Speaker 1 | 00:00
Welcome back to the deep dive. We have a heavy stack today. And I mean that literally and figuratively.
Speaker 2 | 00:07
It's an existential stack, isn't it?
Speaker 1 | 00:09
It really is. We've been combing through reports, market analysis, data from Reuters, data from Pew, and a whole host of industry commentary that, well, it basically puts the entire business model of the modern knowledge worker on trial.
Speaker 2 | 00:24
That's really the only way to describe it. It's an existential.
Speaker 1 | 00:26
Moment. It feels that way. We are specifically looking at this through the lens of, say, the boutique consultant, the niche expert. The advisor. The Exactly.
Speaker 2 | 00:35
People whose product is their brain.
Speaker 1 | 00:38
Their product is their brain. And if you just look at the surface level, just scroll through LinkedIn or Twitter right now, the mood in the industry feels different. I don't know, It's a total party.
Speaker 2 | 00:47
Electric. It's a party. It really is. Everyone is popping champagne.
Speaker 1 | 00:51
Yeah. It feels like a productivity golden age. You talk to consultants, you talk to founders, and they're all saying the same thing. I have finally cloned myself.
Speaker 2 | 00:59
Right. I'm everywhere.
Speaker 1 | 01:00
They are everywhere. They're using AI to write faster. They're on LinkedIn five times a week. They have a newsletter. They're on Twitter. They're churning out these white papers. The bottleneck used to be, I just don't have time to write.- And the general consensus is, well, that bottleneck is gone. You can now be everywhere at trap.
Speaker 2 | 01:18
Once. And that feeling, that golden age sensation you're describing.
Yeah. That is the alarm.
Speaker 1 | 01:24
See, that's quite a way to start. I mean, we haven't even been talking for two minutes and you're already pulling the fire.
Speaker 2 | 01:29
Because the building is on fire and everyone is inside admiring the warmth. Look. If you are sitting there feeling relieved because you can finally be everywhere with half the effort, I have some very bad news. OK. You are probably about to lose your pricing power. You are probably about to lose your margin. And if you aren't really careful, you might lose your business entirely.
Speaker 1 | 01:51
Okay, hold on. We need to unpack that immediately. Because that sounds like you were just raining on the parade of every solo consultant who is just trying to, you know, Survive 2024. Efficiency is supposed to be the goal, right? How can being efficient possibly be bad for business?
Speaker 2 | 02:09
Because we are confusing efficiency with effectiveness. And in the knowledge economy, I mean, those are two very different metrics. They aren't even on the same axis. Explain that. Efficiency is just how fast you can produce a unit of content. It's a factory metric. Effectiveness is whether anyone cares, whether it actually lands and makes a difference. And what we are actually seeing, and this is consistent across all the market analysis we have here, it's not a golden age of insight. Not at all. It's a crisis of Low effort sameness.
Speaker 1 | 02:39
Low effort sameness.
Speaker 2 | 02:40
We are drowning. We're in a sea of smooth, perfectly grammar checked hallucinations of competence.
So the thesis we need to wrestle today is simple, but it is it's pretty brutal. We'll hear it. If you are using AI to sound like a professional, you are training your clients to ignore you.
Speaker 1 | 02:56
To ignore you. That seems a little extreme.
Yeah. I mean, the standard advice, the advice I see on my feet every single morning is that if I'm not posting, I'm invisible.
You know, stay top of mind. Right. Consistency is key.
Speaker 2 | 03:07
And my argument, which is backed by this data, is that you can be posting five times a day and become even more invisible than if you posted nothing at all. How is that possible? It's the phenomenon of the invisible consultant. You're there physically. Your post is in the feed. The pixels are lighting up the screen, but it just slides right off the brain. There's no friction. It leaves no mark. We're going to talk about AI slot fatigue and height fatigue, but the core fight here isn't about getting likes anymore. That game is about margin.
Speaker 1 | 03:37
Over. So what's it about? It's.
Speaker 2 | 03:40
It's about your bank account. If a client can predict your next sentence because it sounds exactly like the statistical average of the Internet, why on earth would they ever pay a premium for your advice?
Speaker 1 | 03:51
So, okay. The stakes are purely financial. This isn't just some, you know, artistic integrity or writing with soul argument. We're not preserving a.
