Why AI Is Changing the Future of PR Agencies

Justin Levinson (00:00)‍

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Agency Side Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson, and today I'm joined by Greg Metusky, founder and CEO of Gregory. Under Greg's leadership, the firm has grown into a 130-person independent PR agency with offices across the United States and London, earning national recognition for its innovative use of AI and digital technology. If you're interested in how successful founders grow an agency and use AI to transform the way communications work gets done, this is the episode for you. Let's roll it.

Greg, so great to have you here today.

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Greg Matusky (00:42)

Thanks for having me, Justin. It's wonderful to be talking to you here on this beautiful day on the East Coast.

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Justin Levinson (00:47)

Yeah. For folks who might not be familiar with Gregory Agency, it would be great to just kinda learn about what you guys are doing there.

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Greg Matusky (00:54)

Well, I've been I'm a overnight thirty-five year success story. So I've been at this for a long time, Justin, and I've seen all the ups and downs. I started as a business writer. I wrote for business magazines. And then I said, That's really boring. I hate sitting by myself in my basement. I really would like to work with people. So I started a PR agency with that delusion and I worked that on it for f thirty six years. I started in nineteen ninety, it's our thirty sixth year.

We're now, according to our trade journals, the thirty sixth largest PR firm, independent PR firm. we do a lot of financial services, technology. We handle a lot of data digital infrastructure, including data centers and and colleges and universities, education and healthcare. So I must have done something right, 'cause I'm still here. Many of my contemporaries have disappeared. Either they retired or they got smart, got out. So

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Justin Levinson (01:47)

Well, I mean, that seems like a I guess what what is it that got you straight from being a a writer to PR agency? Did you have any background or how how did that all come to be?

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Greg Matusky (01:57)

Well, that's interesting. I had no background. I I didn't come from like I had not been in an agency, didn't know how things worked, but I had was writing for business magazines. And it's really a lonely existence. You're all by yourself inside your head. And being inside my head is very dangerous. So I wanted to I wanted to start building something more than just me. So in nineteen ninety, I stopped with the writing assignments and I started an agency.

And it built from there. And in the nineteen late nineties with the internet bubble, I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to work with many of the up and coming e-commerce players. And then when social media took over, I was very enamored. I've always been enamored with technologies. I owned my first personal computer in nineteen eighty-five, which I pieced together here outside of Philadelphia. There was a little retail store run by the Hare Krishna, who imported the parts. And I would import the motherboards and the drives and build them.

build one eighty six is myself. So I've seen everything, but it's nothing like I've seen in the last six years in in the emergence of AI. And I can tell you, I think it's just as important as the Gutenberg press or or the internet or any of the other technology innovations. My personal opinion is that PR has been in an AI, I'm sorry, a technology desert since the smartphone and social media. We all think that the tech stack is having a media database.

And AI has disrupted all that, thrown it up in the air, reshuffled the cards, and it's a great time to be alive because chaos presents opportunity, as I always say.

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Justin Levinson (03:33)

Well, I bet that that computer that had the imported parts was a lot different than that Mac laptop that's sitting on your Okay, same one. Yeah.

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Greg Matusky (03:39)

that's still it. It's still it. Okay. I

got the gerbil inside turning the hard drive and seems to be working. No, that that those Hare Krishna PCs only lasted for about six months. So I went on on from there to be more tech enabled.

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Justin Levinson (03:57)

I'd love to get more into the AI stuff. but just to go back in time, I I thought I might have read that you ran track in field or you did outdoor track when you were

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Greg Matusky (04:04)

Believe

or not, I did through my college years. And the last race I ran was the very last day of my college career when I said, I'm never running again. And that had been after junior high, high school and college career.

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Justin Levinson (04:19)

What what events did you run?

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Greg Matusky (04:20)

If you can believe it, I ran the 400 intermediate hurdles, mainly because when I went to college, they asked everyone what they ran, and when they said the hundred, about ten guys put up their hands.

