State of the MOPro - Mid 2026/with Naomi, Mike, and Michael

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. Today I'm your— well, first I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my partners in crime, Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo. How's it going?

Hello.

Good.

It's going, it's going. It's been a while.

Last time we chatted, I think, was the 3 Amigos. Last time I chatted anyways.

Could have been.

I want to say that it's also true for me. Poor, poor Hartman, just running solo. We're actually just gonna shoot a whole entire new intro for the show because it's really just like, instead of the 3 of us, it should just be Hartman. We'll just cut our 2 Nah, it's all good.

It's all good. I, um, you guys know, like, I just stopped like trying to work around your schedules because it's just too, too hard, right? No, no, no, no shade. Like, it's all good.

I keep saying yes. The worst part is I say yes and then I'm like, dang it, I can't make that one either.

Yeah, it's the worst. Oh yeah. So I think we, when we started, we talked about getting onto the, um, I always enjoy these. Like, it's kind of, it is now, let's see, last, was there kind of in the last week or so of June 2026? I, it's weird that I have to say the year these days.

I know.

Um, but, uh, it's kind of a mid-year thing and just kind of see where things are, like almost like a mini State of the MoPro and see where, like, I know we've talked a little bit before we start to record about a couple of things, but Where do you wanna start? Should we start with like, is the world just gone AI crazy?

Like, yeah, I mean, do you think that AI has made marketing ops, revenue ops, everything ops, has it made it better, worse, or the same? Neutral. I don't think it's neutral, but I guess depends on who you ask, I guess.

Yeah, I think it is dependent upon who you ask. So I have a slight— I don't have all the data compiled and the written report done, but we did this AI assessment benchmark sort of study, and it's coming together now. No surprise, we had a whole bunch of bots fill out the forum, so we had to go—

Oh no.

Crazy.

Yeah, right. We had to go scrape out the data to make sure we were just looking at what we believe is truly valid inputs. And there was a question in there around hiring and headcount and support for the role. And I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I can tell you that at first glance, it was pretty clear that for those that at least participated in that study, AI has not made things You know, much easier necessarily in terms of like advocating for headcount or anything like that. They certainly are leveraging it to do what we heard for many, many years, which is like do more with less.

Mm-hmm.

But I think just to lend my perspective on it and my response to your question is I think it's I think it's harder. I think it's a lot harder.

Do you think that's because it's actually like a bunch of new stuff or the expectations are that it's going to make things so much better so quickly or?

Yeah, fair, fair, fair question. I think it's harder because it feels, I think it's a mix of 2 things. If we go back in time and we look at like the martech landscape and the explosion of marketing automation, right? And we kind of remember that now, at least for those of us that have been around long enough to have seen most of it. Um, there was, there was a level of excitement about the opportunity in front of you back then, but it was an unknown sort of territory, right? And so that excitement carried you into this, I'm going to try these new tools and learn new things and adopt new things. And And I think there's elements of that that are present today in this current environment with AI. But the difference now, the second part of why it's harder is that people are generally more educated on what is possible around technology. And so because you're more educated on the possibilities of technology, it simultaneously feels like even more is possible, right? Like it's just that much easier. Well, It's already been done that way before. And so if it's already been done that way, I know that that can do that. So can it do this? Could I be doing this instead? And it just, it sort of like opened up this land of opportunity where it feels like all of it's tangible and accessible. But the reality is, is that it's actually quite hard and it takes a lot of orchestration and a lot of work and a lot of like really sitting down to try to figure out how to make the thing work. But everybody's like, well, it should be easy. Like the AI can just do it for you.

It's kind of like the paradox of marketing automation is that it's not truly automated. It still requires human, like, yeah, I think my answer is more like, I think about, actually it was funny. I was just, when you asked the question, I was thinking about our, the question we had, was it probably a year ago about is marketing ops actually marketing? And I think that was the, I can't remember if I got the phrasing right, but—

Yeah, I posted, I was like, marketing ops isn't marketing thoughts.

