Digital Social Hour
Unlocking AI Superpowers for Entrepreneurs | Zach Wilson DSH #1267
Tue, 25 Mar 2025
Unlocking AI superpowers for entrepreneurs has never been this exciting! 🚀 In this episode of the Digital Social Hour Podcast, Sean Kelly sits down with tech expert and entrepreneur Zach Wilson to explore the incredible power of AI and data in revolutionizing businesses. From building digital twins and leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT to scaling productivity and creating impactful personal brands, this conversation is packed with valuable insights you can’t afford to miss. 💡 Zach shares his journey, from working at major tech giants like Netflix and Facebook to launching his own company, Data Expert. He dives into the importance of high-quality data engineering, the future of AI, and how entrepreneurs can harness these technologies to gain a competitive edge. 🌟 Whether you're looking to stay ahead in the tech-driven world or simply curious about the latest AI trends, this episode is for you! Tune in now to learn how to unlock your entrepreneurial potential with AI. Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🔥 Don’t miss out—join the conversation today! 🗣️ CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:28 - Yearly Focus and Goals 00:49 - Importance of Data Analytics 02:24 - Apple's AI Update Overview 03:55 - Creating a Digital Twin 05:00 - Sponsored by Kinsta 06:50 - LinkedIn Strategy Insights 07:53 - Salary Growth: From 30k to 600k 09:17 - AI's Impact on Job Market 10:37 - Companies Adapting to OpenAI 12:48 - Overview of Meta’s LAMA Model 13:32 - Daniel's Opinion on Zuckerberg (2018) 16:49 - Anticipating Netflix's Success 20:49 - Recent 10-Month Journey 23:59 - Benefits of Taking a Year Off 24:35 - Netflix Severance Package Explained 28:37 - OpenAI vs Elon Musk Discussion 30:35 - Twitter's Current Landscape 34:00 - Decline of Clubhouse 36:34 - Netflix Options Surge 38:27 - Airbnb's IPO Stock Crash 41:19 - If You Could Be Any Animal 42:00 - Entrepreneurial Aspirations 43:10 - ADHD as a Superpower 49:51 - Following Zach's Journey 49:59 - Data Expert Academy Overview 50:13 - Farewell and Goodbye APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: jenna@digitalsocialhour.com GUEST: Zach Wilson https://www.instagram.com/eczachly https://www.dataexpert.io/ SPONSORS: KINSTA: https://kinsta.com/dsh LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad #aiautomationagency #aiautomation #aicopywriting #ainews #dataengineer
Chapter 1: What are Zach Wilson's current focuses and goals?
All right, guys, Zach Wilson here, one of the smartest guests I think I've ever had on. Thanks for joining us. Awesome. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah. What's been your main focus this year so far?
Just building out my company, a data expert, and just trying to teach the world about data and AI because AI is coming quick. It's coming really fast. It's going to be way faster than we think. Yeah.
Yeah, I think people know AI is coming. I'm curious about data, though. What's important with data?
Chapter 2: Why is data engineering important for AI?
So one of the things that people forget about with AI is that AI is only as good as the data that you feed it, because it's all about the knowledge that is fed into the AI is what makes the AI smart. And so there's this underlying layer that is less sexy than AI. It's called data engineering, which is this layer of building out high-quality, valuable data sets that then are fed into AI
that then allow them to be smarter and make better decisions. And I think that that's kind of the whole like you got to walk before you run sort of mentality. And that's a lot of companies get this layer very wrong.
Right. Even the best ones, because I've been on ChatGPT and I'll have the wrong source and then the answer comes out kind of wrong, you know.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And there's a lot of other interesting techniques that you can do to like ground chat GPT. And if you have other data that you want to bring in, it's a thing called RAG, retrieval augmented generation, which is a way of bringing in your own local data to allow chat GPT to not hallucinate as much because it's a very... ChatGPT essentially just pulls in the entire internet.
And I don't know if you know, but not everything on the internet is true, right? There's a lot of things on the internet that is very like kind of sketchy and it kind of just pulls it all in. And we're at the mercy of whatever those engineers decided that was quality and what they picked and what they didn't pick, like as they were like scraping the internet. Right. And so like, and that's where...
You can have other engineers kind of build on top of chat GPT with your own high quality data that allows it to hallucinate a lot less.
That makes sense. Yeah. Have you seen Apple's new AI update? I have not. I don't think so. Okay. Basically, when you open your text now, it summarizes it for you.
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Chapter 3: How is AI transforming communication and branding?
Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. Like it's, there's going to be so many cool, like productivity changes. I've, I've, I mean, I use chat GPT and Gemini and all this stuff. Just if you're not using these things, like you're falling behind.