The two hundred about eight guys, the four hundred about five guys, an intermediate four hundred hurdles. No one put up their hands, so I said, That's my event. But seriously, I I ran for University of Pennsylvania when I was a much younger man.

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Justin Levinson (04:44)

You must have been pretty darn quick though, 'cause you can't just s you know were you like scouted out or did you just kinda walk on? Yeah.

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Greg Matusky (04:50)

I

was recruited to University of Pennsylvania's track team. I had been a good high school runner in the two hundred, four hundred intermediates, quite frankly. And I one of the greatest gifts of my life, aside from getting married and having my kids, is that the track coach of the University of Pennsylvania took pity on me and put me on the list and I got into run track and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

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Justin Levinson (05:11)

That's amazing. I I also ran track and field. Technically, I did run in college one race. So yeah, I didn't run the hurdles. I did the 400 meter dash. I did the 100, 200, but I never I never did the hurdles. man, the hundred meter dash is just one of the most excruciatingly painful things to do. And I can't imagine doing hurdles on top of it because it's you're sprinting for, you know, 400 meters straight.

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Greg Matusky (05:32)

Four hundred is a terrible race. You never want to do it. But fellow track and field athlete, I can I empathize with your learning to tolerate the pain. This

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Justin Levinson (05:41)

Yeah.

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Greg Matusky (05:42)

interview with me today. So you've been well schooled on it and

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Justin Levinson (05:47)

Well I I had I went to Berkeley College of Music and course they don't have a track team there because it's a music school, but they they let you run at Emerson. So I ran a couple of races over at Emerson in in Boston. So I technically was a college collegiate athlete for there

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Greg Matusky (06:00)

There

you go. That's that's a very unusual combination. I'm a meter runner and artist. I I didn't know too many of those.

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Justin Levinson (06:08)

Jack of all trades.

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Greg Matusky (06:09)

That's the full spectrum right there. You can do anything now.

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Justin Levinson (06:13)

So tell me when Gregory agency started, were you thinking of it as being like a just a kind of a solo kind of thing? Or did you were you thinking of scaling it? I mean, did did you envision it being like the third biggest independent agency at some point, or did you were you thinking smaller at that time?

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Greg Matusky (06:29)

I always thought that I'd have something more. And back then we had a a teleph telephony service where you could put in extensions, you know, hit one, hit two, hit three. So I used all my gnome deplumes as a writer for each of the extension with the thought that someday there would be a a I'd work alongside other p creative people in mind. I always wanted to work with more people and I thought that that'd be the route to assuring that I would not just have a practice, that I'd have a business.

So believe it or not, even though it was just me, I always thought of it as a larger organization. And, you know, the staff meetings were rather boring. It was just me and myself. But other than that, it seemed to work out.

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Justin Levinson (07:12)

How did you land the first like couple of clients? How did that come to be?

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Greg Matusky (07:16)

Well, because I had been a business writer, I had built up a network of professionals all across the country. And I was working out of Philadelphia, where I still sit today, even though we have offices in Philly, Boston, New York, and London. And because I'd written w for many of these individuals, written article articles about them and their companies, where I kept a good relationship with them. And so then when I switched, many of them had all kinds of communication challenges and I just kind of segued into it with a handful of clients and from there started building.

And I continued to I I c continued to write books from there, which helped to business books. And that led to my career in public relations. And I was always trying to recruit and find new people. And it was hard at first because I'll never forget my first employee quit because he said he wanted to work for a real company, which broke my heart. Because I I was like, What? What we we actually we actually have a Xerox machine. What are you talking about? So it's been quite a ride, Justin.

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Justin Levinson (08:14)

Yeah,

I can only imagine. what were the first couple of hires?