That was the whole post. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's too early, it's still a little too early to tell, but I think I'm with you, Mike, is I think it feels like there was a lot of hope and hype and a lot of action. It seems like people are now coming back to this like, oh, it didn't do what we thought it would do. Right. Totally. And things are shifting. And so I still think there's like the, I still feel like I have an open question. Like I'm not sure if I know an answer right now. It does. I'm like, with you, Mike, I think it feels like it's generally been a net negative in 2 ways. One, I think there's whether it's been real or not, right? The layoffs that have been coming around and hitting marketing in general and marketing ops to some degree are being blamed on AI. Do I actually believe that's true in all the cases? No, maybe not even half of them, but I do think that the people who are making those decisions probably do believe to some degree AIs can replace some of this stuff. But I think where I'm starting to land is that all these AI tools are tools, right? And how we use them is, we're still figuring out which one is the right hammer for the right thing and which one is the right wrench for the right thing. Like, I don't think that we've figured that out. And because of that, right, that there's this pressure to do this, do AI, but like, it's really unclear, like, what things could happen. And when I think about, like, how are the, what are the use cases? You get started out with, oh, we can develop content and we can take content and, like, create pieces we can use across different channels. That pretty quickly was pretty standard, but then you got things like, okay, what can it do to automate things? What can it do to clean our data? What can it do to excel, like do lead scoring or like, and then like, and there's orchestration stuff. What I think is gonna happen, like the whole martech landscape, I think is gonna get blown up. Then I really don't know what's gonna happen.

I think like, That's interesting because, you know, I, I, I talk to new grads a lot or people who are going into, who are going into university trying to figure out what to study and interested in marketing ops and whatnot. And, you know, I think those of us who have been in industry for a while, like we try to be mentors, right? And mentor like the next wave and the next generation. And a lot of us who have been in the industry from like the very beginning, a lot of us are at the age where we are parents now to young kids. And I think, and I'm not speaking for everyone, and this is just myself, like I feel like this strange mix of like excitement and also like unease about AI because I think for the majority of the last few generations, right? Like you could, like our parents could reasonably, and our grandparents too, right? They could reasonably assume that, you know, my kids and my grandkids will grow up in a very similar world to the one that I grew up in. Right? Regardless of like cell phones, space travel, like it's gonna be pretty similar, right? But I think about just how fast things are changing and I'm like, okay, my daughter, she's 5 this year. When she's 18 or when she's 28, like what is the world gonna look like, right? It could be entirely possible that, you know, by the time she hits university, even high school, AI tutors are better equipped than actual teachers, right?

Will university even be a thing?

Yeah. Like most, uh, the idea of like, you don't need to learn facts anymore when you can just look it up. It's more gonna be about like your judgment, your interpersonal skills. You're like, you know, are people gonna have interpersonal skills when all they're doing is talking to each other on, on, you know, social media or on their phones or in whatever, like, you know, chip that's been implanted in their brain so they can like brainwave their texts to each other. I have no idea. You know, you know, and it's like unsettling because like, you know, as a parent you want to best prepare your child for their future, but how do you prepare them for their future when you don't know what that future's gonna look like? Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. This is a whole other can of worms of this. Like, so for everyone listening, we had no idea what we're gonna talk about on this podcast, so we're just kind of winging it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but I think, you know, I think that's the, I think that's the value of opportunities like this and the show in general is like, if you're listening or watching, I guess, you may have some of these thoughts and we're talking about it today. So come talk to us if you ever want to talk about it.

Yeah.

Come to the future.