Right.
Cause it's like it, I have been noticing that even in my own life, like when I'm like coding or building stuff, like I'm still hesitant to like, give the control to the AI. Cause I'm like, I know what I'm doing. I don't need any AI, but then I know if I let the AI do it, I get 30 minutes back now and I can do something else like, or I can go have fun.
Right. And enjoy my life more. Instagram has AIs that talk to people now. Yeah. So exciting. It's crazy. Yeah. Cause some people get a lot of messages and they can't answer everyone.
Oh, yeah, and that's going to be a much better option than like ManyChat because I've been using ManyChat. ManyChat's decent, but it's very like algorithmic and it feels very like body, right? It doesn't feel authentic. Yeah, at all, right?
And so if you have something that has a little more AI, especially if you can train on your – and can learn who you are as a person, so then it kind of – it talks back to the user and the fan kind of like as you, that would be – Ooh, yeah. It's going to be very amazing to see what happens with personal brands, because now you can kind of scale yourself, right?
You can literally make clones of yourself to talk to thousands of people at the same time on a one-on-one. And that is something that is... That is one of the most exciting parts of our time for sure. Have you made a digital twin yet of yourself? Oh, yeah. I mean, I've done that like with in my in my courses. We actually go over that.
That's actually one of the big things I do when I teach AI is teaching them like how to build Zach GPT, which is where we build an AI that is has all the transcripts from all my videos and all my LinkedIn posts and just consume all of that data and then build an AI on top of that. And then it can like
it's scary how good it is it's scary i'm like when i talked about like wait that's me and but i'm me like that's spider-man yeah right it is exactly dude that's not so how accurate are the answers like especially if it's going to be something that i've talked about and since i've made like 5 000 posts on linkedin that's where that's why content creators are
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Chapter 4: What is Zach Wilson's career journey and insights on salary growth?
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applications right yeah that'd be cool i've had ai companies offer just to buy my raw data to train their ai models oh yeah yeah they're gonna try to do podcast ais yeah i think google already has one oh yeah they have that where you can turn you can turn a document into a podcast like it goes the other way around right where it's not it's not like podcast the document but you can actually turn a document into a conversation now when i saw that i was like i was like what is going on like
Why do we need this though, right?
To be fair, some people have different learning styles. So to learn auditorially, they can retain it more than just reading a document. Definitely. So I could see some use case for that. But man, those podcasts sound super accurate. Yeah, crazy times. Why do you choose to focus on LinkedIn out of every social media platform?
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Chapter 5: How is AI impacting the job market and technical roles?
Part of it is I started on LinkedIn like four or five years ago when I was working at Airbnb. And part of it is I had an unfair advantage on LinkedIn because I worked at Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb. And if you just say that on LinkedIn, like you just get a million, you just get tons more views, right? Because it's... It's unfair. It's just how it works, right? Credibility.
Especially if you work at Fang, right? Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, those five, right? Then you have just everyone's like, whatever this guy says is correct, right? And there's this unfair advantage that you get on that platform versus other platforms. And then I just got into the habit of in the morning when I would go to work at Airbnb, I would go and write my paragraph on LinkedIn.
And then... After a while, I noticed I was like, well, this is snowballing. I'm getting hundreds of thousands of followers. And then I got to a point where I'm like, I don't think I need to work at Airbnb anymore. I think I can just do this content full time now because I can see the potential and see the momentum.
Yeah. Prior to that, your first job was $30K a year, right? Yeah. You went all the way up to $600K a year? Yeah.
That's insane. That was $30K in 2014 and then $600K in 2021 in seven years. Dude, that's insane.
I did not know jobs were paying $600K a year, if we're being honest.
Yeah. Keeping in mind that this is not a VIP position or a director position or a manager position. No, I didn't. I had no reports. No one under me, right? This is me making $600,000 a year writing code, right? And writing code and producing like a lot of architecture designs and stuff to like further the technical vision of Airbnb and Netflix. But like, yeah, it was no managers though.
That's nuts. Does that still exist or is AI going to replace?
Oh, yeah. No, those roles are going...
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Chapter 6: Who are the contenders challenging OpenAI?
This is one of the things I noticed when I quit my job and I've been building a data expert over the last year or two is when I'm writing the platform, it feels like I have five hands or six hands where I'm like, well, okay, I just have come up with the architecture and then the actual implementation of just let ChatGPT do it.