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Greg Matusky (08:17)

Well,

the first couple of hires, one individual joined me, the very first person. He was very good. He went on to become a very successful wealth management professional. That was one of the first hires. I hired part-time clerical people in the beginning to help me out. So originally I hired some home based people, but then as I started to grow in nineteen ninety one, believe it or not, I saw a small sign for renting an office at $113 a month. I

I'm sorry, three hundred and thirteen dollars a month. I had no idea how I would cover that in nineteen ninety. And it's still the same building that I'm in today. Now we have the whole building, but quite a story. It was only an hour, it was only a mile from my home, a great commute. And I made that cute commute this morning, as a matter of fact. And we just kept building within that. And then we started to acquire and choir firms and open new offices and and and gain more talent.

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Justin Levinson (09:12)

I'm sure the rent is still not three hundred and fifteen dollars what I'm saying.

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Greg Matusky (09:15)

You

put what what four circles in the back of that, three circles, you get more and more, but

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Justin Levinson (09:22)

I'm interested in getting into some of the books you have written. so definitely want to touch on that. But I know from from doing some backs re research on you that you have you were kind of getting into AI before even Chat GPT was like you know available for the masses. And I'm curious what sort of that early adoption kind of looked like and and when when that was. Thanks for tuning in, folks. This episode is brought to you by coming up creative.

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Greg Matusky (10:22)

Well, it's an interesting story because it was two thousand twenty twenty, right? And my son, who's who went to Carnegie Mellon, has a engineering degree and and a MBA from there, s came to me and said, Dad, your firm is facing an existential threat and you don't even know what it is. And I said, What is that? And he said, Machines will still be will soon be able to write and think better than you can. And at that point I still had the arrogance of the PR industry in me and I said, Ha

I'm an artist. I spent 30 years learning how to do this. But you know what? You're my son, and we'll give it a try. So we developed our own in-house content platform. We called it Gladwell, Gladwright after Malcolm Gladwell. And it was the it was a very nascent AI platform, but it did work. It hallucinated, had all kinds of problems. The first time we we demoed it was at an annual meeting at the end of 2021, and it actually said that we had a mascot that was a

The green frog, which I don't still this day know where the machine got that from. But, you know, as Ben Franklin had said, what good is a is a newborn baby? And I thought it was remarkable that it could even put together sentences. So we kept experimenting, and then ChatGPT came out. And as a pioneer, you you you obviously take arrows in your back, but you also ha gain a lead. And we had a lead already as soon as it came out.

We had a whole library of prompts that we had built, not knowing there were prompts. And in March of 2023, we came out with a free news release writing platform, which got a lot of press. And it was done simply to show that this this new thing could work. And then we advanced them our models very, very quickly, Justin. For instance, today we're a completely agenic firm in that we have twenty-one agents all named and on our platform.

They share some and have developed some five hundred skills that have absolutely turned our workflow on its head and can do some amazing things. And our people have spent h hundreds of hours in training just learning how AI works, what its boundaries are, what the opportunities are, what the risks are. we around the office, we all know who the agents are and we'll talk. Well, did you get it from Malcolm or Glenn? And Glenn.

And and they can share skills among themselves. And that really is the first instance I have seen of an enterprise-wide agenc PR firm that works shoulder to shoulder with people. So it's been an amazing journey. I've immersed myself in the topic. I tend to go to machine learning conventions and AI conventions instead of communications conventions because in within our own realm, I think we're still kinda nascent in what we understand. And those are

that I see are are are leading edge. I mean, in my the last AI communication seminar I went to a few weeks or months ago, they were still talking about how to write a prompt. And those days have already gone past us. They've already ceased. So it's been an interesting ride. I think it is a huge transformation. I have my own podcast on AI and the human condition called The Disruption is now where I get every week an hour to talk to some of the brightest minds in the world, literally, you know, computational linguists

to machine learning PhDs, to filmmakers who who use AI products to learn where this train is going as far as human communications and the machine component of it. So I love it. It's reinvigorated my career. It's given me a new reason to believe that that at its heart, all human communications is valuable. And the more we can spur that, the better the world will be.