Well, it's funny. So I have kids who are older than either of you and in college right now. And it's like, we have this conversation on a regular basis about Like what it's like for them and their friends who just graduated and things like that. And the job is tough, right? And part of that's just general economy, I think. And some of it is uncertainty and all that. But it was interesting, my oldest, he's a big history buff. He and I were talking, he's like, he was sort of describing the world that I think it was Rockefeller, like one of the, whatever you call the tycoons from the late 1800s who lived long enough to go see essentially Civil War, the US Civil War, steam engines, trains coming, automobiles, airplanes that within a few years were used in a war, right? To rock— the amount of stuff. And then he was like, and Dad, I grew up in an age where like we didn't have like cell phones. The first cell phone I saw was in my one summer home after college, like my freshman year in college. And it was like the military style, right? Where it's carry the box and the headset was—

The briefcase or the—

Yeah. Yeah. And we had car phones and stuff. Like I've gone through like record players to tapes to CDs to MP3s to like all this. Like, and I've like, I never really thought about it until he's like, my lifetime has gone through like this massive change and this is just another one. And there's a part of me that goes like, is it truly different than like what happened on the turn of the last century timeframe? Like early 19— late 1800s, early 1900s? Or is it something really like, is it similar, different? Like, is the disruption like it's, I don't know. So that's part of like, I hesitate to go like, I'm trying to be optimistic, but like, I don't know what, like, I really don't. It's hard to predict what's going to happen because it doesn't, like, what feels different here is the pace at which things are changing. Because it feels like every time I feel like I'm starting to understand, oh, I could do this with AI, something changes.

But I think the biggest difference, Michael, is like, Most of the changes that you're talking about were things or like tools that changed how we like did things, right? Instead of like picking up a rotary phone and doing the turns, like now all of a sudden we're like just telling Siri to call somebody, right?

Right.

Versus I think a lot of the changes in the technology that's happening is changing like who does the things. Right? I think that's the big difference too. And like, we also went through a period where a lot of things were analog and we saw the difference between, like, if we look at something, we can critically say, I mean, it's getting harder now, right? Like, is this AI? Is this not AI? Is this real? Is this not real? We lived in a world and grew up in a world where like we had to bike to our friend's house or like pick up a phone and say, what are you doing? Or like, look at a TV guide and say like, here's when our show's on, right? Uh, that's not the case now. Like if you grow up now and you see something online, do you just take it as like fact because you don't know any different?

Yeah. I don't know.

Right.

Yeah.

No, it's, yeah, the difference of technology before was like always making something for humans In a lot of ways, it was often geared towards humans still do the thing, they just do it easier, or it's just like a little bit better than it was before. In some cases, a lot a bit better, right? Like arguably moving from horse and buggy to cars, like a significant shift. But, you know, the innovation of industrial revolution and technology there was about sort of momentum and energy and machinery all making things like going from place A to place B or doing X to Y faster and reducing labor. And there were labor markets that were shifted. And as a lot of— I'm not an economist student, I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of the history of how technology's impacted the job market before, but I You know, yeah, technology's always impacted the job market in some way. And from the little nuggets that I've pulled out from some of the people talking out there, you know, it also creates new opportunities in new ways too.

Yeah.

And so, you know, to echo a bit of what you're saying, Hartmann, like, I think we don't know exactly what's going to come of all this. And Naomi, I've thought a lot. I mean, you know, I've got 2 kids, for those of you who don't know, I've got an 8-year-old and near 6-year-old. And yeah, I genuinely have no idea what to expect for their horizon in front of them. And if you ever spent, I don't know if we talked about this the last time that the 3 of us were on or not, but if for those of you watching or listening, if you ever spend a moment and you're, that you got that curiosity bug and you kind of look at what is called like the post-scarcity economy, like the concept of this.

Mm-hmm.

