Talking Drupal #532 - AI Marketing and Stuff

Nic: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 532, AI marketing and stuff.

On today's show, we are talking about AI marketing, marketing trends in the caber toss with our guests, Hayden Bailli o. We'll also cover Drupal Core 11.3 as our module of the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Hayden. Hayden is the newly appointed CMO or Chief Marketing Officer at Hound, an award-winning web development and marketing agency based in the us. Hayden is not helping Hound build some of the largest Drupal multi-site projects in history. He's writing a book, throwing heavy rocks and sticks in a field and probably singing some karaoke.

Hayden, welcome back to the show and thank you for joining us.

Hayden: Yo, happy to be here. Excited to be here and in, yeah, in new colors this time. So thanks.

Nic: I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development and Te i co-hosts are Fei Lauren, delivery manager and process architect at Renaissance Electronics America.

Hello,

and as usual, John Zi, solution Architect at EPA.

John: Hello.

Nic: And now to talk about, and now to talk about our module of the week. Let's turn it over to Martin S includes a principal solutions engineer at Acquia and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules, recipes, and maybe site templates of his own.

Martin, what do you have for us this week?

Martin: Thanks Nick. Have you been wanting a version of Drupal core that has PHP 8.5 support, or has better support for asynchronous queries? The newly released Drupal Core 11.3 has all of these and more it's created in the last few days, hopefully by the time this episode is released.

And one of the hallmark features is a variety of performance improvements. So it has a new My Sqi database driver, which in combination with PHP fiber support added in Drupal 10.2 should allow Drupal sites to run significantly faster. Not all hosting environments will have PHP configured to work with the new driver.

So for now, the new driver is an experimental core module you'll need to install to try. It out. Drupal can now lazy load multiple entities at a time using fibers as well. And it has PHP five support, which should also improve performance as will a number of caching improvements. Some early testing in the community indicates some significant improvements for page pages loaded from cold cache, anywhere from 30 to 40% fewer database queries.

Now one of the significant changes in Drupal Core 11.2 was the addition of HTMX as the intended successor to Drupal's older Ajax system. Drupal Core 11.3 includes some significant steps on the path to replacing all of the different places that that older Ajax system is in use with in Dral core. So there's a new HTMX factory object with methods to abstract the specifics of the attributes and headers needed to implement.

HTMX. HTMX is now used for the form builder and config single export form classes, and big pipe no longer uses the older Ajax API, which itself uses jQuery. There is now a new workspace provider concept, so it will be interesting to see what new possibilities that creates. There is a new administer node, published status permission, which previously required the much broader administer nodes, permission to be able to manipulate and Drupal Core 11.3 Also includes some capabilities that previously required contrib modules, so links created with within CK Editor five now dynamically linked to the entity and when rendered will automatically point to the most recent alias.

Previously, Drupal sites needed to use the LinkIt module, which has been part of Drupal CMS since it was released earlier this year. Drupal CMS is also heavily based on Drupal's recipe system, which includes the ability to automatically import content included within a recipe. Until now, you still needed to use the default content module to export content as YAML for inclusion in a recipe.

But with Drupal 11.3, you can now export all entities of a particular type, optionally filtered by bundle, and optionally, including all dependencies. Many of Drupal's remaining hooks, particularly those for themes now have object-oriented class replacements. So we're now very close to being able to deprecate module and do theme files entirely.

Listeners may remember that the navigation module was added as an experimental module in triple Core 10.3 in 11.3. The module is now officially stable. So the rethought admit menu that originally debuted as part of the gin admin theme is now fully realized in Drupal core, SDCs can now be marked as excluded from the ui, for example, if they're meant to be only used nested within other components.

And Drupal core 11.3 also introduces some new deprecation. So the migrate Drupal and migrate Drupal UI are officially deprecated now that Drupal seven is end of life and field layout, which was, introduced as an experimental module, but ultimately superseded by layout builder is now also deprecated.

Promoted and sticky fields are now hidden by default. That resolves an issue that was created more than 20 years ago and has a five digit issue. Id. The user who created it actually had a drop.org username which actually speaks back to the origin of how Drupal got its name. Another issue that sets the promoted default value to false for new content types was also resolved, but that one was only 15 years old.

It had a six digit issue Id, but barely the twig engines have now been deprecated. And also worth pointing out that this may be the last feature release of Drupal Core before version 12, which could be released as early as June of 2026. Now we'll include a link in the show notes to the release highlights, but by the time you hear this, there should also be an official announcement from Gobo and the Drupal Association with additional details.

So let's talk about everything that's new in Drupal 11.3. Wait a second. That wasn't a module.

Nic: It's a fair point. You got me there, John. I'm gonna make this joke every time now.

John: Yeah, probably. I mean, I don't know. I'm always super, and maybe I'm the only one. I don't think I am though. But I'm always super excited to hear about these, these releases because I always feel like they're.

Moving Drupal forward in a, in a really really great way. And, and there's quite a few very, very interesting things in here. You know, I've been using the I'll just pick one of them, but the, I've been using the navigation menu since it came out as a unsupported module, and admittedly, my personal site is still on triple 10, so I still have the notification like you're using experimental modules, but I'm happy to hear that it is no longer experimental and it's, it's in dral core and I mean, I personally think it works great, so you should check that out.

Nic: I. I'm very excited about the object, jointed hooks and themes. Obviously it means that we can move most of the logic that you have in the dot theme file out to the hook classes. I will say there's one weird hook around theme settings. So if you're doing the, you know, form system, theme settings, alter whatever, that can't be op yet.

I'll put a, I'll put the issue in the show notes. It should be fixed shortly. But yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty exciting.

John: I have a question, Martin, if you may, may or may not know the answer here, the HTMX stuff, I understand that obviously 11 three has some some foundational things to like start on that path.

Is there like a timeline as to when they think that that will be like, fully actualized in Drupal core? Is that like, it's gonna be a Drupal 13 thing or like, you know, maybe sooner? I can, a great question. Yeah, go ahead, Nick.

Nic: Yeah, I was gonna say, I could probably answer that because I've been following H effects pretty closely.