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Justin Levinson (14:10)

Yeah. Is your son still involved with the

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Greg Matusky (14:13)

Yeah, yeah. He he's a consultant in San Francisco. He's legitimately a AI expert right now, for instance. This is interesting. He's building a skill where every single media query that goes out of our firm is going to be tracked and recorded. So we'll be able to look enterprise wide, which pitches work, which don't. But even more exciting, it's going to be able to give us real-time media database by going over.

If in fact it wasn't bounced back or not, and if that reporter is still there. So you could imagine a hundred and twenty-five people, hundred and thirty people contributing on a daily basis to to bits of data that inform the machine and then gives us feedback on everything from what subject line works, what kind of releases do best, are exclusives good or bad. We'll have all that information at our fingertips. We've been baiting it for the last six weeks and we'll have it unveiled here shortly thanks to.

fable and the work we're doing to on that product to to architect that skill.

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Justin Levinson (15:17)

Brilliant. How has how is the team sort of how have they, you know, what am I looking for? Has it been have they willingly been learning this new technology or has there been any pushback or how what's the excitement level of, you know, the the team with with this technology?

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Greg Matusky (15:31)

Well, I think one thing we've proven is is that the tools are available, right? And if you're creative you can build them. The other half of that equation though, which is just as important is change management, Justin, and how you get people to accept these new tools. And there are a lot of obstacles, and not all of them come with a negative intent. I for instance, I just have too much work to learn this, right? It's not everything is, this is gonna take my job, I'm scared of it, or that.

I just believe I can do it better than the machine can. It's not all of that. It's just re physical reality. How do you get everybody to accept a radically new change within the enterprise organization? And for us, it started first with the leader of the firm being a a a real advocate of it and a disciple of everyone from Ethan Molick to to Lex Friedman in in learning about AI.

And then taking that and sharing it and building an atmosphere of excitement where people are rewarded for breakthroughs instead of penalized, where guardrails are set up and they're automatic so everyone knows they can't do anything. They're never going to launch missiles to Moscow. So don't worry about it. It's your it's your place to learn and live. And then rewarding people by how well their clients, how long you retain a client. And for that to happen.

In this day and age, you have to increase quality and you have to increase velocity, right? There's two parts of it. Clients are demanding more with AI and they're demanding higher quality. So if you can deliver on that, the only way you can deliver on that is have the force multiplier of AI, having your agents work all night long to find uncovered news stories and then to have a report to you at 7 a.m. in the morning. And this has to be enterprise-wide. It's not enough just to have a

A CLOD subscription. Rather, the enterprise has to adopt it. And we have built our own operating system that sits over the LLM. That's how it works. And all that information stays within us, that harness, right? It doesn't go out to a third party to learn how we operate. We keep that among ourselves and it's shared among ourselves. So in the world of AI, that's called a learning loop.

Where the machine learns from data that we could have never achieved on our own. Then the humans learn from that. The humans correct and customize it. And then the machine learns. The machine learns the client more and more. And the human learns both from the client and the machine about the client. So the c the machine could be working all night long to learn something new about that vertical and that client, right? That you couldn't get just from the client.

Which then the humans inform to and can take to the client. So it it'll never replace there are people that are trying to bu build AI PR firms. I mean, there might be a role for that in very low end relationships, but in in where we want to go, it's it's never gonna replace humans who can tell the story more clearly to the client.

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Justin Levinson (18:42)

Yeah. I love that. There are also these AI recruitment agencies that are popping up as well, which I find pretty fascinating. How is, I guess what does it look like for an employee? I think you said they're spending like hundreds of hours learning. How are they learning this? Like are they getting trainings or what is how is that information shared amongst the team?

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Greg Matusky (19:01)

We

typically do about two AI trainings a week. And it has been o we had a a content team who we've taken and made the AI team and they push out the trainings. And then when people come to us at any level of the organization, it could be a junior assistant who a junior AI AI AE who's been with us for two months and they come up with some breakthrough. They can give the training session, right?

So you never know within the organization who's going to become its greatest fans and boosters. And we have a training system where we call them faster classes, like like a master class where they sit down and show how they created it, the skill they created it. If anyone would like that skill, it's available to them. It's pushed out automatically through our agents. they can customize it for their client then. So every agent then is is calibrated for that specific.

