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

Michael Hartmann Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOps.com powered by all the mobile pros out there today. I am your well, first, I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my partners in crime, Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo.

Naomi How's it going? Mike It's going. It's going. It's been a while.

Last time we chatted, I think, was the three of me. Those last time I chatted anyways. Michael Hartmann Could have been. Mike I want to say that it's also true for me.

Poor, poor Hartman just running solo. It's so we're actually just going to shoot a whole entire new intro for the show because it's really just like instead of the three of us, it should just be Hartman. We'll just cut our two voices out there. Michael Hartmann Yeah, it's all good.

It's all good. You guys know, like I just stopped like trying to work around your schedules because it's just too too hard. Right now. No, no, no shade.

Like, it's all good. Mike 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. Michael Hartmann Yeah, it's the worst.

Oh, yeah. So I think when we started, we talked about getting on, you know, I always enjoy these like it's kind of it is now, let's see, last weather kind of in the last week or so of June twenty twenty six. It's weird that I have to say the year these days. I know.

But it's kind of a mid-year thing and just kind of see where things are, like almost like a mini state of the moment. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm a pro 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 want to start? Should we start with like, is the world just gone crazy?

Naomi Like, yeah, I mean. Do you think that I 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. Mike Rizzo 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 A.

I. assessment benchmark sort of study. And it's coming together now. No surprise, we we had a whole bunch of bots fill out the forum, so we had to go.

Michael Hartmann Oh no. Crazy. Mike Rizzo Yeah. Right.

We had to go scrape out the data to make sure we were just looking at what we believe is like truly valid inputs. And there was there was a question in there around like hiring and head count 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 in that study, A.I.

has not made things, you know, much easier necessarily in terms of like advocating for head count or anything like that. They they certainly are leveraging it to do what we heard for many, many years, which was like do more with less. But I think just just to lend 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. Michael Hartmann Do you think it'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. Mike Rizzo Yeah, fair, fair, fair question. I think it's harder because it feels I think it's it's a mix of two things.

If we go back in time and we look at like the MarTech landscape and the explosion of marketing automation. Right. And we remember that now, at least for those of us that have been around long enough to have seen most of it. 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 I think there's elements of that that are present today in this 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's 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, yeah, I can just do it for you. Michael Hartmann It's kind of like the paradox of marketing automation is that it's not truly automated. It still requires achievement.

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 the question we had, was it probably a year ago about is marketing, is marketing ops actually marketing? And I think that was I can't remember if I got the phrasing right. Mike Rizzo But I posted I was like marketing ops isn't marketing thoughts.

That was the whole post. Michael Hartmann Yeah. And and I and I I think I think that I think it's too early. It's still a little too early to tell.

But I think I think I'm with you, Mike, because I think it feels like. There was a lot of like 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 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 you might.

I think it feels like it's generally been a net negative in two 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 A.

I. Like, do I actually believe that's true in all the cases? No, maybe not even half of them. But like there's some.

But I do think that like the people are making those decisions probably do believe to some degree like A.I.'s can replace some of this stuff. But I think where I'm starting to land is that all these A.

I. tool are tools are tools. Right. And how we use them is like we're still figuring out.

Which one is the right hammer for the right thing and which one is the right wrench for it? 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 A.I.

But like, it's really unclear, like what what things could happen. And I think about like how how are the what are the use cases you get started out with? Oh, we can develop content and we can take content and create pieces we can use across different channels. That pretty quickly was pretty standard.

But then you got things like, OK, what can I do to automate things? What can I do to clean our data? What can I do to like do lead scoring or like and then like and there's orchestration stuff. What I think is going to happen, like the whole MarTech landscape, I think it's going to get blown up.

Then I really don't know what's going to happen. Naomi 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 going to be pretty similar. Right. But I think about just how fast things are changing and I'm like, OK, my daughter, she's five this year when she's 18 or when she's 28. Like, what is the world going to 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. Michael Hartmann Right. Will university even be a thing?

Naomi Yeah. Like most the idea of like you don't need to learn facts anymore when you can just look it up. It's more going to be about like your judgment, your interpersonal skills. You're like, you know, are people going to 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 text to each other?

I have no idea. 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? We don't know what that future is going to look like.

Yeah. Right. Michael Hartmann Yeah. Naomi This is a whole other kind of forms of this.

Like so for everyone listening, we had no idea what we're going to talk about on this podcast. So we're just kind of winging it. Yeah. Mike Rizzo 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 you know, you may have some of these thoughts and and, you know, we're talking about it today. So, yeah. Come talk to us if you ever want to talk about it. Yeah.

Yeah. Michael Hartmann Well, it's funny. So I have I have kids who are older than either of you in college, 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.

Yeah. Uncertainty and all that. But it was interesting, my oldest history buff, he and I were talking, he's like he's sort of describing the world. I think it was Rockefeller, like one of the whatever you call the tycoons from the like late 1800s who lived long enough to go see like essentially like Civil War, the U.