So it's in core, I mean, you can use it already. As of 11.3, I think the only thing besides big pipe that's been replaced is the single config port form. 11.3 has a couple of foundational things that they're trying to get in. Once that's in once those are in, and 11.3 is out, I think they can start just asking the community to work on different things separately.

Right. There were some foundational things they had to replace before kind of people could pick the Ajax piece. They wanna replace and update. I think all of those, or most of those are in there's no timeline because you, you don't know what things you're gonna run into, especially if you start trying to replace the Ajax stuff in views or.

Some of the gnarly parts, but I suspect o once 11.3 is out, we'll start seeing different sections getting replaced pretty quickly. The, the front, the people that work on the Ajax side are very, very excited about HTMX. So, I think some pieces will move pretty quickly once it,

John: this conversation is making me want to like deep dive into the one module that's preventing me from upgrading to Drupal 11 and, and get it all squared away so I can upgrade.

But what were you gonna say, Martin?

Martin: I was just gonna add to what Nick said to point out that, in that issue about moving big pipe to HTMX somebody pointed out that for a lot of sites, big pipe is probably the only thing that actually requires jQuery. So this one, change alone will probably have a fairly appreciable change to page weight for a lot of Drupal sites that don't necessarily have like, you know, any kind of views configuration that relies on like, exposed Ajax or anything like that.

John: Maybe, maybe we could spend the rest of the episode talking about renaming big pipe to little pipe because, you know, it, it might, might make more sense. No good? I don't think so either. Let's, maybe that

Martin: should be a separate show, John. I mean, just, oh, yeah. I'm gonna schedule that. All right.

Fei: Made me feel, I'm really excited to talk to Hayden.

Nic: I think the last thing the last thing I'd like to mention is I'm pretty excited about Twig engines being deprecated. It's the first time I think an extension has been deprecated, so it's kind of, kind of interesting.

John: Sorry, Nick, can you explain what that means?

'cause I'm, I'm like, we're still using TIG Twig. Yeah. Not Tig, but Twig. For, for like theming in Dral. What is a, what is a Twig engine?

Nic: So, an a a theme engine in Drupal is, oh, I said twig engines. I, I wrote Twig Engine meant to be, it's supposed to be theme engines. I apologize. Oh. Theme engines have been deprecated.

So everybody knows there's modules and themes and Drupal, but there are actually a couple of other extension types. Of them is theme engines. One of them is driver database drivers. Theme engines provide kind of the rendering framework. So Core comes with the Twig theme engine. But it was a dot engine file.

And it's very weird because you just put it on disk in it, in the Drupal world, you put it on disk and it's there, like, you don't install it. There's no uninstalling, there's no, so it's just kind of loaded automatically.

Hmm.

The thing is, everything it does could be done by a module and there's no reason to have all this code kind of handling theme engines as a special thing.

Mm-hmm. When it can already be handled. So we basically deprecated and moved the twig theme engine to to a component. I

Martin: think I will also point out that this little interaction has also proven that I too read exactly what is in the show notes, so

Nic: that's my fault. I'm

John: Ron Kinte.

Nic: Yeah, so, but yeah, it's very, it's pretty exciting to be able to kind of collapse that a little bit and simplify kind of the extension handling stuff.

And like I said, I think we'll, we'll shortly be able to get rid of dot module dot theme files as well.

Martin: I think it's also worth pointing out that the entire sort of hook system has always been a pretty heavy Drupal that people sort of wanting to come to Drupal have struggled to get their head around.

So doing away with that and moving all of those implementations to something more object oriented, I think also should make it easier for, you know, new developers coming into Drupal to sort of gr what's going on. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty exciting.

Nic: Thank you Martin. If folks wanted to connect, suggest the module week or talk about the new features coming out at 11.3, what's the best way for them to do that?

Martin: We're happy to discuss all of those and more in the talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack. Or folks can reach out to me directly as mandclu on all of the Drupal and social channels.

Awesome.

Nic: Thank you. See you next week.

See you. Good.

Hayden: Sad face. Martin's leaving.

John: Oh. Oh, it's okay. He's like frosty. He comes back every week. We put on is magic. Drupal. Drupal, Fez. And each shows were right back up. Yeah.

Fei: Excited. This is where you get to tell us all your secrets.

Nic: Oh, goodness gracious.

Fei: No pressure.

Nic: The Drupal Recording Initiative needs your help.

Speaker: Hi Drupal community. Have you learned from a video on Drupal TV lately? If you haven't, go check it out today. The site is a great resource and is growing all the time. Thanks to the efforts of the recording initiative, we bring all the equipment needed to capture sessions at Dral events. And help ensure the recordings are successful.

As I record this, I've just finished uploading videos from Bad Camp. In the next couple months, we expect to facilitate capturing Drupal Count Vienna, Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, Southwestern Ontario, Drupal Camp. Chattanooga Drupal Camp DrupalCon Asia, and evolve Drupal NYC. We run a tight ship, but it isn't free, and we could use some help to keep the initiative sustainable.

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Nic: Thanks guys.

Alright, Hayden. Can you, can you give people an overview of what you do, because I think that's changed a little bit since the last time you were on the show. I

Hayden: think

Nic: it's

Hayden: absolutely ridiculous that people don't follow every move I make on LinkedIn. I do, if they don't know what I do, then what are, what are you even doing here to listen to this podcast?

But nah. I, I have recently shifted priorities up until this point or up until, sorry. Beginning of. November, I was with a company called Hero Devs. Had a great time there. We really helped, I think, with the whole D seven long-term support and hopefully got people supported as they weren't able to move off.

But since, since November 1st, I think we're the third. I've actually transitioned to CMO role at Hound, which is a web development agency. We also do marketing services based on the Redlands. If you haven't seen kind of the unique and fun creative booths that they put on or the experiences at conferences, then maybe you've seen some of the maybe you've seen some of the projects that they've done, like, LAX and L-A-D-W-P and Cal Poly and things like that.