Clients that it handles. And that relationship is part of the training too, because it it kind of floats with you throughout. So if we bring on a new client, the di biz dev team will do all this research in advance. And sometimes in the past, that research wasn't handed off effectively to the account team. Now, right, there's a whole onboarding skill. That skill populates the team's shared drive with the agents. And all of a sudden, the the agent knows just as much.

As the team. The agent then goes out and does original research in the internet and the world beyond us. And at the same time, then every phone call is recorded with the client. From that single call, then rolls out a number of factors. One, the agent learns more about the client. The team learns more, right? Then all the to-dos are rolled out to the team from that call. The agent assigns to-dos. Then the agent

The agent will actually start producing work product as discussed in the call. If there's a discussion about a statement that needs to be created, a social campaign, a news release, a byline article, that agent may have enough information from that call to start crafting it from it, which will then go through the human process. Then the agent will list talking points for junior people on the team for the next call because one of the friction points is always junior associates.

feel uncomfortable on client calls asking questions. So we serve those up from the conversation previous conversation. Then two days before the next call, the whole team is pinged by the agent to make sure that all the to-dos are handled and a new agenda is made for the following call. So that's what I'm talking about a workflow and how it's enterprise wide. Just not your agent doing this for you. It's the agent doing it for the team, doing it with the client and creating this learning loop.

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Justin Levinson (21:56)

Wow. That's incredible. That's it's very very futuristic. has it affected like any needs that that you've had? Like are there like junior level do you feel like there's been roles that are not as important now that this information or is it just sort of like superpowering junior more junior?

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Greg Matusky (22:13)

My my opinion has changed, right? And we've ping we talked before this you and I that you're seeing perhaps less c recruitment for junior level people. And I thought that would be the case, right? But think about it. I think you're gonna need a mix of junior level people and senior level people. And what you have to do with AI is help those junior level people sidestep two to three years of learning.

Right. And I've seen that with AI. We had a one young woman who's been with us one year, and she gave a whole session on finding media gaps that's stories that could align with your client that the media has yet to report, because you always want to report you always wanna know what they could report. The reporter doesn't want to know what they just reported. They want to know what future stories. And that's a real example of truncating, of really compressing the learning curve. That's something that might have taken

Three to five years to really learn. This individual learned it in less than 12 months. Not only that, built a skill for it, and then made the skill available to everyone else in the company. So on the one hand, I go back and forth, Justin. Sometimes I think it's going to really affect it, but I'm then I think, well, if you can do those kind of skills at a higher level at a lower rate, because they're still not going to get what the higher rate is, isn't there an incentive to hire more junior associates?

But then on the other side of the spectrum are highly skilled people who I find use AI simply to increase the velocity. They know what quality is and how to do it. So they might do one new product announcement, but from that, they'll make talking points for the sales team, a deck for the sales team. You know, they will do a statement from the CEO, maybe a script for a video all from one thing that w I find junior associates just struggle more with.

In that regard. So I don't have an answer for you on that. I know that two summers ago we hired 10 recent college graduates for our firm. This summer we said we're cutting back. We're only doing four. And then guess what? We hired two more and we hired another one. So we're up to seven. So I think we're what we're learning is what the world's learning in AI when you know the job of Geddon never came, right? It they didn't hire, they didn't lose all these individuals.

Companies like McKinsey, they cut their junior associates. Now they're hiring them again because they realized they needed them. So I think what it's going to create in the end, Justin, is more work. I think the demand for human communications is going to be like the demand for customized transportation before Uber, three billion rides a year. After Uber and others, I was just in my first Waymo, as a matter of fact, over the weekend, 11 million rides a year. So there was all this hidden demand.

I think there's quite a bit of of demand for highly customized human communications and we'll never be out of work.