S. Civil War, steam engines, trains coming, automobiles, airplanes that within a few years were used in a war. Right. To rock like the amount of stuff.

And then he's like, and dad, you like I grew up in an age where like we didn't have like cell phone. 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.

Naomi Yeah. Yeah. Michael Hartmann 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 in the turn of the last century time frame, like early 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 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 started to understand, oh, I could do this with AI, something changes. Naomi 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, 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? 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? Michael Hartmann Yeah, I don't know. Naomi Right? Mike Rizzo Yeah, no, it's a the difference of technology before it was like always making something for humans in a lot of ways it was 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 car from from horse and buggy to cars like a significant shift. But but, you know, the innovation of of industrial revolution and technology there was about sort of momentum and energy and machinery, all making things like, you know, going from place A to place B or, you know, doing X to Y faster and reducing labor. And there were labor markets that were shifted.

And as as a lot of, you know, I'm not a economist, you know, student. I don't I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of the history of how technology has impacted the job market before. But I, you know, yeah, technology has always impacted the job market in some way. And from from the little nuggets that I've pulled out from some of the people talking out there, you know, it it also creates new opportunities in new new ways, too.

And so, you know, to echo a bit of what you're saying, Hartman, like I 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 two kids, for those of you who don't know, I've got an eight year old and your six year old. And and yeah, I genuinely have no idea what to expect for their for their horizon in front of them.

And if you if you ever spent, I don't know if we talked about this the last time the three of us were on or not, but if for those of you watching and listening, if you ever spend a moment and you're that got that curiosity bug and you kind of look at what is called like the post scarcity economy, like the concept of this. It's it's a fascinating. The exploration of a topic and and the idea, of course, is that if you 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, while 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, you know, a head of cabbage is grown at the farm or 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. 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. Naomi Right. Mike Rizzo 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, 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, 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.

You know. Naomi Do you think that in that situation, there would be nobody, though, that'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.

Michael Hartmann I delivered newspapers when I was a teenager. Naomi Exactly. But there's still there. It just those things changed.

Right. And that kind of goes back to what I was saying about like the changes were. Michael Hartmann How we did things is more like biomechanical replacement as opposed to cognitive versus who's doing the things right. Naomi 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 lots of thoughts on this. Michael Hartmann No, I mean, this could easily go down this whole rabbit hole of like. Whatever preceded the abacus and the abacus, eventually you had some sort of calculator and then you had spreadsheets and like it's like. So there are things that I think I think there are other things like that that are probably maybe a better analogy to the cognitive impacts.

Like, I mean, that's my fear. Like you put out, Amy, is that like I think a lot of people and I know you're kind of. Dissing on LinkedIn earlier to a little bit about how much AI sloth there is, but I think a lot of people have outsourced their their thinking. Because of AI, like completely, and I think 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 may be able to make connections again.

And like, I don't know that we've got I don't know that we've got a generation or two of people who've got those skills. Naomi You know, I mean, do you remember going to the library and doing your own research and going to like site searches and. Michael Hartmann Yeah, card catalog, microfiche, yeah. Naomi Yeah, some people listening are googling like, what is microfiche?

Michael Hartmann If you want to know how it's spelled, it's a yeah, yeah, M-I-C-R-O-F-I-C-H-E. Mike Rizzo You have to wait till the end of the episode. Michael Hartmann 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 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 to be trying to record something off the radio because you didn't know what 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 two buttons. Right. Naomi And for once, you make another copy where you'd like cut out all of the, you know, extraneous stuff you didn't want. Michael Hartmann Yeah.

Like, I mean, like that's none of that exists. Like when you bring you like TV, like TV Guide, like, like you don't need it now because like back then, like we used to I still remember we had another couple friend before I had kids. He like our thing was every Sunday we'd get together at one of our houses. We 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. Mike Rizzo Yeah. Michael Hartmann I feel that now. Mike Rizzo Yep.

It's all instant gratification these days. My kids actually really enjoy commercials because they never see them. They were on like some sort of terrestrial TV like channel and they're like, oh, commercial came on. Dad, don't skip it.

I want to see it. No, now you're going to want to 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.

It's almost like, oh, so funny. So weird to say that. Michael Hartmann Yeah. Well, I will tell you, I think I wish I had seen it earlier, but for you and me too, and anybody else who has kids who are even at the teenage age book, The Anxious Generation.

This whole idea, like how people that and 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 percent, 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've 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. Mike Rizzo 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. Michael Hartmann So that's steps, right? It's a word count. Mike Rizzo Yeah.

She's got a word count. She's six. So almost six. 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 this idea of like what it's done currently, you know, 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 three, four or five 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 is dated now. Dated in the world of A.I., that is back to a whopping May 25th.

So just about a month ago from this recording date. Yeah, super, super data. No longer is no longer relevant. It's not relevant anymore, obviously.

But the article I'm referencing is NVIDIA. It's it's it's it's actually Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, who who says that CEOs who are blaming A.I. for layoffs are giving a, quote, lazy and, quote, excuse.

