You're the Top of the AI Sandwich - with Brian Piper and Matt Wilkinson

00:00
Daniel Nestle
Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. Plenty of good communicators lost their jobs over the past few years. Senior people with decades of judgment just gone in somebody's reorg. I was one of them. I mean, I saw it coming and I even wanted out so I could build my own thing. But it still stung when the restructuring landed on me knowing the punch is coming. I doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. So anyway, a lot of us did what we tried to do to sometimes get new jobs. I didn't go in that direction. But so many built our own businesses. Solo consultancies, new agencies, training companies, even amazing SaaS. Companies that built patent pending products and started a new category for professional authority intelligence. But going solo was supposed to be lonely. The solo part is true.

00:55
Daniel Nestle
I do work alone most days. But the lonely part really never materialized. Because. Because somewhere in this AI moment, a bunch of us independents ended up in the same boat, trading secrets and methods instead of guarding them. The best colleagues I found out there aren't on anybody's payroll. And two of them are here today. One left a lab handling compounds more toxic than cyanide for marketing strategy. The argument can be made that marketing strategy is indeed more toxic than cyanide, but we'll get to that another time. But then he built synthetic customers that talk back and push on your weak claims. The other is optimized content. Since 1996, he wrote a book on epic content marketing twice and got into AI before most of us even had a word for it.

01:41
Daniel Nestle
Well, a month ago, the three of us got on stage at Marc Shafer's Uprising retreat. Three independents who could have kept our methods to ourselves, built one marketing plan together instead, each running our own team of AI helpers to do it. And we had a blast putting it all together. Now, maybe this is what colleague means now. I mean, how work changes when you're solo. But never alone. One founded the UK agency Striven and wrote the forthcoming book Buyer in the Loop. The other co authored epic Content Marketing Volume 2 Co edited a book with me, the most amazing marketing book ever. One's been here before, back when this show had my name on it. Both are proof that solo was always the wrong word. Please welcome to the trending Communicator, Matt Wilkinson and Brian Piper. Matt, Brian, how's it going?

02:34
Brian Piper
Excellent, Dan. Thanks for having us on.

02:36
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah, thanks for having us on, Dan.

02:37
Daniel Nestle
Good to see you guys. And now this is a rare treat for me. It's a rare treat for, I think hopefully this is going to be a real rare treat for our listeners and viewers because, you know, I rarely have two guests at once. You know, it's what a privilege to have the brain power that I see before me on the trending communicator. And you know, I should note that I've always been kind of mishy, mushy, moshy. Whatever you want to call wishy washy is the right word, I think about the border between marketing and communications. And I think the things that we're all doing are applicable to, you know, whatever hat you're wearing, whatever it says on your nameplate, whether you're marketing communications, if you're speaking to audiences, and especially if you're using AI these days.

03:21
Daniel Nestle
You know, the stuff that the three of us are doing is like across the boards. We don't, we don't care who your commanding officer is. If it's a mark, a CMO or cco, it's all good stuff to us. But yeah, these guys have been, these guys, you guys have been good friends now for years. And as I said in the intro, like we did a killer presentation, if I do say so myself, at the Uprising, which my listeners might be sick of hearing about, but we're going to tell you again. A retreat in the woods of rural Tennessee that gathers. What was it this year? 40, 35, 40 Marketers and communicators and thinkers in the woods for a three day nerdfest about the cool stuff's happening in marketing and comms.

04:14
Daniel Nestle
And I still have never seen or heard or experienced anything like it in any other conference or event. You know, let's start there. Guys. What was your take on the Uprising? And, well, the first, first of all, like, welcome to the show. Introduce yourself real quick. And then let's talk about your take on the Uprising. Start. Matt, what do you, what'd you think?

04:35
Matt Wilkinson
Well, yeah, so I'm Matt Wilkinson. I'm a recovering scientist. So thank you for introducing me.

04:39
Daniel Nestle
You're the cyanide guy.

04:41
Matt Wilkinson
I am the cyanide guy. I'm. Well, I was actually the arsene guy. I made a lot of arsenic compounds and I left academia and being behind the bench to move into science and business journalism and then wound my way into marketing strategy. So that was kind of my journey. And there's lots of twists and turns in that story, but they're for another day, I think. But the Uprising is just the most magical place, I think it's one of those places you turn up in the middle of the woods and it doesn't feel. That sounds a bit creepy, but it's not. It's a beautiful lodge just outside Maryville. And I'd never been to Tennessee before till the first time I'd been. And I absolutely fell in love with the state and the area.

05:27
Matt Wilkinson
And, you know, the people that are attracted to go to Mark's event are just some of the best people you will ever meet. You know, I'm with two of them here and, you know, I've made friends for life by, you know, by going along. And you just meet people that are just so open mind but also so welcoming. It's just wonderful.

05:47
Daniel Nestle
For sure. For sure. Brian, what do you think and who are you?

05:50
Brian Piper
Yeah, so. So I'm Brian Piper. I'm a integration and content marketing consultant with a background in higher education. Most recently. But, you know, this was my second year at the Uprising. And, you know, it's just something that's on my schedule now for. For as long as it lasts. The. It's just a very unique event that I haven't attended. I've been at lots of different events, never attended anything quite like that. I think the format that they've come up with where, you know, a presentation is like 20 minutes of presenting and then 40 minutes of discussion.

06:31
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

06:31
Brian Piper
And there's just such a sense of like, everyone is willing to share and everybody immediately, like, opens up and is just vulnerable. And like, here are my problems, here's what I'm facing, here's what I'm dealing with. And not only on the. On the business side of things, but the personal side of things. And you get to see all that kind of crossover and overlap and you're there with, you know, titans of industry and people who are like, just getting started on their personal creator journey. So it's just a unique environment in a beautiful setting and so well facilitated. Like every. Every meal is planned and coordinated for ultimate, like, networking opportunity. So it's really something special.

07:18
Daniel Nestle
It's great. I mean, it's. It's fantastic. I've spoken about it before, but something you said about like, you know, 20 minutes of presentation and 40 minutes of people sharing. You know, it just occurred to me that maybe one of the biggest differences and one of the reasons why we're probably close friends and because I, you know, I met Brian, I met you before outside of the Uprising, but Matt, I met you at the Uprising a couple years ago, but one of the reasons why we Connect is because it's not that kind of sycophantic sharing that you get at a normal conference where your idol is up there speaking and you're like, oh, I need to say something smart so that this person notices me and so that the 300 people in the room, somebody might connect with me on LinkedIn.

07:59
Daniel Nestle
That's not the way it works. And it's all. It's. In fact, it's 100% the opposite. When we get a sense of that at the Uprising, it's like, well, thanks for coming. I hope I don't see you next year. It's the kind of feeling we get and the fact that almost half the people there are alumni that are coming back and again is an indicator. But this time around, it was like from the go. It's not like people are pushing back on you, but you're not getting grandstanders who are going to stand up and say, give their opinion because, you know, because, oh, they want to look better than the people are presenting or look good to the people presenting, you know, and part of that is just the nature of the people who attend.

08:41
Daniel Nestle
And the other part is the speakers themselves, the people who do present, you know, this time it was Joe Polizzi. And, you know, I'm sure that a good percentage of my listeners will know who Joe is. Joe's a legend, right? I mean, he's a legend. Marc Shaffer's a legend. These people have nothing to prove to anyone. They are well known thought leaders, authors many times over. And yet at some conferences you'll see them speak and people just are besides themselves trying to prove themselves as like, oh, Mark, you gotta listen to me or Joe, hey, I'm gonna get your attention. Joe, Joe. Doesn't happen at the Uprising because they're part of it. They're in it with us. There's no separation of speake and participant.

