Marketing is Already Dead, You Just Don't Know It

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Marketing is Already Dead, You Just Don't Know It"

Podcast: Marketing Against the Grain
Hosts: Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot CMO), Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot SVP of Marketing)
Date: January 22, 2026

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Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Kipp and Kieran confront the “death” of marketing as they see new AI-driven tools threaten to replace genuine human connection with mass automation. Using the launch of an AI marketing agent by Astral as a case study, they dig into the dangers of automating core marketing activities like community engagement and content creation, warning that it could push the internet toward a “dead web” dominated by spam and bots. Their central argument: real marketing requires human craft, originality, and participation—and AI should enhance creativity, not replace it.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Dystopian Rise of AI Marketing Agents

[01:29 - 04:39]

• The catalyst: a marketing tool by Astral that automates large-scale commenting on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit, supposedly to "replace jobs" and boost founder productivity.
• Both hosts react strongly against this, describing the tool as “basically automating spam.”
  • Kipp: “Are we paying marketers…is this what they’re doing? Just going out and spamming Reddit?” [02:38]
  • Kieran: "It's like 1/1000th of a real marketer. ... This is not marketing." [04:39]
• The deep worry: If AI tools are simultaneously creating, distributing, and engaging with their own content, human value and essence are simply erased.
  • Sam: “If we go to a world where AI is creating content, AI is distributing content, AI is commenting on its own content, then we are in a dystopian future.” [02:49]

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2. The “Dead Internet Theory” & Its Implications

[04:43 - 05:15]

• Kieran defines the “Dead Internet Theory”: “All this spam is just going to blow up over the internet and the internet’s going to become unusable.” [04:49]
• The concern is not just about marketing integrity but the increasing inability to distinguish human from AI interactions online—a loss of the original promise of the Internet to foster authentic community.

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3. Why Comment Automation Misses the Mark

[05:47 - 06:26; 07:21 - 09:13]

• The hosts draw a line between AI-assisted marketing (helpful) and AI outsourcing of deeply human interactions such as commenting (harmful).
  • Sam: “Commenting on posts is a deeply, deeply human thing to do. ... It’s a horrible, dystopian thing to automate.” [07:21]
• Praising the research capabilities of AI (“use of AI for a busy founder—pretty good”), they condemn its application to community engagement and warn this will create endless, meaningless threads.
  • Kieran: “It's researching that research to do spammy stuff that’s the problem.” [09:06]

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4. The Problem With “Human-Sounding” AI Content

[10:00 - 10:45]

• Both hosts agree that while AI can mimic human language, it can’t replicate the nuance or originality of real conversation.
  • Sam: “You can 100% tell when AI has crafted content.” [10:20]
  • Kieran: “Why do we have… human-sounding comments? The essence of marketing is building your tribe, having a community.” [10:28]

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5. Where AI Adds (and Detracts) Value

[11:15 - 13:21]

• AI should be used to assist marketers, not replace them:
  • Sam: “Crafting content is going to be a timeless skill to learn. Do not outsource that to agents.” [11:15]
  • Kieran: “As a co-writer or an editor, it's great. ... Not as [an] autonomous creator.” [10:17-10:20]
• Kipp and Kieran both stress: automated comments are not real marketing and reflect a misunderstanding of what marketers actually do, which is about building lasting brands and communities.

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6. The Broken Web: The Stack Overflow Example

[13:21 - 14:31]

• Stack Overflow: once a vibrant knowledge community, now diminished after AI harvested its content, reducing incentive for community participation.
  • Sam: “ChatGPT ingested all of that information... and it killed the community. ... Now that’s bad for AI because there’s no more content being created.” [13:36]

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7. True Marketing: Craft, Participation, and Brand Building

[14:33 - 16:18]

