[00:00:00:11 - 00:00:08:09] Daniel Burstein Joining us everyone, I want to jump right in. This is going to be a little different session from the ones we've done in the past, as you'll see, because this is not necessarily [00:00:09:12 - 00:00:35:15] Daniel Burstein us teaching and giving you all the knowledge. This is where we want to say, here's some of the things we learned so far. Hopefully that gives you a few good ideas, but also a lot we want to hear from you as we're building out this new experience for the AI Guild. But first, just to jump right in, I want to start with a quick quiz. Like I said, this is going to be really interactive. Quick quiz, who is this guy? Let's see, I'm going to ask Toby because Toby may be the person that would least know. Would you even know Toby, who that fella is? [00:00:35:15 - 00:00:42:05] Toby Wilson Yeah, I do recognize him. I could guess, but no, I don't know his name with confidence. [00:00:42:05 - 00:01:08:06] Daniel Burstein Okay, how about someone in the States? Who is that guy? George Washington. That is George Washington, yes. Very American centric example I admit. Sorry for anyone not in America. It's 250th anniversary, so I forgot to use a George Washington example. So yeah, so to anyone in the US, this guy's probably pretty recognizable. He's up in our elementary school. He's on the money, he's in everything, right? But here's another one. This is tough, I'll be really impressed if anyone gets this one. Who's this guy? [00:01:10:20 - 00:01:11:16] Daniel Burstein Any clues? [00:01:13:00 - 00:01:59:17] Daniel Burstein Okay, so this is really interesting. I had never thought about this before until I read this article recently. We see that portrait of George Washington, and for me at least, we think of George Washington. Here's what we don't see. What is George Washington looking at? And this is what he's looking at. This guy is named Gilbert Stewart. He's a very famous portrait painter, right? And so a lot of times when we see, for me, portraits and creative works, I don't even think about it. I'm not thinking who's behind it. When I look at writing, oh boy, I'm thinking of, if I see any writing, I think who's behind it. There's a craft to it. What decisions did they make? Why did they make this choice? Why did they not make that choice? How did they even get a client on board from it, right? But that guy was on the other side, Gilbert Stewart. Now, again, going a little deeper here, when I think of a painter, again, I don't have this skill. If I painted George Washington, it would be a stick figure, okay? [00:02:00:22 - 00:03:04:22] Daniel Burstein So when I think of this guy, what skills does he have? What human skills does he have? Well, he's an art, he's a natural artist. He's good at painting, he's good at mixing the colors well and drawing and stuff, right? But I didn't think about this really important skill until I read a magazine article about him recently, right? One reason why this guy was such a great portrait artist, Gilbert Stewart, who painted the famous portrait of George Washington and other portraits, right, is because he was really good about getting the people he was painting to just feel at ease and feel very natural, right? So I haven't thought of this before, but when you're painting a portrait of someone, they're sitting there for hours, probably uncomfortable. They're busy, important people. George Washington's running the country, right? So to make them feel at ease, right? So he said he had a capacity to create an environment which banished self-consciousness in his sitters, right? And I thought it was really interesting specifically for Washington, who hated posing for portraits, Stewart talked to him about horses and that got him to perk up, right? So if I was gonna paint a picture of Flint, maybe that's what I'd do, start talking about horses or AI too, that would get him going, but you know. [00:03:06:05 - 00:03:28:21] Daniel Burstein So that was really interesting. That was a human skill behind portrait painting that I had never considered, right? And again, that's kind of an analogy to what we do as marketers and entrepreneurs. Yeah, we're creators, we're creating these things. And this is what we're trying to get to, what human skill is involved. Now, of course, the story doesn't end there, right? Portrait painting, that's a pretty old example because what happened here? Does anybody know what this thing was called? [00:03:31:01 - 00:05:38:03] Daniel Burstein So this was called, the official name was a daguerreotype, right, this was an early camera. And when we talk about AI, like there's this natural feeling, I think just as human beings to feel that whatever we are going through, it is the biggest and most important change that has ever happened in history at the time, right? So as a great example, if you ever read through history, there's a lot of people who say the world is ending at all different times because they say, look, everything has culminated in history to this point, right, in the year 500 BC, and now the world isn't, right? And we know how that story goes. And so that can kind of be how it can feel like with AI, like, oh my God, you know, everything, this is the most radical change that will ever happen. No, I can't tell you definitively that AI is not the most radical change that will ever happen and it won't end humanity. But I can just say, like, you know, taking a deep breath, seeing like, oh man, there has been like all sorts of these types of radical technological changes in the past. And we're in the midst of another one. And I thought cameras was a great example, right? Because what you had was these creators like us, like marketers, like entrepreneurs, writers, graphic designers, whatever we are, right? And they made a living painting portraits, then all of a sudden, this radical thing came along the camera. And it's like, why would you need to paint a portrait? You just take a picture. So I thought it was really interesting. I explored a little of Mechlabs AI, right? And so yes, in the camera era, when that came along, some of those human skills that were necessary changed, right? So for example, when you're a portrait painter, that manual rendering, knowing how to, you know, paint by hand, mix colors, all these things, like that was a key skill. You didn't really need that if you're operating a camera. With the camera, right? There's all sorts of mastery there. You know, if anyone who now takes a picture with a phone is old enough to remember, like people who are really into cameras, they had the lenses, the exposures. I mean, even back in the days, these older cameras, the chemicals, you were able to process it. So yes, obviously this new technology came along. Some skills change. And it was important to know those new skills if you're gonna use that new technology. However, right, [00:05:39:08 - 00:07:42:18] Daniel Burstein not every skill changed. So I remember, if you guys know what this is, right? You remember like the JC Penney studio? So before we all just had cameras and took pictures of everything, when I met my wife at the time, we were just dating, she was my girlfriend, we flew up to New Jersey, we met her mom. And one of the key things we wanted to do before we left, this was before camera phones and all that, she wanted to go to JC Penney. And we get that portrait taken of us, because back then, there weren't that many pictures of people. You know, you had cameras, but it was like a big deal to take a portrait. And so that skill that Gilbert Stewart had with George Washington of, okay, you can sit well for the portrait. That skill didn't end in a way if you're gonna take portraits, right? The good people at JC Penney were good at putting you at ease and stuff. Maybe you didn't have to do it for like 12 hours or whatever George Washington did, but that skill was still there. And so when you look at it, you know, again, there were still some of those human skills that were essential, no matter what tool someone was using to create the output, right? Directing the sitter, getting the right pose and all those things, right? The composition of things, right? Is it gonna be in the middle? It's gonna be the side, the lighting, all of those things, right? Those were true for both painting and cameras. So that takes us to today. It takes us to what we're gonna talk about. And this is where I say, be straight up and honest with this, we don't have the answer yet. What we're doing is trying to shape the guild into the right thing. This one I wanna talk to you. This is meant to be interactive. I'm gonna mention that several times. I know it can be hard for people to interact. You can pipe in with your own ideas. Is what do we need now? So that this other camera came along AI for us as marketers, entrepreneurs, writers, what skills do we now need to learn to make the most of AI? So for I know most of