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Justin Levinson (25:12)

I love that. Are you do you see like when these junior folks are getting the the questions from AI to be able to speak with the clients? Do you are they do they feel like that's made a difference? Have those junior level people been more confident? Did those questions really resonate and did they did did they land and and all that jazz?

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Greg Matusky (25:32)

Yeah, it really empowers young people, Justin. A couple things, right? Imagine your job as a twenty six year old, twenty-five year old person is to brief a client on an upcoming interview opportunity. That's a big ask, especially if you've never worked on the other side as a journalist. You don't know what could be in store for your client. Well, because AI has the ability to project itself as any personality, as any job type, the AI can help you prep that briefing.

And that's empowerment. And what I always found with with the training young people is they became discouraged when they got a document or a briefing that was full of red lines that the client would say it just doesn't sound like us or we don't want to say that. I think working with your agent, you can you can increase your chances of hitting it on the first attempt, which will bring you to that table. You know, you'll have a seat at the table with the client a lot faster.

Than if they've worked with you before and there's been a lot of revisions and changes and and lack of assumptions. So that, yeah, I I I've seen it people, young people, for instance, who come to us, for instance, in PR, it is a big advantage to be able to write very well. Some people can, and this helps them bring their skill level up. You know, one young junior associate who was doing phenomenal with media relations, she was just had a great tracker record. Clients loved her.

But the writing just wasn't there, right? And she knew she had a skill gap. And she works with her AI as part editor, right? To review it, to to make sure the Oxford commas are right, but also to really focus on the message. And her her, you know, reviews have gone from, hey, you gotta work on this, to hey, you you have successfully found a workaround that it's that works for you and good for you.

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Justin Levinson (27:27)

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. That's that's that's really cool. How how maybe you could tell us a little bit mm because I know we have about like another ten minutes or so, what are some of these books that maybe you can tell us about the books that you have written? We'd be interested in learning about those. Well

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Greg Matusky (27:40)

Well,

it was a long time ago. And when I was very young, I was probably twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-seven, I got the opportunity to co-write. I had no interest in the topic, a book on franchising of all things. And I had no idea how to write at that point in my career. So I interviewed a hundred different franchise and I transitioned between all their quotes. And I'll never forget it was published by John Wiley. It was called Blueprint for Franchising a Business.

And the publisher called me, my my editor, and said, This, I can't believe how much research you did. And I said, Well, I didn't do any research. He goes, There's so many quotes. You spoke to so many people. So I I learned at an early age that the voice of humans is very powerful. And that was the first which I I wrote. And then I wrote additional books, but because I had this l kind of landmark book about franchising, I was asked to write for Inc. magazine and Success Magazine and Fours Magazine.

And I went on from there. And then in nineteen ninety that became very, very boring and tired. And I had said everything I could possibly say about franchising. So I thought I'm gonna I I love technology. I'm gonna really try to focus on technology and the evolving nature of a economy.

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Justin Levinson (28:54)

Do you think there'll be any other books coming out about AI's affecting communications or any other things like that?

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Greg Matusky (28:59)

People people ask me all the time and sometimes I think about it and I don't think so. I don't think so. I think fr the problem with AI is it changes too fast. I mean, you know, I was talking to somebody well, my my son who works as a consultant, we were talking about the open source model is just released by the Chinese called Kimmy, right? And you know, you stop here and you think, what would that ever have to do with a PR firm

And they're servicing their client. But all these disciplines have come together at the same time. And Kimmy is important to know because it's a cheaper model that comes very close to the frontier models. And it opens this whole discussion as to whether we really need the the best of the best all the time. Do we need to be able to solve cancer to write a press release? And what models should we use? And when should we flip in and out of it? And how do you optimize your model? One that's built.

you know, specifically for X, Y, Z. And then once you have that model, how do you train it, right? How do you train it f for that industry so that it knows everything it can and it becomes a landmark LLM with regard to financial services? So I'm involved with that. And I I don't know how I would write a book that would take three months, even if I self published it would take three months. And by then maybe we'll have

super intelligence and we'll all be at the beach while machines do our work for us. So it's moving so fast. If I take a weekend off of reading X with with the latest and the greatest news on AI, I feel like I didn't study for the midterm and it's coming up on Monday.