• Replacing real engagement with automation is a “lowest form of anything”—it diminishes both the profession and the impact of marketing.
  • Kieran: “If you don’t have time to participate in Reddit, you shouldn’t participate in Reddit.” [14:33]
• Building a real brand takes more than remote engagement; it requires showing up personally with perspective and personality.
  • Sam: “If you want to build a real long-lasting brand, you have to show up, you have to participate, you have to have personality.” [16:18]
  • Kieran: “This is not about that product or that video. That video is an example of what could go really wrong.” [15:38]

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8. Contrasts in AI Implementation

[16:55 - 18:59]

• The hosts highlight good AI use: videographer PJ Ace employs AI tools to create compelling stories faster and more affordably—not to replace storytelling, but to amplify it.
  • Kieran: “That’s an amazing example of using AI because he’s got this really great story that he can now tell faster, cheaper, and in more contextual ways.” [17:18]
• The wrong use: marketers who aim to “outsource marketing thinking” or treat it as mass, low-quality output.

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9. The Renaissance vs. Industrial Revolution Analogy

[19:08 - 21:37]

• Kieran and Sam call for a “Renaissance” of marketing—as in Florence’s golden age—where new tools help craftspeople do more, not replace craft itself.
  • Kieran: “You can either think about living in Florence…being a part of the Renaissance…or...the Industrial Revolution for marketing, like factories making everything the exact same.” [20:22]
  • Sam: “True craft has imperfections. AI does not know how to do those things.” [21:37]
• They see a risk: pursuing short-term gains through full automation leads to a soulless Internet and the genuine “death” of marketing as a valued discipline.

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10. Call to Action: Choose Craft, Humanity, and Long-Term Value

[22:01 - End]

• Warning: If agents create, distribute, and comment on content, humans will “opt out,” causing the Internet to lose all meaningful value.
  • Kieran: “People want to work with you because you believe something, … want to be part of something bigger. You can’t communicate any of those things through automated comments.” [22:17]
• Final appeal: Marketers have a choice—follow the “renaissance path” and craft real, valuable work, or watch marketing and the Internet decay.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Is this what marketers do? Oh my God, these people are going to ruin the Internet.”
  — Sam [01:38]
• “The second you outsource conversations to robots, the robots are just going to go back and forth to each other ... and it fundamentally means nothing now.”
  — Kieran [03:18]
• “Commenting on posts is a deeply, deeply human thing to do. ... It’s a horrible, dystopian thing to automate.”
  — Sam [07:21]
• “You can 100% tell when AI has crafted content.”
  — Sam [10:20]
• “Marketing is not, ‘How do I comment at scale?’ ... Marketing is how you build a tribe, deeply understand your audience.”
  — Sam [11:47]
• “Has there ever been a company in the world that has automated their storytelling and actually built a real brand?”
  — Kieran [15:38]
• “You can either live in the renaissance or the industrial revolution of marketing... I am fully committed to the renaissance.”
  — Kieran [20:22]
• “True craft has imperfections—AI does not know how to do those things. ... If we get beat by the automators, then I think there’s bigger problems than marketing dying—I think the Internet is dying.”
  — Sam [21:37]
• “People want to work with your company, not just for a good product or a fair price, but because you believe something and they want to be part of something bigger.”
  — Kieran [22:17]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:29] — Introduction of the controversial AI marketing tool
• [04:49] — Explanation of the “Dead Internet Theory”
• [07:21] — Critique of automating human interactions
• [13:21] — Case study: Stack Overflow’s community collapse
• [16:55] — Example of creative AI use with PJ Ace
• [20:22] — Renaissance vs. Industrial Revolution metaphor for marketing’s future
• [22:17] — Why human brand-building matters

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Conclusion

Bottom line:
Kipp and Kieran passionately argue that marketing’s future should be driven by human craft, not mass automation. AI’s best use is as an assistant, helping marketers do more and better, not automating away the very essence of what makes marketing meaningful. They urge listeners—especially founders and marketers—to reject tools that promise “replacement” and instead embrace a creative renaissance, celebrating the imperfections and individuality that real marketing brings to the digital world.

Transcript

[Sam]

All right, Kip, I think we're going to come together today to talk a little bit about the potential death of the Internet and just what is going on.