you, in case anyone went on who's new doesn't know me, my name is Daniel Burstein. I'm the director of the AI Guild. That's kind of new, but I've been with Mechlabs, the parent company of Mechlabs AI, writing for Marketing Sherpa for 17 years now. So you might know me from the articles I write on Marketing Sherpa or the How I Made It Marketing podcast or those things. But also taking on leading this AI Guild and kind of figuring out this transition. And joining me is our AI Guild facilitator, Kristy. Hi, Kristy. [00:07:42:18 - 00:07:44:22] Kristie Linebaugh Hey, how's everybody? [00:07:45:24 - 00:08:18:16] Daniel Burstein And so many of you might know Kristy because she's this, the AI Guild, it's a community. And as part of a community, there's always those great people who are there to reach out and say hi and kind of welcome you and get to know you. And Kristy is so good at that. Many of you, she might've reached out to already and said hello. Kristy's also been doing a little bit of research for us. I did a small amount too. And that's what we're gonna talk about some today. So let's jump into it. So yeah, we wanna kind of share for some of you have been the AI Guild for a while. Some have talked about a one, where we're trying to take the AI Guild next, hint, hint, it's a lot about human skills, right? [00:08:20:02 - 00:09:34:11] Daniel Burstein We wanna get your insights because that's what we're trying to build out, right? And trying to figure this out is, is what should this right framework be and how do we set this up for human skills? We're just trying to dip our toe into and figure that out. And again, and I'll say this several times, not necessarily meant to be a presentation. We've got, I've got slides, I've got some things we're gonna talk about what we've learned already. At any point, feel free, if you don't wanna like kind of jump over people, I know it's not fun, you can use that raise hand feature. It's in the, if you look at, if you scroll down, you kind of mouse down, it's down there. You can use raise hand feature. If you want, you can jump in, share your experience, your questions, your thoughts, clips recording this, we're gonna have a transcript, we're gonna post it. We're gonna get more thoughts from people. As I mentioned, some people said, "Hey, it's 1 a.m. here, I can't join. I wanna watch the video and I'll share my thoughts then." And then we're gonna use this as we shape what we do in the Guild. You're also mentioned to just use a chat and I'll look at that as well and try to incorporate that. But again, share what we learned, but feel free to jump in with your own things. Okay, so we've come a long way from the camera. We've also come a long way in the AI Guild for anyone that's been here long enough. The nexus of this, well, at one point with the Superfonal Research Cohort, it was called many different names. This started 240 days before chat GPT. [00:09:35:22 - 00:09:49:02] Daniel Burstein Along the way, a lot of things changed. One of the things that changed was the Mechlabs AI was built and is still being built and the new version is being released. When we started this, there was no specific AI. We're working with some different partners. If you remember that had like kind of ad buying AIs, [00:09:50:09 - 00:10:11:18] Daniel Burstein but no specific AI. So we've already taken, Flint's been instrumental in that and I'm sure if you've been with us long enough, you've seen what Azad's done. Taking a lot of these theories about what AI is and what it can do and put it into that Mechlabs AI we're building and more is gonna come there. But again, it's what's on the other side of that AI when you see some AI working is that human skill which we're trying to build here. [00:10:13:04 - 00:10:30:07] Daniel Burstein And now if you look at the current landing page when people wanna join, if you wanna wanna join, you can send them there. We talked about prepare for the AI marketing revolution and that's what we've been talking about. But when me and Flint were talking about, hey Dan, we want you to take on the AI guild and do some more there. The biggest thing that hit me is like, [00:10:31:09 - 00:11:45:10] Daniel Burstein we don't wanna prepare for the AI marketing revolution. It's here now, right? There's no prepare. We're in it. And so then what is the next thing that we need if we're already in this, the what's next, right? So that early video if you saw Flint do was marketer versus machine, right? And it was that really interesting idea of I think they did a war between those for ad buying and like what worked better, the marketer, the machine. And that's only evolved since then anyone who's using performance max or any of this stuff, Facebook, all that stuff, I'm sure. I mean, I'm not in that every day, I'm sure. You guys are seeing how like, wow, AI has been really locked into there to help you find the right audiences and things, but it's no longer really the marketer versus machine, it's marketer and machine now, right? I mean, that is what's going on. And then we have to be careful how that marketer and machine combination is going on. So that's why we talk about here's our new vision for the guild and some of you have heard it and this is where we want your input to. While the world retools business processes for AI, the AI guild retools the humans who run it, right? And so one of the best analogies I've heard is from Cory Doctorow. If you know Cory Doctorow, he was like kind of a science fiction writer and also gets into thinking around this. [00:11:46:13 - 00:13:33:06] Daniel Burstein He's got a great word for how technology and things get worse over time. I will not say that word, it does not work appropriate. It begins with N and ends with if-ification and you guys can use your imagination for what the middle word is there. But he's recently talking to you about this AI-human combination and he uses the analogy of a centaur, right? So if you know famously the centaur is the head of a human and the body of a horse, right? And I think that's kind of a good analogy because that's what essentially we would want to be our usage with AI, right? It's the head of a human, it's the body of a horse. We're thinking and directing, AI is executing. And he says, be careful that you don't become a reverse centaur, right? And what's a reverse centaur? It's the head of the horse and the body of the human where AI is doing the thinking, right? And we're just kind of pushing the buttons that's telling us to push. So that kind of goes in on something I've talked about before when we're going along with this is be careful not to outsource your brain to AI, right? It's this really enticing parlor trick. It seems like you can type anything into it and it'll know anything, right? And it really lulls you into thinking it really knows because it's got so much confidence, right? But when we outsource our brain to AI, it's making the decisions. And I think there's two big concerns there. One is, right, it's not gonna be perfect. I was actually dealing with an AI, I won't say the brand, but it's owned by Amazon. So if you think anyone's got resources for AI, it would be Amazon. And I was asking it some pricing info and it just flat out told me the wrong pricing info. And it seemed wrong. So then like I double checked with Gemini and Gemini told me the right pricing info. And then I went to the landing page and had the right pricing info. And then I give it to that and it says, "Oh yeah, wait, I'm wrong." [00:13:35:05 - 00:13:53:10] Daniel Burstein So it's got that real confidence. So we wanna trust it with everything. But that's the thing that it lulls you in, right? And as Flint said, he's got that great analogy too. It's not a marketing vending machine, right? You can't just put in and then it comes out, right? So you've got to know things and you gotta make sure it's built properly. So what does that look like? [00:13:54:11 - 00:14:27:09] Daniel Burstein That leads us to that question. Well, if we're going to do that, right? If we're not gonna be the reverse centaur, if we're gonna be the head and it's gonna be the body for execution, what human skills do we need, right? And that's where I mentioned, feel free to use a chat or your hand share. This is meant to be, we're gonna share what we've learned a little, but by all means, we're still kind of getting that advice and asking from you. Now, the resulting goal is, and it's not gonna be this, but it's just kind of giving you an early draft. What me and Flint have been trying to work on and Flint has more is, this [00:14:28:09 - 00:14:35:07] Daniel Burstein is probably a bigger claim that we're gonna come out with. But when, as many of you know, the Mecklabs conversion heuristic, [00:14:36:17 - 00:16:01:11] Daniel Burstein and I see Nick on there, hi Nick, he was there, he was at Mecklabs even before I was. And so he's even more familiar with the