Speaker 2 | 03:59
Craft. The stakes are 100% financial. They're existential. Can a boutique firm survive if it is indistinguishable from a generic large language model? That's the entire no?
Speaker 1 | 04:08
Question. And if the answer is.
Speaker 2 | 04:10
Then you have a problem. If I can prompt ChatGPT to give me the same advice you charge $10,000 a month for, Your retainer is gone. It just evaporated into the.
Speaker 1 | 04:21
Cloud. All right. That sets the stage pretty clearly. We're going to dive deep into this. We have to diagnose exactly what is happening in the market. Look at the data on trust because you're right. The numbers are scary.
And then, and this is crucial, we need to figure out the cure. Right. We have this concept of specificity as the currency of trust to get to and a very specific 14-day Absolutely.
Speaker 2 | 04:42
Experiment. We do. And we need to get practical because the theory is completely useless if you don't change how be right tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1 | 04:49
So let's start with the diagnosis. We have these two terms floating around in the source material: AI height fatigue and AI slop fatigue.- I feel like I know what hype fatigue is. I am so tired of 10 prompts to master chat GPT threads.
So tired of it. I'm tired of being told I'm going to be replaced by a prompt engineer.
Speaker 2 | 05:10
Right. And that's the surface irritation. That's just the noise. Hype fatigue is it's just boredom with the meta conversation. People are tired of hearing about the tools. They're tired of the whole gold rush energy where everyone is selling shovels. But slop fatigue is That's different. How so? Slap fatigue is much more dangerous because it's subconscious. It's insidious.
Speaker 1 | 05:31
Okay. So define slop for us in this context. Because when I hear that word, I think of pig farming.
Speaker 2 | 05:37
That's actually the perfect imagery. Keep that in your head. Slop is the term emerging for content that reads smooth but says absolutely nothing. It's the linguistic equivalent of highly processed food. It fills you up, but there's zero nutrition. It's that LinkedIn post that starts with, "In today's fast-paced digital landscape, leadership is more important than ever.".
Speaker 1 | 06:00
Ouch. I feel personally attacked.
Now... Now a machine is writing it.
Speaker 2 | 06:21
At an industrial scale. The source defines slop as an existential threat to expertise because it completely destroys the signal to noise ratio. When the feed fills with these smooth nothings, readers don't just scroll past. They start strictly and I mean strictly rationing their attention. They stop trusting the platform itself.
Speaker 1 | 06:41
That's a really interesting distinction. So slop isn't necessarily bad text. It's not full of typos and broken grammar. In fact, it's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2 | 06:50
Exactly. It's too perfect. It's perfectly average. It's the uncanny valley of text.
Speaker 1 | 06:54
The uncanny valley of text. I like.
Speaker 2 | 06:56
That. It has the perfect cadence. It uses words like tapestry and delve and foster in exactly the right predictable places. And the reason it's so dangerous is that it mimics competence. It mimics the structure of a thought leader. It's got the bullet points. It's got the emojis. It's got the little hook at the top. But there is no human will behind it. There's no intent. There's no risk.
Speaker 1 | 07:17
But let me play devil's advocate for a second here. This is the red team perspective. Is slop really that bad for the person who's posting it?
I mean, maybe this is all just a phase. You know, people used to hate Photoshop. That model's skin is too smooth. And now we just accept retouched photos as the baseline. Maybe we just get used to AI writing and it becomes the new baseline.
Yeah. Good enough is still Well, it's still good enough, isn't it? Keeps you top of mind. It keeps the algorithm happy.
Speaker 2 | 07:45
That is the strongest red team argument. And I hear it all the time. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. And honestly, yeah, it is the fastest way to kill a boutique business. OK, if you are selling a commodity, if you are selling cheap SEO articles or if you're selling volume or if you're a news aggregator, then yes, good enough is fine. McDonald's is good enough.
Speaker 1 | 08:06
McDonald's makes a lot of money. They serve.
Speaker 2 | 08:08
Billions. They do a ton of money. But McDonald's is not a boutique consultant. You don't go to McDonald's for Custom nutritional advice or, you know, a bespoke dining experience. We are talking about high ticket experts here, people who sell judgment. And in that world, good enough signals commodity.
Speaker 1 | 08:28
So if you sound average.
Speaker 2 | 08:29
You are priced like a commodity. It's that simple. Slop isn't just bad writing. It is a signal of low stakes. It tells the reader, I didn't care enough about this idea to actually wrestle with it.
So I let the autocomplete finish my thoughts.
Speaker 1 | 08:43
So it's a signaling problem, a trust problem.
Speaker 2 | 08:46
It is a massive trust signal. If you have low stakes in your writing, the client assumes, and they're right to assume this, that you'll have low stakes in their business. If you automate your thinking in public, clients will assume you automate your thinking in private. And nobody, I mean, nobody pays premium rates for automated thinking. They pay for the struggle. They pay for the struggle. They pay for the specific hard-won solution that wasn't obvious.
Speaker 1 | 09:07
That hits hard. Nobody pays premium rates for automated thinking. Okay, so let's look at the data because you mentioned this isn't just a vibe or us being grumpy about bad LinkedIn posts. We have reports here from the Reuters Institute and the Pew Research Center. What are the numbers actually telling us?
Speaker 2 | 09:27
The numbers confirm that the trust cliff is real and we're already falling off it. Reuters flagged something very specific about LinkedIn. They noted that the longer posts, you know, the thought leadership essays, the stuff that used to signal I am an expert, are now becoming heavily AI generated.
Speaker 1 | 09:44
And hard to detect. That's the scary part. It's not like the early days where the bat would just glitch out halfway through or start talking about being a large language model.
Speaker 2 | 09:52
Hard to detect technically, yes. If you run it through a detector, it's a coin toss. It's 50-50. But Pew's data shows something fascinating about human psychology. Which is? The public has low confidence in their ability to spot AI. They know they can't tell for.
Speaker 1 | 10:05
Sure. Okay, so they can't tell. Doesn't that actually help the slop riders? If I can't be sure it's a robot, maybe I'll give it the benefit of the.
Speaker 2 | 10:13
Doubt. No, it completely destroys them because that lack of confidence doesn't lead to acceptance. It doesn't mean they say, well, I guess I'll just read everything. It leads to what the researchers call baseline suspicion.
Speaker 1 | 10:25
That's interesting. So it's not that I look at a single post and say, aha. "That's a robot." No. It's that I look at every post and think, "Is that a.
Speaker 2 | 10:33
Robot?" Precisely. It creates a guilty until proven innocent environment for all content. Think about legal systems. Trust used to be the default. Now suspicion is the default. If you are an operator trying to sell original intelligence, you have to understand that your reader starts with their arms crossed. Wow. They suspect everything is sloth. Your job is no longer just to add value. Your first job is to prove you're human. You have to claw your way back to zero before you can even start.
Speaker 1 | 11:02
That completely changes the burden of proof on the writer. Before, if I wrote a decent article, you'd assume I was smart. Now, if I write a decent article, you might just assume I'm good at prompting.
Speaker 2 | 11:12
Or that you're lazy. And that suspicion, it kills the sale before it even begins. The moment the reader suspects your work is synthetic, they disconnect emotionally. And you cannot ever close a high ticket deal without an emotional connection. It's impossible.
Speaker 1 | 11:27
This connects directly to what the platforms themselves are doing. I saw this in the notes. LinkedIn is rolling out content credentials. It uses the C2PA standard to tag AI-generated media. And on the surface, this looks like a feature update. Hey, look at us being transparent. Here's a little Failure.
Speaker 2 | 11:45
Badge. It's not a feature update. It's a quiet admission of failure.
Speaker 1 | 11:49
That seems harsh. I mean, isn't transparency a good thing? We want to know what's real and what's not.
Speaker 2 | 11:54
It's a quiet admission that the platform is broken. LinkedIn is admitting they have a massive trust problem, not a novelty problem. They know their users are drowning in slop and they're frantically trying to build a categorization system to save the entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1 | 12:09
They're trying to label the ingredients.
Speaker 2 | 12:11
Because people are getting sick from the food.
Speaker 1 | 12:13
Exactly. Digiday called this a digital fatigue crisis. But let's look at this from the user's side. If LinkedIn gives me a tool that says this was AI assisted, or if I just use AI to, you know, polish my rough notes, why shouldn't I? The source material mentions this phrase I like. Don't autopilot your reputation. Right. But isn't autopilot good? It keeps the plane steady. It stops me from making typos. It smooths out my tone so I don't sound angry or manic on a Monday morning.
Speaker 2 | 12:43
Autopilot keeps the plane steady in clear weather, but it doesn't land the plane in a storm. And business is a storm. Okay. Here is the trap, and it's subtle. When you use AI to polish your rough thoughts, what does the AI actually do? How does an LLM Exactly.
Speaker 1 | 12:56
Work? It predicts the next most likely word.
Speaker 2 | 13:00
The next most probable token, It averages out the tone. It removes the edges. It removes the weird phrasing, the jagged transitions, the specific idiosyncratic language that makes you sound like you.
Speaker 1 | 13:13
It sands off the friction that makes it more... Aerodynamic.
Speaker 2 | 13:16
And friction is where the value lives. In consulting, friction is the hook. If I read something and it flows perfectly, I just slide right off and my brain says, I know this pattern, nothing new here, save energy, move on. But if I read something that stops me, that challenges me, that uses a word I didn't expect, that's friction, that's traction. When you smooth out your edges to sound professional, you are sanding off the only thing that makes ideas stick in the first place.
Speaker 1 | 13:40
So if a founder starts to rely on that C2PA tag, if they say, Well, I didn't tag it as AI so people will know it's real. They've already lost the game.
Speaker 2 | 13:48
Totally lost. The metadata won't save you. The content itself has to prove it. If you need a digital stamp to prove you're human, your writing has already failed the test. You need to write in a way that a machine couldn't have written, regardless of any tag. If I can take the tag off and you still can't tell the difference, you have a deep.
Speaker 1 | 14:06
Problem. OK, so we've diagnosed the disease. We have slop fatigue. We have this baseline suspicion where the audience assumes we're frauds until proven otherwise. And we have the autopilot trap where we polish ourselves into invisibility. That's a good summary. Now we need the cure. Because if we just stop using AI, we're slower, we're less efficient.
So how do we compete? The source material pivots here to a concept called specificity is the currency of trust.
Speaker 2 | 14:32
Yes. This is the pivot point. This is probably the most important part of our whole deep dive today.
Speaker 1 | 14:38
And it asks a question that I think, well, It haunts a lot of us. If AI writes the smooth summaries, if it can aggregate all the knowledge in the world, What is left for the human consultant?
Speaker 2 | 14:48
The practical question is not, is AI allowed? That's the wrong debate. That's a distraction. The real question is, does this feel earned?
Speaker 1 | 14:55
Earned. That's a heavy word. It implies work. It implies sweat. Define that in this context.
Speaker 2 | 15:02
Earned means the writer has skin in the game. It's that simple. AI cannot have stake. An algorithm cannot fear being wrong. It cannot lose its reputation. It cannot lose a client's money. It just predicts the next token based on probability.
Speaker 1 | 15:17
But a human can.
Speaker 2 | 15:18
A human consultant can be disastrously wrong. A human consultant can lose a client. A human consultant can get fired and have their reputation ruined. When you read something earned, You can feel the weight of that risk behind the words. You can feel that the person writing it has the scars to prove it.
Speaker 1 | 15:36
It's a bit abstract. I get the sentiment. But how do we show that? How do I put skin in the game? Into a LinkedIn post. I can't exactly bleed on the keyboard.
Speaker 2 | 15:44
You don't fake it. You cure fatigue by stopping the prediction engine in your reader's brain. You must stop predicting the next sentence. And the source gives us a very specific antidote. It's a checklist, really. A list of elements that you must include to validate your content as human, as earned. If you aren't doing these things, you are almost certainly writing slop.
Speaker 1 | 16:07
Okay, let's go through the list. I have it right here. Name the buyer. 2. Name the constraint. 3. Name the numbers. 4. Name the trade-off. 5. Name the failure mode. And six, name the decision rule. That's six things.
Speaker 2 | 16:24
Six things. And if you look at most business content out there, it has what? Zero of them? Maybe one if you're Most content is written for everyone.
Speaker 1 | 16:30
Lucky. Let's break them down one by one because I want to make sure the listener really get how to use this.
So name the buyer.
Speaker 2 | 16:36
It's addressed to leaders, to managers, to innovators. That's generic because it's trying to get the biggest possible audience. Original intelligence names the specific person. For example? Series B sauce founder with high churn. HR director at a manufacturing plant with under 500 employees. An estate planning attorney in Florida who's losing leads to online services. When you name the buyer that specifically, you signal, I know who I'm talking to, and just as importantly, I know who I am not talking Yes, you are.
Speaker 1 | 17:06
To. You're actively excluding people.
Speaker 2 | 17:09
And that builds immense trust with the people you keep. They feel seen.
Speaker 1 | 17:13
Okay. Makes sense. Number two, Name the constraint.
Speaker 2 | 17:18
AI exists in a vacuum. It gives you advice for a perfect world with unlimited resources. You should invest in better communication. Okay, great. Thanks. But in the real world, there are always constraints. You have no budget. Your CEO hates meetings. You have a legacy code base from 2005 that nobody understands. You're regulated by the FDA.
Speaker 1 | 17:36
So the advice has to live in the real world.
Speaker 2 | 17:38
Original intelligence embraces the mess. It says do X given that you have constraint Y. That's real Specificity creates trust.
Speaker 1 | 17:43
Consulting. That already feels more real. Okay, number three, name the numbers.
Speaker 2 | 17:50
Saying profits increased is slop. That's a press release. That's marketing speak. Saying profits increased by 12% while headcount dropped by 4%. That's evidence. AI hallucinates numbers or keeps them vague. - Humans have the receipts. If you have the data, show the data. Be.
Speaker 1 | 18:07
Precise. Name the trade-off. This one seems crucial because all of marketing usually tries to hide the downsides. It's all win-win. This.
Speaker 2 | 18:16
Is my favorite one because it's the one that requires the most courage. AI tries to make everyone happy. It synthesizes on the one hand this, on the other hand that. It always looks for a win-win. But in real business, strategy is about trade-offs. It's about painful choices. You can't have it all. You can't have speed and quality and low cost. You have to pick. When you name the trade-off, when you say, we are going to sacrifice top-line growth for better profitability, you prove you're making a conscious decision, not just listing options. You prove you are an adult in the room. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 18:44
Name the failure mode.
Speaker 2 | 18:45
This is the what if it all goes wrong part. AI is relentlessly, annoyingly positive. It hates negativity. But real experts know how things break. They've seen it. If you can describe exactly how a project will fail, if you don't fix the data layer first, this expensive new dashboard will just show you in real time how fast you're losing money. That proves expertise.
Speaker 1 | 19:08
It proves you've seen the car crash before.
Speaker 2 | 19:10
You've seen the car crash. You know where the bodies are buried. That's what people pay This is the Holy Grail.
Speaker 1 | 19:14
For. And the last one, number six, name the decision rule.
Speaker 2 | 19:20
A decision rule is a heuristic. It's a mental shortcut for making hard choices when the data is ambiguous. AI gives you information. It gives you analysis. Humans provide judgment. A decision rule codifies that judgment. It says, if X happens, we do Y. No debate, no meeting.
Speaker 1 | 19:35
Let's make this concrete. Give me an example of the difference. Let's take a standard, boring consulting topic. Optimizing works classic.
Speaker 2 | 19:42
Flows. Perfect, a Okay, let's do the AI version, the slop version first.
Speaker 1 | 19:43
It's necessary but everyone writes about it and it's always dull.
Speaker 2 | 19:49
If I prompt a model, it's going to spit out something like, To stay competitive in today's dynamic market, leaders must optimize workflows to improve efficiency and foster a culture of cross-functional collaboration. By streamlining processes, we can unlock value and drive.
Speaker 1 | 20:04
Growth. I'm falling asleep already. It sounds like every corporate email I've ever received. It's smooth, it's safe, and it is completely and utterly useless. It just washes right over.
Speaker 2 | 20:14
Right. No friction. Now, let's apply the list. Let's look at an original intelligence version. A human operator, an actual consultant would say, if you are a Series B SaaS founder, that's name the buyer, and you need to extend your runaway to 18 months, that's name the constraint, you need to cut the marketing budget by 20% to force the sales team to fix their abysmal 15% closing rate.
Speaker 1 | 20:38
That grabs me. That has teeth.
Speaker 2 | 20:40
It's got teeth. And then you add the tradeoff is slower top line growth for higher gross margin. We just named the tradeoff. The failure mode is that your VP of sales might quit because their leads dry up and they can't hit their numbers. We just named the failure.
Speaker 1 | 20:53
And the decision rule.
Speaker 2 | 20:54
The decision rule is do we value growth at all costs? Or do we value survival? You have to pick one. Right It feels risky.
Speaker 1 | 21:02
Now. That feels completely different. It feels, I don't know, heavy.
Speaker 2 | 21:08
It feels like advice that could either get you fired or make you rich. That is specificity. The AI provides the average. The consultant provides the decision rule.
Speaker 1 | 21:19
That decision rule part seems to be the key differentiator. AI can give you options. It can say, here are five ways to save money. But it rarely, if ever, tells you do this one. And by the way, here is who will be angry about.
Speaker 2 | 21:31
It. Exactly. AI tries to make everyone a winner in business.
Sometimes you have to choose who loses. Original intelligence acknowledges that hard truth. And that brings us to a mindset shift that I think is really difficult for people, especially people who've been trained in content marketing. The source calls it writing like you have to be right Precisely.
Speaker 1 | 21:48
Versus writing like you have to post.
Speaker 2 | 21:50
Think about the pressure we talked about at the very beginning. I need to feed the algorithm. I need to keep my streak going. That pressure forces you to write safe stuff. It encourages volume over value. It encourages fluff, but Writing to be right? That sounds terrifying to most people.
Speaker 1 | 22:08
It implies consequences. It implies accountability. If I'm wrong, I look like an idiot. If I tell that Series B founder to cut marketing and the company dies six months later, That's on me. It How is that an advantage?
Speaker 2 | 22:19
Is. It's 100% on you. And that is the asymmetric advantage.
Speaker 1 | 22:24
It sounds like a liability.
Speaker 2 | 22:26
Because most of your competitors are algorithm feeders. They are posting to keep the streak alive. They're optimizing for impressions. They're playing a volume game. If you shift your strategy to posting to be right, meaning every single piece of content you publish is a defensible thesis that you would bet your entire fee on, you're playing a completely different game.
Speaker 1 | 22:45
What game is that?
Speaker 2 | 22:45
You're playing a game of status and authority. You're not a content creator anymore. You're an advisor. But.
Speaker 1 | 22:50
Wait, let's really dig into the economics of this. Yeah. If I'm that specific, if I'm only talking to Series B SaaS founders with runway issues, am I not alienating 99% of the market? Why does that scare off the price shoppers? I think it would just scare off everyone.
Speaker 2 | 23:07
Because price shoppers want options. They want a menu. They want to come in and say, OK, I want a little bit of SEO, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of design. They want to be the boss. They want to pick and choose. Right. Premium clients, the ones who pay high retainers, the ones who pay $50,000 for a strategy session, they don't want options. They are drowning in options. They are overwhelmed by choices. They want decisions. They are paying for certainty in an uncertain Exactly.
Speaker 1 | 23:31
World. They want the omakase. The chef's choice.
Speaker 2 | 23:35
It's sit down, shut up, eat this. It's the best fish we have in the market today. If your writing is full of on the one hand, on the other hand, you sound like a junior analyst presenting a report. Your writing says do X because not doing it will kill you. You sound like an expert. You sound expensive.
Speaker 1 | 23:52
I can hear the listeners right now, though. I can feel their anxiety. They're looking at their analytics dashboards. They're seeing the views and impressions go down. If I stop posting 5 Ways to be a Better Leader. And start posting these complex, specific trade-off scenarios about Series B Santa Ass runway, my audience is going to shrink. The line on the graph is going to point down. And that's terrifying. Good. Good. You're telling people to tank their metrics. That feels like career suicide in this climate.
Speaker 2 | 24:20
Yes. Good. The source is explicit about this, and it's the hardest pill to swallow. Impressions are vanity. If you are a boutique consultant, you do not need 100,000 views. You need 10 clients. You need the right 10 good.
Speaker 1 | 24:32
Clients. The metric discipline. We're addicted to the big numbers. They feel.
Speaker 2 | 24:36
It's a trade-off. See? We're applying the framework right now to our own strategy. You're trading visibility, being seen by the many for authority, being trusted by the few who can actually pay you. The source says it clearly. Watch your comments and your qualified DMs rise as your impressions DMs.
Speaker 1 | 24:51
Fall. That's the key metric then. Qualified.
Speaker 2 | 24:55
That's the money metric. That is the scariest moment for a creator seeing that big impression number go down. But if the DM number goes up with people saying, hey, we have that exact problem you mentioned regarding the sales team and our closing rate, then you are winning the game that matters.
Speaker 1 | 25:10
It's a shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting.
Speaker 2 | 25:14
Perfectly put. You aren't trying to shout to the whole stadium. You are trying to whisper to the CEO in the luxury box. If the people in the nosebleed seats can't hear you anymore, fine. They weren't going to buy a $50,000 consulting package anyway. They were just consuming your content as free entertainment.
Speaker 1 | 25:31
Let me red team this one more time, though. A reality check. If my business model actually relies on ad revenue, If I'm a newsletter writer who sells sponsorships or an influencer who gets paid per post, this is terrible advice, right?
Speaker 2 | 25:44
100%. It's terrible advice for that business model. If you sell eyeballs. You need slop. You need mass appeal. You need the five comps to change your life because you need the volume to sell the CPMs. You need the widest top of the funnel possible. But we are not talking to them. We are talking to boutique consultants.
Speaker 1 | 26:03
And for them.
Speaker 2 | 26:04
For them, silence is better than smooth nothingness. If you post slop, you aren't just failing to attract the right clients. You are actively repelling them. You are signaling that you are cheap. You're signaling that you're a.
Speaker 1 | 26:18
Commodity. Silence is better than smooth nothingness. I think a lot of people feel the exact opposite. They feel like if they go silent, they die. They feel that FOMO, the fear of missing out on the algorithm's attention.
Speaker 2 | 26:29
In a world polluted by noise, the signal becomes incredibly valuable. If you only speak when you have a genuine decision rule to share, people learn to listen when you show up. It's like that friend you have who only speaks when they have something truly important to say. Everyone in the room shuts up to listen.
Speaker 1 | 26:45
And the friend who chatters constantly.
Speaker 2 | 26:47
You tune them out. You might nod politely, but you aren't really listening. You're just waiting for them to.
Speaker 1 | 26:52
Stop. OK, let's get tactical. This has been a great framework. We've covered the philosophy, the trap, the shift to specificity. Now, the source material offers a simple rule experiment. It's a 14 day challenge to break this slop habit.
Speaker 2 | 27:06
Yes. A simple rule that moves money.
Speaker 1 | 27:08
Walk us through it. What do we do for the next two weeks starting tomorrow morning?
Speaker 2 | 27:12
Step 1. Publish fewer pieces. Just stop the daily grind if you don't have something with sticks to say. Cut your volume in half if you have to. If you are posting daily, post twice a week. That's it. Okay, that's step one. Step two, make each piece you do publish impossible to Step three.
Speaker 1 | 27:28
Fake. We'll come back to that one.
Speaker 2 | 27:30
Run this for exactly 14 days. Two weeks.
Speaker 1 | 27:34
And step four.
Speaker 2 | 27:35
Keep what produces real conversations. Not likes, not views. Real, qualified conversations in your DMs or emails.
Speaker 1 | 27:44
Let's focus on step two. Impossible to fake. We touched on this with the six point list naming constraints and failure modes. But what does that look like in practice? Is it just about having a unique writing style?
You know, can I just ask the A.I. To write in the style of Hunter S. Thompson or write like a weary detective?
Speaker 2 | 28:03
No, because style can be mimicked. You can ask ChatGPT to write in the style of Hemingway or write in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. And it does a surprisingly decent job. It might not be perfect, but it's close enough to fool a casual reader.
So no, it's not about style. It's about consequence.
Speaker 1 | 28:19
Consequence. There's that word again.
Speaker 2 | 28:21
It's about telling a story that has a real world consequence. Tell a story about a specific client failure mode. Share a hard decision where there was a clear loser. AI hates stories where there are losers. It always wants a resolution where everyone learned a valuable lesson. It wants synthesis. Original intelligence acknowledges that sometimes things just break and somebody loses.
Speaker 1 | 28:40
Can you give me a clear example? A story that is impossible to.
Speaker 2 | 28:44
Fake. Sure. Imagine a consultant posts this: "We launched the new product on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, customer support tickets were up 400% because we didn't account for a legacy integration with Salesforce. We had to pause the entire launch, issue $50,000 in refunds, and personally apologize to our first 200 beta users. Here is the specific change we made to our QA process so that this never, ever happens again. Wow. And AI cannot write that. It doesn't know you lost $50,000. It doesn't know the visceral pain of writing that apology email. It doesn't know the specific change you made to your QA checklist. That story proves you are in the arena. It proves you have the scars. It proves you survived the failure and are now smarter because of it.
Speaker 1 | 29:27
And that shifts the entire mechanism of action from likes to conversations. Because if I read that, I'm not just going to double tap it. I might comment, man, I've been there. Or I might DM you and say, how did you handle the refunds with your payment processor?
Speaker 2 | 29:39
Exactly. And that is a qualified lead. A like is a fleeting dopamine hit. A real conversation is a deal in progress. You are shifting the metric from vanity to reality. You're shifting from look at me to I can help you avoid the pain I went.
Speaker 1 | 29:55
Through. This really feels like the end of the AI honeymoon phase. We had this, what, year and a half where we thought, wow, this robot can do my job. And now we are collectively realizing, wait a second, if the robot does my job, I don't have a job.
Speaker 2 | 30:10
We are growing up. The industry is maturing. The toy phase is over. Now it's about serious integration. AI is a phenomenal tool, but it's not the talent. You are the talent, but you have to prove it. You have to step up and do the work the machine can't.
Speaker 1 | 30:23
We've traveled a long way in this deep dive. We started in this sea of AI slop, wading through the hype fatigue. We saw the data that proves trust is eroding, that everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
Speaker 2 | 30:34
The baseline of suspicion. We Specificity is the currency of trust.
Speaker 1 | 30:36
Looked at the platform's quiet admission with things like content credentials. And we found the pivot point. Specificity.
Speaker 2 | 30:45
It's the only one that matters now.
Speaker 1 | 30:46
And we have that list. Name the buyer, the constraint, the numbers, the trade-off, the failure mode, and the decision rule. That's your checklist against slop.
Speaker 2 | 30:56
That is the boundary. On one side of that boundary, you have AI. It analyzes data, detects patterns, makes sense of chaos. It's brilliant at that. Use it for that. Use it to summarize your meeting notes. Use it to write code. On the other side, you have humans. We apply judgment. We hold accountability. We help clients get breakthroughs not by summarizing the world, but by helping them decide what to ignore.
Speaker 1 | 31:20
So for the listener right now sitting there, maybe looking at their schedule post for the week. Maybe they have a buffer full of generic three tips for success posts ready to go.
Speaker 2 | 31:29
You have a decision to make right now. Are you an algorithm feeder or are you a judgment dealer? You cannot be both. You cannot chase the algorithm's favor with generic engagement bait and then expect to be hired for high stakes judgment. The market is splitting. The middle is falling out completely. You have to choose your.
Speaker 1 | 31:44
Side. And we promised an immediate action, something they can do in the next 15 minutes. Not a philosophical change, but a physical one.
Speaker 2 | 31:51
Yes. Don't just listen to this and nod and say, that was interesting. Do this. Open your last three pieces of content, your last three blogs, LinkedIn posts, client emails, whatever. Apply what we'll call the prediction test.
Speaker 1 | 32:05
The prediction test.
Speaker 2 | 32:06
Read the first sentence. Then ask yourself honestly, could a reasonably smart AI predict the third sentence?
Speaker 1 | 32:14
Meaning, does it just follow the... The logical, average, predictable path?
Speaker 2 | 32:19
Exactly. If the first sentence is leadership is hard in a remote world and the third sentence is something like that's why you need to listen to your team, an AI could predict that a mile away. It follows the well-worn pattern. If the answer is yes, an AI could have predicted it. Delete it.
Speaker 1 | 32:34
It. Brutal. Just delete it. Or rewrite.
Speaker 2 | 32:36
Take one of those pieces. Just one. Rewrite it right now in the next 15 minutes. But add a specific constraint and a specific failure mode. Name a real tradeoff where something had to be sacrificed. Put some skin in the game.
Speaker 1 | 32:48
And how will you know if you've done it right?
Speaker 2 | 32:50
You'll feel it. If you feel a little twinge of fear before you hit publish, if you think, ooh, that's a little too opinionated, someone might disagree, my old boss might see this and frown, then you have found your margin.
Speaker 1 | 33:03
If it scares you, it's real.
Speaker 2 | 33:05
If it scares you, it's earned. Stop deep end.
Speaker 1 | 33:07
Posting. Start deciding. That's the takeaway. Thanks for diving in with us. See you in the.