09:29
Daniel Nestle
It's just everybody's there and I tell you, I just, I'm going on too long about it, but I loved it. And the reason I'm going on long about it is because the three of us spoke, right? The three of us were presenters. This is my third time or something, speaking at the Uprising, but I had such a great experience with you guys. And one of the reasons was because were giving information, I think, and were delivering something that was and is indicative of the times in which we live. Fantastic for people who are like the solopreneurs like I mentioned, or small agency owners, but also completely Applicable to anybody who's working in enterprise and across marketing, comms, everything.

10:18
Daniel Nestle
And I want to talk about that for a bit, like what we did and why we did it, you know, and maybe what insights we learned as were interacting with the uprisers, you know, these 40 very smart people after or during it, as it were. So just to tee it up, we, our session was called AI beyond the Prompt, right? Because we figure people are beyond prompting. Like we've done that now for two years. It turns out we're not exactly right about, and let's put a pin that we can talk about that soon. But AI beyond the Prompt.

10:57
Daniel Nestle
So went there with the intent and I think we successfully did this to show that the way to work with AI is, you know, you take your business case first, you take your business need and your, what you want to achieve, what you need to get to first. Then you figure out how to orchestrate AI to be your most effective partner, assistant, intern, coffee runner, whatever you want to call it. But how you basically assemble an AI.

11:28
Matt Wilkinson
Team.

11:30
Daniel Nestle
To complete the tasks, do the analyses, do the heavy lifting so that you can get from concept to campaign in hours rather than weeks. And our topic was a fictionalized and yet potentially true event. We were building a plan around holding the uprising in Europe, what that would look like, if there's a market for it, who the audience would be, et cetera. I did the research part like the foundational, can we do this? Is it valid? Is it defensible? And then we hand it over to Matt to do the audience research, to do the audience analysis in depth understanding of who we're actually speaking to, what's going to resonate with them. And then taking all that information, Brian then took us home with a content strategy and an overall kind of wrap up plan. So I think that summarizes it. Okay.

12:32
Daniel Nestle
Am I right about that, guys?

12:33
Brian Piper
Yep.

12:34
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah.

12:35
Daniel Nestle
Well, what you think?

12:36
Brian Piper
Shoot.

12:38
Daniel Nestle
You know, either one of you go for it.

12:41
Brian Piper
Yeah, I mean, I think it worked out really well. I tend to be hesitant to do co presenting because it's always a added challenge, not only on the, you know, presenting but also on the ahead of work or ahead of time work that needs to go into, you know, building the presentation. But I think very early on we kind of established our lanes and established how were going to connect each of those pieces together. But really when it came down to it wasn't about the tools. Right. It was about the workflows and the processes and the thinking and the planning that needs to go on so that you're giving the tool the right information. We were very intentional about sharing our prompts with each other, sharing skills, sharing research.

13:29
Brian Piper
But it was all really came down to, like, sharing our ideas about how to, you know, not only make the most effective presentation, but also to have the most effective output at the end that could actually, you know, help Mark in the launching of the, you know, of the final goal and achieving of the final process. Yeah, and it was just a ton of fun and we got great feedback, I thought, from every. Everyone at the event.

13:56
Brian Piper
And, you know, a lot of the people in there were earlier in their AI journey, but there were several people in there that were, you know, deep in it who all really appreciated, like, oh, I see how you know, took the skills that you had created and Claude and integrated those into what you were doing in ChatGPT and then tied the research together with NotebookLM and then brought in all the different tools that were used, really helped construct this, like, picture of. It's not about the AI, it's about what you're trying to accomplish and what you're trying to have happen.

14:34
Daniel Nestle
I appreciate it when they would, when they'd say, like, why didn't you use this tool? Or couldn't you have done this in. Could you done this all in one tool? Or, you know, and yeah, it's a matter of choice and what you're comfortable with. And, you know, that we've been. Now it's so weird to say that we've been the three of us. I certainly know for a fact that three of us have been like, at least in the generative, like, jumped into generative AI in November of 2022 and haven't looked back. So that makes us veterans in some sense, which is the strangest thing. But I really, you know, I thought that was really interesting how people. And as I said, kind of reinforces the fact that you don't have like, wallflowers there. It's like they're like, why don't you just use this one?

15:16
Daniel Nestle
Or how did you know, can you dig into that bit a little bit? It was really interesting. Matt, what was your impression or, you know, how did you. What was your big takeaway about. From that, from our presentation, from what we did?

15:27
Matt Wilkinson
Well, I mean, I loved it and it was great, you know, working with you and learning, you know, from you both. And what was really interesting, I think, from the learning is none of us were really talking about how Are you doing that with the prompts? Sometimes it's about which tool do you use. But it was always the thing that I think that I hope we did with the Roman was to share a little bit about how we think about working with AI. And for me, it's a mindset shift. It's not about saying, here's the task, I need to get to here.

15:58
Matt Wilkinson
It's actually almost looking at what are the things that we really need to do, how do we build the context, how do we engineer a process to capture all of the information that we need and the AI needs to do a really good job. And so it's the information about the place, the information about the people, and then once we've got all of that information, then we can start building the campaigns. And it really was that sort of sequential buildup of information that then allows us to do something that isn't generic. And that for me just is, was such a wonderful experience to then be able to show a group of people just how much fun it can be to do that and to share, you know, all of that information. And, you know, that experience was just great.

16:42
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Which something you said there is really, I think critically important is that mindset shift. You know, when we were doing the run up to it, you know, it was a 45 minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of questions. It ended up being probably more like 30, 55 or something like that.

17:05
Matt Wilkinson
But,.

17:07
Daniel Nestle
But we, you know, we came at it from a couple different angles. We knew that from the get go, we knew, okay, here's what we want to do. We're going to act as though we are an agency in a sense and we're going to present this as if we have given a brief, like a full on brief with our results to our client, who was in this case, Mark Schaefer. And as went through the process, and certainly each of us showed this in the presentation, we created deliverables along the way as though were actually delivering for a client. So when I did the research, I had a full research brief. I had the results, I had kind of side by side analyses of the different locations that were under consideration and why we should choose this city over other cities. Compare.

18:03
Daniel Nestle
All of that was included, cost benefit analysis, everything to give the big picture before Matt went into his synthetic Persona. Creation and building and I mean, what an incredible kind of flow that became. But, you know, it was just like we could do these things and we could show these things. But why did we come up with it that way? Why did we kind of approach it like that? And the mindset shift, I think it's, there's this sort of, I don't know, ether or glue or, you know, whatever you want to call them, little dotted lines that connect all the various nodes out there. Whatever it is, it's the sort of middle space in between that determines whether or not you're successful with AI or at least you achieve what you want to achieve with AI.

19:04
Daniel Nestle
And I, I've been, I've taken lately to calling it comfort, just very simply it's your comfort level or fluency. But fluency you run into measure, like how you measure fluency. But I don't know what are your thoughts on that? Because I feel like when I talk to people about AI and I talk to people about AI all the time, there's a clear difference when I'm speaking to somebody who's comfortable with it versus somebody who just has some prompting techniques or just kind of, you know, is pushing their way through in A. Or trying things and, and not getting anywhere. I, I don't know. I mean, how are you. What, what are your thoughts on that, Brian?