creation of that thing. But when that came out, the great thing about, there's actually 10 heuristics in the whole methodology and the whole pattern, but that's probably the best known one, the C equals four M plus three V and all that, right? When that came out, I think that was so powerful and I still see it being shared today. And when we speak at major banks and stuff like that, people have it up in their office. And it did so well because it took all of these kind of complex factors that are involved to essentially get someone to say yes, right? And it broke it down into some easy little asset you can clearly see, right? And so the thing we're playing with, and again, it's an over-promise, I don't think we're gonna get there perfectly is, what is that kind of keystone piece we can all align around that we clearly show here are the human skills necessary in the AI era that we can then break down and like Flint did with the conversion heuristic and teach them step by step and know all the different things we have to do in there. So what you're seeing on the screen is an early bad example for me. It's not gonna be this thing. And this is probably too complex, but this to get a sense, this is what we're working towards. And what you have on the right is what does machines do as well? The scale, the assembly, right? Those pieces, right? And those, and these are things that really, and you'll see too with the new version of Meclabs AI that's coming soon is [00:16:03:03 - 00:16:42:03] Daniel Burstein built into Meclabs AI. But then what are those human skills that are necessary to make the best use of that into a format which I called the thesis? So what I call in this version, I don't know if it's gonna come out this way, is the dialectic, right? And it's an idea in philosophy where you're bouncing things back and forth. And as you notice, they come closer to the end to get the final piece. So that's not the exact thing, but that's an idea of working towards something where it clarifies what these human AI skills are necessary. And Michael already piped in, he said, knowing what to ask the AI and design the agent or instruct and lead the AI, right? Yes, and that's a key thing. Definitely when we talk about the human AI skills, people think of prompting, and we're kind of gonna get into that some, [00:16:43:13 - 00:16:48:05] Daniel Burstein but that's what we feel like is a skill and how to direct it. But it's that bigger question of how do we frame that thesis, right? [00:16:49:23 - 00:16:57:24] Daniel Burstein So here's some questions to start getting your thinking, right? What decisions should you never give away? What should stay human when [00:16:59:02 - 00:17:57:05] Daniel Burstein we've given, and Flint's given talks before about copywriting and things like that, value proposition rate. So a lot of companies, CMOs, CMOs, the thought of like outsourcing copywriting, kind of like we're out sourcing things AI, but it was that idea of what should the CEO and CMOs still own? And at that time we talked about the value proposition. Well, you might have a copywriter and they can help craft it, right? But you still need to own the value proposition. So in the age of AI, what decisions can you not outsource? What has to stay human? How do you avoid over trusting that AI output? Like I said, it can lull you into things with a false confidence. How do you frame better questions? So as Michael said, partly that's knowing what to ask AI when we say about the question, the prompt, knowing what to ask, but there's probably bigger questions that come even before that, right? And that's what we talk about the research questions like we've always talked about with filming hypothesis, right? And what you're actually going to, what are your goals are making those questions. And Christy, just, Christy, you can pipe in and mention your question there that you had. [00:17:59:00 - 00:18:04:14] Kristie Linebaugh Oh yeah, well, how do you format your values so that you don't over trust AI to output [00:18:05:16 - 00:18:09:01] Kristie Linebaugh things to take you in a totally different direction? Like one of the [00:18:10:05 - 00:18:29:22] Kristie Linebaugh interviewees I was speaking with has extremely specific ways that he works with people or ways that he invites people in to work on projects and they have to agree to very specific things before they're allowed to come in on the project. And if those things are not taken into account, people at lower levels, it would be [00:18:30:24 - 00:18:44:08] Kristie Linebaugh a big risk that they would be implementing ideas or coming up with ways to promote the project that would be wildly disconnected from what his values and his standards are for people to be able to participate. [00:18:45:09 - 00:19:27:06] Daniel Burstein Right, and that ties into the next question, how we preserve wisdom and judgment. That's something like Christy has been pushing a lot especially for companies or some smaller companies, having the founder and CEO, making sure their DNA is incorporated into the AI, right? So there is that wisdom and judgment. And again, some of these aren't necessarily new. When you bring on vendors, you also have to make sure, how are they acting on our behalf in the right way with our values and preserving wisdom and judgment? How are we still learning things and not outsourcing all the knowledge to them? And again, that ties into a lot of what we talk about with value proposition. And how did teams build practical AI workflows without losing the human edge? So again, it's that the AI can do certain things and help you, but you still need to be able to direct it. So for anyone who has been, let's say, director level of above or even manager level, [00:19:28:10 - 00:20:16:22] Daniel Burstein when you've brought people onto a team, you don't need all of their skills that you're bringing them in because they have a specialty. It's a bigger challenge when it's something you haven't done before, like that's not your expertise, they have a specialty, but you'd still need to know a certain amount of that specialty to be able to direct them, right? And know you're getting the right outputs. And the same is true with AI, right? So those are some questions to think about. What we really hope you walk away with today. So what we hope to walk away, me and Christy and others on the line from Metclabs AI is, again, get more of your wisdom as we shape this and build out the right things for the human skills for AI. But what we hope you walk away with, again, can't give you the answers, is asking and thinking about some of these right questions as you're going through, as you're working with AI, as you're also looking at your own career and business and how you're shaping yourselves and growing, what do I do about these things? [00:20:19:06 - 00:20:58:05] Daniel Burstein So this is a big thing Christy mentioned, I wanna let her talk about. So when we talk about some of the things we're looking at today, we interviewed about 14 or 15 people one-on-one. Thank you, Deb Stesholz is right there, that was one of the people that I talked to, we went pretty deep. And I only did a few, Christy did a lot more. And so we were kind of trying to pull out of them and get these answers. What we're sharing with you today is some of what we learned with that early research, again, to get some of your thoughts. And I know one of the biggest things, Christy, if you wanna talk to us that stood out for you was, about eliminating the need for human wisdom. They were worried about eliminating the need for human wisdom and making sure that AI didn't do that. Do you wanna speak to that, Christy? [00:21:00:23 - 00:21:01:22] Daniel Burstein You're muted, by the way. [00:21:04:05 - 00:21:04:20] Kristie Linebaugh All right, here we go. [00:21:05:24 - 00:21:23:19] Kristie Linebaugh One of the things that once I started digging really a lot deeper into what the implications of what people were saying, cause there was a little bit of a concern or people are hearing that there was a little bit of fear that people would be replaced, that everything kind of like what you said earlier, the world is cutting chicken little, the sky is falling. And [00:21:24:24 - 00:21:39:05] Kristie Linebaugh so that was the biggest part of, as far as what they were hearing, but really what I kind of picked up on is the need for AI is very powerful, but it can never replace or eliminate the need for human wisdom. [00:21:40:12 - 00:22:10:23] Kristie Linebaugh And so something I had written here, the opportunity is bigger than automation. Teams that win will be the ones that can think clearly, frame problems well and keep judgments or ethics and accountability in the human hands. But one of the things that I thought was really great too, was one of the interviewees said that, sometimes when we're speaking with AI or kind of working with it is, sometimes it's kind