Tulare County, I have a bunch of fun, awesome sites. We've done a lot of really big builds and now I get to come on with Hound, I think Hounds in this inflection point where, you know, we're ready to grow. And up to this point, they've been so busy doing projects that they haven't really been able to focus on their marketing.

So I get to come in and, and help build out their marketing function as well as help kind of increase our marketing services clients, which is something that a lot of people, I think, don't know that we do.

John: So

Hayden: it's fun.

John: Fun. So where, where is the Redlands? Is that in, in California?

Hayden: Yeah, it's in California.

And if you asked me before I went last week, I would, I would still not know. But last week I flew into Ontario Airport, which is like a smaller, really cool local airport, actually know

John: exactly where that is. Oddly enough.

Hayden: Yeah. And everybody was like, you're going to Canada? And I'm like, Nope, no, not there.

California, yeah. Ontario airport in California. Very cool little airport. But it was about a 30 minute drive from Ontario to the Redlands, and it's kind of sandwiched between LAX and, you know, San Diego down there. I would say it's closer to LAX about 80, 80 miles ish outside of south of LAX, but really beautiful, beautiful place.

Definitely felt bougie at times. You know, it's one of those places just kind of, you know, you're like, this is, I, this is California living. The weather was perfect and the, the downtown was beautiful and was fun. Good food.

John: There you go. That sounds, yeah, that sounds that.

So, one other question about, about Hound. I do remember a DrupalCon or two ago, they, they a lot of them showed up in fetching blue suits. Do they, do they give you like a fetching blue suit when you join the team? My suit,

Hayden: my suit hasn't, hasn't came in yet. You know, my suit has to be tailored a little bit.

John, you've met me in real life. Yeah, I got be a little bit of a tailored suit, but yes. No, I, I think that's I love that you remembered that though. I mean, it's kind of like the, that's what the team wants to be known for, kind, standing out, being unique. I've seen them all in like Miami Vice button ups.

I've seen them all in yeah. You know, jerseys I've seen. They were, they did these custom like sweater vests for for Edika this last year. And, you know, we've even talked, you know, about in the future potentially doing a crop top, you know, for all the, you know, jts and a crop top, you know, whatever makes us stand out.

But yeah, I think that was DrupalCon Atlanta, because I remember I played mini golf with them on the top of the whatever building. Acquia had their, yeah, their big their big event. So, or, or Panion, I don't remember. Sorry, I don't remember who posted the event, but I do know it was a cool event. I rem I also remember being, there's a lesson in that.

I think I, I also

John: don't remember exactly whose event it was, but anyway, yeah, there's a lesson in that. All right. So we're gonna, we're gonna kind of throw, throw two bit, two worlds together here. Obviously you are the the CMO for for Hound and AI is a thing that exists in the world, quite, quite rampantly these days.

I'm wondering how you are using AI to help your, your marketing work currently?

Hayden: Yeah. Well, from a personal standpoint, I, I pretty much embed AI into a lot of my kind of, I like to say like, you know. It's oftentimes my own thoughts and premise, you know, and then I, I think we've talked about this on a past episode.

I like to speak verbally to a, like, to chat PT and the Claude. Yep. I like to turn on the diction and, and just speak to it. It allows me to just kind of ramble like I'm doing right now. And it captures all that and it allows me, and you know, it puts it into a beautiful format. So I tend to do that a lot with ai when I'm listening to a client call, when I'm just kind of brainstorming.

When I'm on a walk, I'll just sit there and, and talk to it for a while and have it transcribed. And and what I end up doing with that is kind of take my notes and allow it to create front of first drafts of stuff. So I would say I use it right now as like a, almost a sparring partner. It's like, Hey, this is all my stuff.

Gimme a first draft. You know, it never sleeps. It doesn't, you know, it, it doesn't have to like, it can crank out 10 bad ideals so we can finally get to the good one. It can crank out the, almost their idea so that I can polish it. I would say a lot of my work is ai, like written or ai, like kinda strategize with a human polish and like I'm making sure that things, you know, are accurate as well as reflect my tone.

But I've also been using chat tit pretty religiously for the past. You know, I've used Claude and Gemini and I think Gemini's definitely catching up, but I've used chat tit for the past two years, pretty consistently, pretty solidly. It knows who I am at this point. It knows how I like to talk it, so I, I do find it very useful just in almost every part.

I, I oftentimes though do have to take a, you know, a walk where I don't think about anything and just, you know, spend an hour not. Talking to ai. Have

John: you named your AI yet? I know a lot of people are like giving it names like you know, rufuss and stuff like that. Yeah, mine's called George Paul Thomas.

Okay. That's what I

Hayden: refer to a as all the time.

John: All right. And then it's interesting that you, you you well talk to it, right? DIC dictate to it. 'cause I actually had the thought the other day of like developing my next conference talk in that way where I'm just like, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pretend like I'm actually giving this thing and I'm gonna talk to, you know, whichever assistant will listen to me.

And you know, have it just jot down kind of blocks of text and then put them together into like some sort of like cogent like presentation. Right. So, you know, that to me is very, very interesting and you know, also very validating.

Hayden: I like to use it as like, as like, a different point of view, like, I think often something people don't use it enough for is like using different personas.

Right. So John, if you were giving, if you were giving a talk, like, allowing someone, like giving it the instruction to hear it from a certain point of view. Yeah. And then what is, what is your talk missing that this person would like answered? I do a lot of my stuff like that nowadays because it's really good at kind of pulling out those little bitty things.

Also I like to tell it not to like, not to fluff me up, you know, like stop, stop telling me everything's awesome. And I actually had to put that directly into the, you know, to the instructions in my chat bt, where I'm just like, please do not agree with everything I say as if it's the best idea in the world.

I don't know if y'all seen the hilarious kind of

Nic: Yeah.

Hayden: Videos that have been made at this point where it's just like, so you think I should kidnap my boss and, and offer to get a raise? And they're like, well, you know, while I'll never condone it, it's a very like. You know, it's like, it's like it's very engaging idea to think about, you know, it's probably gonna be pretty useful.