It's a fascinating exploration of a topic. And the idea, of course, is that if you ever studied like economics, like, you know, supply and demand type of stuff, right? If there's high demand, you know, price gets up and all these kinds of things, right? The supply chain and unit economics concepts. Well, When you look at the post-scarcity economy concepts, it takes this idea of like, if the unit cost of production effectively moves to zero because you're able to just, rudimentary example, like a head of cabbage is grown at the farm. Well, if that head of cabbage can effectively be grown at the farm in mostly autonomous ways, in fact, picked, curated, and shipped on a truck that is self-driving on a robot that never sleeps, that eventually puts it in— the grocery store or just delivers it straight to your house, the production cost of that thing no longer has human capital behind it. And so you don't have to pay the robot. You have to pay the company that makes the thing that does the thing, right? And so it's like, where's the robot? Right. Or maintains the robot. But in theory, it should be a lower unit cost overall because they don't have to take a break. They don't have health benefits that they need, right? Like, there's just like all— like, as you start to unpack and unravel the things that go into just getting something like a head of cabbage to your grocery store and to your kitchen fridge, you start to go, whoa, what happens to that pile of money that eventually in that supply chain was distributed along the mix, right, to all of those places? Where does that money go now? And what hap— like, just generally what happens to the, you know, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of different types of products out there. And there's now just genuine— genuinely a pile of money that has nowhere to go in theory that I can't, because I can't rationalize it in my head. I'm too small-minded for it. But in theory, like if there's no human to give that to, so where does it go and what happens next? And so this whole exploration of like, we don't know what's going to happen.

Do you think that in that situation there would be nobody though? It's just like, if you think about back when, you know, we were like, people would get milk delivered to their house or like newspapers were printed at like proper letterpress, like the typesetting and whatnot. Those jobs don't exist anymore, right?

But there's still people. I delivered newspapers when I was a teenager.

Exactly. But they're still there. It just, those things changed, right? And that kind of goes back to what I was saying about like the changes were how we did things.

It's more like biomechanical replacement as opposed to cognitive.

Versus who's doing the things, right? Because like, you know, before Photoshop would change how we used to edit images, right? But like, you know, AI is now changing who creates the image in the first place. You know, like who's creating it? Who can take, who can edit it? Does it even exist? You're just making an image out of thin air, you know? So I don't know. I just have, I have lots of thoughts on this.

No, I mean, this could easily go down this whole rabbit hole of like, um, whatever preceded the abacus and you had the abacus and eventually you had some sort of calculator and then you had spreadsheets and like, it's like, So there are things that I think there are other things like that that are probably maybe a better analogy to the cognitive impacts. I mean, that's my fear. Like you pointed out, Amy, is that I think a lot of people, and I know we were kind of dissing on LinkedIn earlier too, a little bit about how much AI slop there is, but I think people have outsourced their thinking because of AI, like completely. And I think that's dangerous because if what is going to make a difference from a human standpoint in the future is our ability to be discerning and understand and be able to make connections again. And like, I don't know that we've got a generation or two of people who've Got those skills. Yeah.

I mean, do you remember going to the library and doing your own research and going to like site searches and looking?

Card catalog, microfiche. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Some people listening are Googling like, what is microfiche?

If you want to know how it's spelled, it's, uh, yeah, yeah. M-I-C-R-O-F-I-C-H-E. You'll have to wait till the end of the episode. I'm just kidding. No, I mean, I was telling my kids were sort of like wide-eyed the other day. I was like, I don't, I guess we never talked about it because I'm like, I love all kinds of music. I explained to them what it was like to do a mixtape where you had, you were trying to record something off the radio. Because you didn't know it was going to come, but you were like, I want to get this song. I know it's going to be in the rotation. So you have your boombox ready, your tape player with the 2 buttons you could find, right? And for one song.

And you make another copy where you'd like cut out all of the, you know, extraneous stuff you didn't want.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, Like, that's—

none of that exists.

Like, no. When you bring it like TV, like TV Guide, like, I, like, uh, you don't need it now. 'Cause like back then, like we used to, I still remember we had another couple friend before we had kids who like, our thing was every Sunday we'd get together at one of our houses. We'd cook dinner, hang out because we, and it was all around a TV show that was only broadcast at a certain time on Sunday or whatever. Right.

Yep.

No, I feel that now.

Yep. It's all instant gratification these days. My kids actually really enjoy commercials 'cause they never see 'em. They were on like some sort of terrestrial TV, like a channel, and they're like, oh, a commercial came on, Dad. Don't skip it. I wanna see it.

Yeah.

Like, no, 'cause now you're gonna wanna buy the thing.

Right.

Commercials are arguably more impactful today to the consumer market, I think, than they've ever been because they're just like never seen anymore. And it's almost like, oh, some So funny. It's so weird to say that.