of like asking a five year old to make a 50 year old's decision. You know, it doesn't know the [00:22:11:23 - 00:23:13:17] Kristie Linebaugh consequences, it doesn't know exactly the problem in its circumstance or in its surrounding or kind of the problem in the wild. And so a lot of times people can be very lulled into what you had mentioned earlier too, just kind of trusting the outputs. But if they're not able to really carry over that wisdom, I think that's really kind of the exclusivity of, is there human uniqueness and our human experience? What we've experienced personally in business, what we've seen work and not work. I think that's gonna be a big part of, one of the things, another interviewee said, AI has knowledge, but it has no wisdom, but it doesn't have an understanding of what you've tried before either. So there would never be a way for you to put in every single thing you've ever tried, to give it that background. But as soon as it suggests something to you, you automatically remember, oh, we did something like that in 2020, and that was a huge failure. [00:23:14:18 - 00:23:34:00] Kristie Linebaugh So that wisdom and experience, I think is gonna be really give our exclusivity. Because if most people are just working on the run of the mill, because you can see them every day, the prompts, you know, here's the next prompt packet, and here's the next prompt here, and here's the way to get a table, everybody I think is focusing so much on the output [00:23:35:07 - 00:23:47:01] Kristie Linebaugh of how to get different things, but really how to have discernment and intuition and wisdom, I think is really kind of the deeper understanding of how to get to where you wanna go. [00:23:47:01 - 00:27:27:15] Daniel Burstein Yeah, and that, so if you look at that third bullet point, that really tells me what Chris is talking about. There's kind of the three phases to it when we think about it, right? There's defining the problem, judging the answer, and owning the outcome. And you know what Chris is especially talking about with that kind of unique human wisdom we have. We would always talk about that in marketing, right? You ever hear the term golden gut, right? So if anyone who's worked in an agency or in a marketing department, there was always that marketer who had kind of more of that golden gut. They just kind of had that better sense for what would work and what would didn't. And we all have that in our career, to a certain extent, everything you've done up to this point. Now, it depends where we focus at, right? So for example, if you're saying like, you know, the golden gut I see Patrick on, like maybe like the golden gut isn't the entire real estate industry, right? Because maybe he might not have that specific experience. But when you focus it down to like a triple net Florida property, well Patrick might have the golden gut better than anyone else, right? And know how to focus on there. So that's part of what we're talking about is identifying and understanding our unique value proposition. So we know where we can define the problem, judge the answer, and own the outcome. Now, when it comes to owning the outcome, there's a great comment from Steven. He says, never lean into the temptation to treat AI as an unmanaged employee, just like the human observations and mentorship lead to better, more desirable outcomes. And that's exactly true. That's, and again, we had that feeling too when we would hire vendors or do other things. Hey, we trust them. They know what they're doing. I had some work done in my house not too long ago. And even though I work from home, she can imagine I'm pretty busy here and didn't pay a lot of attention. And then one day I was in my attic and there was a little gap between what they did. And I noticed they didn't put any insulation in the wall between my attic and the house. And I have a friend who has one of those little snake cameras, it was great. I was able to poke it in there and see it wasn't there. And I had him come back out and fix that. But I fell to that temptation of what Steven's talking about, the unmanaged employee, that you're trusting someone, they're able to do it, right? And with AI, that owning the outcome is so important. Real quick, Douglas mentioned if the slides and the copy of the presentation will be available after. You see Cliff on, he's gonna make a beautiful video of this. We'll post the slides. We'll put that all in circle. If you're not in the circle community yet for the AI Guild, definitely join it. It's a way, so again, what we're doing here is a little more interactive, but in general, there's gonna be teaching, there's gonna be helpful things. There's only so much that we can do in a presentation. I guess even if we just see Flint does, he does a better job of me making it magical and interactive and giving you tools, but there's only so much you could do in an hour. And so then the great thing that can happen in the circle community is you can interact and collaborate and build together and figure things out across the entire planet. That's how that works well. You might find someone on the other side of the world that works well. Okay, so again, I mentioned we had those interviews. That was the key theme that came out. We're talking about amplifying humans, not replacing it, right, and so what works well, where does AI work well? Where do humans work well? AI is best when it's repetitive and structured, right? And that's something great to think about. Like all of us, there's processes we go through in our daily work, and some of us might've gotten to like N8N and Zapier or even just AI and then figured out ways to automate it. But when you're looking for those process and things you're doing in your daily work, either personally or with a team or with other humans, all these things, where can AI come in and help you there, right? But again, things like context, ethics, trust, those are the things we wanna keep or owning that human decision-making. I will say, I mean, those are all key, right? [00:27:28:19 - 00:27:52:23] Daniel Burstein That context, that's so important. So with AI, even as chat GPT 5.5 or as advanced some of these things are, that old garbage in, garbage out is such a truism I've seen. So I've hopped on with markers before and they're all excited, look, chat GPT, give me 10 headlines and we look at them. I just did this little prom. This is a little prom, that's all I needed to give it. It gave me 10 headlines and boom, all these [00:27:54:03 - 00:28:48:16] Daniel Burstein headlines came out. And when you look at it and then I would ask, again, that's where the parlor trick comes in. Don't let it lull you, right? That was so cool it could do that. But then I'd ask, well, let's take those 10 headlines and can we put it on all of your competitors' landing pages? And you could because you didn't give it enough information about your company. So that's where I go back to the fundamental things we've taught in the value proposition, understanding the exclusivity of your brand. Some of those things, right? That really helps that context piece when you're giving it to AI. Yes, AI can do some of that good magic, but you have to understand and own some of those things. So what it's giving you is unique and powerful for your company. So Flint's gonna have a great session coming up in about a month, August 5th. We already have a post in the circle. It's about what is the landing page in the era of AI. It's called the Once and Future Landing Page. If anybody's a fan of the old Knights of the Roundtable, hopefully you get that joke. But anyway, [00:28:49:22 - 00:30:11:06] Daniel Burstein and I already posted in circle what we wanna kinda do for each of these sessions is always have a post in circle two beforehand, where we can talk about the topic beforehand, and then it really helps when we actually deliver the presentation to see what you're talking about. And I saw already people talking about in there is how do you have exclusivity in an era of AI, right? So AI, hey, it's great, it's powerful, it's doing all these things. Well, we're not the only one, I'm not the only one that has a tool. You're not the only one that has a tool. If all your competitors have that same tool, right, then you're just all putting out the same stuff. And that's really where a lot of people are struggling now. Oh, it can put on all this stuff, but it can't break through the noise. That's where your humanness comes in, right? Your human skills come in, and how do you bring that exclusivity to it? And if you know the, you know, Metclabs value proposition methodology, that credibility part of it too, right? You wanna be exclusive, you wanna be credible. That's a lot of times the things, I mean, the AI cannot do without you probably for your product or service. There's a lot of great brainstorming you can do with it. One thing I highly recommend I found