"Papa, I hope you don't take it the wrong way"
My son called last week to tell me he's worried about my AI habit. Here's the argument I wish I'd made.
In this edition:
VIDEO: The contradictory premise of the YouXAI Summit. Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too?
One day left for early bird pricing!
“Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way.” An uncomfortable conversation with my son about AI
What I’m reading right now: Tommy Landry’s book on AEO/GEO has got me all excited
Idea Worth Considering: Your AI self-interview
1. VIDEO: My Daughter Asked Me If My Video Was AI. She Had a Point.
2. One Day Left for Early Bird Pricing!
The YouXAI Summit is Saturday, September 12, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, at the Performing Arts Community Center in Waco.
Twenty speakers across two tracks, one long day of people who were doing real work long before any of this was fashionable.
Early bird tickets are $59 through tomorrow, July 31 - after that they go to $79 for August, and $99 from September 1 until the doors open. If you've been meaning to grab one, tonight's the night to stop meaning to. youxai.live
3. “Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way”
It feels weird to be talking about the “AI backlash” and AI as a human “amplifier” together in the same breath.
I seem to be at the center of this AI backlash, yet I’m very AI-positive.
My millennial kids have criticized me for going all-in on AI. And I participate daily in online conversations about how AI slop is littering our timelines.
But I see AI is a solution to this.
Am I trying to have it both ways?
An uncomfortable call
My son phoned me the other day to specifically call me out on my whole-hearted embrace of AI.
After a little discussion about my daughter-in-law’s pregnancy and the new apartment they’re moving into, he got right to the point:
“Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way,” (gulp…I think I know what’s coming).
“But I’m not comfortable with how much you’re embracing AI. You know how those data centers are hurting local communities…” and so on and so forth.
I tried to argue with him. I told him how I’m advocating for the responsible use of AI. But it didn’t faze him.
So here’s my attempt to build a cogent argument that might satisfy him (and my other kids), while at the same time explaining the premise of the YouXAI Summit I’m organizing in Waco, Sept. 12th.
Humans need to be at the center of AI
“We’re putting the human back in AI!” Sounds like a campaign slogan, but how we can put the human back in AI if it was never there in the first place?
Ok, all seriousness aside. Humans need to be at the center of AI.
And more specifically, your zone of genius, your POV, your experiences, opinions, your unacknowledged great ideas you take for granted.
AI has given us a wonderful opportunity to outsource the busy work, while we finally focus on our craft, our art, our innovations.
And AI can help us!
Here’s a little story to illustrate my point.
I had a weird experience with Claude. I was using it (him? her?) as my confidant, sharing maybe a little too much personal information.
It suddenly told me: “Your patterns all point to one thing: you’re great at highlighting other people and extracting their zone of genius. You ghost-write books for them; you organize events so they can speak; you interview them and spread their message. You’re giving everybody a platform but yourself.”
Claude almost made me want to cry by showing myself to me. (Get yourself together, Fernando).
But what this showed me is that, despite what my son told me, AI can be beneficial…at extracting that sumthin’ sumthin’ that makes you special.
Which in today’s world is more important than ever.
AI can handle the busy work so we can focus on our art
Artists feel like they were put on this earth to create their art, not balance their books or create funnels.
But sometimes they drown in busy work.
The beauty of AI is that we can automate all that stuff so we can do the wonderfully human task of creating art.
And yes, I also mean entrepreneurs, founders, and creators. We all do art.
What’s more artistic than innovating new technologies that are a pleasure to use everyday?
AI can make our dreams come true
Ok, stay with me here.
Two of the speakers at the YouXAI Summit, Dariia Isyk and Shakhlo Juraboeva, from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, respectively, designed and shipped their own app called AdmitAI while still students at Baylor University.
The app helps international students navigate the labyrinthine process of applying to an American university.
Are Dariia and Shakhlo engineering students?
No. Shakhlo is studying finance. Dariia is pursuing an International Studies degree.
In my interview with them, Shakhlo said, “In the world of AI I think we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero, because everything is easy, the only thing we need is an idea.”
We need an idea. That’s deep.
The one skill we need now is to actually develop ideas, but our idea muscle has been under-developed because we’ve been so focused on the “how” instead of the “what.”
If we have the idea, then “...we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero because everything is easy.”
AI makes it easy to implement our idea.
Think about a movie producer or a director. They don’t carry the camera or hold the mic boom. They don’t put the make-up on the actors, nor get their wardrobe ready for the next scene.
They created the idea for the movie, and orchestrate the whole thing through a team of specialists.
They were the intellectual authors of the blockbuster.
That’s the same for those of us who have a crazy idea we want to bring into existence. AI is our team of specialists.
What’s missing in today’s world are ideas. AI can take care of the rest!
This is where I see that apparently contradictory explanation of the post-AI backlash - the putting of the human back into AI - while going whole hog into AI.
It’s a new paradigm, a new way of thinking.
Just like TV used to be just radio shows on a sound stage, until we figured out we can do so much more with it.
Right now we’re using AI like we’re on a sound stage with cameras filming us.
But we need to use it as our implementation partner, our specialists, and as a way to help us see our hidden genius
4. What I’m Reading Right Now
I’m really excited about my buddy Tommy Landry’s book, “From SEO to AEO to GEO: The New Rules of Search in the Age of AI.”
Tommy’s been a friend since 2009. We met during that weird period when the Great Recession coincided with the rise of social media.
We were both going to the new meetups popping up like mushrooms all over Austin: the Big Ass Twitter Happy Hour (which later became the Big Ass Social Media Happy Hour); the Austin Social Media Club; Blogathon, etc.
Tommy staked his claim as Austin’s SEO expert, won a bunch of awards, and became the guy we all referred our clients to when they needed SEO.
Then the sky fell again, but this time it was AI. It pulled the rug out from content marketers and SEOs.
And Tommy being Tommy, he pivoted, immersed himself in AEO/GEO research, and emerged as an expert.
His book is the culmination of this work.
From schema markup, to .JSON files, to entity optimization, and snackable, self-contained paragraphs, his book as it all.
Ignore it a your peril!
You can pick up his book here on Amazon.
5. Idea Worth Considering: Your AI self-interview
I told you above about Claude reading my patterns back to me and nearly making me cry into my coffee.
I want to be careful about how I frame that, because if you open a fresh chat window and type “what’s my zone of genius,” you’ll get a horoscope. Warm, flattering, completely useless.
It worked for me because I’d been feeding it for months. Meeting transcripts, half-finished ideas, client calls, the story about the girl at the leadership retreat in Houston that I’d told maybe four people in forty years.
It had material. It wasn’t guessing about me, it was noticing something across a pile of evidence I’d handed over without realizing I was building a case file.
So if you want to try this deliberately, start by giving it something to work with.
Dump in a year of your LinkedIn posts. Transcripts from three or four client calls. The origin story you tell at every networking event. Then ask it what you keep coming back to without noticing, or what you do for people that you seem to think is normal.
Here’s the part that matters, though. The right answer will not feel like a revelation. It’ll feel obvious, and slightly embarrassing, and your first instinct will be to wave it off.
“Well, sure, but that’s just how I am, everybody does that.”
That’s the tell. That’s the whole thing. What you dismiss as “just how I am” is the thing your market can’t get anywhere else.
(And if it tells you you’re a visionary thought leader, close the window. It’s flattering you.)
See you next week!
Fernando Labastida