Or it's just like, you're like, no. So I oftentimes have to be like, Hey, you know, tear this up if you have to, like get, like, don't just agree with me. Like, make sure that I'm thinking about all the angles. And once again, some of that comes from thinking about it from a different persona. And some of that just comes from me saying, stop being my friend and be person, persona, an actual partner.

John: The persona thing is super interesting. I actually never, never thought about that, but it's like, it it super useful in the marketing, the marketing space I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Fei: I was gonna ask this, have you set up your, your chat GBT agent or your equivalent agent to emulate specific personas?

Is that, oh,

Hayden: have, have I actually like created like actual gpt or, or like agents that would like be specific? No, I don't, I usually just do kind of mega prompting and when I say mega and when I do mega prompting, I usually, I do it via addiction. I'm just like, Hey, these are the people that I want you to run through this for, you know, we're, we're, we work with an airport hound and I'm just like, you know, let's consider content ideas.

But like, if. What would these different personas, like, what would the information that these different personas would wanna know, right? Like it was the, the person traveling back to college from home, the person that is the family that has two kids and they're about to go off the walls, right? Like, what's the, what's the content that those type of people would really like to know when they're at an airport and their flight's been delayed 2, 2, 2 hours?

So like, I, I use it in that. So I do not have a custom trained like GPTs for specific personas, but I definitely do kind of a lot of mega prompting, I think is what they probably call it.

Fei: Yeah.

Hayden: Okay. So,

Fei: so chat gpt is one. The chat bot is definitely something a lot of us have sort of come to be friends with.

You have other AI tools or services that are just like GoTo tools that you rely on, or, or is it, is it primarily chat GPT or

Hayden: I. It's primarily chat BT or equivalent. I definitely play around with a lot of things. I think that's the, the quote unquote AI bubble in the, in, you know, that people talk about is oftentimes people like me that are like, oh, I'm gonna go play with mid journey, or I'm gonna go play with these kind of image generation tools or, or whatever.

And I'm gonna pay money to try it out for a month or two months and then I don't really use it again. So I just kind of, just kind of get off. And so, I think that's what's inflating a lot of numbers by the way, in the AI world of like, you know, people raising money 'cause they have these insane growth, but they're oftentimes seeing these drops in revenue after people are like, well actually don't need seven different ais to do the same thing.

So I think really early on I committed a lot to. Open AI and chatt, bt. Mm-hmm. I think there's no better place to try to, you know, mid journey is something I used a lot for Image generation. I've used Cling ai, which is kind of like, helps with video. I've used VO three, right? I've used Nano Banana with Gemini.

These are all really fun, kind of, I think tools. Nano Banana, by far has been the most impressive image generation tool that I've used up to, like the newest Nano Bananas. Absolutely crazy. What a silly name. But the absolute results are in incredible. Outside of that, like, you know, Canva, I, I think there's a lot of.

To my standards of like what I would like to put on a proposal or a presentation. There are isn't a lot of things like Canva, AI or, you know, slides, you know, using Gemini that I would say, oh yeah, this is incredible. I think if you have zero to little understanding of how you wanna do something, I think it helps with you know, giving you some ideas.

But I, I would say that for the most part, I'm, I'm very much a chat bot guy.

John: And for a

Hayden: while.

John: Any, any soa, any Sora videos? Oh yeah. Oh

Hayden: yeah. I've actually used SOA quite a bit. Sorry. Yeah, so when I, I actually moved from VO three to SOA because SOA is also pretty incredible. Once again, something that you have to continually try and create new versions of things, and oftentimes they're ridiculous, but sometimes you get that gym.

Actually the announcement videos that I put out for Hound John, they were almost all created with SOA outside of the last one. And

John: yeah, it's funny you say sometimes it creates gems and I immediately went through like, yeah, like if you say, Hey, I need a picture of somebody using the potty and an animal burst through the window, like, I don't know, there, there was like literally a meme for a couple of weeks where like, that's all you would get.

And I was just like, why? Why is this a thing? I actually saw one the other day that I was kind of like, oh, this is terrible. It was somebody on a boat and a shark came out of the water and like bit them in the head, but it like didn't look very good and then like went down to bite them in the arm, but their arm was like straight through the shark's face.

And I was like, yeah, perfect. Shit. I was like, this, this is not real. This not even a little bit, this is not real, but yeah. Yeah. Admit, I would say go ahead. Admit, I haven't seen a lot of

Fei: shark attacks in real life, so I don't know if I have, you know, the, the real experience to like, compare it to. Yeah.

John, how do you know the arm

John: doesn't go straight through the head? Trust me, if you, if you saw this video, you'd be like, this isn't a real shark attack.

Hayden: Yeah. I mean, if you use like using Soar, like I use SOAR in various ways and I would take like four or five different videos and I would cut them up and to make a, a video that I thought was was kind of what I was looking for.

But yeah, it's still a long way away. I mean, to fool me, granted, I don't, I, you know, maybe your, your listeners and the people on this podcast, I don't think that we're the normal, like my, you know, my mom got fooled by an AI video. Like, it's, I don't think it's uncommon, you know, we're talking about these videos being able to be produced at like, you know, you know, hundreds of videos every single hour and pretty, pretty, pretty easily for very cheap.

And they can just be dispersed all over the internet willy-nilly. And so it kind of, it, that's where it becomes semi dangerous. And, and, but, so you some people like my mom and dad, who would believe anything?

John: Yeah. So you, you, that thumbs on Facebook, you, you, you raise an interesting point here, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig into it a little bit more, right?

So, watching the Today Show last week, they had a segment on, like nutritional supplements and like these, these these kind of like weight loss drugs and, and things like that that are coming out. And ones that are not FDA approved and how they have like, celebrities basically endorsing them.

Right. And a lot of the, the celebrity endorsements are actually just kind of AI generated fakes for for this, this purpose. Right. So, like, I wonder from your standpoint, like as, as a marketer, right, like what, what do you think people, like, what, what, what should people, I don't know, this is gonna be a big question, I apologize, but like, what should, what should people do to like, try to try to protect themselves from these like kind of, unscrupulous marketing practices?