Yeah. Well, I will tell you, I think, um, I wish I had seen it earlier, but for you two and anybody else who has kids who are even at the teenage age, book, uh, The Anxious Generation. It's this whole idea, like how people have that. And I, there was a study, I can't remember if we talked about this. I know I've talked to some people about it that I heard about where The average number of words that we have spoken has dropped over 10 years, like by 30%, like daily.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's like, it was like across a bunch of different studies that weren't necessarily intended to be looking for that. So it was like, and I haven't, full transparency, I have not gone back and looked at the full study or the ones that it references, but like, it feels like that, like that doesn't feel far off. Yeah.

As a person of very few words, I wholeheartedly agree. My daughter, on the other hand, has a word quota to hit every single night before bed. Just putting that out there.

So not steps, right? It's word count.

Yeah. She's got a word count. She's 6, so almost 6. I want to go back for a second on this topic of, again, on AI, you know, we haven't really gone off of it, but I wanted to go back to Um, this idea of like what it's done currently, you know, in, in our market, I think a lot of us have felt or seen, at least seen the impacts of it. You know, there's layoffs and all this other kind of stuff. LinkedIn feeds galore around, around people who are looking for new work and all that stuff. If you don't follow me, by the way, I'm not asking you to follow me on LinkedIn, but if you'd happen to pay attention to some of the things that I comment on, most of the time I'm commenting, it's because someone's hiring for a job. So if you're looking for a job, I'm usually dropping a comment that says, hey, like someone who follows the community, like here's a new job. Yeah, I try, I literally almost 3, 4, 5 times a day I'm doing that. So for what it's worth, lots of opportunities out there despite the market landscape. And speaking of all of this, this article's dated now, dated in the world of AI, that is, back to a whopping May 25th. So just about a month ago from this recording date.

Wow.

Yeah, super, super dated.

It's no longer relevant.

It's not relevant anymore, obviously. But the article I'm referencing is Nvidia. It's actually Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who says that CEOs who are blaming AI for layoffs are giving a lazy excuse. And so he really hammered home this point where, if I could quote it here, it says, I think the narrative that connects AI to job loss, for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy, end quote. And then he goes on to say, AI has just arrived. How is it possible they're already losing jobs? And as you kind of unpack the rest of the statements and stuff like that, really, if I was to TL;DR it for you, it's like, obviously those 2 sentences say a lot, but he's arguing that we're at the infancy of what AI is possible of, and yet everybody's jumping to the conclusion that it's at its maturity. If you think of that like a hype cycle type of thing.

Yeah.

And, and it's in, I think, you know, I think you kind of touched on this either during the recording or pre-recording, Hartman. I can't remember which.

It all comes together, like blends together.

It's all blurring together, but really it scratches at this idea that like we, we've sort of, uh, what is it called? Like jumped the shark on this a little bit and people are realizing That, hey, I might have made, or companies in theory are realizing we might have made a mistake here and we've kind of jumped too far ahead. If I could illustrate it with a practical example of even touching back on this AI assessment study, I mentioned that we had bots that filled out the form, right?

Sure.

Anybody want to take a gander or a guess at How I came to figure out that there were bots that filled out the form.

Hmm. Did you capture email address?

We did. Yeah. Yeah. So for those that left the email address, yes.

Yeah. Uh, okay. So it was an optional thing. Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

So that would've been that to me, that was probably the first clue, but other than that, I'm, I'm waiting to hear. Naomi, do you have a guess?

Let's put it— I'll ask it differently. Do you think the AI figured it out?

Well, the bots that we have on our forum, like, it just seems too complete, if that makes sense. Like, I don't know.

Yeah. Does the—

Was it AmbiAshes?

So here's the question, I guess, differently. Do you think the AI figured it out or do you think the humans figured it out?

Humans.