And then it makes it so that all I have to do is come up with the design. And that is, and I think that's where AI is going. So AI is going to replace some of these technical jobs though, for sure. It's not like there's no disruption here. It's especially, this is where there's the, a lot of people on LinkedIn are talking about this is like,
the death of the junior engineer because AI is going to take a lot of these junior roles. Like the people who are like trying to get into the field now, it is very difficult. It's very difficult to get like a junior entry-level role in tech right now because of AI and you're competing with these roles.
It's complicated though because it's like, well, what do we do when all the senior engineers die, right? Because it's like we have to have juniors now to replace them later. But I think that if you're a senior engineer or a staff engineer, there's never been a better time to be in tech, actually.
As long as you can embrace using AI.
Yeah, for sure. You have to embrace using AI to give yourself those superpowers, but you should be actually able to make substantially more money.
That's good. Do you see any companies catching OpenAI, catching up to them?
Yes. Oh, a bunch of them.
Really?
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Chapter 7: What is Zach Wilson's perspective on Facebook and Meta?
Another place is that small companies who build their own local models, that is a different way. Because another thing to think about is a lot of people don't use OpenAI because of privacy. They're not just going to ship all their data to OpenAI and be like, hey, sorry. And so what they want to do is build their own models. This is where meta, this is where meta is. This is why, this is...
I rage quit Facebook in 2018 because I actually did not agree with Mark Zuckerberg's leadership. Really? Now I actually think that Zuckerberg is doing a lot of really good. The stuff he's doing with Meta, the stuff he's doing with Llama, the Llama models. Because the Llama models are essentially what OpenAI should be. Because OpenAI is like, no, we're not going to give you our model.
But then the Lama models are like, here's the model. You can look at all of it. You can go all the way into it, right? It's very open and transparent. And that's where I really think that Meta is doing a very good job in that space.
What's the Lama model exactly?
So Lama is going to be a competitive model with GPT-4. But the thing is, it's completely open source. So you can actually look at what it's trained on and the weights of the model and how it makes decisions. Because with GPT-4 and these other models, like you have to treat it as like a black box. It's kind of magic, right? Where you just put in your prompt and then it gives you something back.
But with Lama, you can actually like see what it's doing underneath, right? Because it's open source. They give you everything that it's doing, right? And that's what meta is all about, right? And they have two models. They have like a 73.
billion parameter one and like a seven billion parameter one depending on like how smart you need it to be and or how lightweight you want it to be dang that is crazy yeah zuck has grown on me i'm not gonna lie yeah i wasn't his biggest fan why didn't you like him in 2018 Um, so in 2018, I left Facebook. So I worked there 2016, 2017, 2018.
I worked in core growth there, like helping them scale up users in that period. Like we went from 1 billion users to 2 billion users.
Damn.
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Chapter 8: What was Zach Wilson's experience at Netflix and his recent journey?
But personally, what happened for me was I found that they just didn't care about data privacy. And from my side, as someone working in data there, I like saw all this negative news come in. And then I was looking at
what was actually happening on the ground and on the data privacy things that were happening on the ground because zuck was essentially being like well this was the past right because a lot of the a lot of the profiles and stuff was actually like harvested in like the early 2010s was like 2011 2012 and zuck was trying to market it as like no this is the past we're a new facebook now and then you know but then i'm there looking at what was going on at the company and i'm like
no, I see this problem and this problem and this problem. And there's still a lot of other privacy problems that I see going on right now. And so like, I, it felt like to me that Zuckerberg was straight up just lying to my face. Right. And then it made me feel like I want to go somewhere else. So I left and that's when I left and I actually joined Netflix.
Cause I was like, I feel like, cause Facebook was very hated at that time. And I was like, I feel like people don't really hate Netflix. Like they might like, they might think that the shows suck or whatever, but they don't like hate it. Right. They don't like, it might, they're like, Oh, it's boring or like not that good, but no hatred there. Right. So, and Netflix was an interesting company too.
Yeah. That was before they started their originals. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. That was right, right around then was like when I joined and they were, they just started making those like big billion dollar investments. Was it chaotic back then?
Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely. Cause they weren't making money back then.
they were not making money and then uh also uh my second year at netflix that's when they uh disney plus came out and people were like uh-oh they were like disney they were very nervous about what what the implications for disney plus were for the company and like yeah the stock got cut in half like people were very like anxious i could tell like about that competition i know they feel differently now because i feel like they actually kind of crushed it like netflix has done a very good job it took them a couple years there to like
find themselves again but like yeah definitely is they rebounded well yeah for sure yeah now they're probably number one streaming service oh yeah but yeah dominant again for sure wow interesting did you see that happening um i i was not sure i think for me like what ended up happening for me was i i joined netflix and i learned a very hard lesson at netflix which was that just because you have the technical ability to do a job doesn't mean it's the right job for you
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