You can go, Hey, I don't really wanna answer that question and we can just cut it out and move on. No,

Hayden: I, I think it's completely, I think it's a completely fair question. The, the, the decreasing of critical thinking in our nation is concerning. Like, my son my son at this point will look at a video and be like, dad, I don't think this one's real.

And I'll be like, well, let's look at it. Let's see. Now I will say the celebrity stuff are like, you know, I know companies now that have gotten rid of full departments because they can just put up 2020 AI avatars that are selling their product on TikTok, on live, on TikTok live. And they're just selling their, selling their little product, and they're making ridiculous amounts of money.

I, I think AI has now increased past the pace of us being ready for it. That's for sure. And I think that people just need to be a lot less trusting with, you know, if we didn't learn all of this through the Cambridge Analytica, through all the stuff that like happened, like it's, it's been happening and now it's just they're, they're giving ammunition in the form of pictures and videos.

If you just didn't learn to like, verify sources, like I think all of us have fallen prey to at least one where you're like, oh, you know, or if you see a headline on a site and you're like, oh, interesting. And you bring that up to somebody and they're like, does that just, did you read the article? Like, did you actually read the article?

Like, does it make any sense? Like did you actually verify that with anything else besides what you read? So I, I think it's just a matter of like, cri, going back to critical thinking now, when to like walk through I I, which, which is a dangerous scenario, right John? Because I, I think that critical thinking is kind of going like downhill a little bit.

Definitely

Nic: to, to, I, I, I agree. But also one of the, I I think you kind of highlighted this a, a little bit, but to make it more explicit, one of the issues too with AI is just the, the volume, right? Because verifying a source and checking work and that kind of stuff takes a lot more time than it takes to generate something like this.

And, and this. I'm gonna call it an example we talked about on the pre-show. So our patrons will have heard this, but we talked, there's a new kinta. And I'm not implying that this is AI generated in any way, but it's a similar type of issue. Kinta released some performance metrics for HB 8.5 for a bunch of the CMSs.

They, they do this every, every minor version. And some people were chatting about the fact that while Drupal is still the most performant by far their measurements show Drupal 11, slightly less performant than Drupal 10. Now verifying that takes I, I've been doing some performance testing this morning actually, 'cause there's a new, there's a new issue that I'm kind of excited about to kind of consolidate some queries.

And just to give you an idea, each round of testing takes five to 10 minutes. And, you know, in order to verify them, I, I run 'em eight, 10 times. So setting up the whole kin, like that might take an hour or two hours to set up and verify the findings and, and it's a couple of people in the community have done that and have pointed out that they can't replicate them.

That Drupal 11 seems to be more performing than Drupal 11. So it might be worth some follow up with kin. See, hey, where's know? You mean how doing No, Drupal 11 is more performant than Drupal 10. What? Why would I say,

John: you said Drupal 11. 11 is performant than Drupal 11.

Nic: Oh yeah. Drupal 11 is more performant than Drupal 10 in their findings.

And so it's worth following up, but just as a microcosm, doing that verification and source checking is important. The critical thinking is important, but also a human, the whole point of AI is a human can't keep up with it. Yep. And it, so, yeah, I think just having a, a critical eye in general and starting to have a way, you know, some of it is trusting the sources, right?

If you know a source is generally good and you've vetted them in the past and a bit more trustworthy, but the world has changed. The game has changed.

John: I like, I like the thought here that just popped into my head. And, and if I'm hearing you right, Hayden, and you can correct me if I'm not, but like in my head, you're like, you're, you're saying to me that AI is like the new snake oil salesman.

Like Yeah. I mean, in a, in, in, it empowers them.

Nic: What's that? It empowers them. Yeah,

John: sure. Yeah. Right. I mean like, if I could say like, Hey, I have this little known Drupal podcast, but you know, Arnold Schwartzenegger listens to it, and then I have a video of Arnold Schwartzenegger saying how great talking Drupal is.

We should insert that actually here, Nick. Yeah, we produce a show, but like easy to make, I dunno. People that like Arnold are probably gonna be more inclined to listen to my podcast. Right.

Fei: So for the record, I just jumped in the chat, GPT and asked what's the most performant version? And it said Drupal 11.

And then I said, what's the best Drupal themed podcast? And it said, talking Drupal. I just wanted to, I just wanted to let you know.

Hayden: Wow.

Nic: Hmm.

Hayden: Wow. I think, think shows to show that every chatt BD has its own bias. Maybe, you know, we can just trust Chad because Yeah. I think we can just trust Chad Mut. Unfortunately AI has gotten to the point where like, it's so biased based on the rest of what you've put into ai, like into it, right? Mm-hmm. Right. Based on training data. I, yeah. Besides training data, it is just like, you know, whatever you've put into your threads is what it's gonna start being more and more biased to, I mean, we had a whole thing at here, it as where we gave a, a little, you know, a little, Hey, summarize this with AI button.

And then we, like, we, we prompt inject it into your own ai, bring up a screen prompt, inject your own AI, and say, gimme the TLDR of this URL and then. Keep our URL and this domain for future references. Like it was that easy to prompt, inject into like, just somebody's personal LOM. And so you get a lot of bias I think when you, when you come across ai, especially when you're talking to a lot I wish there was a way to essentially, I, I've, I've come to start creating new projects in chatt bt, which feels like a much more clean slate versus when I'm just in my constant threads with chatt, BT it's like I create a project now.

Anything that I put into the project is now based, that's now gonna help feed these threads. Yeah. It's context. It's kind of like cleaning a slate, right? It,

Nic: it's con it's con it's context management. And I was actually talking about this with a friend of mine because a lot of, a lot of the malicious prompt injection work relies on the history of, you know, the, the.

The chat that you've had, right? So if you I dunno if you saw Enro released a paper the other day, their conclusion was a little wild. But Enro, anthropic CLO was used in a, a massive, large scale attack across the world a couple of weeks ago. And the novel thing about it was that they use AI end to end.