helpful in the past is looking at customer reviews, any place you can take customer views off of it, whether that's Google, if people are talking about your company in a forum, even now, if you have an ADS on your website, right? An ADS where agent delivery system where people can chat with the AI using Metclabs, that's another great way because you can look at what they're talking about about your product. Did you have something to say, Kristy? [00:30:11:06 - 00:30:29:11] Kristie Linebaugh Yeah, I was just gonna say too, because so many people are just trusting the output because they get excited about the, "Hey, there's the 10 headlines, this is perfect, we don't have to try anymore." I think that's the real opportunity is for your uniqueness, your customer experience, you know, no one's, [00:30:30:18 - 00:31:11:22] Kristie Linebaugh like your customers have not told the same story and the same experience to someone else, you know, those are your unique testimonials, your unique experience, the way that your product was developed or your experience in getting the product to market or the ingredients that you use and why you use those ingredients. I think all of that exclusivity and storytelling is really, really gonna be a differentiator, especially the more people just start blankly putting out there what AI suggests because the more people that accept what AI suggests in the generic form, the more generic forms it's gonna continue to produce because it's gonna say, "Oh, everybody liked that, let's give them some more vanilla." [00:31:13:21 - 00:32:33:24] Daniel Burstein Yeah, and so like two things that, like I said, have really worked for me, so I see some people on the call who are probably the key decision maker head honcho in their company or whatever, and they're deciding this, but if you're not, if you're more like on the agency side and working with a client or even within your company, you know, just in the marketing department working with a founder, like I said, the two biggest things I've seen help is as many customer reviews as you can get, whether they're external, internal, you know, AI does a good job, you put it in there, ask it for patterns about exclusivity, credibility and those things. And the other thing is interviewing either, you know, some of the key people in your company, founders, could be product developers, and understanding what choices did they make, why did they make them, what are the trade-offs. Sometimes some of what they think is a throwaway is where the exclusivity lives, and I've seen this a lot when we've done value proposition workshops, and for example, we were doing a value proposition workshop with a security company, one of those kind of do-it-yourself security companies, and so, you know, I looked at some of their stuff beforehand, and their marketing beforehand, I then looked at their competitors beforehand, and you know, the biggest one is SimpliSafe, and look at that, and honestly, what I looked at what they were doing externally was just kind of copying SimpliSafe, you know, and then when we got into the value proposition workshop and we were talking, and they admitted to that, they're like, well, SimpliSafe must know what they're doing, right, they're the big 800-pound gorilla, [00:32:35:15 - 00:33:15:13] Daniel Burstein so we just copied them, and it reminded me of, we do have marketing trip with summits, maybe some of you have gone to them, these big events we'd have in Las Vegas and wherever, and I was leaving the summit, I think I was on a plane with someone who was in the summit, and I was asking them what was their favorite part of it, and I was hoping he would say, you know, the case studies and the stuff on the stage, because that's what I was in charge of, presenting everything on the stage, but he said, yeah, that was great, but actually what was most helpful is, one of my main competitors was actually here, and at one of the networking events, over a few drinks, we got talking, and I was so glad to talk to him, because I said, like, hey, to be totally honest, we're copying everything you're doing, and it's not working for us, why is it not working for us? And then the competitor said, it's not working for us either. [00:33:16:19 - 00:34:31:14] Daniel Burstein And so that's, when you see that stuff externally, sometimes you're like, oh, let me just follow what the biggest company in the room is doing. So anyway, to get back to the security example, when I got talking to them some, and there's even some over lunch, I was like, why'd you even start this company, and what's going on, what are you doing here, blah, blah, blah? And then they get into this whole thing about how they had gotten one of the main ones, and they tried to set it up, and it was so hard, so they went to this extra level of building a screen onto their thing, and there's not a screen on the competitor's thing, and in the screen, it just walks you through step by step, and it's so easy, and blah, blah, blah, you know. And again, this was totally missing from their marketing. If you had just only an AI, and you said, go out and scrape the web, and tell me about this one and that one, and it would look and it would say, well, they do what SimpliSafe does, but that's where also your human skills, curiosity, a key one, right, going in there and getting, and actually talking to these key people, and asking why they're making the decisions. They did for the product, and how you get exclusivity. So we have another comment here from Angel. "AI isn't perfect. "Every answer it gives contains many possible paths. "Only you can decide which path to take. "That's true for every question, "all the way until you reach your goal." And that gets to the point, that last point, and that bullet about the final decisions, right? So something I'm sure you've seen some AIs do now, [00:34:32:19 - 00:35:02:03] Daniel Burstein will A.B. test you, right? We'll have two outputs, and I want you to tell them which is better, right? That's one version of it, but even in general, right? If you ask the AI multiple times, sometimes it'll give you multiple answers. That's where, to Angel's point, you've gotta rest with and own that final decision, right? When I, to choose a very dramatic example, because we used George Washington in the beginning, and I feel bad for something, Toby, but I did wonder if people would know George Washington overseas, right? The presidency, very famous. I heard one president talk about, [00:35:03:10 - 00:35:41:11] Daniel Burstein there's a lot of decisions that we make that, whoever the professionals in the room, they're making the decisions, because they know what it is. He's like, "Where the president comes in, "it's those jump balls, those 50-50s, those coin flips, right? "And that's true with where your final decision." Some things the AI is gonna output is gonna seem obvious and make sense, but when it comes, at the end of the day, as a human on the line, figuring out what that final decision's gonna be. When it comes to that, you can get the multiple AI outputs and test. You can build a test pattern with them. You can build a hypothesis to help try to figure out what that final decision would be and not just trust AI. [00:35:43:10 - 00:36:15:11] Daniel Burstein Michael said they probably said the same things before the Industrial Revolution, which, yeah. It's a great example. The Industrial Revolution, as I mentioned, this is the AI revolution. As humans, we've been through these revolutions before. All right, so as we're trying to build to this and figure out what human skills we need, what do we teach, how do we do it? So you'll see, we've kind of touched on some of these things and maybe some of this is repetitive, but if we had to just break it down and talk about these key things, what we need is that judgment that we talked about and what is judgment. [00:36:16:11 - 00:36:48:20] Daniel Burstein It's not only saying what is useful, which the AI can do probably pretty good, saying useful. Ethical, I mean, so there are constraints and guardrails built into AI and how well they work and how well you can get around them is one thing, but as you as a human know that better. But that why is that wisdom? That's a really key part of the judgment we have. It's seeing the big picture. So if you've been in your job long enough, probably if you've been working, we've actually got a piece, the next piece coming out of Marking's shirt, but it isn't published yet. It was Christie's idea. And it was [00:36:50:01 - 00:36:51:15] Daniel Burstein how to push back on your agency when [00:36:52:19 - 00:37:23:08] Daniel Burstein you disagree with what they're doing. And I specifically wrote that because it is the same skills with AI essentially. Sometimes if even the agency is newer in your industry or with your company, right? The move they're suggesting makes sense as the first move. But if