19:53
Matt Wilkinson
I'm sure Brian has lots of thoughts here, but I'll jump in quickly. I, for me, my prompt engineering is. It is the baseline now. You know, how do you build a good prompt? But the thing is the AIs are getting really good at building prompts better than I can ever build anyway, for sure. So it, for me it's now not getting hung up on what prompt it's actually thinking about how do I actually create an environment that the AI has a better chance of succeeding? How do I treat this more like a marketing intern or an intern where I can need to give it lots of context. And that for me is. That is the big difference.

20:31
Matt Wilkinson
And also just being like realizing that you can ask the AI to do something and yeah, you might burn through some tokens if you get it wrong. But if it's gone wrong and it's got 80% of the way there, then have a conversation with it to get it the next 10% and then the further 10% and don't try and one shot everything, the one shot approach of going from A to B, yeah, you can do it, but don't be scared of just having a playing with the AI to see how you can get from A to B, that for me is just the. That difference in. Yeah, yeah.

21:03
Matt Wilkinson
Here's a tool that I'm a bit scared to use because I don't know if I'm going to get out of it what I want through to actually, you know, this is a tool I can play with. And that for me is that. That for me has always been something I've done and I've always had a. I've always enjoyed experimenting with what I can actually achieve with these things.

21:23
Brian Piper
Yeah, Brian, I think the like Matt, you were talking about, it's a mindset shift, right? You have to change the way you work. We haven't had a software that we could collaborate with in the way that we can with AI ever. Right. We've always told our software what to do and it very responsibly and you know, reliably goes out and does those things that we tell it to do. And now we have this opportunity to work with this tool where we can go back and forth. So it's not prompting anymore. Right? Because like, you know, you both said AI writes great prompts. I don't write my own prompts anymore. I'd say I describe the problem and now write me a deep research prompt or custom GPT instructions or whatever.

22:07
Daniel Nestle
Right.

22:09
Brian Piper
But I think that mindset shift goes deeper and even like the, when were working together, it's not just collaborating with the AI, it's collaborating with other people because we got much better prompts and we decided what context we needed to give the system much more effectively by working with each other in a group and saying, oh, but what if you asked this when you were building those Personas? Or what if we made sure that were looking at this when we did the research and that all tied into like, now I've got more ideas when it comes to the content strategy side of things because I understand what's going into those Personas. I mean, if someone just gives you a Persona and you're like, great, I can ask it questions.

22:53
Brian Piper
But you don't know that it has all those like decision criteria and like user journey, like, you know, intelligence baked into it that then you can use that to help inform how your strategy is going to evolve from there. So it's really, you know, I think collaboration with the tools and collaboration with other people is how we get the most out of AI.

23:19
Daniel Nestle
Well, in our presentation and in the run up to the presentation, we always talk about human in the loop. We talk about Ethan Malik's human in the loop. I had A guest recently who talked about that the human is the loop. A little more philosophical there, but it's not that you're in the loop. You are the loop. And we've called it. Three of us ended up calling it the. The. The human. The human sandwich. Human loop. Sandwich. Right, the sandwich where the humans are at the, at the base. Then the meat of it all is done by the. Or if you're vegetarian, the cucumbers and mayo are done by the. I don't know if that's what vegetarians eat. I'm sorry, but, you know, that's all done by the AI. And then the top layer of bread is back is us again.

24:13
Daniel Nestle
And, you know, approaching things from that way, it's not much different than being a supervisor or a manager and having that, that perspective and that lens. You know, it's part of mindset. But I think that's the, that is the way that you're going to be most successful or get AI to do what you want to do. And something said Brian reminded me, like, I always say that AI is not software. I mean, technically, what you're using is an interface and there's software there. But AI is different. We have to have a different term for it because, like, when was the last time you could brute force a formula to work on Excel? Yeah. The answer is never. The answer is never.

25:06
Daniel Nestle
But if you're working with AI and you have an idea, you can brute force anything through AI as long as you understand that it will require a conversation, require you to clarify exactly what you want. And as long as you know that. Well, what's going to happen is you start to talk about something, the AI is going to say, okay, here's what I think you need. And you're going to say, no, that's not what I need at all. Or you're going to say, yes, that's what I need. And when it does, it's like, I'm not sure if that's right. And I think it was. Was it Danna Walstaff who said at the Uprising, she brought up the word discernment. She's not the only person who says that.

25:54
Daniel Nestle
But having that discernment and that kind of like just knowing what good looks like is, I think, a prerequisite almost for that mindset to happen. I found that to happen again and again through our presentation and at the Uprising itself. You know, what'd you think about that? Like, how's your discernment levels? Matthew.

26:17
Matt Wilkinson
So, I mean, that's a great question, actually, because I think that's why I'm very comfortable using AI for the things that I do all the time, and the things that I've, you know, I've got experience doing in the past. I think where I am less discerning is, you know, I mean, I can build an HTML page and I can code it, you know, by hand, but if you start asking me to use JavaScript, yeah, that's a little all Python. That's a bit beyond me. And so when you're starting to look at where am I comfortable and how can I discern whether this is. This looks good or not? I can look at the outputs, but I really need to understand also what do the words individually look like as well.

26:58
Matt Wilkinson
And so I think that's something, for me that's always been really important is sticking in my lane in terms of being able to discern what good looks like, because then you've got the experience to very quickly and easily say, yeah, I can see this is good, or I can see this isn't. Yeah, and then you can, you know, you really want to get a first draft of whatever it is to that 80, 90, 95% before you start trying to massage it, you know, and the closer you can get, the easier it is. And so for me, that's that discernment of, does this work to, Do I have a good structure? Do I have. Am I telling a fun story with this? And, you know, and.

27:36
Matt Wilkinson
But one of the things that I really love about working with AI is that you can look at an idea that you've had and you can visualize it on the page and you go, I wonder what happens if we did this?

27:49
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

27:49
Matt Wilkinson
And you move from, you know, one of the things I've been experimenting a lot with is going from, you know, rather than just writing a blog, then trying to turn them into, shall we say, metaphorical stories, you know, shall we say fairy tales for adults, and telling, you know, using things like Freytag's pyramid to tell a blog story with a hypothetical customer or whatever it is, and going through that journey. And for me, that's a really powerful thing. I love storytelling. It's one of the things that I really enjoy doing. But it's so much fun to be able to just use the AI to help me then build that. Does this work?

28:25
Matt Wilkinson
If I twist it this way, how's it best for me to communicate this so I can, all of a sudden I can transform information into many different formats to see actually how am I best use. What's the best format to use to try and make the point that I want to make here?

28:42
Daniel Nestle
Well, it's that spirit of play, that and experimentation that grows from curiosity, but also from wisdom and experience. Not that I'm calling myself wise in any way, just there's a lot that goes behind that question. Like how do you even get to the question? I wonder if I could because that takes a certain type of person, it takes a certain amount of knowledge because I know my 19 year old daughter might not even, it would never occur to her to ask like, oh, I wonder if I could turn this into a, you know, a marketing plan. Like it's not in her realm of knowledge or understanding, you know, so we, you have to have that, you have to have a certain kind of worldliness or kind of broad understanding of what's happening out there.