[Kieran]

I've never felt this worried about marketing in my life.

[Sam]

There's some warring signs in terms of how we are bringing all of these AI agents to life and what we're doing to the real value of the Internet.

[Kieran]

The Internet brought people together in really helpful ways. It's how I met my wife. It was awesome. We're worried that the next generation of the Internet might be driving people apart and that we might be going too far.

[Sam]

Right.

[Kieran]

Before we get into today's show, here's a quick word from HubSpot. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty incredible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow.

[Sam]

All right, Kip, I'm scrolling in X today, and to my surprise, there's a new launch of a marketing agent that's got a lot of negative reaction.

[Kieran]

Interesting.

[Sam]

And I think one of the reasons it's got a bunch of negative reaction is when people look at it, there's two real takeaways that people are having. First, wow, marketing sucks. Is this really what marketers do? Oh, my God, these people are going to ruin the Internet. And then the second one is the AI is really going to ruin the Internet. So I want to give you a little bit of a introduction to this and get your take.

[Kieran]

Yeah, please.

[Sam]

There's a company called Astral, and they had a launch, and it's basically a marketing agent that allows you to do commenting at scale. So it will go off and it will say, hey, like, you're interested in this and your audience are interested in these things. And it creates a bunch of agents and then goes comments for you on LinkedIn. It makes the comments on Reddit and it goes and actually gets a bunch of comments that you can go and do at scale. And when you actually watch it, if you're not a marketer, you're like, jesus, is this marketing? Because is this what marketers do?

[Kieran]

This is brutal. I watch.

[Sam]

This is horrible. What are you all doing with your time?

[Kieran]

It's basically like automating spam.

[Sam]

Yeah. Are we paying marketer My pay, my marketers. Is this what they're doing?

[Kieran]

They're just going out and spamming Reddit.

[Sam]

And LinkedIn mindlessly commenting on all these threads. As someone who has been like a victim of AI comment and at scale on LinkedIn, I have to be really honest, I do hate this use of AI. I've been very, very vocal about that. And there' also the problem that if we go to a world where AI is creating content, AI is distributing content, AI is commenting on its own content, then we are in a dystopian future where the real essence of the web that really helped marketing, I think get elevated and create value for people is being eroded and killed. And you and I do not want that to happen.

[Kieran]

Well, the second you outsource conversations to robots completely, the robots are just going to go back and forth to each other and then it's just going to become unusable to humans. Right. Because you're just going to have these competing robots saying what they think and oh, okay, well this means nothing now, now, now there's this whole thread of stuff that fundamentally means nothing.

[Sam]

So the AI starts a thread and it's like, hello humans, I have this question about this product or service and then another agent comes in comments and goes, hello human, that's a very interesting question. And that's what the web is. So why do people really hate this? First of all, I think that this is a mid marketing tool. I think the problem is this is the lowest level stuff.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Sam]

We're trying to talk about like why did this have such a negative reaction? Right, Correct. And I think it's because like this is not actually marketing, to be honest with you. This is not how I've ever thought about my role or have ever spent any time doing this. Right. I think, do we have people who participate in conversations and community? Yes. That is part of your brand. That is not something you outsource. They also did something that I would really recommend them that they want to go down this path not to do. And I've also talked about it publicly. I don't think a great brand message right now is replace jobs. That's what they're leading with.

[Kieran]

No, it's not.

[Sam]

People are not going to get excited about your brand. Right. Like I don't think that's an exciting comment. But this person here, this is maybe one, I would argue it's not even 1% of what a market does.

[Kieran]

Yeah. It's like 1/1000th of a real marketer. And I actually don't even Know that it's a real marketer.

[Sam]

This is not marketing, this one here. Right. The dead Internet theory is coming through. This is kind of what we talked about.

[Kieran]

What does that mean? What's the dead Internet theory? It means that all this spam is just going to blow up over the Internet and the Internet's going to become unusable.