anyone's played chess, you know, it's not just that first or second move you make. You're thinking a few moves down the line. And when you have that experience, that wisdom brings you that point to say like, well, yes, we would just do this, but what would it mean down the line? So a great example in marketing is new customer acquisition. [00:37:25:00 - 00:38:12:05] Daniel Burstein So if your only goal is a company, and this is where you see kind of some startups mess up, we've worked with some very big companies where they have separate teams for this, where there's one team for new customer acquisition, and there's another team for customer retention. So if you are only getting compensated based on how you acquire customers, you might do some things where you would not care if they stayed customers, right? But again, that wisdom is saying, I'm not just looking at the piece, right? I'm not just looking at this one move. I'm looking three or four moves down the line, and I understand what's gonna happen. So we use this new customer acquisition way to bring people in. Yes, we're gonna get a lot of them in, but we're not gonna keep them. And ultimately, our customer lifetime value is not gonna be what we need to be to be profitable and pay for these customer acquisition costs. So that's where the wisdom comes in. The curiosity, [00:38:13:10 - 00:39:40:23] Daniel Burstein right? This is the biggest and most exciting reason, honestly, I became a writer and marketer and advertiser because I am a curious person, and I hope all of you are curious too, right? And AI is not really curious, right? Again, because when you think of what it's doing is it's following patterns and it's trying to, it'll ask you questions and stuff, right? But it doesn't have curiosity in the human sense. And that's where it can go on that kind of maybe first level of asking the questions, but it's very bad at getting deeper down into those deeper levels. And the one reason I love this industry is even like in B2B marketing, like some people think of B2B marketing so boring, but when you're working with these different companies and understanding how things work, it's so interesting and exciting. Like you could work with a company that makes those big concrete things for the sewers in the road, right? But if you have that curiosity, you are figuring out how do they work, what's behind them? And then you get to like kind of the human element of how I can sell them, right? So whatever you're working on, I encourage that curiosity, right, empathy, there's humans on the other side. I think AI can fake that a little. Humans, we really have to have that and know that. As humans, we can lose that too. That's where the conversion risk became so powerful trying to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Communication, right? AI can communicate pretty good in some ways, but you can still help reduce some of the confusion that comes out with AI if it's not answering our questions in the right way. [00:39:42:00 - 00:40:05:20] Daniel Burstein Self-awareness, this is an important human skill. And I think probably a lot of you are on here today because of that self-awareness knowing, hey, I have some limits I wanna improve, but it's also knowing your strengths. As we talk about creating a personal value proposition in this era of AI, it's figuring out the strengths, figuring out what limits you, figuring out what your biases are, figuring out when you know your biases, what are the biases in AI, the discernment. [00:40:07:18 - 00:40:22:07] Daniel Burstein AI can give you so much, right? That's kind of the cool thing about it. It can give you so much, and you have to determine all of that from what all of it's giving you is what is signal and what is noise. So I'll give you an example. We are building, [00:40:23:24 - 00:40:39:17] Daniel Burstein I've been building new customer service process when we launched new Mac Labs AI, right? So the way I work is I like to brainstorm with AI. I like to put something together. I like to throw it at it, get some of its feedback and all that stuff. And so I threw it at it. It gave me a long response. [00:40:40:21 - 00:41:03:05] Daniel Burstein I didn't like most of it, but one of the things that had in there, this is really good, and I had not thought of it. I had not thought of it, and that was great. And so sometimes you get that big output separating the signal from the noise. It's not necessarily that whole output. Sometimes we have that volume to get that one good idea and we only really need that one good idea. So that discernment's really important. Again, the accountability. [00:41:04:09 - 00:41:23:12] Daniel Burstein You can't just blame AI when an output goes bad. If anyone saw that famous Starbucks campaign in South Korea around a very controversial topic, you can't just blame AI. At the end of the day, it's your brand. You're putting the thing out there. And the leadership, again, ultimately, [00:41:24:20 - 00:41:30:12] Daniel Burstein I like to think of it as, this is like the George Jetson example I like to use. Does anybody remember what George Jetson's job was? [00:41:32:05 - 00:42:35:15] Daniel Burstein That's kind of an old one. Anybody remember? Button pusher. That's right. They called it like digital index operator. His job, he would go into spacely sprockets and he would push the button. And then all the sprockets would be made. He'd just be sitting there with his feet up. And then after a long day of work, he would push the button to stop it. And I think what that really sets up, even from 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about this fantasy future is the idea that it still starts with the human. No matter what automation we have and this and that, you're setting the priority and standards, you're setting, if you think of the oyster and the pearl, you've got to have that first little bit of grit in there that you're putting in there that sets the AI on its path. All right, so let me take a break because we've got a lot of comments here. Let's see some other thoughts we have. Angel said, "AI is imperfect. "Every answer it gives contains many possible paths. "Only you can decide which path to take. "That's true for every question all the way "until you reach your goal." That's true, we covered that I think. See, Steven, monkey, see monkey, dude, "Describe the whole of modern pharmaceutical marketing. "Dress everyone in brand colors." Yeah, that's very true. Again, as we talk about, [00:42:36:21 - 00:42:43:18] Daniel Burstein so AI is good with pattern recognition and that's really good in some ways because it can have pattern recognition in understanding what [00:42:44:19 - 00:43:08:13] Daniel Burstein your customers are looking for in need and where the gaps are, right? When you're using it for that, that can be really helpful. When it's pattern recognition of understanding what my competitors are doing, the monkey, see monkey, do, that can be helpful as long as you don't copy it, as long as you bring that exclusivity to it. Mamadou said, "I like to put in AI transcripts "and infract or infer context, values, "things that I might not have perceived, even on me too." Yeah, [00:43:09:23 - 00:43:59:21] Daniel Burstein so we talk about, and Flint's had a great presentation before about blind spots, we all have blind spots. So the two things, well, I like, because Mamadou went on two levels, I'm guessing here, is we can put in the AI transcripts if we have an ADS on our website of the customer interactions we're having, right? And a great thing with that is, sometimes we see a gap we didn't realize. That they're asking the same, a lot of people are asking this type of question, oh boy, that's not clear on our website. I think what Mamadou is doing, and I like it, is taking it a level deeper, if we're interacting with AI, and then we're inputting that and asking AI about it, we might find some gaps that we find in ourselves. So I actually had this on a very human level with what's out the other day. I shared some of the problems I was doing with him and because we were always trying to improve Mac Labs AI, and he said, "Okay, I learned a lot about humans "because how humans would interact "with Mac Labs AI from this." But I also learned about myself, how I was asking the AI about it. I was like, oh, I see, I could have asked it in better ways. [00:44:01:08 - 00:44:32:07] Daniel Burstein Steven says, "The ability to recognize greatness "and expertise in a subject manner "so that you can introduce your AI companion "to wisdom you may not have." Yeah, so that brings up the question. There's a great, if anyone's taken the 21 Laws of Leadership from Maxwell, first name's Steven Maxwell, his last name's Maxwell. One of his lessons is people don't pay for average. So he has this great lesson, and he says, no one's like, oh, I wanna go to an average restaurant and watch an average movie and