Humans. Yeah. I'm not tooting my horn. It was me, but it was humans. And the reason I was able to figure it out at the end of the day is, and if you didn't listen to hardly any of the rest of this episode, maybe just take this clip and send it to your boss. The reason that we were able to figure out that the analysis we were performing was incorrect and that there were bots in there is because I know my data. It's because I know what to expect from the database.

Yeah.

And so when we sent out a survey and we got a bunch of results, And I started to unpack the current analysis and I was like, now show me the N number of how many survey respondents there were and break it down by the demographics and all that stuff. There was this huge swath of like CEO, C-level titles that came in and I was like, that's not our database. Yeah, that's not us. I would love to have it be us and have more people at the C-level role in our community. Sure. But you know, I love all of our members, but it's generally not us. And so I started to look at it and I was like, lo and behold, they all came in at right around the exact same time, just a couple minutes apart from each other. They all had CEO titles. All of those CEO titles, most of them, 99% of them were Gmail addresses. It's like, oh yeah, you're right. The CEO came in and just like, was like, yeah, I'm gonna use my personal email address.

Maybe they're just autofilling their form.

You never know, Munkar. Yeah. Yeah. They're using their home computer.

Maybe.

Well, it's funny because I assumed it was human-caught because, so I'm, I would be surprised about this, but I'm a big fan of a YouTube channel, YouTube guy who is, guy's named Rick Beato, is a music guy. And he talks all the time. He has kids who are teenagers and there's so like a lot of AI-generated music now that is becoming like going out on Spotify and whatever. And like his kids, can tell instantly what's AI generated, at least right now. Right. And so I think there's something about what gets produced by these AI bots that just something about it. And I don't know that, I'm sure somebody's analyzed what it is, but it just doesn't feel right.

Yeah. Yeah, I know. There's, you know, I don't know if it's that, you know, when I think about it like a drummer, right? And the rhythm that they put into a drum, even though like the percussion of the movement between instrumentation and syllables that they're using across that drum set can be pretty symbiotic in the sense that it's on a pattern, there's still enough of a flaw that I think maybe the human ear, as subtle as it might be, we can tell the difference between that and like the machine doing the like perfect rhythmic movement between these things. And so perhaps it's that. And Yeah, I would imagine at some point AI could probably mimic it, right? And it'll be even harder to tell. Just like in the survey data, I was able to uncover it. The AI had no idea. I arguably, I could have told it like, here's our TAM, here's our current audience, here's our database, here's who we expect to see. I could have prepped it for all of that stuff, but frankly, that would've taken me longer, right? So why spend all that work doing all that when I could have just like looked at the data myself? It took me 3 seconds to figure out that that was not the right dataset to be looking at, right? And so I don't know, because I try to make the argument that like humans still need to be involved in all this stuff and you need to be intimately familiar with the things you're interacting with because the AI won't know that it's wrong unless you go out of your way to really teach it all your stuff. And even then it begs the argument that a person needs to take the time To go teach it the things and learn, you know, a human has to do that, right? And so anyway, it's, I don't know, I think this all started with, is it making it harder? I think it's making it a lot harder. It feels like there's a lot more opportunity in front of you. I actually have probably 5 multi-threads of, you know, things that I'm doing all at once throughout a day now because I've got one agent doing one thing, one agent doing another, and I'll come back and I'll rework those things as I go do other, you know, right now on this pod, I have a whole like work stream happening for Claude working through some stuff with me as a thought partner, right? I'm not taking a break to talk to it, but I started it and I know it was processing and I'll come back to it after I'm done. I feel superhuman.

Yeah, no, I've got something that's going through a whole bunch of stuff and I've been working through it. I have a really broad thing I'm trying to accomplish. And it's been going on for weeks simply because I don't have time. Again, it's not automated, so it's really more interactive and like one step at a time. And it's, you know, I'm having to, it is like a thought partner, like, and it's good, but it's not, it's not like, it's not something that's not chewing up some of my time and resources. So I think that's like, it's, And I think that's part of like the, like what everyone feels is a little bit like, oh, like I should be able to be, I think there's a lot of, you know, FOMO out there that I think is unwarranted.