[Sam]

So let's just have one more comment and jump into it. So I understand this is the world we're heading toward. Little we can do about it, pros and cons. I'm just devastated that our online experiences are going to be 90% AI generated and it will be harder to distinguish from human generated content. It's a serious loss. I think this is what we're talking about. The essence of market.

[Kieran]

This is the essence of the issue.

[Sam]

Is how we can create and craft things that humans are interested in. And what we're seeing. There are tools that are telling you to. And again, I actually would not even put comet in what marketers do, but let's just say comments for the sake of this conversation is like a tiny part of what a marketer crafts, participates. Outsourcing the entire thing to AI feels like completely the wrong thing to do. And I just don't think this is the kind of things that marketers should be doing.

[Kieran]

Look, AI content is everywhere right now and most of it is total garbage. It's low effort, generic, and frankly obvious. But AI isn't the problem. Bad prompts are. We built a system with 20 prompts that keep your content, human ideation, creation, distribution, optimization, the whole thing. Get it right now. Click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. You shared this with me ahead of the show and you and I both, we used a lot of expletives back and forth on WhatsApp about how ridiculous and wrong a lot of this is. Before we kind of talk about that, we just want to show you the first.

[Sam]

Right. Let's give a little bit of the launch video. And again, this is just our take on marketing and to give you a little bit of like what our core beliefs are and we're not trying to like rag on the founder or company here.

[Kieran]

Yeah, it's no disrespect to the founder who made this video. It's more about the underlying premise of what she's talking about. The product doing is just we could fundamentally disagree with.

[Astral AI Narrator]

You're looking at a network of AI agents working together so that one person can outperform a team of 10. Let me show you how it works using Atif. Atif is the founder of Capital Stack, an investor outreach app with no customers. But we're going to use Astral to get him his first 10.

[Sam]

So I will say this product is definitely aimed at early stage founders.

[Kieran]

Yes, early stage founders.

[Sam]

I want to make sure get their Jew here that it's like really focused on early stage founders who do not really have any marketers and have no real resources.

[Astral AI Narrator]

I'll ask Ashwell to pull fundraising posts From Reddit and LinkedIn and draft comments that drive leads to his product. Now watch what happens next.

[Sam]

I cannot even say how much I despise automating comments. I know I've said that all this year. Commenting on posts is a deeply, deeply human thing to do. It's like part of the real essence of the web and is bringing folks together so they can conversate on all of these different shared interests. And I just feel like it's such a horrible, dystopian thing to automate as like an agent create content and an agent comments on the content.

[Kieran]

Well, I think that's the issue. It's not just like, oh well, I have this idea and I want this agent to go and post it. For me, it's like the agent's coming up with this idea, it's posting it, and then other agents are going to keep doing it and what you're going to have is just like an endless thread of LinkedIn comments or Reddit comments from all the companies using this automation source and it's going to be completely unusable.

[Sam]

You already have this on LinkedIn, by the way. I'm on LinkedIn a lot. I like posting content on LinkedIn and I hate the agent comments. They've actually decreased a little bit over time because everyone got sick of them and we're like calling them out. But I'm going to keep going here.

[Astral AI Narrator]

First, the AI team lead kicks off the task and spins up a full team of specialists. It pulls everything it knows about Atif, his voice, his product, his story. Next, two research agents dive in. One uses Reddit's API for recent fundraising posts and the other browses LinkedIn for the same. Then the content lead steps in, not to Write, but to brief. 2 Expert Copyright.

[Sam]

By the way, I think the research stuff here is actually cool. Use of AI for a busy founder. Research in which are like good communities to participate in research in. You know, what are good topics that your audience are interested in. All pretty good uses of AI.

[Kieran]

We've been a huge fan of AI for research. It's researching that research to do spammy stuff that's the problem.

[Sam]

And we're going to show a couple of examples that in a very future show of how we would use a version of research to do actually really incredible marketing.

[Astral AI Narrator]

No, these aren't generic AI writers. They know what lands, what converts and exactly how to sound like a teeth.