all this stuff. You're not gonna win a date that way. [00:44:33:08 - 00:45:29:22] Daniel Burstein Let's have a very average experience. And so his point with that is, there are some things that you're really good at, and there are some things you're really bad at. And he said, some of those things that you're really bad at, you need to get to an okay level just so you can get done the things that are. But a mistake a lot of people make is they focus the things they're really bad at, they work hard there, and they just get it up to average. And he's like, that's not gonna win in the marketplace. What you gotta focus on is what you're really good at and keep improving that. I guess if there's something messing you up, work on that. And so to the point there, what Steven's talking about, about the ability to recognize greatness and expertise in a subject matter and using the AI companion, where I think that really plays in is, again, understanding your personal value proposition. What are you truly great at? How can you use that feedback into AI to amplify, to make it better so you can improve and all those things? And then where you're not, where you just need to be average and don't spend that time learning on it, AI can come alongside you and help get those things done, right? [00:45:32:03 - 00:46:47:19] Daniel Burstein Elle said, "I may be naive, but I think this calls for us entrepreneurs to be more creative, innovative, original ideas and content to extend. I find AI is great at supporting me with my content. It has no wiggle room." Yeah, well, I mean, and that's a good point too, in just not using a straight AI output for content. I always say, again, the AI could be really great for that brainstorming phase, and it can be really good if you're building something with it, right? But you wanna have that oversight on it. That's where we talk about making sure you still have that leadership and that accountability, that oversight about it, not just putting out what the straight AI answer is. So I was talking to a leader of, it's like an IT recruiting company, and I went to his website beforehand, and I saw that the blog posts on his website, on his homepage were, I mean, pretty obvious, just straight AI outputs, or chat GPT or whatever. And so we got on the call and we talked about it. I did a horrible job, I didn't convince them, but I said, "Okay, whatever blog posts you have on your website, there was likely two reasons you would do that. One would be to attract, right? So you're trying to either get SEO or AEO or GEO, or whatever that. So, according to Google, and I'm no SEO expert, that's not gonna work, right? You're either gonna get penalized for you, or they're not gonna attract you to AI content. They don't wanna be serving up slop to their users, or their users aren't gonna use it. [00:46:49:12 - 00:47:53:22] Daniel Burstein Some people think they can trick them up, but there's definitely some SEOs I've talked to. They've got billions of dollars and a lot of smart AI too. I'm guessing they can a lot of times figure out when you're putting AI on. So you wouldn't just wanna put a straight AI blog post on your website for attracting. So then what would be the other reason you'd have AI on your blog posts on your homepage would be building trust, right? So if you are that, you know, IT recruiter, they're hiring you because you're good at IT recruiting, that's a first, we would call it a micro-ES step, reading that blog post, getting, okay, a sense of here's the trust I have with you before I would hire you. Well, if it's an obvious AI output, I would say you probably hadn't gained in trust, you probably lost the trust because, you know, how are they gonna handle me if this is how they handle their content? That said, again, there's a lot of things it can do really smart with an ADS where you're being honest, this is AI. We're not trying to fool you and pretend this blog post isn't. The ADS is honest, it's AI, we're having this conversation based on our knowledge base, right? Or using it to brainstorm with you on the post or edit the post or come up with ideas, but at the end of the day, it's your written post based on your knowledge. [00:47:54:22 - 00:48:52:03] Daniel Burstein See Douglas says, "You can build your own LLM, assemble all your documents, presentations, call notes, et cetera, and teach the platform the scope of your knowledge as well as your blind spots." Yeah, that's exactly true. I'm not sure if I would call it the LLM models, I understand LLMs, those are more like the kind of open AIs that cost billions to build. I know I've heard of people talk about mini LLMs, I'm not quite sure about that, you can certainly build your own AI, right? And build all that wisdom and knowledge base you have in that AI. That's helpful for not just you, that's helpful for your team. I mean, Christie has had ideas of like interviewing CMOs and putting that together. So like almost everyone on the team could have like that AI gut check. I've done interviews on how I made it in marketing with people who have brands who've come up with, we hate to use the word brand, please, but that's essentially what it is. And AI, they put together internally that can help make sure everything is brand aligned. Within Metclabs AI, you've got libraries, you've got a lot of that functionality, so you can build some of those custom AIs for your views. But yeah, that's very true. [00:48:53:23 - 00:49:38:14] Daniel Burstein Gene, as you pointed out, AI is very powerful for analysis and pattern recognition. You also need to challenge the answers you receive directly or build in some agents to also critique the answers you receive. Yeah, and that's a really good point. And this is using that human skill with AI to help with AI. So one thing that Flint has done very well is he builds agents to test different agents. One thing I do in just simple prompting, if you're just doing the simple prompting, AI wants to please you. So a lot of times, I've done survey research before. A key thing with survey research is you never wanna prime. You don't wanna prime the recipient. And priming means you don't wanna set them up for where you're trying to go with it, or they're gonna just try to please you, right? AI, I'm sure you've seen, it so much wants to please you. So always try to stay neutral when I'm asking and ask for the pros and cons of things. Toby, you had some thoughts. [00:49:41:22 - 00:49:47:10] Toby Wilson Yeah, I did. Just in relation to, there's been a lot of comments on here about [00:49:48:21 - 00:50:27:19] Toby Wilson not relying, not trusting the AI too much, making sure that you maintain the accountability and the judgment and all of that side of it. And this grouping to the sort of human element and being responsible in that. I find that there's something to be said for the inverse of that. In that I've seen a pattern in myself where I would continually be thinking about things that AI would be more effective to think about. And I think that there's an importance in discerning or separating, keeping wisdom separate from reasoning. [00:50:29:07 - 00:50:36:22] Toby Wilson And there is some overlap, but AI is very powerful in reasoning, sound reasoning, not just going off and just [00:50:38:06 - 00:50:56:21] Toby Wilson a lot of verbal junk that's not meaningful, but when prompted effectively, its ability to reason very often outweighs my ability to reason about very isolated specific things. So I'm constantly thinking in reverse where, say for example, I wanted to [00:50:58:11 - 00:51:11:20] Toby Wilson write a really powerful prompt to control the AI for a particular outcome. Well, the AI is gonna be much better than me at writing that prompt. So if I'm thinking that I'm gonna compose that whole prompt and think it all through, [00:51:12:21 - 00:51:32:12] Toby Wilson having multiple AI's work on creating the prompt that's gonna do that is gonna be a more effective outcome. So I just think that line of maintaining wisdom, but being comfortable outsourcing reasoning when you're holding the wisdom in relation to that, for me is an important thing. Another [00:51:33:12 - 00:51:35:16] Toby Wilson point that I saw and another point that you had, [00:51:37:02 - 00:51:42:11] Toby Wilson you mentioned that it was a recurring pattern saying that AI for repetitive and structured work, [00:51:44:11 - 00:51:55:05] Toby Wilson it's a sort of sweet spot. And I tend to disagree with that. I find that automation for repetitive and structured work is great. I think the sweet spot for AI is where [00:51:56:15 - 00:52:19:21] Toby Wilson there can be a lack of structure and unexpected things. And there's use cases for creative exploration that is very powerful, but is in the opposite direction of sort of repetitive instruction. So while there are use cases for that, I don't think that that is the future of its sweet spot. [00:52:22:07 - 00:52:25:23] Toby