And so he he really hammered home this point where if I if I could quote it here, it says, I think the narrative that connects A.I. to job loss for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy. And, quote, and then he goes on to say, A.

I. has just arrived. How it is possible they're already. How is it possible they're already losing jobs?

And and as you kind of unpack the rest of the statements and stuff like that, really, if I was to tell the art for you, it's like, obviously, those two sentences say a lot. But he's he's arguing that we're at the infancy of what A.I. 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 to you like blends together. It's all blurring together. But really, it scratches at this idea that like we we've sort of what is it called, like jumped the shark on this.

Yeah. And people are realizing that, hey, I might have made companies in theory are realizing we might have made a mistake here and we've kind of jumped too far ahead. If I could if I could illustrate it with a practical example of. Even touching back on this A.

I. 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 up the form. Michael Hartmann Did you capture email address? Mike Rizzo We did.

Yeah. Michael Hartmann Yeah. Mike Rizzo So for those that left the email address, yes. Michael Hartmann Yeah.

OK, so it was an optional thing. Yep. Yep. Mike Rizzo Yeah.

Michael Hartmann That would have been that to me, that was probably the first clue. But other than that, I'm. I'm waiting to hear. And we have a guess.

Let's put it on the A.I. figured it out. Naomi Well, the bots that we have on our board, like it just seems to complete.

If that makes sense. Like, I don't know. Mike Rizzo Yeah. Does the was it in the ashes?

So here's the question, I guess. Differently, do you think the A.I. figured it out or do you think the humans figured it out?

Humans. Humans. Michael Hartmann Yeah. Mike Rizzo 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 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. 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 end 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. I was like, that's not our database.

Yeah, that's not us. I would love to have it that's 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 of minutes apart from each other. They all had CEO titles. All of those CEO titles, most of them, 99 percent of them were Gmail addresses.

Like, oh, yeah, you're right. The CEO came in and just like was like, yeah, I'm going to use my personal email address. Naomi Maybe they're just auto filling their form. You never know, Michael.

Michael Hartmann Yeah, they're using their home computer. Mike Rizzo Maybe. Michael Hartmann Well, it's so it's it's it's funny because I assumed it was human caught because so I'm I would be proud about this, but I'm a big fan of a YouTube channel. YouTube guy who is a guy named Rick Beato is a music guy.

And he talks all the time. He has kids who are teenagers and there's like a lot of. Michael Hartmann And he talks all the time. He has kids who are teenagers and there's 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 it what's AI generated, at least right now. Right. And so I think there's, 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. Mike Rizzo Yeah.

Yeah, I know there's there's, you know, I don't know if it's that, you know, when I think about 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, you know, 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 same 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 have 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 three seconds to figure out that was not the right data set 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, human has to do that.

Right. And so anyway, it's, I don't know. I think, 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 five 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, 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 super human. Michael Hartmann 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, for weeks, simply because I don't have time. And 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, it's good, but it's not, it's not, like, it's not something that's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it'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. Mike Rizzo Yeah, I think so too. I think we, you know, 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 of 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 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 a community a couple weeks back, I was like, does anybody get into 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. 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.

Naomi Sorry, do you feel less unsure? Like almost like you need something to sanity check you? Mike Rizzo I've, to be fair, if you look at my disc profile, I've always wanted sanity checks. I'm not a decisive person.

Naomi 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? Mike Rizzo 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? 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? Like, yeah, you know, why talk about that if it doesn't actually bring any value to my members of my community, right?

Like, 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. I think there's a lot of people that just use it to create noise.

Michael Hartmann It feels like it wasn't that long ago where all of my LinkedIn feed was filled with people telling us all those great ways to prompt, you know, chat to your quad or whatever. Those have like disappeared. They quietly just... Mike Rizzo They have.

I've seen them make their way into my feed on Instagram with like, here's the set of instructions that you should use or whatever. Yeah. Michael Hartmann Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think I saw more on Instagram, but like there were so many. Mike Rizzo Yeah. Michael Hartmann But they've like, there's very few now. Mike Rizzo Yeah, I agree.

I will say that I actually, I grabbed one of them 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 five or six or seven 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 going to 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.

Michael Hartmann Yeah. I mean, I started doing some of those things within like chats or whatever, you know, directly as opposed to like an overarching set of directions because I was like, it was sensing like, oh, it's agreeing with me. Tell me what I want to hear. You know, sometimes making stuff up and like basically I've told it like, like be really direct and critical.

Mike Rizzo So. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.

I know we're at time. Naomi's got to jump. I got to jump too. Michael Hartmann All right.

Well, as always. Mike Rizzo Don't listen. Thanks. Michael Hartmann Yeah.

Always fun. Naomi, 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. Mike Rizzo I have, I hear my birds chirping too, but now the trash truck's driving.

Michael Hartmann I'm like, 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 want to, want to jump in and on the conversation or go on a tangent with us and, 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 until next time.

Bye everybody. Bye.