29:37
Daniel Nestle
But there's another thing popped into my head is like when you think about discernment, all three of us have said that it's not necessarily about the prompting, but you can build the discernment into the prompt to a point as a system prompt or as a baseline. That kind of frees you up now to say, okay, from now on, whatever I do, within this session or within this project or within this custom GPT or whatever it is, from now on, whatever I do, at least I know that I've already baked in some of these guardrails and it may not always obey. You know, you have to kind of look at it. But, but at least I know. All right.

30:21
Daniel Nestle
And then as I continue to work with, on whatever project I'm working on, you know, something will occur to me or it'll be like, you know what? I don't like the way you're doing that. You're going to have to add this to the system prompt. You're going to have to put this in memory or you're going to look. And I know what to do when this happens. You know, how many, I mean how much, how many times have you seen these days? And maybe this is for, for the general you like listeners, like almost a rhetorical question. But also for you guys, it's like all the talk about EM dashes and these, not this, that constructions and these AI tells, right, that you're seeing in written language.

31:09
Daniel Nestle
And you know, Anne Hanley's great when she's talking about this stuff and Chris Penn is great talking about this stuff and like, you know, if you don't like that kind of language, well, then plug it into your prompts and say, don't talk this way. I mean, I feel like. I feel like it's second nature, you know, like I just added to all my design systems and all my, you know, all my engines and everything I do that. You know, anytime you write something, you need to review it for these patterns. And if these patterns are appearing too often, then you haven't done the right job. And that's all you need to say. You just have to have that perspective to be able to say that. And you're very much in control of how the output eventually gets published.

32:00
Daniel Nestle
You may not be in control of how the AI is going to write it, but between the AI writing it's the top of the sandwich. You have to get in there and go, all right, there's too many AI patterns or there's too much of this and, you know, kind of, you know, kind of really be that discerning top layer. I don't know. Brian, what are your thoughts on all this stuff?

32:18
Brian Piper
Yeah, I think it's. I think it's so funny that we are adapting our creativity to fit AI conventions, like, you know, using EM dashes, even though the EM dash is a perfectly good.

32:30
Daniel Nestle
I'll die on that M Dash hill, by the way. I'll die on that EM Dash hill and. And Anne Hanley, if you're listening or if you ever get a chance to watch, it's buried in my mount of hats. But I do have the justice for M Dash's hat and T shirt, by the way. I'll die on that hill. But anyway, Brian, sorry.

32:48
Brian Piper
Yeah, yeah. When it comes to, like, discernment, I think is the critical factor in AI success. So AI is amazing for general knowledge, right? It has so much, like, understanding. You can get great information back. But I think where it really excels is when you tie in expertise, you know, and you talked about building that discernment into the prompt and into the structure of your models that you're using. You know, that really showcases itself in amazing ways when you bring your expertise into the model and you can be like, well, you know, I've been optimizing content for 30 years. I can share all of that expertise and knowledge with the tools. And as it's giving me feedback and, you know, generating things, I can look at that and say, this isn't right.

33:46
Brian Piper
You know, you need to adjust this in your model or in our project as we move forward so that you understand that these are the mechanics that are involved, not what you think it is because of all this general knowledge that you're trained on that, you know, half of it might be from anybody on Reddit who really doesn't have an understanding of what they're talking about. So.

34:07
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

34:08
Brian Piper
So, you know, I think discernment is really critical when it comes to making sure that the information that we're putting out, the content that we're putting out that is tied to our areas of expertise is really focused on being the best out there, you know, the most accurate, the most relevant, the most connected with your audience. I think for people that are just, you know, using AI to build like, you know, generalized content, you're missing the mark and you're missing big opportunities.

34:44
Daniel Nestle
You know, it almost makes me think that, like, ultimately, is discernment the thing that we get paid for, that everybody gets paid for in their jobs? Like, isn't that the thing, like, you can discern something better than somebody else can for sure, you know, or at least at such a level that it's worth a company investing in you to bring you on as employee, because you can discern the counting rules better, or you can discern this better because you know what good looks like and you know what a good result is. You know, so you could broad brush it like that and, you know, it kind of comes, you know, kind of makes it sound like, well, you know, anybody who's good at their job has discernment, or anybody who's, who's a domain expert in some way has discernment.

35:26
Daniel Nestle
I mean, you do, you should have some, you know, but like, it just makes me think about how that gets operationalized or, you know, how we can build that into what we do. And it's also like a value, like a, A value indicator. Like when I built Lilypath or, you know, when I built what became Lilypath, I built it like, I, I wasn't a coder, now I'm a coder. You know, I wasn't a product guy. Now I'm a product guy. Like all this stuff, fine. AI allows me to do that. But I'm not fooling anybody and saying I can code. No, I can supervise someone who's coding, right? And I have the discernment to know what good looks like, and I have the experiential understanding and knowledge to understand all the, like, hey, we need this security.

36:18
Daniel Nestle
And this isn't Going to fly in Enterprise. And then beyond that, though, at its core, it's not that I built a way to measure your authority on LinkedIn. What I did was I took 25 years of understanding executive positioning, and that is how it started. It didn't start from, hey, AI, I want to optimize my LinkedIn profile. Yeah, we forget about that. You know, so, like every prompt, the argument can be made that every prompt you write is. Has that behind it. It's not true because you can write a prompt that's completely irrelevant. But if you're writing or if you're doing something that's in your. In your world of expertise and you know how you. You get. You have that comfort with AI, you're able to go back and forth and really kind of push it, get to where.

37:15
Daniel Nestle
Where you want to get it to. That process is fueled by that 25 years, 30 years of expertise. Because Matt, you know, was playing around with arsenic and cyanide and who knows what it did to his brain cells, but because he was able to do that, you know, because he has like 17 letters after his name. Right. He has a very different way of interacting. He'll ask much different questions than I will of the AI, and his discernment is in his area, and it's different. You know, so when we got together to do our. To do our thing, were. We were sort of merging all of those different kind of experiences and discernment as humans to really augment what were getting from the AI. I don't know. I think I got it. Got something pretty important there. Yeah, in a way.

38:07
Matt Wilkinson
I mean, I. One of the things that I've really, you know, that blew my mind, I mean, over a year ago now, when the reasoning models came out, was how you could all of a sudden take a task that would have taken days and days and do it in 15, 20 minutes. So thematic analysis. One of the things that I've loved doing, voice of customer, you know, really being able to get, you know, qualitative data and start to analyze it. And it always was painstaking to do it. And then being able to get something where you can go, okay, if I've got all this data, I wonder if I can. And it's that discernment of I've got this information. How do I turn that into something that's more. That's going to help me more? And I. So often we see.

38:54
Matt Wilkinson
I think we see information laying around in organizations that's just not being used. And I. And I think the best question that we can ask AI is really is how can we take whatever data, you know, we have and then how can we make that usable, better, more usable by the humans that need to use it? How can we get more insight, different insight than we ever would? Because there are insights that you would pull across different, you know, different data sets that we would never see. And I think that's one of the things that I just find absolutely amazing. And I love playing in that space now.

39:29
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, well, and then when you share that with other people who are doing this kind of work.

39:34
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah.

39:35
Daniel Nestle
There's a compounding effect, like, you know, taking. All right, so in our project, you know, I did the research side and I, you know, so I kicked it off. But I got there because of, first of all of our discussions as people and as humans, to understand where we wanted to go and your perspectives. And I took the transcripts of our meetings, you know, because we do that now. So I took the transcripts of all of our, like, planning and kind of brainstorming to get to where I needed to be to start the project, you know, and then, you know, I put it all together and then I said, okay, here's how I would approach it, knowing this, here's now how I will approach it. And I'm sure that both you guys did this exact same thing.