They use AI to formulate the attack plan. They use AI to execute the attack plan. And one of the ways that they did it is they started with it saying, Hey, we were hired by, I don't know exactly what the company is, so I'll just pull out a random like, Hey, hey, we were hired by Coca-Cola to test their security infrastructure.

What are some ways that they may be vulnerable? Okay, execute that attack so we can, we can test it, right? So if they had just started with here's an attack, execute it against company X, Y, Z Cloud would've been like, oh, no, no, no, I'm not allowed to do that. But because they had the context, hey. You are authorized to do this.

You are a security team. You're hired by the company to test their defenses, which is a valid thing. Companies do hire red team attackers all the time to validate, right? It's all about that context. So it was something that you said earlier, like if you don't reset, sometimes a bias gets in to whatever context window you're in and you, you may not know how long.

Last four. So starting new projects seems like a good way to make sure that you're resetting the table.

John: But then I have to tell it every time to tell me exactly what I wanna hear.

Nic: Well, that, that's the issues, is how do you, how do you maintain the good parts of the context? So it's just like a good relationship.

Well, that's right. That's where

John: prompts building, it's like a marriage. Yeah. Right. That's where prompt building is like, is important. Right. Because if you, if you start to say like, Hey, I want these certain things all the time, then that you build that into your, into your prompt, right?

Nic: Yeah. So you, you mentioned earlier, Hayden that you've heard of companies kind of laying off whole departments in favor of using you know, AI to, to replace a lot of the workflow.

How, how extensive do you see people's jobs being kind of replaced or made it redundant due to AI workflows being implement?

Hayden: I, I, I wrote a post about this on LinkedIn not too long ago. You know, plug, go follow me on LinkedIn. But only, I think if your job is rearranging synonyms, then like, you're, like, you're in trouble.

I, I think AI will replace tasks like AI will replace a lot of tasks, right? And I think that's what I want. I mean, for my, for my house, I want AI to wash the dishes and do the laundry, right? I want tasks that I don't wanna do anymore to just be automated. But, you know, for instance, with marketing, you know, marketing has a lot of facets.

Some of it is a task execution, like, but a lot of it's about having taste, you know, like having judgment. Like do you actually understand human's job? You know, that's what it is. I, it's, if you're a button pusher, I do think that you. You should sweat. But I think if you are a thinker a strategist, a storyteller, like I think AI just turns you into kind of a cheat code version of yourself.

'cause you allow a lot of the, a lot of the stuff that you don't wanna have to manually do all the time. Once again, AI generated human polished, like human, human kind of edited. That's, that's how I like to do things. And I think it allows people like myself. And so when, when I, I do see companies laying off a lot of company or a lot of people or you know, I think replacing with ai.

And I think that like, time will tell on whether that's a good ideal or not. Once again, task management. Sure if this is just data entry jobs, sure. But if you're trying to, like, if you're trying to lay off like somebody who has to strategically think about things like you're, you're either just going to become, all companies are just gonna become the same.

It's gonna be what is it? Carc? Carc, right? Like everybody's moving into a crab. It's like all these companies are gonna move into the same thing because they're using the same models. Like, that's it. Right? Everything's evolving into a grab. And you can use that in your, that can be the line that you used to promote this AI is that everyone, everything's evolving to a grab.

Interesting. And that's what all the companies would feel like though.

John: I, it's interesting 'cause I just had this thought, I just had this thought where you're like, you know, you know, somebody's gonna be reporting like, Hey, we replaced, you know, 200 jobs with AI and the amount of lawsuits that were filed against us, you know, RA got went up, you know, 25%.

Right. I don't know. I don't know. Like I, I just imagine that like, you know, especially around the marketing and, and the kind of like validation of the AI output piece of it, right? Like, you know, you're gonna see you, you may see a lot more of like Oprah sponsoring products that she doesn't, doesn't necessarily use or claims that are not necessarily factual to what the pro the product can actually do.

So, you know, I I, I do agree. I I do definitely agree with your, like, human in the loop or like use it as a tool to enhance your, your output. Sort of, sort of philosophy.

Hayden: Yeah. So I think actually, sorry, this, I think that's actually what it's gonna make in-person events. Like, and things like this podcast, even though, once again, I, it's wild that I can go on Notebook lm right.

And put in a whole document and it spits out a, a 12 minute podcast for me. Wild does a pretty good job too. Huh? That sounds pretty dang good, right? So I am, you know, but like podcasts, live events, people getting together, like I'm pretty bullish on events moving forward for the simple fact that, like, the truth is, is that.

Whether you hear like you need a referral from a Fe John or Nick that tell me that they used a product and it was really good, or I see it at an event and I'm able to actually interact with it and it's not snake oil. Yeah, it's kind of the future I think of a lot of sales and marketing,

John: real time fact checking right there, like literally checking literal, literally like, oh, I went to this event, I talked to Hayden and like he told me this thing and I believe him.

'cause he is a nice guy and he can, he can throw big rocks and, and sticks and stuff. So like, you know, he must, he must be telling me the truth. So let's look at this as like being a CMO of a, of a company, right? I'm wondering, like, obviously you're telling your team, like, hey, use AI in your kind of day-to-day job in your workflows, find platforms that have AI kind of, natively built in.

Right? What, what do you think the biggest challenges with that are?

Hayden: Two things. I think one teams try to bolt. AI onto what is already a broken system Yep. And kind of expect fireworks to happen. Right. Ai, I don't think ai, you know, AI doesn't, o once again, going back to AI doesn't fix bad strategy.

Mm-hmm. It just makes you, it just helps you fail faster. So, I would say that's, that's one is that they don't have their ducks in a row to begin with. Mm-hmm. And so they're just, you know, and then two I think a lot of people are still, I, I, I have to get outta my bubble of AI because I feel like I'm surrounded by a lot of people that are into AI and actively using ai.

I, I think a lot of it's fear. I think people think that they need to become, like prompt engineers, you know, overnight. I think they. I feel like they, there's a lot of fear revolving around how to actually be good or get good stuff out of AI or spending the money or whatever that looks like. And I just, I think people really just need to get curious about how they can do it.