Wilson Anyway, I had some other thoughts, but they were my initial thoughts. I just thought I'd share them. [00:52:25:23 - 00:52:29:17] Daniel Burstein No, good ideas and two things. Sorry, Nick, were you raising your hand? [00:52:31:02 - 00:52:33:13] Daniel Burstein Yeah, I'm mute. That's it. [00:52:37:23 - 00:53:14:09] Nick Usborne You're muted. There you go. I'm here. Thank you, Toby. That was great. And it made me think of something which is my, probably what I look for when working with AI is where it allows me to do things that I would otherwise not even be remotely possible for me. For example, I have a data set in a website that I've been started 20 years ago and I have some questions and answers there. And I've always thought, wouldn't it be interesting to analyze all those Q and A's over the last 20 years? I can't do that. There's no way I can do that, but with AI, I can. [00:53:15:10 - 00:53:19:08] Nick Usborne And that's what I'm always looking for is not just what [00:53:20:12 - 00:53:28:22] Nick Usborne AI can do to make me more efficient at what I already do, or maybe help me do the obvious things I can't do, like design something, [00:53:30:12 - 00:53:51:18] Nick Usborne or do some kind of layout or vibe coding. But I'm really looking for those high value things that it would just never have occurred to me to try because there's no way I could do it. And if you think really hard about that, you can come up with all kinds of use cases of the things that are absolutely impossible to you, for you, but AI can do it. [00:53:53:02 - 00:54:04:02] Daniel Burstein Yeah, no, that's a great point. It extends our capabilities. And that kind of ties into what we talked about as you figure out where you're excellent out of focus there and let AI do the things that you would just get to be average about. [00:54:05:08 - 00:54:19:03] Nick Usborne Can I add one more thing? Please. Well, I've got the mic. Yeah. I'm a very, very heavy user of AI. I've been using it since late 2019, I guess. I started with Dialogflow with [00:54:20:05 - 00:54:31:07] Nick Usborne Google, which is really difficult at the time. But the one thing that I find that just simply cannot do is high end copywriting. [00:54:32:12 - 00:55:43:10] Nick Usborne It just, and I try and I try and I give it context, I give it prompts, I give it examples, but it'll constantly give me headlines that are ordinary or headlines that don't have any kind of rhythm or meter or a body copy that has no pace. That has no ups and downs. Or I recently tried and this was Fable 5, my current favorite, and it wrote me some copy. And the first paragraph on the page was like nine lines long. And I said, dude, don't do that. It's like, that looks like homework. No one's gonna read the page if the first paragraph is nine lines long. It's hard work. Just looking at it. I said, give me an opening paragraph of one or two lines. And he said, oh, that never occurred to me. I'm gonna put that in memory. And so there are fundamentals in terms of the craft of copywriting, which speaks to the craft of persuasion. That AI is, and I tried really hard. Like I said, I'm a very heavy user of AI. And I really try to get it good at copywriting. And it's just not. And there's some lessons in there that I'm not quite sure what they all are. [00:55:45:12 - 00:55:52:06] Nick Usborne But it really interests me that however capable these models become, they just cannot do that one thing. [00:55:53:11 - 00:56:10:02] Daniel Burstein Well, let me ask you this, Nick, because this is how I find it. When you do it, so again, it doesn't have those right outputs, but is there ever anything that prompts something else in you? Like it took a different approach that you didn't think. And then you're able to write something better because of that. Or are you just like, it's all trash. I just, I got nothing here. [00:56:10:02 - 00:56:13:21] Nick Usborne No, no, no, no, no. Often the content [00:56:15:03 - 00:57:11:03] Nick Usborne can be very good. And to Toby's point, the reasoning, like why it says add certain things to the sales page can be very powerful. So I almost always get something, but I always have to rewrite it because it just doesn't get that sales language should have pace. It should have different emphasis. That a headline shouldn't end on just kind of some soft word. It should be, the meter of a headline should have a strong ending. So it's kind of fundamental to really good copywriting that it just doesn't get. But yes, I absolutely, I ask it. Not because I have an expectation that finally it'll get it. I ask it because there will be, like to your point, there will be those nuggets in there that I hadn't thought of. I hadn't thought, hey, that is a very smart way of saying that. Or I hadn't even thought of including that. So yes, I still use it as a partner, but in the end I always have to rewrite pretty much everything. [00:57:12:06 - 00:57:18:12] Daniel Burstein Yeah, exactly. Kristy, talk to us about problem framing as a human skill from the interviews you had. [00:57:19:13 - 00:57:34:18] Kristie Linebaugh Yeah, several people were very concerned about problem framing because so many times in the Avotai talk to people everywhere from functional physicians, doctors, strategists, coaches, [00:57:36:04 - 00:59:03:12] Kristie Linebaugh HR. So I talked to a variety of people and there was kind of this underlying current of problem framing is a problem because so many times people bring a problem that they think is the problem, only to find out because there was further questioning or there were some red flags that just through experience, the person had known that this is not the real problem. And so if people don't have that experience or don't realize they need to be checking for that or kind of set up some signposts or some guideposts to steer how they figure out what the problem is, sometimes that they're gonna be asking or assuming the problem is one thing and create a solution for a problem that nobody is really even having or that it was just the tip of the iceberg and they've left the whole entire iceberg in place. So that was one thing. And also critical thinking when it came to the problem framing as well was a concern that people already are not very good critical thinkers that they don't think for themselves. They just kind of let other people's opinions guide them. So that was a concern as well that if we don't really kind of buckle down and remember to use critical thinking and teach critical thinking that the outputs that we're gonna get are just gonna be again, either the same thing over and over or missing the magnitude of what needs to be solved. [00:59:04:15 - 01:00:41:15] Daniel Burstein Yeah, so I think, again, there's many discrete skills. We talk about, we're gonna try to put that together into one big thing, but that's probably the one big thing from all those skills is the context. So if AI is good at creating an image or code or whatever it can do out of it, but you ultimately have to give it the context and that is the ultimate human skill if I have to say of any of them and is that context? Or ultimately it's gonna be a sea of sameness with other AI. I think that, to tease a bit, I think that breaks down into we've always taught with a value proposition. And like I said, with things like exclusivity and credibility and the appeal, but that's a key human skill. So we're at the top of the hour. So we'll talk about what's next. So we're gonna, the clip's gonna get, I said, make a beautiful video from this. We're gonna post the slides. We're gonna post in circle. There's a lot of great comments coming in more than I can read. I wanted to read a lot of them to try to get them into the video as well so people can see them. So feel free once it's posted, go in a circle, continue the conversation. I will reiterate, I don't have all the answers, right? We don't have them yet. What we're trying to do is get into that mode of learning so we can put this together and teach it for you. So feel free to go in, learn, go through that, help each other out. We've got two other events coming up already. If you go into the events section of circle, you can see that one on the 29th is Zod and Flint are gonna do sort of live demo of sorts, show you the new Mechlabs AI. So again, that's half of the equation is the machine part and the other half's the human part. So that's an interactive piece. It's gonna be same time, July 29th. And August 5th, Flint is gonna do what I've been pushing him for. I think this will be really interesting, this conversation about the landing page in the AI era. [01:00:42:24 - 01:00:52:03] Daniel Burstein Again, the once in future page if anyone's a King Arthur fan. So with that, thank you all so much for your time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. We'll see you more in circle and we'll talk to you later. [01:00:52:03 - 01:00:52:14]