40:18
Daniel Nestle
So, you know, there's a multiplier effect when you are kind of piling discernment upon discernment or, you know, kind of insight into insight. Like my knowledge of synthetic research. Synthetic was a. Synthetic focus groups or synthetic Personas, whatever, you know, is. Is what it is because of Matt, you know, like, I knew a little bit, but dilettante level, I still, I'm still not like, great, but because of the work that Matt's done and that we've kind of talked about a lot of, you know, okay, I get it. And now in my own work, I wonder where I can plug that in. You know, because of Brian's work on the content flywheel and how we're looking at, you know, at build outs, you know, and how we're looking at even like AI governance and sort of enterprise.

41:19
Daniel Nestle
Enterprise organizational, let's call it kind of implementations, you know, Like, Brian has taught me more about that than me sitting on my ass by myself in my office, that's for sure. So this human part of this, there's a connectivity that goes beyond where you kind of work with the AI. And I think you're foolish if you Sit there by yourself and you think you're gonna get all done?

41:48
Brian Piper
Yeah, for sure. Even what Matt was saying about the huge unlock, when we, like, how much time AI could do, you know, how much time I could save us and how much it could do in a much shorter timeframe than we're used to. And most organizations, when they see that, they're like, oh, great, we can do more of that now. We can scale content creation or whatever the process is, we can do that at a higher level. And I'm like, I don't know that is the right answer. Like, we have this extra time that AI has given us. Now the really strategic part is figuring out how you're going to use that time and how you're going to spend that time in a way that benefits your organization the most or benefits your customer the most.

42:40
Brian Piper
It may not just be putting out more content. It may be figuring out how you're going to reskill your people, how you're going to restructure your organization, how you're going to think about, like, what work is going to look like a year or two years down the road and start preparing for that now. Don't just take that, you know, that extra scale that AI gives you and just do more of what you're already doing. So I think, you know, we really are getting to, I mean, that goes right back to that discernment issue.

43:09
Brian Piper
You need to understand where the people are and how you're going to move your organization forward so that everybody benefits from this, that you're not just, you know, saving enough time that you can get rid of some headcount and still do the same thing that you were doing with fewer people? That's not the right answer. You know, how are you going to use all that expertise and knowledge and experience that you have to add the most value for your clients and your organization.

43:35
Matt Wilkinson
And I think you hit something really close to my heart there because you said, she said more isn't always better. And I mean, sometimes more is better. So I'm not going to say, but I'm gonna say more is never better, but sometimes less is more. And I think sometimes by saving that, you know, by being able to do certain tasks more quickly, you can actually look at doing some of the tasks that would have been too laborious to do in the past, bring those into the workflow so that actually you. That, you know, let's just say that the content creation process, if you're putting out, you know, X pieces a week, you still put Out X pieces a week. They're just better. There's more insight that. And so for me, sometimes it's not about scaling volume, it's about scaling. It should be.

44:17
Matt Wilkinson
And I really believe that we should do, because otherwise the world is just going to be full of AI slop. But we can really use AI to increase the way that we think, the way that we engage with the information that we have that the world has, and that's at our fingertips, thanks to the Web, and we can then just do better. And I think that's something that's just so such a wonderful opportunity for us all.

44:40
Daniel Nestle
I wonder if that's. If that's happening or how that's manifesting itself. Because, okay, first of all, this whole myth about time, I don't get it. I've become busier and busier. I've had more and more work since AI. Now, of course, I know that's because I keep thinking of new things to do, and one thing begets another. Oh, I can accomplish this now with AI And I don't have, like, oh, suddenly I sit back and I'm like, all right, now I can just spend more time with walking the dogs. It's like, okay, now that's off the plate, now I can focus on something different or that opens up another door that now I have to go through. There are hidden consequences and results to shifting work or tasks to other beings, people, entities, AI, whatever it is.

45:39
Daniel Nestle
So suddenly, it's not like suddenly I'm freed up. That never happened, you know? But then I realize a lot of people don't think that way, right? A lot of people, they don't. A lot of folks. And probably, you know, and I'm not. I'm not making judgments here. I'm saying maybe. And this goes back to something I saw, I think on Nate B. Jones, about, you know, the why AI adoption has failed in enterprise. You have a sliver of the population, 10, 20%, who are just, like, running. They're gonna run like us. They're gonna run with it like, oh, my gosh, I could do this now. What if I could do this and have this curiosity and, oh, that means, oh, shit, if I can do this on a cloud project, maybe I can jump over to Claude Code and make it different.

46:28
Daniel Nestle
Or, oh, geez, if I could do it on Claude Code, maybe I can build a website with design and figure this out. Or maybe I. Sorry, Jim McLeod, I can go and do, like, kind of look, you know, I can do animated gif. Now, whatever it is, right. It just kind of compiles and the work does not stop. But that's a small percentage. A lot of people are just checking the boxes. You know, they want to get through their day, they want to accomplish a task, do their job well, you know, do a good job, but they want to go home. You know, they want to spend time the way that they've, they're accustomed to spending time. And it doesn't give them the warm and fuzzies to like, discover, oh my gosh, I now can build an app for this.

47:06
Daniel Nestle
Like, that doesn't have any impact on these people whatsoever. And that's good, that's fine, we need that. But it's creating this massive gap. And how can organizations understand this, you know, when they're being told everybody's got to get on the AI train? I don't know, what are you guys seeing in this? Because I, I think that, like, it's failing. It's definitely failing on the enterprise level, you know, but we're here to solve that in some ways. So how are you, what are you seeing and how are you solving that problem?

47:37
Brian Piper
Yeah, I think, you know, the problem that most enterprises have is they're still stuck on the tools, they're still stuck on measuring usage. They're not stuck. They're not focused enough on building a community and focusing on the change management part that creates that mind shift that we've been talking about. You know, when you have all sorts of individuals within an organization working in their own silos, working on their own projects, and you haven't set up conventions for knowledge sharing for, you know, like, ideas around tools, and you haven't set up these, like, communities of practice and these ability for people to fail in their job and it'd be okay. You know, you haven't set up that, you know, that culture of learning where everyone is looking for, like, what are the opportunities and what could we see next?

48:33
Brian Piper
You know, instead of, you know, here's a new tool that you can use, here's some really bad training that you can take about how to prompt it and go out and do your job, you know, and we saw that in the Stanford research that came out about, you know, like, 95% of organizations that were integrating AI have not seen any ROI out of it. That's from poor implementation and poor planning and not treating it as a change management project and just treating it as a technology integration project.

49:04
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, Microsoft had a similar thing where I think it was like 100% or 90, some 90 high 90s percent of people in cross organizations were trained. 80% Or more stop using it after three weeks.

49:21
Matt Wilkinson
Right.

49:21
Daniel Nestle
Which follows the path for so many other kinds of tech trainings. Right. Ridiculous. Like it's, I mean, that's a failure of titanic proportions and speaks to the fact that even the people who are responsible for training, who are for implementation, for rollouts, either they're the wrong people or they simply don't know what they're doing. Like they don't understand what the AI is. This is not every organization, but it's a big problem. Matt, you were going to say something?