Yeah, I think so too. I think we, you know, we'll talk, I don't want to dismiss this idea of mental health. We had a session today for those of you who weren't able to join. It is not recorded. It was a town hall session dedicated to mental health. And so I don't want to completely dismiss this because we only have a couple minutes left and we're going to wrap the show. today. But I think all of this does create a level of, you know, we talked about the book that you were referencing, right? This anxious—

Anxious Generation.

Anxious Generation. And it's creating new levels of anxiety because it does feel like you should be doing more, plugged in more, always on, or, you know, you have more access to more information and I asked the community a couple weeks back, I was like, is anybody getting to, like, to me, I've gotten to a point now where it actually feels like more work to have to go use the AI to like take the next step. You know, like I wouldn't have otherwise taken the step to do the next thing as quickly as I did, but now I feel almost obligated to go do it because it's there. I'm like, I know the output's going to be great, but I feel like I have to do it. And so it's like creating this like new weird tension. Naomi, you're muted.

Sorry. Do you feel less unsure? Like almost like you need something to sanity check you?

I've, to be fair, if you look at my DISC profile, I've always wanted sanity checks. Yeah. I'm not a decisive person.

Do you almost feel like even more so now you need like, because you know it's there, do you feel like you need something to almost validate or do a secondary validation, you know?

Yeah. I'll sometimes cross-check it. Yeah, I think I do that on a fairly regular basis. And part of it's that I've created a system for myself to allow me to do that, and it brings me a level of comfort. I don't know that everybody would do that, right? Yeah, that's fair. But my personality is that like, If I've set up this environment to help cross-check myself, then it benefits me to feel like I'm not speaking on a subject or in a direction that doesn't match where I want us to go as an organization, right?

Yeah.

Like, you know, why talk about that if it doesn't actually bring any value to my members of my community, right? Don't create noise just for the sake of creating noise. Maybe I'm using it the right way or the wrong way, I don't know. But I think there's a lot of people that just use it to create noise.

Like, it feels like it wasn't that long ago where like all of my LinkedIn feed was filled with people telling us all the great ways to prompt, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And those have like disappeared. They quietly just—

They have, they have. I've seen 'em make their way into my feed on Instagram, uh, with like, here's the like set of instructions that you should use or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I saw one on Instagram, but like there were so many. Yeah. But they've like, there's very few now.

Yeah, I agree. I, I will say that I actually, I grabbed one of 'em recently and it was like, I particularly love it. Maybe I'll drop it in the show notes and just like share with y'all which settings I ended up putting in. But I basically gave my instructions for Claude, like, I don't know, these 5 or 6 or 7 rules that I found. And I was like, oh, I like those rules a lot. Like, it has to rate its confidence before any claim. It has to tag it as certain, likely, or guessing. It has to kill certain phrases. It has to disagree with me first. It has to tell me when I'm wrong, even when it's like gonna make me uncomfortable. Like I tell it to never start with an agreement. Like it's, I actually, it's completely changed my relationship with the AI. So.

Yeah. I mean, I started doing, I started doing some of those things within ex— like chats or whatever, you know, directly as opposed to like an overarching set of directions. Because I was, I was like, it was sensing like, oh, it's agreeing with me, telling me what I want to hear. Yeah. Sometimes making stuff up. And it was like, basically I've told it like, like be really direct and critical. So.

Yep. Yep. I love it. I know we're at time. Naomi's got to jump. I got to jump too. All right.

Well, as always, it's—

For all of you that listen, thanks.

Yeah. Always fun. Nami, thanks for letting us hear the birds chirp in the background. I can't have my windows open here in Texas at this time of year.

I heard my birds chirping too, but now the trash truck's driving up inside. I'm like, you fucked it.

Yeah, not exactly the same relaxing sound. Anyway, hey, it's always a pleasure. I know you guys got to go, you know, so I'll just wrap up here. So everyone, you know, as always, if you, uh, want to, want to jump in on the conversation or go on a tangent with us and, uh, or you have an idea for somebody who would be a good guest, you know, reach out to one of us and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye.