#113: Why free-range AI consulting is the best job in tech right now | Noah Levin (Founder @ Serious People, ex- Amazon & Honor)

Amazing. We are live. Noah, welcome. Thanks. Nice to be here. I'm excited for this. And we were itching to start recording because we were getting into some of the fun stuff before. And I find that whenever people start to tell us what they actually are excited about in the pre-recording, it's really hard to like simulate that in the same authentic way after we start recording. So I'm excited to actually hear what you've been thinking about. Well, maybe Riverside needs a feature where you can secretly start recording a minute earlier. Yeah. Like, like granola and Riverside had a baby. Hopefully there's a PM in there listening and maybe someone's going to get sued if they build that product. Yeah, probably. Amazing. And just super quick context. So I, you know, I've met Noah through Supra and, you know, Noah, you're, in my opinion, a super accomplished product leader. You were the PM at Whole Foods, you've been a CPO at a lot of really cool startups and companies. And, but yeah, when I was catching up with you, I could just feel like an excitement in your voice about what you're doing. And I was like, Hey, like, what, what, what is, what is this new company you're starting? And you're like, actually, like, I'm not doing this thing. And I love the term that you used, you call it like a free, free range AI consultant. So maybe let's start there. Can you define what that is? I can try. I think, I think this is a, this is a new term we're trying to coin here, right? So a free range AI consultant is someone who is applying their own knowledge of AI without any built-in stack or built-in methodology to whatever is around them, I think. And for me, what it means is I am finding myself talking to lots of mostly small medium businesses, some large pushing on the upper bound of medium, but mostly not enterprise companies. And the conversation usually starts with, I need to be doing AI, but not knowing really what that means, or maybe having an idea of what it means that's starting from a place of FOMO or seeing a lot of, you know, things on Twitter that, that hype it up. And mostly what I'm spending my time doing is not AI consulting, but actually business consulting and helping people get back to first principles and what matters in their business and what their goals are and what the bottlenecks are to those goals. And then AI comes back into play as a tool in support of that. And in a few other ways as well, we can talk about, but the free range part means that I am figuring this out as I go. I can take it in any direction I want. There's a growing band of brothers that are working on this together. And, and I think that it's really exciting to see a lot of people taking this path because I think that there is going to be a wave of really capable people bouncing around like free radicals, trying to figure out how they can make their mark on the world. And it's just a new thing people get to do because it's super, super valuable. Can you give just like a few examples, you know, if you don't want to name any specific companies that's cool, but just like, I'm trying to kind of wrap my head when you talk about this, the, the kinds of businesses that you've been like talking to, are these like your local mom and pop gyms and accounting firms and like law firms, or is there some like restaurants? Like what do you, where, where are you seeing a pull so far, who are you talking to? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a few examples. And these are really just like data points on a scatterplot, but I would say there's a cluster. So I live in Austin and Austin it's, I'm not sure if it's well known, but Austin's like a CPG hub. There are a lot of startup CPG companies here. And then you hear about these big exits like Siete. And why is that? Why is Austin like such a CPG like magnet? I don't know that I know the answer to that. There are, there is an infrastructure here, there's some VCs here, there's there's a great network for startup CPG here. I think the ecosystem is just built up, but I don't know what the origin is of it. One thing, one data point I do have is I remember when we were at Life360 and we were, we hired a, like a professional, like market research, kind of consultant to help us like figure out how to get to the next level of growth by doing a lot of research. And I remember that they said the two demographics that San Francisco companies would always kind of go to the two cities they would go to, to do like their on the ground research to understand broad market appeal for kind of like your everyday American companies were actually Sacramento because it was close, it was the most representative close city and Dallas. And so Austin is not that far from Dallas, so maybe there it's like maybe the most innovative city in proximity of a big place like Dallas and Texas is obviously a huge melting pot of different preferences and cultures that has something to do with it. I think that I think you're onto something there like in Austin, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call Austin reality, but you can definitely make contact with reality here much more easily than you can in San Francisco or New York. And it's, it is a health and wellness hub as well. So a lot of the CPG has a health and wellness orientation. If you have like, if you want peptides, we got peptides, like everyone's got peptides. Whole Foods was started there too, right? It was. Yeah. Yeah. And yes, I that maybe that's the origin of it, to be honest, it could go back to that and Whole Foods is very supplier oriented. So they love to promote new brands and they have resources and funding for new brands. So there's something to the ecosystem here, but. Sorry, that was all, that was all a tangent from you were telling us that you're in Austin, there's a lot of CPG activity there. And I just, I just kind of can't believe how much of it there is. And when you talk to these companies, there's a lot of unique angles on the products, but what sits behind the products is it's a pretty common shape of tech stack and business model. And so there, there is a right answer, I think, to how do you solve the LTV to CAC question and how do you operationalize that on someone's Shopify store plus, you know, probably Shopify now front end plus Google and meta ad spend plus customer service platform, you know, one of three plus 3PL service, it's actually doing the shipping. It's just kind of a common stack. And so you talk to companies and they're all asking versions of the same questions, some of which have been solved by SaaS, some of which oddly haven't, even though it seems like it should be a very well-served market. And yet no one seems, no one feels satisfied that they've got the solution to their problems. And so, you know, there's a cluster of, of small, medium business needs in just that one pocket. Jumping all the way across the spectrum here, private equity companies, both like acquisition targets and companies that are in their turnaround phase, they, they seem to have an acute need to figure things out quickly. And for most of these companies, AI is either a catalyst for driving the valuation that they need, or it's the thing that's going to bite them and make them unable to, to get there. And so either way they need to address it head on. And I'm working with two private equity backed companies that are going through different versions of this evaluation and, and then transition where they're trying to figure out what AI means for their product, for their operation, for their competitive landscape. And everything in between. I, a friend of mine just started her own legal practice and she's building her own SaaS stack to support her own way of working. There's nothing on the market like it. Maybe there shouldn't be. I'm not sure she has a very opinionated way of working. But it's hers and she's building it herself and she's very good at it, but she needs a little help. And so there's, that's a, that's a shape that's totally different than the first two buckets. I guess the, the, the point of being free range is that it doesn't have to be a playbook. At some point, some parts of it will be, but it can be highly adaptive to whatever's around and whatever's interesting. And why do you, why do you think these people are coming to you as opposed to like, maybe like hiring like a more traditional like consultant or like, you know, I don't know who's doing like this, like kind of like AI, like consulting and like, maybe it's like the X, like, you know, the, the Accentures of the world, or even like, I know there's like now like some like more like specific AI consultancies, but like, I mean, like we can spend some time thinking about like, you know, if you're a free range, what is the kind of like, what is the other side? Right. And like, what are the, the main differences that you think, and maybe like, why are people kind of attracted to your model versus maybe the. Who are the factory farmed consultants? Is that the. Exactly. I, so I think this is, there's like different competing goods, right? So maybe the first thing to say is that I'm surprised a little bit that there's a need for this at all, right? Forward deployed engineers have become this very on-trend thing. And I read somewhere that job postings for forward deployed engineers are up 700% year over year, which seems right. It also seems like maybe people are just using that term instead of consultant now. But but it's, this is an acute enough need that open AI and Anthropic have put massive dollars behind building out their own in-house consultant practices. And every consultant firm that delivers technology or that talks about technology has to have their own version of a practice. So I think that I think it's sort of interesting that even in this world where the intelligence is like in the product, you need people to stitch it together. And I thought Dan Shipper put this really well when he was on Lenny's podcast a week or two ago, where he talked about basically every agent needs a human to love them. And, and you see this more and more when you go like into implementation of agents and businesses where there is, there is a giant gap between putting an agent in place and having it deliver the value that it's expected to deliver. And the people matter so much for this still and will for a very long time. But there's, there is a different profile of problem and company that an Accenture or a deployment company, a subsidiary of open AI is going to go after relative to a guy like me. And I think that in the same way that those companies probably wouldn't prioritize individual small, medium businesses on their roadmap. Most small, medium businesses wouldn't think to call those companies either. And and there's reasons not to totally trust them. And I don't mean, I don't mean that to to neg these companies, but the incentives are not like 100% aligned. The model companies, the models themselves are like on a commoditization path. And which is wild because these things are like the halves, the cutting edge of technology and you know, the billions of dollars and the smartest brains in the world are going into building these things. But there is like a reason to think that they're on a glide path to being roughly interchangeable and you know, priced like utilities. And so at that point, these companies need some vertical lock-in, right? So they're going up the stack and up the stack and you know, maybe the very top of the stack is whole integration companies that just use, you know, the house stack. Like they're going to eat the BCGs and the McKinsey's and these other companies or partner with them. But like, I don't see how those companies have a future without being integrated in some deep way with the frontier labs. Like having a giant consulting company that is not AI native makes zero sense. I think, I know that I agree with you for like Accenture or Deloitte technology where you're delivering code. I think I agree with you for, you know, people who are paid to be smart in a room, right? Like taking like the pure case of like the McKinsey man who goes in and presents the deck. There is probably a long while where you want someone to actually think the actual output of the deck may not be as human created, but the human judgment and the accountability for the opinion, I think still. I think the number of people that work in consulting is going to go down. Like I think you're not going to need as many people doing consulting jobs. And I think they're all going to have way more leverage, but I think they will have to be AI fluent and AI native to be effective consultants for like the future to future proof their relevancy. I mean, no doubt. But I agree with you. They're not going to get replaced with like, the whole value of having a human do that kind of job is to give you peace of mind that you're not being an idiot. And that like the decisions you're making with your business are like well reasoned and there's an objective person who's looking at the way a bunch of other companies are doing things and they're bringing that knowledge to you so you don't have to fall into like the same holes that other people fall into. You get to follow some best practices. Absolutely. But I think like the business model is going to have to change, right? Because like, let's say you go like it's like head to head, like, you know, like a proposal like competition. Right. And I'm sure there's going to be companies that are going to be like going to go in there and be like, Hey, I'm going to do like a little bit of the groundwork for free and only pay me if you do the, if you get to get the outcome done. Right. And I think the skill set to deliver that outcome is going to be very different than the skill set that you maybe like a business or McKinsey has that actually I'm like, I'm not going to touch the outcome. I'm just going to tell you what to do and I'm going to predict what that plan is going to lead. So I think like, I don't know, like that's maybe going to force, I mean, I think it's going to happen overnight, but I think it's going to force the way they operate this company. So otherwise it's going to be really hard to compete. I think that it's useful when you talk about like the role that AI plays in these consulting practices or frankly, in like any company, it's useful to sort of tease it apart because I think it's, AI is like playing every character in the play, right? There is a, if you are a consulting firm, you absolutely need AI to be part of the way that your consultants deliver their output, right? It needs to be in their operating system. They need that leverage. Separately, you might be a capable consultant on the topic of AI, right? What is the impact of AI on your company's strategy, on your company's operation? Separately from that, you might be able to actually take AI as a tool and use it to develop product, develop technology, and even within that, it bifurcates, right? The AI can be part of the product surface or it can just be an enabler to building the product surface. So AI is like in all the places and it matters to know where your point of leverage is. When I'm talking to companies, I usually try and group AI into three buckets that they ought to think about. And this is pretty reductive, but I think it's useful. There's like AI as a coworker. This is like the cloud code, cloud cowork, sitting next to you, helping you do your day-to-day life, collection of skills and connectors. It's the generic use cases. There's AI as operator, where you have variable work that needs to happen. That is, it's happening on a cadence. It's probably part of your cost structure, your unit economics. It's largely non-technical and there are high judgment tasks that you're trying to turn into low judgment tasks and ultimately automate. At Amazon, we would call a lot of these things hands off the wheel, things like what percent of POs really need to be looked at by a human or can just be cut by a machine. But AI can be dropped into an operating process. This is where people talk about agentic AI, like as being a cost savings for businesses where you can really just like power a narrow solution for a company. And then the third bucket is product and engineering, which is like not a variable expense. It's a fixed expense. It's R&D budget. And it's all about how do you give your product engineering team leverage to go faster and to build products that are more capable. But these are like three pretty different things that require different architecture behind them. And they have different reasons for building them. So one of the things we talk about early on in these engagements is trying to scope out which of the three is really like the leading use case for the company to get their goals done. Do you start with a problem? Before you even talk about which of those three is the quote unquote solution or the right path, do you start by using your PM muscles, I guess, and doing that problem discovery and really trying to understand what the goals are and all that stuff before you even think about the implementation path of what kind of solutions. A lot of the engagements start off as just discovery engagements. One company I'm working with right now, we're spending three months just doing basically discovery and scoping for the work that probably ought to be done. Which is, I give this company a lot of credit for investing the time in that cycle because jumping over that step, you end up building the wrong thing oftentimes. The actual way discovery works these days is kind of just mind-blowing though. Say more. I had this great experience. It was like my light bulb moment for it. And it was almost like three months ago now. So maybe it's boring at this point. But there's a gym down the street where there's a co-working space attached to the gym and everyone who goes there is very trendy and attractive except for me. And so I like to hang out there and do my work there. And I ended up talking to someone who's a neighbor of mine who has a business and has these acute pain points in her business that she was talking about. And we started talking and I hit record on granola while we were talking. And she spent maybe like 15, 20 minutes just sort of describing a competitive research use case and a use case around basically a CRM that would have been useful to her. And about 20 minutes in, I just said, okay, pause for a second. And I went and I grabbed the raw transcript from granola and I dropped it into a cloud code with very limited instructions. And three minutes later, she had a competitive research report in her email. And she had a prototype of the product that might solve her needs. Just the UI flashed on the screen. And was it perfect? No. But it was real and it was there. And digesting the raw output of that discovery in a noisy gym, you know, coworking space to a like reasonably high fidelity prototype. It happened, you know, before the meeting was over. It happened before the 45 minutes was up. And so when you take that and you put bring it into like a more structured consulting environment, you know, where you have, you might have a two week discovery window with a dozen interviews and a lot of document and GitHub browsing. The context that you can grab and then what you can do with that context is just wild. My proposals are better than some finished products that I thought I used to make. So I feel like I have superpowers right now. I feel like that's such a differentiator between people who are like, you know, quote unquote, like, yeah, affluent and people that are not like, like the fact that you can just do that as part of the sales process and then you compare it to someone who just gives you like a PDF and maybe like a deck of like, here's like how we're going to work together is like, it's not even like you're not even playing at the same league. And I feel like that's like what a lot of like now, like sales is changing to like, you can just do so much cool stuff. And I'm like, I get so many like cold emails now that I'm like. Like I get so many like cold emails now and I'm like, that is just lazy, like you could have like, like almost done a first version, right? Like there's so many things I could have done that like you just wasted like some random tokens and like some cute personalization that you'd like figure out how many members the super have and how long I've been running it. But like, you know, like what I want to just give me like, you know, a teaser or something. And I just feel like that's such a much better taste of what it would be like to work with that person, especially given what the tools enable today. So I couldn't see you for doing that. Well, I want to, I want to insert one, there's one objection that I'm hearing in my own head when I say this. I just want to like get in front of it in case, in case this feels like I'm producing a bunch of AI slop as a consultant. Because I think, I think what you just described Mark is like these cold emails, like the floor has gone up substantially for what the minimum effort is that you should be able to put in, but that doesn't make it good. And that doesn't make it a service that you'd be proud to pay for or proud to offer. When I'm writing a document for a client or a proposal or putting a product together, the raw output of the models is not, is not a good enough product. It's leverage, but it's like an accelerant on getting there. But but there's the proposal that I just created for one of the CPG companies took me hours to create. But the reason it took me hours is because I was able to produce very high fidelity mocks of all the pages that we were going to build. I was able to present detail on the methodology behind the math in the system that we were building. And I had like a long back and forth argument with my agent about what we should build and what the right methodology was around the aesthetics of the proposal. And then I decided to take an extra half hour to bake it into a skill so that the next time we were going to write a proposal together, all the all the IP that I had brought to the party was going to be available to the agent. And so that's how this stuff compounds over time. So I don't want you to think that the 20 minute gym example is the way that like free range consulting is meant to be done. But it Matt Van Horn, who writes some of the most like useful articles on X that drive the way I do my work. He put it really well in his article. It's one of the co-founders of Lyft, right? Correct. Yeah. And June Ovens. And now he's like a top open source contributor to like all the things that matter. He is in constant dialogue with his AI, but it's a completely asymmetric dialogue. The AI is working its butt off to try and please him. And he will just be like, more of this, less of that, you know, be less bad on this topic. Make this spicier. And of course, he's not even typing it, he's saying it into his microphone. And so he's engaged in the process throughout as a human, like very much in that loop. But it's not the type of human in the loop that you'd expect from like a corporate document review or something addressing red lines. Yeah. And this reminds me of the famous story of like Pablo Picasso that I feel like he, I think he was like in a vacation, he was like vacationing or like he had a house like in the south of France. And then like someone came up to him and was like, hey, like, can you make me a drawing? And he takes a piece of paper, like, and literally just draws this beautiful thing in like 30 seconds. And the guy goes, okay, it's going to be, you know, $30,000. And he's like, wait, what? Like, you just literally spent like 30 seconds doing that. And he's like, no, no, no. Like I spent 60 years, took me 60 years to do that. I kind of feels that way for like a lot of like skills and, and like, you know, context that you share with the models. Like, you know, Ben and I also have like this skill and kind of automated workflow where we'll get feedback from customers for inside of loops and then kind of like suggest exactly like what parts of the guide they should update based on the feedback. And then we kind of review it and most of the time it's like nails it. So you could be like, hey, actually, like, you're just, you know, why, why should we pay money for this? Like, you're literally just like not spending that much time on it. It's like, no, but actually like the process that we went through to make this skill actually valuable. And we probably spend like, you know, 10 or 12 hours or more, like literally going version by version, modifying the instructions, modifying the scripts, modifying the context, modifying like the guidelines. And yeah, I think that's like the IP, like in a way, like for a lot of knowledge workers moving forward, I think the, the ability to kind of like codify all, all of the learnings and like the way you just described Mark, I think that's kind of increasingly becoming what IP is because IP is not the, the code for like our guide apps, right? It's like, it's everything that it's like the, the, the knowledge, like the substance that's powering the way that the whole thing works is increasingly becoming the IP. Which is so funny because it used to be like, you know, the actual code, it's like you bought a company and it was not at, at some point, like, you know, companies have been bought because like, we really want your code base, you know, it's like that code base is so valuable and sure, you could argue our skills are in our repo. So like maybe that's part of the IP, but there's, there's another, there's another layer behind even like the IP that's in the, in the code or in the prompts that is now driving the code. Like if you, if you take it back one step farther, like there's IP in the, in the business knowledge behind all that too. And you don't even need AI in the mix to, to have this matter. Like at Honor, we used to talk a lot about not automating a process until you know that it's the right process. And so, so if you enter a new environment, like, you know, when, when I go to a new client, the, the prompt to me might start as automate this thing we do. And the first hurdle might be, well, do you even have written down the way that you do it? Where's the SOP that you hand to someone on day one? Maybe that exists, but then that may not actually reflect the reality of what's happening, right? So, so spending the time to do the gimbal walk with the people who are actually doing the work on the shop floor, so to speak, you get then one layer deeper into like, okay, here's the actual work that's happening. But even that may not be the right work because you can look at, you know, there are probably 10 people each roughly doing it their own way. So you get this natural distribution of, of it's almost like it's like a natural experiment basically and some subset of those people are doing it in a way where it delivers the result you care about. And so you can look at a sort of messy field of data on the way people are running a process that is the input, the outputs it produces, figure out which version of that is the process you want to codify. And only then do you start like throwing in Asian data to try and automate it. And if you skip over those steps, or if you don't understand the objective function that the business is trying to optimize for enough to know to go solve that problem, then I assure you, I mean, it's all slop at that point. Is there any difference between like the skills required to do what you're describing? Not the AI skills, but like the human skills, the competencies, let's say, that are required to do what you're describing and just like the competencies, competencies, just like great product managers to just like figure out what the right solutions are in a given market or for a given customer or given space. It feels like it's mapping almost a hundred percent of my imagination as you're talking. Yeah, I think you're right. I think, I think everything's product management at some level, right? I, I feel like all of the great powers that AI gives to an individual are accruing way more to product managers than to almost anyone else because at its purest, product management is just like a high judgment brain with no arms, right? It's the person who is spending lots of cycles trying to be right to keep the rest of the organization doing the thing that matters. But now the PM can do the thing too. And so suddenly things that were bottlenecked on not just resources, but also on communication and coordination costs, you can just manifest these things in the world now. You like, you say the incantation and the thing appears. One of the, you were talking on your podcast a week or two ago about like the benefits of bootstrapping and not having to take VC money, right? Cause you're not bound to someone else's expectations. You're not on this like rigid rails that someone's laid out for you that you've decided to put yourself on. I would generalize that a little bit. Like anytime you bring a second person into the mix, you the, like the, the, the data exchange rate between your brain and their brain is a lot slower than between your brain and itself. And and so just like the things that you can accomplish before you have to say a word out loud to another person, the experiments you can run, the things you can try and fail at. And then of course, like not having to get money to fund it is also very helpful. It's just it's one of the reasons I'm doing this in the first place. It's a reason why I was able to build confidence to do this because I didn't have to like talk to anyone else about it until I built up some confidence myself. I could not agree more. You know? No, no. Well, well, we were talking about how like the difference between what you know, like the skills required to like do the kind of consulting and discovery work and I kind of like problem identification and ultimately shift into solution mode for like clients as an advisor, as a consultant. Seems very similar to kind of like the PM discipline or the PM function. And I think, you know, you were saying kind of like how it's kind of like all becoming or it's all product management or like PMs, maybe to the PMs more shall be given is kind of like how this feels. And you know, Mark and I, Mark, I haven't actually verbalized this to you, but like I was kind of like thinking how, first of all, Mark and I have been like, we spend so much time talking to each other that I think we've done some of that brain, that mind melding that you're describing. So like Mark and I in a way kind of do work a little bit like a single brain, even though it's like got like he still has his own ideas and I have my ideas, but like I think there's a growing, growing overlap in like the things that we take to be obvious or the assumptions that we make so we can, we have less lossy kind of communication like the way you would with like a new person coming in the mix. But then the second thing I think about is I used to think that you needed like the traditional way of thinking about a co-founder is someone who's got like kind of like complementary skill sets and you know, so like for a, like a designer and an engineer or like a, like a go to market person and like a tech person kind of right. And given that Mark and I both come, we're not engineers and we both come from a product management background, I was kind of wondering like, why does this seem to actually be working? And one of the reasons I can, that one of the stories I tell myself is actually feels like because we're both able to get so much leverage from the tooling and from the technology, it's actually more like we have two, we're like two barrels that can both get a lot of work done and each of us almost have our own like cross-functionally staffed pod that we control. So it's like, you know, that's why it feels like we're able to get so much done without, while still being complementary is because each of us has our own like Ironman suit, I guess that allows us to do a bunch of other stuff independent of each other. And those are superpowers. I think there's also something to like, I think Noah, you were saying of like that example of like that 20 minute, like conversation turning to prototype and then just having like a much better artifact to react to and like the quality of the conversation and the insights that you get from that going faster. Like I think that's also happening when you're working with someone, right? It's like, like we're able to bring like such high quality, like, you know, plans, proposals are fleshed out to the point that like, it really feels like every decision is super high leverage. And then that just kind of compounds, right? And so I think that's like the other benefit of this new world where you're just able to have like much, I think the density of high quality conversations and high leverage conversations is way higher than it used to be. I mean, if you're using it correctly, like, but I think in our case, like Ben, I feel like that's, that's true. The timeline for conversations has condensed so much too, like historically I remember like, and I still sometimes find myself by default reverting into the old way of thinking that like, you know, we'll need like three or four conversations to get something done. Like sometimes I still revert to thinking that way because it's how it used to be because you could only make so much progress between conversations. And and now I continually, continuously find myself asking myself, why, why can't we just do this with no more conversations? Why is this like, we already had the one conversation we need to have. Everything is captured. The next conversation should be like a decision async kind of conversation. And so a lot is condensing in that sense. And I, like anyone that wants to drag stuff out over multiple conversations now, I'm like, man, you're just not, you're not like working as smart as you probably should. Well, every conversation is a prompt for the next task, right? When you start recording conversations, you realize that the entire like workflow inside of most companies is just transformation of information from state to state to state, right? It's, it's, you know, a goal to strategy, it's strategy to tactics, it's PRD to design, it's design to code. And and so life is just like a series of prompts, man. You know, it's, it's you, whatever conversation we're having right now, yeah, flip that. That's just like your opinion, man. It's, um, but it's just incredible. For those just listening, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark's mind was blown when, when Noah said it's all prompts. Or an assimilation. The anytime you like are doing anything with an AI, right? You can always ask it to do the next thing, right? This is the middle mile problem of AIs is that there's, there's always a first mile, there's always a last mile that live outside of the AI. But once you get the prompt in, you're in the middle mile, and the AI can do its part. And it's parts getting longer and longer and longer. And you can even tell it and that system prompt to then always end its response with and here are the next five things I could do for you pick a number one through five. The answer is usually all of them, please. And and so to your point on like, why does this have to be like another conversation? The the conversation that you're having in the course of running a business is itself a prompt to go and go get more data so that you can make the decision or the decision is implicit in what you said. So you can just go do the thing that was decided and and so on and so on until objective function is met. And I think a lot of the leverage that people like me are getting right now is in compressing cycles by just treating everything as a thing that can be prompted into the next step. And then there's this like, incredible meta benefit to it, which is that I have a massive imposter syndrome. And some of it's probably unwarranted, some of it's probably warranted, I'm doing things I've never done before. And so and that converges with procrastination, right? Anytime you feel yourself not wanting to do a task, it might be because you don't know how to do it well enough to like, want to grab it as the next thing. And guess what the solution to that is? It turns out that, you know, my agent would love to help me do that thing. And it's gonna add a very, very, very low bar minimum, like, get me started, if not complete it to my satisfaction. And so it's just, it's this incredible unsticking tool. And it's a tool for giving me the, the deserved confidence to go into situations where I wouldn't otherwise belong. If you're enjoying this conversation, please check out the links in the show notes to support the podcast. Mark and I do this out of love, but to keep it going, we also need your support. Thanks and now back to the episode. I think that's such a profound point. Like, I have the exact same reaction, like I think to me, like I, when you're starting a business, there's so many tasks that you hate that, but you have to do like, it's almost like chewing glass is part of the rule. And I used to hate that part. Like I, there are weeks that I'm like, I know I have to do this thing that I hate, but I just the most important thing that I need to do for the business. And I just like, remember, it was just like, kind of like, kind of going a lot of walks those mornings, just doing everything except the thing that I had to do. And now I get excited when I have those tasks, I'm like, it's an excuse for me to play with those tools. And I just see what they're capable of. I'm like, Oh, cool. Like I, today's R&D, like I get to see like how far can this, I mean, which is also in a funny way, like another form of procrastination, because a lot of times it might not be the most efficient way. But now I've managed to make it into a game where I kind of enjoy it. And sometimes I get it done faster than I would have. Did you ever read the article? There was this article that went viral on Twitter, I think, very early this year, called Something Big is Happening. Yeah. Right. The premise was sort of like shaking you by the shoulders and saying like, it's time guys, tell your friends, tell your mom to get on board. And there was this article that came out maybe a week later satirizing it called Something Small is Happening. And the recurring theme of this article was like, everyone needs to understand right now is the time to go buy a Mac mini. I bought a Mac mini. I haven't opened it, but I plan to. And when I do, I'm going to be so optimized. I'm not sure what I'm optimizing, but it's going to be the most optimized. And I think there is this trap, which is optimizing for the sake of optimizing. And you can sort of monitor the ratio of time spent building your system to time spent like getting leverage out of the system. And there's some healthy balance there. Here's how I'm justifying the fact that I spend way too much time building my system is this is how I learn, right? I'm dogfooding everything that I'm trying to bring to my clients. So I'm more than willing to like rebuild my chief of staff bot once a month on the new thing and treat that as like my R&D. But I'm not pretending like it's because it's giving me leverage each time I do it. Yeah, I think there's also like a power law component to it, right? Like you're going to get one use case that's actually like a killer use case that sells you a lot of time. That to me makes the whole thing worth it. I think you can only get to that use case if you're tinkering enough, right? And you're doing that R&D. But it's hard to know which one's going to be. That's well said. Yeah, I think I'm constantly having to let the latest thing kind of like go in front of me and not beat myself up with FOMO. Well, actually, I'll put that another way. If I'm not feeling FOMO, it means I probably don't care enough to try it. I actually never felt FOMO with OpenClaw as that craze came by. I never bought a Mac mini. I mean, Mark, maybe have your own opinions. But the majority of the people that I know that have set up OpenClaws or Hermes seem to be spending more time talking to me about the time they spend configuring it than about the value it has delivered to them. So I think that ratio feels skewed to me at the moment. So I think I'm probably opportunistically waiting for the inflection point where like the time spent on something like that dramatically is like an order of magnitude less than the amount of value it delivers. And then I'll get on board. But we use AI for stuff like the way we use AI on a day-to-day basis to me is like a no brainer from like an order of magnitude. I honestly don't think we could do any of what we do with Insider Loops without AI. I mean, it's like it sets at the core of everything we do. But Mark probably likes eating glass more than I do. I think I just need to have enough excitement about the problem that something is going to solve in a general path in my head to like this is I don't know the exact steps, but the steps exist. And so the moment I have those two things in mind, like it's important and the steps exist. I don't know how to do it. I get excited about that. It doesn't feel like eating glass. Well, it feels like eating glass is going into a meaty problem and feeling like it's low leverage to solve it. Like it kind of feels like this is hard. I don't know how to do it. And even if I do it, it doesn't seem like it's going to move the needle in any way. Like that stuff sucks. But sometimes you just got to do unglamorous work. And Mark is our unsung hero. and glamorous work and Mark is our unsung hero with our partnership for taking on I think a lot more of the things that I dread working on but but but yeah Mark you're really good at like putting on your blinders I think and just like if Mark if Mark goes into like a focus block you cannot get a hold of him until he's out of his like focus block and I think I'm guessing you're having fun while you're in there like because it's you're sucked into it yeah I mean I think also I'm able to just be more present and just yeah get to get more things done and I also feel like I mean that's part of why I do what I do right like I think I have the flexibility to do that and that to me like that time of tinkering on values is so valuable and that I just wouldn't trade that for anything and if I'm if that's part of the reason why I'm doing all the rest like I might as well just protect that with everything I have right. I think that you know Mark when I was a super member and and when we used to talk one of the things that I always admired about your approach to things probably applies to you too Ben is like the intentionality and the way you work right and even you know the way you teed up the podcast before we started recording I think I think that having the this is not to do with AI at all just to do with the way you guys have set up your business and your patterns of working one of the most frustrating things has to be a consumer of content like this where you feel like there's all these great ways of living your life and approaching your work and then going into an environment that doesn't facilitate that like having a focus block where no one can get a hold of you is a death knell in some companies or just impractical at a lot of companies and so part of the reason that I'm so high energy right now and that I have a smile on my face is because I can take inspiration from you and decide that I want to go do that tomorrow and there's no one to tell me otherwise and I can create the circumstances for that to be possible and it's what I'm loving that aspect of my life I want this to end with some practical advice for people who are working full-time jobs and environments that are less conducive to that but I think all I can offer is empathy and saying I've been there and that the outside world will be there when you want it. I think the most optimistic take I have for full-time work giving people more of what we're talking about is that when the dust settles I don't know how long it's gonna take for the dust to quote-unquote settle but like I think companies that don't empower their people to have this kind of focus time will get less leverage out of their people so I think that like the capital if the capitalistic dynamics play out the way I hope they do companies that do give their like smart and well-intended workforces the space to leverage and go into rabbit holes and build and tinker are going to benefit from that like they'll have higher like revenue per employee kind of stuff right like I think that that's my hope I and if that happens and hopefully the percentage of people that listen to these conversations over time that feel like they're stuck in a place that is not as conducive to like you know tinkering and going into focus blocks will go down and down over time but you could totally take a more cynical and less optimistic approach about where we're heading and I promise you whatever take you have I probably have a more cynical one I think I think that's probably true in a platonic ideal and it's probably true for innovation companies where change and building are the priorities I don't want to be unfair to like past companies that I've worked at but I'll give one example of where I think it's maybe not the case when I was just a wee lad I worked in the creative services department at McDonald's headquarters so you know this is a lifetime ago pre-business school on you know slow days I was an AV guy on big days I would like get to help with the rigging and the lights and the set for the Elton John concert at the convention center where all the owner operators were there so a wild job to end to see companies like McDonald's from the inside is really like a privilege but have you met sir sir sir Elton John I was I was backstage with him I did not meet him okay okay keep going I just need to make sure we answered that yeah I know we lads please he has a new shirt I just McDonald's doesn't benefit from having like rapid change right it's working the old the system is working like don't rock the boat like yeah like yes you want you want to you want to iterate right you want to keep current but there are checks and they're literally checks and balances it's like a it's like a you know there's the three branches of government there are literally the three legs of the McDonald's tool the suppliers the corporate and the franchise and and part of their job is to make sure that no one does anything stupid and so and I think that you know just to bring it back to free-range consultant for a second one of the things that's really fun and eye-opening about going into companies is it's so easy to think that all companies are tech companies right or that all companies even if they use technology have sort of Silicon Valley Y Combinator dynamics and and there's just a breadth of other like internally consistent alternate you know maximums out there reasons why it ought to be a different way and it's working for that business and it's okay that it's working for that business and it takes a lot of humility to go into a company and say like okay I get why you have all this process because if you have one HIPAA breach you're done right or I understand why you work in a waterfall method instead of an agile method because you have 100,000 employees distributed across the country and 500 stores and change management's hard so you don't want to do it every day you know and and so I guess the the point is that coming in with a playbook to these companies and and certainly with like Silicon Valley you know or even MBA hubris is really dangerous because you can break a thing that's working and part of the fun of this is trying to solve companies needs on their own terms and assume that they're not stupid for doing something the way they're doing it they're actually optimizing for what's rational in their circumstances at their stage And then when you end up building something to solve for that it means that you're it means that you can measure success in other ways than just like you know have you gotten all the meetings off the calendar or are your engineers writing more lines of code? I think that that makes me think of something and I I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like how do you know it's time for a free range AI consultant to like move on because like similar to AI right like there's always the next thing to build right there's always step three and four again and again and again so I think I'm guessing to you like you know I think you've at a point in your life where you're like kind of like trying to chase that what gives you energy so I'm curious like if you find any connection within the two of like when is it time to move on and kind of like when you saw me feeling I'm not as excited or motivated about what I'm what I'm delivering to companies? Are you asking when is it time for me as the consultant to want to move on to another profession? Yeah. Yeah. Like when do you think hey like I think you've gotten probably the highest ROI that I could have gotten from you and kind of like from now on. Not to another profession. I think I think you're talking about like an engagement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like let's say you're helping your lawyer like your lawyer friend right of like and like set up their practice and maybe like the biggest pain points like how do you know hey like my tour of duty here for this specific company is done and I need and I should move to the next one. You know the what's coming to mind when you ask this question is I've built this the system prompt I think I mentioned earlier where every time I run a session with an agent its response ends with and what would you like me to do next and here are some options. And there's something about consulting that's kind of like that too where every engagement is meant to lead to the next proposal. So if you wanted to and the cool thing about consulting too is if you don't want if none of those options for where it goes next are interesting to you as a consultant you could refer them to someone else or just like let them know that you know you can give them some reactions to maybe how they're thinking about implementing what the next step is. But you know you're you have some other priorities but assuming you're interested yeah I totally agree no. Well where I get my energy is from the discovery and problem solving stage. Maintenance is a real thing that needs to happen and an optimization and tuning of these agents and making sure that they have a closed loop that's actually working. But so I think there is a there's a rational like handoff point where when something is up and running and the closed loop is working you really don't want a company to have to rely on you to maintain that forever. And you know with these things are most successful when it's a co-build and someone at the company feels accountable for the ongoing maintenance and evolution of the thing. But that doesn't mean the engagement is over because there's always a next thing to build and more value to capture. And so I guess the my walkaway point is when it stops when the relationship stops being good right. Which I haven't had that happen yet but if a client was really really unpleasant to work with that would be a great signal to walk away. But otherwise the the diffusion curve of AI even within a given company is going to be you know a long stretch. And every engagement is just discovery for the next engagement. You learn things you didn't know before or you you realize that the next logical thing to do is limited by some underlying infrastructure that can be evolved. So I don't think there's a natural breaking point. I think what you're describing to me is the reason why it's almost like the fundamental difference between full time employment and like being out on your own is that the way you describe things is like as long as it's a good fit we'll keep we'll keep re-upping we'll keep going to the next thing and parlaying to the next thing and as long as they think it's a good fit and they're getting a high ROI from whatever they spend on you and you're feeling like it's feeding your flywheel like it's helping you improve your skills it's helping you get more data points it's interesting work that's playing to your superpowers and you find yourself excited about it then why would either party terminate the engagement as long as it's good. And the happy path is that you know some things just naturally come to an end and that's okay like you they just know they've run out of discovery type work to do and you like to do the discovery type work so it's just not a natural fit you guys still love each other and you go somewhere else after spending maybe three to six months like helping them with some big project. Problem with full time employment to me like the fundamental dynamic there that's kind of broken for people like me that get bored quickly is that there's like no natural happy ending for you in a play in a in a full-time role if you lose interest in the space you're working on or if the problem evolves to the point where you're not excited anymore. I totally agree Ben and I think that's why I was at Amazon for a decade is because Amazon has solved for that somewhat with rotation right it's there's nothing quite so nice as being like new to a problem where things aren't working but it's not your fault yet and you get to be the hero who comes in and fixes it. Love that phase. There's also nothing as nice as walking away from a problem that you created so maybe there's a little bit of moral hazard baked in but I do think that changing things is good. I mean when I when I started at Amazon I started on Amazon fresh in as an intern in 2011 back when it was just in Seattle and that's wild. I know people laughed at me for the fact that we were going to be selling salmon on the internet and this director on the team said that I guess bananas and I have this experience this weekend putting bananas into my Yeti cooler. Bananas are the only like item that if you put it into a cold environment it goes worse right yeah right so ambient stuff can be chilled frozen stuff can be chilled for a period of time and survive but bananas go bad right they turn black and they haven't solved for it yet and every banana that Amazon fresh shipped in 2011 was brown and she said that she's been working on the business for a couple of years and she stopped seeing it and she stopped she stopped caring that they were shipping brown bananas just because you don't you know you get you get used to it and part of the value of being new to a problem again I think this is one more reason why having someone come in as a consultant is a nice thing is because you have someone who's naively unsatisfied and still sees it with fresh eyes and asks why that thing is the way it is when everyone else just sort of knows it's always been that way the other thing this is a another reason to just like be happy about this consulting life is I'm very like pilled against consulting from my like life at Amazon we didn't hire consultants we were all about seeing things through to the finish line and consultants you know like to leave things on your desk and walk away and and so I've sort of had a negative valence around consulting forever and one of the things I always assumed would be true about consulting is that you never really feel like you're on the team and you feel with less appreciated for doing that work and the thing that surprised me the most is that it's literally the exact opposite because someone who is paying you real dollars out of their budget to solve an acute problem that they can't solve themselves is so happy to have your time and your attention and your expertise and I feel very valued for the work that I'm doing if I didn't I probably wouldn't want to work with that client and honestly they shouldn't want to work with me and and the fact that I'm not on the team seems sort of beside the point I think I think that the not being on the team is kind of part of what makes it special like you know last year I did a lot of like fractional kind of like interim work contract work projects and I found that like not if you could take every one of those engagements and turn them into a full-time role I have a feeling it would deprive it of some of what makes it what made it so good it's just like the at-will nature of not no one has to fire anyone no one has to give anyone benefits no one has to give anyone a laptop no one has to give you equity if you you know if it's not it's like the most transactional positive some kind of like way to set something up to be clear I'll take equity if that's yeah yeah I just chose not to take the equity because yeah you know between us like what wasn't that yeah I won't say it it's funny because yeah we were we're in a group chat with a bunch of other product people and there's someone who's like a interim VP of product at a big company and they're saying the same thing right it's like it's part of the fun is that they're not you know they they feel like they get to be part of the team but without like the kind of like the unlimited like time and responsibility that maybe comes with like a full-time job maybe before we start wrapping like one thing that I'm super curious about given that you're just so thoughtful about everything you do is you know we're talking in the pre-recording that you're a point where you know you've gotten a lot of traction and you're like you know have a lot of people want to work with you to the point that hey you cannot take more work yourself so you're thinking about scaling and that's something that I'm like always kind of questioning whether it's worth doing or not like even for insider loops like when I like talk with like actually like we don't want to mess with this because like we're having so much fun the two of us and we're worried that we add someone to the dynamic is going to change the way we spend time we might be managing people like and like the way we spend time will change so I'm curious like how do you like how do you how do you think about staying energized energized as you're you're thinking of growing the team right and like and how you spend your time on what brings you energy when when that change happens. I don't know the answer to this right so I'm standing on the cliff edge about to jump so I'll maybe have you back on in a year we can we can talk through the lessons learned I am here are the things that I know are true I really like the work that I'm doing if I don't do it on a given day I don't get paid I'm selling my time as inventory and there's a finite supply of it and I get a lot of energy from working on the meta parts of the business as much or more as I get on working on the engagements themselves and so when you sort of add all those things up I think it means that having the ability to know that the machine is running the gas pedal is down with or without me but then I have the luxury of having my hands on the steering wheel that that feels like the version of the business that I want to grow into the other thing is we've we've talked about free-range consulting but I don't know that I've ever like really actively decided to be a consultant as strange as that sounds I am consulting is the selling your expertise by the hour is sort of the default thing to do when you don't have a product right and over time there are patterns that emerge in these engagements both vertical use cases and like horizontal parts of the stack that need to emerge where they're like very clearly needs out in the world and as well served as sass is right now and as much as there is being built in AI like I'm getting privileged knowledge of what those needs are from these client engagements that the whole thing is basically like product discovery phase for some future product to be built and yeah and so I think I think that you and there are some companies that have this model going already and I think I think it's smart to be both consultants and product company to deploy the products through consulting there's just a lot to do so I want the luxury of being able to move in and out of those things you'll you'll find you'll find the angles for productizing certain parts like just to give you an example like you know I started doing one-on-one interview coaching which was entirely like you know time in money out kind of thing yeah and then I turned that into a course which was still time in and money out and then in the process of doing that got to understand where what gaps existed and built my co-pilot my practice co-pilot which is a standalone product that people can buy and I don't have to spend time to serve that demand and then I turned my course into a self-paced course that people could also take without me having to be there to teach it and now everything we're doing with insider loops is us taking knowledge and packaging it so for consumption as a product so my intuition is like you know if you ever want to jam on that more I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities and what you're looking at that can help you turn it into like a digital product of some kind if you choose to but that but there's a natural evolution you know I don't think anyone can just start with the digital knowledge product that first doing that that manual non-scalable phase of offering like doing exactly what you're doing I think and getting to know space. I'm really glad to know that story of yours and I think I will be hitting you up for for advice or you you or whatever agent you point me to I I think the other thing that you've clearly like solved for are making a deliberate attempt at solving for is you know in a world where anyone can build anything distribution matters more than ever and and so having a way of telling the world about your product whether that's through the network you built from doing it as a service first or by building a platform like this one it just matters so much more now I my my like singularity moment which happened you know Q4 last year like everyone else when I opened Opus 4.5 and I was like oh okay it's happening now I I built my first app end to end. I, I built my first app end to end, um, since college, I, in college, I built a PHP app, which was a lot of like me looking up PHP tutorials on GeoCities and then building things. Um, but you know, this was my first time being able to say, Oh, I don't need to know how this library works. I just need to know that I can use this library. And I built an app that did career coaching, um, and, and it's still up. Not a single person has used it. Right. And, uh, and so I was very, very proud of the proof point that I was able to build something. And, uh, it sort of makes the case that building, building something is no longer enough. It's just a commodity. Uh, and the point is, can you get it into people's hands who care? Yeah. I was in the product market fit, you know, it's the market that matters now, um, uh, more than the product. I could not, could not plus one that more. I was, I was talking to some of my friends that, um, teach, teach courses on Maven and we're just like, we, we share our learnings. We actually have a super group that, um, for some people that teach courses and, um, one of the things that the group reflected to me is kind of how clear, how, how for me at least, like what seems to have worked really well over the last couple of years is the choice of the, the market. Um, and once I kind of knew the market that I'm serving, which is really like PMs in the interview, like PM interviews, um, you kind of put your blinders on to things that are not in that space and you kind of get to know what that market needs. And then if you could build an audience that, that is that market and you have something that, that you, you believe that market needs based on your knowledge of the market, then when the time comes for you to have something to offer to that market, you will have already, um, resonated with enough of the people in that market as to develop some kind of, uh, audience. And then, um, and you know, not everyone in my audience wants to buy what I'm selling, but my, my goal is that the, if there's people in my audience who do need what I'm selling, that they know about it, um, so that they can choose to consume it or not. Um, so as you do, you know, to bring it back to you, like, I think as you enter this phase and this is what I tell everyone is like, you want to kind of figure out what the market, like if there's a market, like a specific market that's pulling you based on the conversations you have and you know, you kind of have to close some doors to go deep on that market. But if you can carve out that niche for yourself and become the go-to person for whatever market, fill in the blank, um, I suspect that no matter what it is you actually build for that market, they will like, they will find it and they will buy it. If you can create a bunch of consistent content over long periods of time that are designed for that market in specific. And we should start, we should start rubbing, but yeah, no, you go, because I was like, oh shit, he flew by. The closing doors topic is on point and really, really hard. I struggle with that. Um, in business school, I started and stopped recruiting for consulting firms six times, uh, before I finally said I'm doing tech and walked away and that, and that's what you need to do for it to actually work as you know. Um, I don't have a hard stop, so we can, we can wrap a mark. Do you have to drop right now? No, I can keep going. I just want it to be mindful of no idea about, I'm happy also to wrap whenever, but I can keep going. There's one other, there's one other point that you sort of triggered for me, Ben, which is, um, you know, when you're building your audience and trying to find the market for your product, I, for whatever reason, I think that I care a lot about making contact with the world outside of tech. Um, and I don't know if you've experienced this, um, but there are a lot of, um, product people creating products for product people, right there. Uh, and there are a lot of, um, content creators creating content about how to create content for perspective, content creators and, uh, and at some point sort of something needs to make contact with reality. Um, right. And so, uh, it's not that these things are invaluable. They absolutely are. And they're, and they're also like, there's a little bit of a cheat code in them because you know, your audience, if you are them. Um, and, uh, it's one of the reasons working at Amazon was like great because you are a customer. And so you kind of, you have that cheat code for knowing what a customer might want. Um, I, I think I'm measuring the value of what I'm building or at least like the non-slop factor of it in like, does someone who doesn't feel like they're inside of AI, um, uh, care about what I'm doing? Um, and that makes building the audience that much harder because they're sitting, they're not, they're not in AI Twitter by definition, right? They're sitting somewhere out there in the big, scary real world, reading like maybe even like a paper trade publication. Uh, Well, but, but this, but this is my whole point. My whole point is that it's, if you like touching, quote unquote, touching grass with like people in the real world who AI is like a thing out there that they're not actively thinking about, then it's possible that the best way to build an audience of those people is to actually not do content about AI at all. It's about, it's about, it's to do content about the problems that they experience, like the boring problems they experience on a day to day basis, doing whatever they do. Like for example, if, um, boutique gyms ends up being like the market that you get excited about working with, then you know, you, you create a bunch of content that is how to improve your gym business. It has nothing to do with AI, it's, but it's all about like how to market your gym, how to do better retention, how to do better offers, you know, how to whatever, like learnings that you can disseminate. And then people that have boutique gyms will be like, oh, this is the best newsletter ever. Like this guy runs like right, the best content for boutique gyms. And then every once in a while you have like a, an offer that you could plug that's like, oh, by the way, I've learned some really good stuff. I have some case studies that have helped some boutique gyms grow their sales or improve retention by X metrics. You know, feel free to like schedule a call with me if you want to learn more about how I can help you or like get my playbook for how to do that for your gym. Like that's, that's, I think the kind of audience building, but I, I definitely wouldn't come at it from the angle of like the AI, AI content. Cause I think that's just saturated personally. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely more, more difficult. Right. Because I think if, you know, especially in our world, like we see a lot of like blueprints for like, you know, how to grow an audience on LinkedIn or how to grow an audience through a podcast. I think if you go to the real world, like we're kind of a bit more removed that way. Right. I'm like, you kind of have to get back into like learn new acquisition channels that maybe they're not the ones that you're used to, like maybe you've been into receiving it, but still like, I think in general too, like as product people, like that's just not a muscle that we have, especially like the sales and marketing. Right. There's all these things that like, that it just takes time, right? I go like, Hey, like actually you should maybe just pick one channel and like, give it a fair try. Like it's just, you know, maybe just dropping $2,000 on Google AdWords is not enough. Like maybe you need to spend like three months on maybe it's like 10,000. Right. So yeah, I think it's, it's a hard skill and I think that the hard part too, is like, there's so many unknown unknowns and that, yeah, to me, like one of the biggest, I've just been talking to people that are in that world or that are experts in that. And just kind of like almost paying that stupidity tax, I'm just gonna like, I'm gonna pay it upfront. It's going to be expensive, but at least you're going to like accelerate the learning. And that's been really useful. Cool. Let's start wrapping. Yeah. Sure. Sorry. I, you got me excited with that last part. So before we do our very, very fun gratitude corner, which Mark can ask the question for, how can people, we have two quick questions. How can people learn more about what you're thinking about in the spirit of audience building? And then the second question is, if the audience does want to be helpful to you, where would you direct them? Well, you can find me on Twitter or X, I'm seriouspeopleai. And you can visit me at seriouspeople.ai and see my cheeky brand reel on the front page of the site, which I had fun making. I, there are two ways you can be helpful to me. One is I'm going to be launching the Serious People podcast in July. You can subscribe to it now, seriouspeople.ai slash podcast. And it is meant to be exactly what we were just talking about. The space where business people who are trying to apply AI to solve actual messy situations in their businesses and you have to confront the reality of how these things get deployed, talk through their case studies. So I think it'll be useful for people who are trying to figure out how to take the hype cycle and turn it into something useful. So that launches in July and would love to have your audience find that in all the places where podcasts are sold. And then, yeah. And then the other way would be, I'm looking for great people who want to do what I'm doing to grow the Meribander brothers. And so shoot me an email, Noah at seriouspeople.ai or find me on LinkedIn or X and we'd love to hear from you or we'd love to hear you raising someone else's hand who you think is great to work with. I have to say you're, oh yeah, go ahead, Mark. I was just curious, like, are you asking, are you looking for any specific profiles like, or is there some turn of people that you think would, and of course, like if they like what you said and how you talk and you think they will be great candidates, but anything else you think it's like really important to have fun with this and work with you and work with the businesses that you're working with? The three principles that we were talking about earlier, I think are the ones that matter. It's insist on the highest standards, get shit done and don't take yourself too seriously. I think that job titles are really not that useful anymore. And a lot of the skillsets that used to sort of cluster under job titles are, they're just melting apart now and puddling on the floor. And so the things that we need to do are have really high trust, high bandwidth, intellectually honest conversations with business owners. We need to understand business from first principles. We need to be like wildly current about what's going on in AI and we need to have practical solutions to things that can actually get done and can be delivered reliably. I don't know. Is that product management? Maybe. Engineering? Sometimes. Being just like a competent human, I think is sort of the, the minimum buy-in. And then from there you can go in a bunch of different directions. The sickest job description right there. I'm alive. Everything you just said is like music to my ears. Yeah. I was going to say Noah's picture on seriouspeople.ai of himself in a suit sitting at a desk in front of an old school computer is amazing. Did you catch the title of the book on the desk? AI for Dummies? Yeah. I had a really fun time. Wait, this is a detour, but I'll go here for a second. I decided to do a one-day photo shoot with all my AI tools sitting at my desk. So I had Claude design be my sort of like brand agency and it came up with this whole brand aesthetic for me. I actually just posted it on X yesterday because I thought it was so funny. It said that my aesthetic is a rich, specific visual world, a Y2K enterprise cosplay as a Trojan horse for modern AI work, a Navy suited man squints at a CRT running Claude, deadpan corporate training video aesthetic, Xerox tan grades. Just nailed it. Amazing. But Claude can't make me photos or videos. So I had to do a full shot list like it was going to be taken to a film set. I brought it over to GPT of a gen, created keyframes. I brought those over to Runway and created clips. And then I had Claude edit it all together with FFmpeg and that's my brand reel. And then I realized I wasn't in the shoot at all. So I decided to do a nice little profile pic sitting in front of a fake desk. The whole thing, the fact that you can do that for a $30 a month subscription is kind of blowing my mind. So yeah, that whole website, I remember when you first kind of released it was just a piece of art. Like every, every little detail is just full of like little Easter eggs, which is awesome. Makes me happy that you saw that. Where were we? Yeah. So I think, yeah. Gratitude corner. Gratitude corner. Ben, you're going to say something before I said it. No, that was it. I said it. Oh, okay. Cool. That was amazing. Now we've made it to our awesome gratitude corner and yeah, you've had an awesome career from being on stage, even though you didn't interact directly, but just being the president of the great Elton John all the way to leading product at incredible companies, leading teams and now doing this work that's deeply meaningful to you. And yeah, maybe like along this way, like maybe there's a couple of people that have played a key role. I just want to take this moment if you wanted to say thank you to them or giving a shout out and you can do a couple if you want as well. It's a pretty amazing thing that you give people the chance to do this. And even just the chance to reflect on it is kind of wonderful. I want to say thank you to Rick Boltinghouse, who is my first boss. Rick was in charge of special events at Navy Pier in Chicago, which included Spring Family Fun, the Navy Fear Haunted House, Winter Wonderfest. And I was his lone employee, an hourly production guy. And he trusted me with things that I still can't believe were my job. I was, you know, I was buying sound systems and I was running large teams of event staff and I was overseeing union contractors doing big installs. I think at one point I pushed go on the fireworks for the city. He just decided that I was capable enough and he trusted me to do it. And that's how it all starts when you're early in your career. And I think on top of that, he's someone who moved fluidly between being like a competent operator and just a really nice guy who was happy to have you over to his house for dinner and have you know his family. And he's sort of, even though I haven't kept up with him lately, he's someone who's always stuck in my mind as being like a key enabler of everything that came afterwards. So thanks, Rick. Amazing. I hope he gets to hear this. I hope someone says that about me one day. You've got a lot of people who will say that about you. But amazing. Well, I'm so glad we did this. This is so fun. You guys are great. Thank you for having me. And yeah, I'm just so excited to maybe have the conversation in a year and kind of hear how this evolution has been and share notes. But I'm so excited for your journey and all the incredible things you've done over the past few years. And so I'm very grateful for you spending time with us. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Ben. And I'm excited to follow your podcast. Yeah. Maybe I'll have you guys on next. Yeah. That would be awesome. Do we have to be serious people for that? The less serious, the better, I think. I love it. Amazing. All right. That's a wrap. Thank you. Thanks. Bye.