49:53
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah, I think there's also the, there's also a big fear factor here. So even, you know, AI itself can be a little bit scary. And, and there are elements of AI that I definitely find scary, but we don't need touch on those. But I think one of the things that the overarching narrative of AI is going to, you know, AI is going to take your job. I think in many cases within enterprise, there are people that really do believe that. And so there is no incentive to work with the AI to teach the AI to take over the tasks that you're doing, because then the AI can take your job. So why are you training up your replacement? And I think that there's a big element maybe sort of subconsciously that people don't actually want to be training up their replacement.

50:45
Matt Wilkinson
And I don't think many organizations are not doing enough to counter that. It's not now, you know, now we've got these tools. We can do more with what we've got. It's, oh, we can save the bottom line. And so those organizations that are, you know, beholden to the stock markets and that are beholden to shareholders, they want to see quick returns. We've seen it with the likes of Meta or what, you know, one week they're telling everybody they're going to be measured by how much they're using AI. The next meet, that next week there's 8,000 redundancies or whatever. Like those things just make everybody just scared of using the tools.

51:23
Daniel Nestle
I think, you know, the timing of this is crazy. And as of like, we're recording this the end of May, and this is actually going to go up about the end of June. So we're not that far from like real time here. And just a couple days ago, my friend Chris G. Who was also a guest on the show and you guys need to meet him, by the way. So Chris G. Post has shared something about the walk back that's happening, the big walk back from the AI bros saying, well, you know, it's not going to replace everybody. You know, it's only 50%. It's not 50%. It's less than 50%. You know, like what does Sam Altman said? I'm just looking at Chris's post here and he said, Sam Altman just said I was pretty wrong.

52:10
Daniel Nestle
And Dara Amaday was like, he just walked back as 50% white collar wipeout. And you know, direct result of course bad implementation or bad rollouts. But also I think it's a failure in many ways to understand human nature because I'm such an expert in human nature. Like people are not linear. So you know what was true? Was it past performance does not indicate future success or something like, yes, if you look at the job description as it is, like today, yes, 80% of that job description will be taken or will be doable by AI. Does that mean you're going to be replaced? Not even remotely. But what it does mean is that change is important and evolution and maybe the job descriptions and the jobs themselves are wrong. Maybe we need new buckets. But it doesn't mean there's not work for you to do.

53:18
Daniel Nestle
And it doesn't mean that you're going to be replaced because guess what, there's going to be new things developing at the same time. You're going to improve your skills in certain ways. You're going to find different ways to learn. There's so much unpredictability or variability from the point A of now to the point B of six months, a year from now. Like it's impossible, so to say, oh yeah, AI is going to replace everybody. Okay, no, it's different than when. It's different than I think when the Industrial revolution replaced like handcrafted, like production. It's different than when the assembly line came and changed, you know, production methods all over the place. Because those jobs were one task. Our jobs are complex, Very complex. And they'll continue to get complex.

54:12
Daniel Nestle
I've been accused of being Pollyannish about this, but I don't think so because I'm me and this is my show. And I'm going to say what I want to say, but I don't know. I really think that we're missing the doom and gloom is just clickbait. It's not right, is my verdict.

54:31
Brian Piper
I think that's part of like Responsible and ethical AI integration instead of just integrating it as a knee jerk reaction because everybody's doing AI, we got to do AI. You really have to be thoughtful about what this is going to do to your people and you can't just do like off the shelf training. You have to really build awareness and you have to really be transparent about what your goals are with AI integration. I mean we're seeing organizations where they're trying to integrate AI and people are intentionally sabotaging the usefulness of the AI and they're putting out bad content and saying, oh well, it was because I'm using AI, it's not going to be as good because they are afraid of their jobs going away or they're not going to be able to work the same way that they've always worked.

55:23
Brian Piper
And that's a direct result of poor awareness and poor transparency from leadership about how this is actually going to help your job better and let you do more of the things you enjoy doing and let you think about like where do you want your career to go? Like where is your, what is your real path and what are all the opportunities that are available now that weren't available two years ago.

55:48
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah, we've just seen sort of the whole, sort of started to see the commencement speeches from the US which is not something we have over here. But it's always good watching them and seeing any of the, you know, any of the people from the tech companies give commencement speeches. As soon as anybody mentions AI, all of the graduates are booing. It really is, you know, it's really interesting to see that there is this real fear amongst the young that AI is going to steal their jobs and that there isn't going to be the, what, you know, the jobs to go into and there may not be jobs. The, the, the job market for graduates right now may not be very good and it's not great in the UK either.

56:30
Matt Wilkinson
But I don't know how much of that is down to AI and actually how much is that just down to the economy. And it's very easy to use AI as the scapegoat right now. I mean, I think a lot of organizations have used AI as a way to downsize anyway. You know, one way or another or at least as the excuse during, you know, during the 2008 financial crisis there were companies that didn't need to downsize because of the financial crisis, but they used it as an excuse to right size their organization because everybody, they could get away with the street. Was expecting it.

57:07
Brian Piper
Yeah. AI Whitewashing, right? That's what they're calling it. Yeah.

57:10
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. I mean, well, it's no joke that college kids. I'm sorry I called them kids. My daughter's 22. She's graduating from college in a couple of months. And I think she's gonna be fine because she's not here, she's not in the US she has some unique skills, but she's in Japan. It's a little bit different over there. And she is doing the right things, you know, to figure out where her next step is. A lot of what she's doing is based completely on networks, her own networking. Yeah. Which is something that a lot of college students either don't know about or don't have the capability because they don't have the networks in place. And we do whatever we can for our kids.

58:07
Daniel Nestle
I'm not saying that I'm getting her a job because that's totally not true, but I can make a couple introductions here and there that'll get her to different introductions because I have a great network in Japan. People owe me and they know me and that's the way it is. That's the way life is. It's always been that way. AI is not getting involved in that process. My daughter, though, had to change her entire plan for after graduation because the graduate program that she had intended to go to shut down. And it was one of the best programs in the world. It shut down just in time for her to not be able to apply. And it shut down because of multiple, kind of. It was a multivariate cause.

58:58
Daniel Nestle
But probably the, the most important thing is that people, kids are not going into the translation interpretation profession anymore because that is one of the areas that AI is. So it's so like, it's such a no brainer for, for companies to spend, who are spending money on translation localization. Like they're going to shift to AI as fast as possible because it's so much cheaper. So those poor kids, however. Right. That's only part of it. That, that university could have taken a different approach, could have rethought their curriculum, but instead they saw the declining numbers and somebody said, now we're going to cut it loose. That's it. There's no, there's no future in this. And they just cut 400 kids out of a master's degree, which would have been useful anyway. And you know, so I'm a Little bit about that.

59:59
Daniel Nestle
But that's a definite effect that's AI is having on these kids. You know, there's. But I think you're right, Matt. You know, it's not, in some ways it's a, the AI is being used as excuse. Brian said it's AI whitewashing. But the fact is that I think even on the corporate side and the hiring side, they're afraid, they're super scared they're going to hire. They would normally hire X number of entry level employees, but they're like, what are we going to do with these people? And there's no plan, there's no understanding. But they should hire these people not just for altruistic reasons like it makes sense as an investment to hire like inexperienced younger folks who are impressionable and who have this, you know, have 35 years of work ahead of them.

