if you can be conscious about those rhythms and you want to be in the rhythm of your home life, [01:16:00] your professional life, your community, and really get in the rhythm whenever possible.
Number three, if you are a writer, you need to pick up Style by Joseph Williams. And maybe Dave, uh, is getting licensing, uh, uh, figures from it, but I don't think he is. But either way, it sounds like a, it's a must have. So that's number three. Number four, to fully leverage AI, you still have to think. Come up with corresponding smart strategies and tactics to fully leverage it.
And as DC alluded to, that means asking the right questions and the right follow ups. Okay, number five, again, from the AI expert being Dave, even if the AI is right, people are not going to believe you if you don't put the human touch on it. That's a huge one right there. Number six, that's a big one. Yeah.
AI must be your thought partner. You need to fully embrace it, but you also have to be skeptical like we've talked about. And the last one, the dumbest people in the world [01:17:00] because of AI think they're the smartest and at the same time, because of that, you need to be think clearly, cogently and skeptically as it relates to all this stuff.
Those are mine.
DC: Those are great. Larry Prager, I knew we were gonna get. Some different things in this podcast with you because of your background. I just didn't realize how different, and I mean that as a compliment. So here I am, I have been, um, thinking as I do throughout the show at my part of this, the attempt that I make, Prager, is to articulate to you what I believe you have brought and can bring that no one else of the 8 billion people in this world can bring like you, like you, you, you have your own [01:18:00] special fingerprints.
I believe this of everybody in the world and that's up to us to figure out what that is and then give it to the world. But we all have it, I believe, uh, inside of us. For, for you, it did not all come together until. What's popping conversation normally for me, it comes together before then, but it was the what's popping conversation around AI that brought it all together for me.
I'm gonna attempt to walk you through that now in five questions. The first one was about brand that you loved and you talked about Air Jordan. You didn't just describe the brand. You described what you were thinking, what happened as a result of securing and wearing the brand. You [01:19:00] talked about what you thought the brand might signify, so it wasn't the first thing.
It wasn't just the buying or securing the Jordan brand, the one that had you looking like a cheerleader back then, but it was the thoughts about the steps after that. Then on the, uh, on the question about, uh, who's had the most influence in your career, when you gave the story about, uh, Daniel Mallard and how he ripped apart your first writing assignment here again, it wasn't just that your first writing assignment got ripped to shreds.
It was the walking to quiet, finding a library going into the basement, then into the garden to find the book style [01:20:00] by Jason Joseph Williams. It was an event, and then there were steps. Now we get to, uh, the question about the biggest f up. And here you. Acknowledge that, hey, I was trying to help my dad out and I created this AI thing.
And un unfortunately it got, as Tony Kornheiser was saying, uh, pardon the interruption, PTI it got blowed up. Okay? It got, it got blow up. And not in a good way, brand nerds, not in a good way. However, you identify the problem that your father was having, and that is you need to scale your voice. You can't just do this on your own.
When people are coming at you, you can't ha handle that volume. You need something automated and your clients need that as well. So the event was, there was a lack of [01:21:00] scale that your father could have, and then you thought about the steps that were needed to help him solve that. And then you, on the final question about what are you most proud of?
You gave the story about how you recognize that annotating and annotation and annotators and that kind of thing happening in an old school way was not the most efficient way to do it. They need computers 150 and, and by the way, uh, Brand Nerds and boys and girls, if you are in a company that is, uh, that has a market cap of a trillion dollars, 150 computers is nothing.
But when you are small, Brand Nerds.
LT: Yep.
DC: That's a big fucking risk.
LT: Yep.
DC: Like, that's like, hmm. Are we gonna make payroll or should we do these 150 computers? Like these are big [01:22:00] decisions. Brand Nerds, yet you've, you, you looked at the event or problem of annotation old school and the risk associated with it and you went through some steps to go to, we need a computer that saved the company. And all of that had me think about what Inner Pitch does today. It does the same thing that you did with Air Jordan, with the book Style, with your dad's company and also with the computers. They're all connected, which then had me, by the way, I'm now a Prager, i'm arriving at a point. Okay? I'm arriving at a point. Stick with me. Just stick with me here.
Dave Prager: Your mom will be proud.
DC: My mom would be proud. Mama Kabin would be proud. And, uh, so a, a clunky way to, to summarize what you do. [01:23:00] What you offer. The world is intelligent, simplified identification at scale. But that's not rhythmic.
That's not rhythmic enough for you. So I thought he needs some rhythm to describe him. And I go to a quote by Albert Einstein, and the quote is, and he's got a lot of them. "If you can't explain it, you don't understand it well enough."
LT: Yep.
DC: That's Albert Einstein. This describes you, I think, and I believe that you are the Albert Einstein of pattern recognition.
LT: How's that landed, Dave?
Dave Prager: Wow. And now all I need you to do is call me the Brad Pitt of looking good. And we're all set.
DC: I'd be lying, man. I can't do that.
Dave Prager: [01:24:00] Wow. That's something I'll, I'll, I'll be repeating that one, that's for sure.
DC: Mm.
Dave Prager: That's amazing.
LT: Yeah, that's, leave it, DC connects the dots like no one can.
That was amazing, D. So Dave, before we sign off anything you, uh, you learned about this wonder from our, our wonderful conversation here.
Dave Prager: You know, let me, let me go back to one more self-deprecating story about my time in New York. Uh, there was a, a place called the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and on certain Sundays
LT: Oh yeah,
Dave Prager: yeah.
They, they would have like a, what they called a free jazz, right? Open mic, not open mic. Just come on in, jam with us. Now. I don't know if, so I'd never played free jazz before about how hard could it be? So I walk in with my trombone and free jazz is what it sounds like on the name. It's free. Everyone does what they want and something emerges from it.
LT: Right?
Dave Prager: So, I, I, what the hell? There's no music. Everyone's just doing their own thing. They, the, the conductor at some point, or whoever was in charge, told me to stand up and do a solo. I was like, I don't hear a rhythm. I don't, I don't hear chord changes. I don't hear [01:25:00] anything. There's nothing I can do.
There's just way too much freedom and I'm paralyzed.
DC: Mm-hmm.
Dave Prager: Uh, that at the point here is when I heard about the way you guys structure your podcast, you have constraints. You have a framework, you have a very specific methodology.
DC: Mm-hmm.
Dave Prager: And in that methodology, there's so much freedom. And I think that that's a lesson that, that I think people need to take away.
I don't know who needs to take it away, but it's so important. If you can give yourself a structure, you're gonna have much more freedom than you ever would have if you had no constraints. So kudos to you guys for building a podcast on a simple framework that opens up the world.
LT: Wow.
DC: Thank you. Wow.
LT: Thank you for that gift.
DC: Thank you.
LT: Thank you so much. On that note, that's a mic drop. Uh. Brand nerd. Thanks for listening to Brands, beats and Bytes, the executive producers of Brands, Beats and Bytes are Jeff Shirley, Darryl "DC" Cobbin, Larry Taman, Jade Tate, and Tom Dioro.
DC: The pod father. [01:26:00] And I just gotta add this because we got Prager, the trombone player.
Rah, rah, rah, rah. Okay, go ahead.
LT: That's great. And if you do like this podcast, please subscribe and share for those on Apple Podcasts if you are so inclined. We love those excellent reviews. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we look forward to next time where we will we, where we will have more insightful and enlightening talk about marketing.