[Kieran]

All our parts transpires. These are not generic AI writers. This is what lands and what's converts. You don't land and convert things in Reddit and LinkedIn. This is like community engagement, community management. This is not. You will get blackballed from Reddit if you're trying to convert people in Reddit comments.

[Sam]

Well, plus Reddit is a community.

[Kieran]

But I guess what I'm saying is if you jump into a Reddit thread and you're like writing conversion. Yeah, like this is like the core problem of humans.

[Sam]

I am here to answer your question.

[Kieran]

I'm going to give you this free thing that you think is awesome.

[Sam]

I will tell you that I think I have spent more time in how to craft content with AI assistance than any human possible over the past year. I think you and I would never recommend having an AI autonomously create content on your behalf. Create a first draft that you add to make better.

[Kieran]

Yeah, as a co writer or an editor, it's great.

[Sam]

Yeah. Not as a. You can 100% tell when AI has crafted content.

[Astral AI Narrator]

Human sounding comments, the kind that rise to the top.

[Kieran]

It's just like human sounding comments. Why we shouldn't have to have human sounding comments.

[Sam]

Why do we have like, I don't know, are we getting excited about this? You can make these things sound like a human. It's a community that is the essence of the web, the essence of marketing. Build your tribe, have a community.

[Kieran]

Participate in this world. You doesn't need even need to sound like a human because it's all going to be bots just talking to each other.

[Sam]

It's going to be bots talking to each. Bots create the content. Bots talk to each other. Humans.

[Kieran]

What's the point then? What is that point?

[Astral AI Narrator]

But we're not done yet. We're going for perfection. Let's head to the review studio, which is your control center as the human at the center of an AI marketing team. Everything the agents created is waiting here in your inbox and you can efficiently process all of the content in your editor. You know this last paragraph ends abruptly. Let's ask the chat to tie it back to the opening anecdote.

[Sam]

Oh God. I Think that's like, kind of cool, actually. You can have an inbox for agents, but you then tell the agent through a command line to change the content. You do not need to learn content to participate in the community should just participate naturally. Crafting content is going to be a timeless skill to learn. Do not outsource that to agents and have agents craft your content on your behalf. I cannot, I cannot emphasize that enough.

[Kieran]

And Kieran, I guarantee you could have this agent write a hundred comments and you could go write 100 comments yourself and. And the engagement conversion rate on what you're going to do is going to be so much higher.

[Sam]

But this isn't marketing. I guess my whole point is like, if this is what we believe marketing is, then we fundamentally don't really understand what marketing truly is. And marketing is not like, how do I comment at scale across lots of communities? Marketing is like, how do you build a tribe? How do you, like, deeply understand?

[Kieran]

How do I get somebody talking about me? How do I do something remarkable?

[Sam]

How do I be the thing?

[Kieran]

How do I actually be worthy of remark? Because I've done something other than like, ask an AI bot to go automate.

[Sam]

And if you're a busy founder, build your brand. Like we've talked about personality led growth. Like, actually build your brand. If you are not a good content creator, have a really great content creator talk to you, understand your points of view of things, like your takes on things and craft that integrate content. Do not have an agent do that on your behalf. It just. These things will not stand the test of time. And I think the thing that got us fired up is like the research part. Cool. But if we really believe the future is going to be a bunch of agents creating content content and comment on each other's content, then like, we may as well just opt out of all of this.

[Kieran]

Yeah. Hey, everyone, we'll be right back to the show. But first let me tell you about a podcast that I love. It's a podcast called I Digress. It is hosted by my friend Troy Sandage and I Digress is great. It's got 30 minute episodes and the podcast is all about helping you eliminate complexity, complications and confusions in your business. It's really heavy in frameworks and strategies to help you scale and sustain your success. And you can listen to all the episodes of I Digress anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Sam]

What is the future then? Well, the future is going to be similar to what happened to Stack Overflow. Like, Stack Overflow used to be an incredible place where people did ask questions and people did answer questions.

[Kieran]

Yeah. Give everybody a little background about what Stack Overflow is so that there's context around this.

[Sam]

So Stack Overflow is a community for developers. It was like the biggest of its time. It had a ton of incredible knowledge there. You used to go there, ask questions, get it answered. People participated like a real community. And then ChatGPT ingested all of that information and you could get it through AI, and then it killed the community. Now that's bad for AI because there's no more content being created that it can actually train on. So it's actually bad for the AI, but it's really bad for the web because now you have a really valuable thing that used to exist, not exist anymore. So imagine this tool. It becomes the ubiquitous tool of how we do marketing. What happens to Reddit? You have agents creating the threads and agents commenting on the threads. I'm sure Reddit actually have some ways to actually figure out over time what's been automated and kill all those things. But, like, this is not a fun future. Right. This is. First of all, I don't believe that this is marketing. I believe that just as common, this.

[Kieran]

Is not marketing at scale.

[Sam]

And the second thing is, I don't know if this is what we should spend our time trying to do. I don't think automating comments with AI is a valuable use of AI. It is the lowest form of anything that you could do to automate. It's just like automating something that should not be automated. If you don't have time to participate in Reddit, you shouldn't participate in Reddit. If you don't have time to show up as yourself in these communities, you shouldn't show up in these communities. Right. Like, that would be my take on it. I don't know how you feel about that, but I just don't think that this is a good direction for marketing tools to go. And I also think it paints marketing in a really light. It paints marketing as like, oh, this is what marketers do. They sit there all day trying to get as many comments as they can on communities. Right. And just try to do it at scale. I don't think that's even a good view.

[Kieran]

I don't want to be associated with this.

[Sam]

Do you know, I don't see anything to do with my job in a tool like that. Again, I'm not trying to rag on the founders, but I just don't think this is how we as marketers show up and do great work.

[Kieran]

Yeah, this is not about that product or that video. That video is an example of what could go really wrong and what could fundamentally just make marketing ineffective and not really exist as a profession. And that's not. I feel like you and I have spent our whole lives doing marketing and we really love it and we don't want to see it go down this really bad path. And also, Kieran, has there ever been a company in the world that you know of that is like automated their storytelling and outreach completely and actually built a real brand and actually not been seemed as some like commoditized spammer?

[Sam]

Now you don't build a brand that way. I guess if you're like a small business and you're just trying to sell some affiliate products and you're like, hey, I just want to make some dollars, then you know, maybe automating some of this stuff at crazy scale is like fine because you're right in a couple of years. But if you want to build a real long lasting brand, you have to show up, you have to participate, you have to have personality, you have to craft things people are interested in. Can you use AI to assist you in doing these things? Yes. But if you're going to outsource your marketing, this again, this isn't marketing. This is common. If you're going to outsource but participate in the communities to AI. I think we've misunderstood what the value of marketing and the web inherently is.

[Kieran]

So for example, I don't know when it's going to come out, but you and I just recorded a show with PJ Ace who is this awesome creative and uses AI video tools to build amazing commercials and tell stories for brands. To me that's an amazing example of using AI because he's got this really great story that he can now tell faster, cheaper and in more contextual ways because of this new technology.

[Sam]

Right?

[Kieran]

But they are still crafting and making this beautiful story. It's just being told without the need of doing a huge production shoot and all of these like slow and expensive things. Like that's amazing. This is the opposite of that. And a lot of the technology and marketing is the opposite of that. Which is like I want to outsource my marketing thinking and I don't want to have to do or really think about marketing. I just want to like message enough people that a small fraction will respond back to me. You know who does that? Spammers. Like that's the business model for like the terrible spammers out there. And it's like, do you want to go to bed at night, like, feeling that way about yourself. Right? I don't know.

[Sam]

Yeah. Like in Reddit, you're turning up and the comment is, hello, I am a prince. I am stuck at the airport.