01:00:56
Daniel Nestle
You hire them in, you make the relationship with them, you train them and yeah, lifelong employment is not a thing anymore, but still like you get incredible long term value out of your employees if you treat them that way from the go. So I don't know, I think it's a good investment for companies that they're missing the boat and they're listening to their boards or listening to shareholders too much. Sorry, I went on too far.

01:01:18
Matt Wilkinson
I think people need to hire for curiosity these days, that's for sure. They really need to have people that are going to ask questions about why are we doing this? Could we do this another way with all those sorts of questions I think are really valuable. Just coming circling back to the jobs question that I do wonder if we're looking at this from maybe a Western perspective a little bit too much. I wonder if some of the, shall we say, some of the translation tasks, some of the copywriting tasks that used to be offshored, I wonder if those are going to be hit harder than maybe what we'll see in the US and the UK that I would worry about. And so that's something I think could be a real concern.

01:02:02
Matt Wilkinson
But I do think that ability to on top of discernment, the ability to ask good questions, those are key skills that I think students really need to be learning now. And I almost fear the most for that sort of cohort that were hit by the COVID pandemic and then get hit by graduating through a university system that was saying that AI was cheating and then go into, try to get into a workforce where AI adoption is starting to happen in the workforce but wasn't happening at university And I think that there's going to be a few years that could really struggle. Universities, I think, are quickly moving into the realization they need to teach AI skills. And as they do, I think those kids will come through much stronger and much better prepared.

01:02:57
Matt Wilkinson
So I think that we could just be in that awkward moment of a transition, and I just hope that governments do enough to really help that group succeed.

01:03:09
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I mean, Matt, you and your partner Jasmine are like, involved in that space. Like Jasmine's. It's called the prompt. Oh, geez. I love, I love the tool. But her prompting kind of teaching tool is an example of the kind of thing that I think universities.

01:03:31
Matt Wilkinson
Prompt arena.

01:03:31
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, the prompt arena. Thank you very much. Is that for public consumption, by the way?

01:03:37
Matt Wilkinson
I believe so. I'm not sure. I don't have the details to have.

01:03:40
Daniel Nestle
It is. If it is, tell me and I'll put it in the show notes. But the prompt arena is just kind of what I think were talking about a while ago when we said it's a different. Prompting is a different kind of thinking and writing, but it's still an important way of thinking and writing and to learn how to do that. And we said at the beginning, beyond the prompt. Yeah, we don't have to worry about prompting so much. Sure. But you still need to understand how to prompt. I'm sorry. And it's such a great exercise to start to think about, well, how do I instruct something, how do I think logically, how do I like, you know, nest instructions and, well, why is something going wrong? Just in my own natural language, why am I not being understood?

01:04:25
Daniel Nestle
These are important questions to ask yourself. And prompting helps you get there. I know. Brian, did you. You looked like you had something to say about the kids getting jobs or.

01:04:35
Brian Piper
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've got three kids in college right now and a lot of concerns from them about, like what? You know, I mean, there's still a couple of them are still like two years from graduating. And what should I major in? What jobs are going to be out there? Is my field still going to be relevant? I mean, we talked about, you know, Matt mentioned the translation challenges, but if you look at like customer service, I mean, that's all been outsourced for so long and AI is so good at doing, you know, 90% of that.

01:05:06
Brian Piper
And I think universities are really going to have to start thinking critically about, you know, how they do accreditation, how they approve programs, how they allow for change within the organizations, you know, tenured Professors don't want to change the way that they've been teaching, but everybody's going to have to change the way they teach. You know, it's gonna, it's going to come down to, you knowledge transfer is not going to be a differentiator anymore. You're going to have to look at outcomes, you're going to have to look at experience that you can get through partnerships with organizations and industries. You know, it can't just be. You get a credential when you graduate, you know, and that guarantees you a job because it just, it doesn't anymore. So we've really got to stop thinking about, you know, what do we want students to learn?

01:06:01
Brian Piper
And we have to start thinking about who do we want students to become. Right. And try to create a culture and a community within that organization that can support the entire network and the entire group of, you know, matriculated students and alumni together as a community.

01:06:23
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. That's brilliant. I mean, I kind of feel like there has to be a whole new, I mean there's gotta be a lot of new stuff, but a new maybe track, curriculum, track in within either business or engineering or maybe even liberal. It doesn't matter where the student is identifying or understanding that they want to be a one person operation from the go. The whole corporate. I want to join a company and get. That's not even on their radar, right? So some schools, like schools of entrepreneurship, et cetera, make sense here. But where from go? Like their curriculum consists of, here's a big problem, right? Here's your budget, figure it out and show me your work. And you learn that way how to kind of create your own ecosystem of whether it's a combination, it doesn't have to be AI, right?

01:07:27
Daniel Nestle
But just the things that you do, including AI tools, whatever. If AI is the way to go that way. But really, how do you go and build yourself not only something that's going to work and achieve what you're supposed to achieve, but it's almost like a suit of armor that's going to be defensive and protective enough and take into account everything that's going to come at you or be malleable. Or maybe armor is the wrong word. Maybe it has to be leather armor that's like, it's flexible. You have to be able to kind of move into the future. I don't know what the answer is, but I think that students who are thinking in those terms need to have a road to follow. They need to have a way to get there. And conventional education isn't it right now, but it could be.

01:08:15
Daniel Nestle
It really could be. So, okay, we've been talking for a long time and I can and I have in the past talked with you guys for hours and hours. We can't do that today, sadly. So to kind of bring us home here. All right. We are all reformed corporate people. Corporate organizational. We are in our nth year of doing things on our own. You know, a couple years for me, a year or so for Brian. Matt, I don't know. How long have you had driven?

01:08:56
Matt Wilkinson
7 And a half now.

01:08:58
Daniel Nestle
Okay, so, Matt, you're the kind of old hand here, but still, thanks. But I mean, that also means that you know more about this stuff because you know what it takes to build a business. The fact is, though, that we're on our own now. We are soloists or solopreneurs or small company entrepreneurs. I have business partners. I'm not necessarily a solopreneur anymore for. For Lilypath, but, you know, I don't feel lonely. Like, I never feel lonely anymore. Like, when I want to be by myself, I can, but like, I look at my calendar, I'm talking to people all the time, going to conferences, I'm going out there. Do you guys feel lonely? Do you ever feel like. Do you feel like this is a journey of. For the hermit?

01:09:42
Matt Wilkinson
No, no. I think that there's. I think there may be moments, but I think most of the time it's more. I kind of just wish I had more ways to delegate stuff. Oh, yeah, Some of that's AI, some of that isn't. But I think that with the gifts of AI kind of have increased the intensity of work. And sometimes you kind of just go, you know what? I'm working so well with my AI partners and all the AI stuff that's going on, if I take myself out of the loop, that doesn't really. That, you know, I can't move things on in the same way. And there's a lot that I can leave going. There's a lot that I can automate and do, but there's a lot of stuff that I really can't. And so, yeah, I think it's the intensity and actually it's that.

01:10:29
Matt Wilkinson
That's the bit that I. I think the biggest miss. But do I feel lonely? No. I mean, I got friends like you guys. I just wish that the time zone difference was less.

01:10:37
Daniel Nestle
Oh, yeah, that's your problem.

01:10:40
Matt Wilkinson
That's my problem.

01:10:41
Daniel Nestle
Majority rules here against the two of us in the East Coast.

01:10:44
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah.

01:10:45
Daniel Nestle
Brian, you're Almost as new to this experience as I've got maybe a year on you on the solopreneur stuff. But you're, I think, one of the most social, gregarious, kind of like you're always traveling and out there. So I know the answer to the question is that you're not lonely.