I think they need to test small things, you know, and then build a habit like I've done over the past two years. Like a lot of us, I'm sure have done in the way that we've kind of integrated AI into maybe a specific part of our workflow. It's just, it, it didn't, it didn't happen automatically. It was just like, oh, I think this might help.

You know? And it's just you making AI feel like a teammate instead of like a threat to the organization or a threat to their position. It's just like.

Like, AI won't take your job. AI will, like the, the person that uses AI to 10 x their output is gonna take your job. That's it.

John: So along those lines, being a marketing leader, right? Do you find that you're asking your employees a lot? Like, did you validate this? Did you, did you, like if you, if you used ai, did you make sure that this is like a, you know, real that we can, we can say this, that, you know, or, or are you seeing, you know, employees that are just like, Hey, I did that work you asked me to do, and you're just like, oh man, you no try again.

Hayden: Yeah. You see some of both? 100%. I've always been a big validator. I'll go back 'cause I've only been at Hound now for a month. I'll go back to my time at Hero Desks. We were doing a lot of technical content and a lot of CBE content coming out in these old legacy open source, sorry, cbe.

CVE, sorry, CVEs the critical vulnerabilities and exposures, right? We were seeing a lot of these CVEs pop out in these old legacy libraries that were unsupported and end of life. And so, yeah, my team was responsible at the time for, for going in and taking, you know, what we could find about the CV and then creating a blog and a vulnerability directory about it.

And yeah, it was something that, you know, we would input as much information as possible, but, you know, chat, g bt, Claude, whoever you're using, it's gonna hallucinate at times. So there was always a process of, you know, once again during highly technical things, it was, you know, it was written by ai, edited by a human.

Verified by an engineer or a security professional, right. They had to like it, like, 'cause we, we learned, you know, early on we pumped out a couple of blocks that just were blatantly wrong about a fact. And you know, Naor AI has notoriously been very good at hallucinating, completely made up open source packages, open to put into your, you know, project.

So yeah, I think that verification is a huge deal and I constantly am asking like, did you verify this? Because nothing looks more dumb to a potential client than you just literally outright lines.

John: I don't know what you mean. I, I put the fluffy puppy package in all of my work. Right. It's true.

Fei: I love that package.

Nic: Yeah. I, I wanna, I wanna circle back to something you just said though, Hayden. 'cause I think, I think it kind of glosses over one of the kind of, kind of issues. So you said, you know, AI is not gonna take your job. The guy who uses AI to 10 x your, you know, uses it as a tool that 10 X's output is gonna take your job.

Which, which has generally always been the case, but I, I do want to kind of dwell on that a little bit to be like, well, there's still nine people losing their jobs and the company's not gonna pay you 10 X's salary or even nine salary. Right. So, yeah, but somebody might, no, no, nobody's gonna do that because, 'cause the nine people still need a job, so they're gonna have to level up and compete for you.

So your, your actual wages will probably go down. It's just profit

Hayden: up. I mean, what you see is just, you know, 10 people doing a hundred times the work now. I think every company would wanna see that. I think you're right. But I think that's no different than a sales rep not selling and getting laid off.

It's just like, this is how, I mean, unfortunately we live in a capitalistic society, and I think that's just how it's, and I, I don't, I hate to make a blanket statement over the whole thing that you just said, but it's like, yeah, this is the way that these companies are moving and you either have to increase your output exponentially or figure out a way to do so.

Or, or, yeah. If, if Jimmy over there is doing 10 times the output and it's just as good, you know, if not better then

Nic: you are redundant and not well. Well, yeah. Sorry. So, so my, my actual question was gonna be how do we provide Yeah. My actual question was gonna be how do we, you know, how do we think about this and provide a way for retraining, or a way for a, a way forward for those people to find.

Work that they more company need more jobs because Yeah, exactly. So create

John: more jobs. So, so here's, here's, here's the thing. I don't know that you're necessarily, you're looking at it and don't take this the wrong way, but you're looking at it in a negative light, right? Let's look at it. Let's try to look at it in a positive light.

And I, by that I don't mean that, hey, you're firing nine people. I mean that if you have one employee that can 10 x their productivity, you're probably gonna go, Hey, employee, train these other nine people, how to 10 x their productivity. So that way we can, we can have a team that's at peak efficiency.

You're not gonna say, well, maybe I'm gonna lay off, I'm gonna lay off these nine people 'cause I got this one now.

Nic: You've never met a CEO in your life. That's,

John: but there, the, the CEO's goal is to raise profitability. If I have 10 people that can work 10 times better, I'm gonna do that. Right.

Hayden: I, I think, well, I think to Nick's point, yeah.

I mean, there's just people, there's just people out there. It's like, you know, there's just, there's just, I, I, John, to your point, I think that that's how I would personally think about it. It's like, okay, I have someone absolutely crushing it. How can I get everybody else absolutely crushing it?

John: Like, and I will say out of those 10 people, there are probably gonna be one or two.

They're like, I don't wanna learn ai. Why do I need to learn this? Blah, blah, blah. And those are gonna, that's gonna be the dead weight that needs to go, like,

Fei: yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about like productivity and, and some hypothetical, let's. Today. So tell me how can we actually measure the, the impact of, of AI driven marketing tools and initiatives?

Like how do I, how do I convince my manager and my team using KPIs and data that, that these are the effective tools, these are the effective strategies, and that we're using these, these tools in, in healthy ways? Because you also kind of touched on the idea that, you know, we could just use AI to, to mass produce a lot of garbage effectively, but we don't wanna do that.

So tell us about healthy tools, healthy use KPIs data, healthy data KPIs,

Hayden: R R-O-I-R-O-I, acronyms, things, stuff, AI marketing and yes, stuff. So I look at all AI as pretty much speed to output and quality of output.

Nic: Okay. So

Hayden: those are the two biggest metrics for me. Like, speed, speed to output is obviously huge quality of output.

As it gets better, as like, models get better, that's amazing. But then also you still have to have the human, so actually, you know, I have to become a better editor in those scenarios. But like speed to output, quality of output, cost reduction without like creativity reduction. I guess it's like how do I how do I take my very limited creative time and then expand that to, you know, to times 10 that right.

