Is there anything that you kind of used to defend hard back in the day that you've kind of had to change your stance on now? I know that you, um, you, you mentioned, uh, that point just before, but i- is there, is there anything else where, where you used to h- kind of hang your hat on now, and then with everything coming through from, from AI, you're kind of like, "Is that still true today?"

Yeah.

Well, I think [laughs] it's, I mean, it's one that there's a big tension about, I think, right now, which I wouldn't say I'm- I don't have a lot of conviction in what I'm about to say, 'cause it's still, I think, a working, a working hypothesis, which is this, you know, the value of answer engine optimization.

You know, we were, you know, the, the, the early days of Google, I can remember having the debates about whether we should open our content up to, uh, to Google or not, and say...

You know, there was, and there were real debates about that, about saying, "Well, they're getting our access to our content for free, and then they'll, that just in- you know, emboldens them to sell us access to our own content," right? And so the- there were real debates about whether or not we'd let, you know, put stuff behind a gate or put it behind, you know, in, in a way that Google can't get access to it.

And in those days, I was pretty, I was pretty hardcore, like, "No, no, no, you wanna optimize.

You wanna, you wanna let that content run free because you're gonna be found, and you're going to, you know, it's gonna be the way that you get discovered through search," and, and, and I was a pretty hard line about it.

Yeah.

With that, let's, let's, let's view the bit.

So when we think about strategy and a content marketing strategy, a content strategy, one of the things that we think about is creating better content.

We want to create great content.

In fact, when we make the business case to our boss, to the CEO, the CMO, the board, whomever it is we have to make our case to, we often think we've got to create great content.

We've got to create this great content.

And the CEO or CMO goes, well, are you telling me that we haven't been creating great content for all this time? And so here's the thing, here's the sort of secret of content strategy, full stop, which is that your content will never provide any kind of inherent competitive advantage, it just won't.

It can be copied, it can now be duplicated, it is now being eaten by the engines that will all of a sudden interpret it and reinterpret it in different ways.

But what do you think when you're developing an opener like this or you're reshaping it for the new speech, what are you trying to achieve with that opener?

But I wonder if you could shed a light on why this matters, whether someone lives in the state or not.

Yeah.

So Wisconsin is a major bellwether state.

It was decided, you know, it really goes where the country is going.

Trump won it by less than 30,000 votes in 2024.

And Wisconsin, very interestingly, it's a state that, for being a purple state, it likes its strong partisans.

It doesn't like very centrist politicians.

But I think that conservatives need to have more of a general mission focus of restoring our country as a whole and understanding that that happens in the states.

It's the worst possible thing for me.

Well, I had a kid one year, and he was Roberto.

And the first day of school, I was telling them, you know, we're setting the rules.

And he says, I don't have to do a damn thing you tell me to do.

And he just looked at me like that.

And I said, well, you're right.

I really can't force you.

Yeah, they do have to have them now.

They would show up, the grass was similar here, and they'd be set loose upon the village to plunder and do other things.

Well, they were free.

You know, in Morocco, I took one tour with a guy in Fez because you get lost without it.

And I was like, you know, he came through my Riyadh guy, he's the cousin of, of the guy who owned the Riyadh.

So I was like, okay, cool.

Very nice guy.

Young guy, spoke good English, did a great tour.

point.

They would show up, the grass was similar here, and they'd be set loose upon the village to plunder and do other things.

Well, they were free.

You know, in Morocco, I took one tour with a guy in Fez because you get lost without it.

And I was like, you know, he came through my Riyadh guy, he's the cousin of, of the guy who owned the Riyadh.

So I was like, okay, cool.

Very nice guy.

Young guy, spoke good English, did a great tour.

the

But that general idea of AI taking over our entire job is something that sunk into this particular generation going into college now.

Yeah, and whether that actually comes to pass or not, certainly the fear of it alone is enough to have us act, right? And so just to your point, you know, when you start thinking about it, like I was having that same person I was having the conversation with, it's like, you know, you start to think about something like mathematics or journalism or medicine or law and, And what he was saying to me is he said, look, the important thing now is not for me sitting in front of my computer and having AI help me through a particularly complex math issue.

I can do that on my own, he said.

But the key is, is that if I'm pushing the practice forward, whether it's mathematics or law, what you're doing is you're having peers human peers pressure you, press you, right? You know, on your thinking.

And so that collaboration, like having somebody peer review my mathematics paper or having someone peer review my, you know, my take on a particular set of laws or having someone peer review my research paper is a really important aspect of the advanced nature of universities.

And that interaction is just, AI will never be able to have that, right? And the key there is because, the magic of working with a peer on a particular problem is the magic of not knowing.

You know what I mean? The magic of not, in other words, you wrestling with a problem together and not knowing.

The