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Justin Levinson (30:41)

Yeah. The time is time is moving fast. That's that's for sure. We'll be robots doing our dishes and we'll be on the beach.

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Greg Matusky (30:48)

I mean, it's unbelievable. human intel the cost of human intelligence has gone down ten to a hundred percent since we've been doing this. And and what we all want is better intelligence. You know, I want to be able to articulate better. I wanna be r able to r relate to Justin and his audience better. All that goes into this new mission of of AI. And it's really the nexus between c communications. I tell my staff all the time, do you know how fortunate we are? Because

We're communicators and at the heart of all this right now is LLMs, large language models. It's as if the skies opened up and the gods sent down a special tool. You know, perhaps, you know, if the sky opened up and I see the guitars in your background and all of a sudden you're Eric Clapton. I mean that that's what I feel like. That'd be cool. Yeah, I know.

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Justin Levinson (31:41)

Yeah,

it is man, yeah, it is wild and it's yeah, it's really affecting the rec the recruitment agency world as well, you know, for for research and for multi channel outreach and for marketing and how we use you know, using how we use our data and you know, research for I the re I love the research and just kind of knowing who the direct competitors are, what the pain points are, all all these different things, you know, you just wouldn't have been able to do you know, even five, ten years.

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Greg Matusky (32:08)

Absolutely.

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Justin Levinson (32:09)

Yeah. Outside of this world, what what do you like to do for personal hobbies and things you like to do for fun?

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Greg Matusky (32:15)

Well, I'm fortunate. I have three thirty year old kids who love to go to dinner with me and hang out and be part of the family. My wife and I have been married for forty years. So my family's a big part of me and what I do and what I do to relax. I own a second home on a really beautiful trout stream in central Pennsylvania. So I love to go up there with my family and fish and spend time with them doing st stupid things in the in what's called Penn's Creek, which is a beautiful river. It runs runs right through the state.

And those are my loves, basically. But as my wife said, if it all stopped tomorrow, I would just recreate the hubbub somewhere within what's going on in human communications because outside of my family, that's my first love is is how do we communicate as human beings? How do we make it more accurate? How do we reduce confusion, chaos? And think what the world would be if countries and peoples and races could communicate better. So that's what I feel the mission is and and anything that helps us in that.

Quest is good.

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Justin Levinson (33:17)

Love

it. Greg, thanks so much for being on the podcast today and offering so much value to the community. Your story was was was amazing and I I really hope to keep in touch with you in the future.

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Greg Matusky (33:26)

I now I'm gonna I'm gonna guess your t your hundred meter time.

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Justin Levinson (33:30)

You're gonna guess my hundred meter time?

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Greg Matusky (33:31)

Yeah,

but guess you're at hundred meter time, all right?

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Justin Levinson (33:33)

Okay, guess it. When I was like seventeen.

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Greg Matusky (33:36)

Ten eight.

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Justin Levinson (33:38)

It wasn't that good, unfortunately.

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Greg Matusky (33:40)

Okay. All right.

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Justin Levinson (33:42)

It was an eleven four. Eleven four was my PR for my Huddry More Dash. But I also grew up in Vermont. So it's like I was like I think that year I was the second fastest kid in the state in my I was like in a an all New England runner. But then you'd go to the New Englands and then the kids in Boston would be running like ten eighths, ten s you know, I'd get dusted. But

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Greg Matusky (34:02)

I I know the feeling. I it's just it never you know, you can never run fast enough. What's the old saying in baseball? Every man failed in baseball. No one many of us knew it before others. I I in the skilled sport, I knew it very early that I I just didn't have it. And then I needed something so simple as you just put one foot in the in front of the other to be successful in athletics. But Justin, it's been great to be here with you.

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Justin Levinson (34:26)

Yeah, thank you, Greg. Have a great rest of your day. Take care. All right, man. Bye.