[Kieran]

Could you imagine going home and telling your daughter that? You're like, oh, yeah. I had to set up my 60th Reddit account today because the first 59 have been blackballed. And I've got five proxy servers because they've banned me across all of these IP addresses. Like, come. Come the hell on.

[Sam]

You're sitting in the dinner and you're like, what do you do? You know, I create videos for Hollywood, so I create trailers. I craft things. What do you do? Oh, I like. I design fashion catwalks for all these incredible things. What do you do? Well, I'm a marketer. Wow. Like, what do you do? Well, Today I created 60 agents and they all commented on things on LinkedIn and Reddit. That's pretty cool, right? Everyone's like, leave.

[Kieran]

I contributed to the downfall of the Internet. But in all seriousness, it's a concern that you and I are laughing, but we are recording the show because we actually are genuinely concerned.

[Sam]

Yeah, I want AI. And the way I talk about it and you talk about it and we talk about it online is to be a renaissance for marketers to be craftspeople.

[Kieran]

Yes, explain that. Explain what that means so that people really understand what that means.

[Sam]

I would say marketers, like PJ is a good example. He is a true domain expert on that video. He crafts incredible videos that are engaging, that you want to watch, but he uses AI tools to be able to do that in a shorter amount of time. So he can craft more things. He can craft more things because it costs less, it takes less time, he's less dependent upon other people, he's more autonomous, and so he can actually really craft more things of value for his customers. So if you take that tool, a better use for that founder would be a tool that offloads a lot of the other admin and mundane things he has to do so he can actually get the time to truly participate in these communities, because that's a valuable thing to do. And I think what we want to see is marketeers as craftspeople who can craft more things that people are interested in consuming will find valuable. And the AI is assistant in the background to do those things, to actually allow the marketer to do those things and be more autonomous and own them and craft more things. Right. We don't want to see the AI just automate a bunch of like things. It's going to automate average at scale.

[Kieran]

Right. I think what we're saying here, Kieran, is that everybody out there has a choice. If you're watching this show, you have a choice. You can either think about living in Florence, Italy in the 13, 14, 1500s and being a part of the Renaissance. And what happened in the Renaissance is new tools made it possible to build and craft new things or to craft things at a bigger and more interesting scale. And that's the world I want to live in. What we talked about today and what we're worried about is like the industrial revolution for marketing, like factories just making everything the exact same and just automating every last little bit so that there's no craft and no personality and nothing of remark that exists. And I know the industrial revolution side of this is going to seem tempting and interesting at times. It is the wrong path and it is the path, path of short term gains for very long term failure. And I think Kieran, you and I have thought about this a lot and we are fully committed to the Renaissance. And actually I think you and I personally feel like we're in a renaissance. We feel like we are making and building and crafting more than we ever have and see the potential for marketing if that's what actually happens. Right.

[Sam]

I think true craft has imperfections. AI does not know how to do those things. I think you should celebrate those imperfections and how you bring them to life and your video content, creating content creation, craft things. I'm sticking to that path. And if we get beat by the automators, then I think there's bigger problems in marketing. Dying. I think the Internet is dying.

[Kieran]

Yeah, look, if this happens, the Internet doesn't exist in any valuable way.

[Sam]

If we live in a world where agents create the content, agents distribute the content, then agents comment in the content. After reading the content, the human is going to opt out because that stuff is just going to be garbage. And you see it on Instagram. There was a real problem in Instagram where people were like, I just, this stuff is garbage. I don't want to be here anymore.

[Kieran]

People want to work with your company or you, not because you just have a good product at a fair price. They want to work with you because you believe something, because they think you're going to be a good partner, because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And you can't communicate any of those things through like automated comments and automated content creations and robots talking to robots. And that's not what we want to have happen, right?

[Sam]

So please join us at SafeMarketing.

[Kieran]

Please join us on the Renaissance path. And let's craft, please, please, and just go into this next era of marketing doing the right thing. We need you to do it. We are going to do everything we can to do it. But we do not want the future to look like the glimpse we got today. Sam.