01:11:03
Matt Wilkinson
But.

01:11:06
Daniel Nestle
Is the loneliness thing a myth, do you think, or how are you feeling about that?

01:11:10
Brian Piper
Yeah, I mean, I felt lonelier working at an organization than I did now that I'm on my own. And I don't know, I mean, I think part of that is in an organization you may have people that you can reach out to with questions, but sometimes they may not be like the experts that you were hoping to be able to reach out to get those answers. Whereas I haven't like, you know, in the last year that I've been doing this, I haven't run into problem where I didn't know somebody in my network who was an expert at solving that problem that I could just reach out to and connect with.

01:11:50
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

01:11:51
Brian Piper
And I didn't feel like I was obligated to go, you know, ask my boss or my manager or whoever, you know, within my team what the best way to do this would be. Now I can just go get input and feedback from people and then make that decision on my own. And you know, I think a lot of that is from, you know, years of kind of building that network and growing those connections with people. That comes from, you know, a lot of the most loneliness that I feel is sometimes when I'm like traveling and doing a lot of conferences and stuff like that, and you're just like inundated with people all day and then you go back to your hotel room and. But that's kind of a loneliness that I welcome.

01:12:34
Brian Piper
At the end of a long day, I'm like, oh, okay, now I can just like unwind and relax. But. And yeah, I, I feel more connected with people now than I did when I was at a full time job.

01:12:43
Matt Wilkinson
Yeah.

01:12:44
Daniel Nestle
And, and that kind of loneliness or that kind of solitude, let's call it, because I don't think it's exactly loneliness, but that kind of solitude is not unique to being, having your own business. I mean, that's just part when I've traveled. If you travel for business ever, like, that's the way it is. I don't know. I grief. Of course I agree with both you guys, but I think that there's a confusion about being alone and being lonely. And I know the same as you. I can pick up and just get on a chat or just talk to somebody anytime I want. It's not always the same as being in person, but then again, I will be in person with people. Yeah, I will see you guys. You know, I see you more often than I see most of my relatives.

01:13:28
Daniel Nestle
That's the way it is. And it's just a couple times a year. But like, I will catch up with you. You have to build these communities or be part of these communities. And then there are times where I'm just so deep and dark in the dark weeds of work or building something that just, I'm in the zone. Days, weeks, months will go by. Loneliness does not factor in because I'm on a mission, right? So like then, you know, then I'll surface for air. I'll go, shit, I wonder if anybody thinks I'm still al, you know? And usually when I start to think that way, I'll start getting texts from people. It's like, hey, haven't seen you around in a while. What's going on? So it's good to know that people know and care about you. But yeah, loneliness doesn't factor in.

01:14:12
Daniel Nestle
All right, look, this has been. And I knew it would be just a killer conversation. I love talking to you guys. So you know Matt. Dr. Matt Wilkinson. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Sorry, Dr. Matt Wilkinson, PhD, MBA and more. You can be found at. Let me get this right. Striven.com so your company Striven. Find Matt Wilkinson on Striven.com that's with two N's at the end. S T-R I V E N N dot com. Find him on LinkedIn or drmatwilkinson. AI a brand new website.

01:14:50
Daniel Nestle
Brian is at BrianWPiper.com for his speaking and book his company, his new company is called AirFlowsolutions.com and it's not H vac, it's AIrFlowsolutions.com I'm sorry, Brian, I'm going to have to poke you about that for a while, but airflowsolutions.com, brianwpiper.com and mattisriven.com with two n's and drmat wilkinson AI also, both you guys are heavily involved on LinkedIn and I know that you're connected to me. And any listeners out there, please connect with Matt and Brian. Before we go, any announcements, anything coming up that our listeners need to know about Matt?

01:15:28
Matt Wilkinson
Oh, you set me up for that one. Yeah, I've got a book Coming out soon. It's called the Buyer in the Loop and hopefully coming out in the next month or so. So I will.

01:15:39
Daniel Nestle
What's it about, Matt?

01:15:40
Matt Wilkinson
Letting you guys know.

01:15:41
Daniel Nestle
Sorry, what's your book about, Matt? The Buyer.

01:15:44
Matt Wilkinson
It's about a way to fight what I like to call organizational gravity. That, that phenomenon where you've gone out, you've understood your customer and then somewhere during the process, the gravity of the organization, the way that the organization does things, just brings all the decision making, all the messaging back into the organization and sort of erases that sort of memory of the customer. And I think I've got a solution or at least one way of fixing that involves building grounded synthetic customers. Customers and using AI to sort of build, you know, representations of your customers. So it's a little bit about AI, but it's not an AI book, it's a marketing book.

01:16:26
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Anybody wants to really get into synthetic customers and what you can do with them, Matt is the man. I mean, the stuff you're doing is not only is it incredible, it's fun, it's interesting, it's fun. You keep, you know, it is results oriented and effective from everything that I've seen. So, you know, congrats on the upcoming week, Matt. It's fantastic news. Brian, what are you up to? Anything where you know, what's coming up for you or what should people do, you know, that wish people paying attention to you in your world.

01:17:00
Brian Piper
Yeah, lots of speaking gigs and workshops coming up. Always, you know, looking for new businesses, looking to figure out AI integration and you know, lots of different ways to start automating the data analysis process. So that's one of the new things that I'm working on is really coming up with workflows so that you don't have to spend your days looking at dashboards and analytics and you can just get an email with all your insights for the week in it. So yeah.

01:17:30
Daniel Nestle
Oh, awesome. And I should add, of course, Brian and you did bring this up during the show. You know, you were the one person to bring up governance and ethics and all that stuff. All three of us have, I would say, impeccable approaches to ethics. But Brian is probably the most codified of the three of us because that's what he does with universities and working from that space. So any questions about governance, ethics, AI boards, AI councils, et cetera, Brian's always my first person to talk to. But implementation across organizations, I mean, you've been so helpful to me and I think you'll be helpful to anybody who reaches out to you.

01:18:09
Daniel Nestle
I think the only thing left for me to say really is we talked about AI and this is all about like, we are AI guys and we're AI geeks and we're marketing geeks and comms geeks and all that stuff. But this is the human sandwich, right? I mean, you can't do this stuff without people. And this is where value is. This is where the magic happens. This is where that kind of ether between the stuff is the real stuff. And it's because of conversations like this, because of understanding or kind of talking with you guys all the time, that I am able to really see new ways to talk to my AI or to deal with people even who are working with AI or in my professional domain.

01:19:01
Daniel Nestle
I want to thank you both for A being here on the show, but b, also just kind of dealing with me for a couple years. It's been, it's been an adventure and you deserve medals.

01:19:13
Brian Piper
You know, that's been fantastic, Dan. And that's, you know, that's the way that we learn AI the best and get the most out of it is by doing it together.

01:19:21
Daniel Nestle
Yep. Matt, Brian, it's been.

01:19:24
Matt Wilkinson
Been an absolute pleasure. And yeah, thank you for inviting two friends on the. On the first chat.

01:19:30
Daniel Nestle
It's been a pleasure for me and thanks so much for being on the show. We'll catch you again. You guys are gonna have to both come on again, if not together solo for sure. So thanks and I'll see you soon. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review view. Five stars would be preferred. It's your call. Have ideas for future guests Want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator. Sam.