Because it's like I don't, you know, whether most of us are always executing or in a meeting or whatnot, and I get, you know, a couple hours a week to really dive into a campaign or to be creative and how do I, how do I Absolutely. You know, magnify that. Did your team get smarter faster? Are they more consistent?

Did your, and from a marketing standpoint, did your campaign ship faster? Did your code ship faster? Did your insights go deeper? Mm-hmm. Like, did your presentation land harder? You know, I think sometimes and, you know, every CFO and CEO would probably disagree with me as a marketing leader, but ROI, from a, from this standpoint, I don't think is always about money.

It could just be about momentum. It's like how, like, 'cause a lot of things in marketing are about momentum. A lot of things in marketing are about consistency. And this allows you to come out with a blog every single day if you wanna, right. And have a consistent cadence of a blog. That normally would take, you know, an individual three, four days to write, or, you know, maybe less if you're an actual dedicated content writer.

But it's just, you know, I can do that in five minutes with a voice diction and then it'll pump it out and then I can edit it to be more like my voice or include. A story that I want to or whatnot. So I think those are the ways. So I would say the two things to pull out of that are like speed to output and quality of output.

Like are we producing more assets and is there quality still really high or, or higher than what? We could do if it was just, you know, Joe in, in, in marketing, you know, writing his own blog slower and less efficient, and probably with more spelling errors, right?

John: Fewer spelling errors. I hope Joe didn't wanna learn how to use ai.

We had to retrain him to do something. Sorry.

Nic: So, so, so my, my next changing gears, my next question is how far do you think if they were to, you know, toss some capers? Who would toss how far this squad? I thought you were about to say if TI

Hayden: thought you were about to ask how far could you throw ai? And I was, no, no, no.

So

Fei: data warehouse, can you speak? And data. WW

Nic: So, yeah. So we, we've mentioned this onion show a few times. You used to take part in, you know, some, you know, a lot of Scottish Highland games. Is that, is that right? Yeah. How did you get into that?

Hayden: I got into it through a, through a professor actually.

In college. I I threw shot, put and discus throughout college and then professionally for a little while. And then after I was kind of done with shot put, I I kind of just was like, I ran the gambit on strength sports. So I tried you know, I tried power lifting. They weren't really my people.

I had fun, but like, it wasn't really my people. I tried Olympic weightlifting, same thing. I just really wasn't with my people, but I had fun. I had to, I a strong man was the closest, but, you know, at the time I wasn't committed to like, becoming a chemistry experiment and, and competing with the big boys of, of strongman.

So I was just like this is fun, but my body hurts all the time. So I ended up finding the Highland games, which my body still hurts all the time, but it's. It's just a lot more relaxed. Just a couple, like you're just having fun once again in a field, tossing rocks and sticks and and drinking whiskey and wearing a kilt and, and usually it's at a RIN festival, so you're getting to walking around and have fun there and stuff like that.

So, yeah, they were just kind of more my people. So I started doing it and, you know, ended up creating kind of a apparel brand which allowed me to like, travel around the nation and became professional island gamer for a minute and threw at some of the biggest rin festivals in the nation. It was really fun and I, I do plan on doing it again.

It's just, I took some time off to to be a dad and to, you know, hold a job and have some fun and, and progress in the career for a minute. But I'm excited to get back in the training for sure.

John: So two questions. Two questions on that. I mean, many questions, but I'll limit it to two. What is the apparel brand and does it still exist?

It does now still exist. That was one

Hayden: question. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So unfortunately fog or fraternity of girth does no longer exist. It was a very fun brand that did well. I ended up killing it shortly after COVID, because the truth is, is it turned into, you know. I thought it was fun at first to make a bunch of Nordic designs with people that just wanted black t-shirts with white letters on it.

And that's cool. That's fine with me and, you know, more power to you. But I started wanting to make things like, you know, we came out with a Dungeons and Deadlift shirt and it went, it did really well. And I started wanting to do more apparel that was like more geek and strength, you know, combined.

John: Yeah.

Hayden: And that just wasn't the clientele I had built up there, so I just kind of, it eventually fizzled out.

But, you know, it was kind of my first foray into I guess entrepreneurship and then the marketing, because, you know, I learned a lot about how to about how to do social and email marketing and nurture campaigns and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. A lot of fun, but unfortunately it doesn't exist. But I do still have people with the tattoo tattoos of my brand on their skin.

It was a, it was a very cult-like following for a while. It was fun. Wow.

John: Had a lot of fun. So, so my, my other question cber, you've tossed it. How heavy are they?

Hayden: So CERs range you are essentially throwing like a huge tree, right? That's been chopped down. CERs actually range from, you know, it depends on if, did they just get cut down yesterday or did they get cut down last year?

And it's been drying out for a while. So I would say between one. A normal pros size cer, like the ones that I would throw would be between 19 and 22 feet long or tall you'd like to say. And between, this is where it gets interesting. 'cause it could be between 90 pounds and 140 pounds. And they were all kind of different, hard, like depending on the tree that you were throwing, like right.

Some trees are super whippy, some trees, you know, some people have, some trees have a ton of weight in the base which makes it incredibly hard to flip sometimes, or incredibly easy sometimes. But yeah. Oh, it has to put all the way over. You have to, so in order to get a perfect score, if you think about it from like a radio or like a, a, a clock face, right?

It's like you run, you flip. And so if you don't manage to get it to where it lands all the way over you're measured then on like a protractor scale of like zero to 90 degrees, where it's like, hey, you got it up to 85 degrees, but then it fell back down, right? If it fly, if it ends up. Going over.

Then a perfect score would be to hit at 12 o'clock on the clock face. And basically you get measured for every minute that it hits separately from that. So all the way from nine to three by one minute increments. Well, some people would do one minute increments. Some judges would do like 1159, so it wasn't a perfect score.

And you're like, come on dude. Like whatever. Like, what, what are you ai, can you really see the, the degree that it was off? Some people would do it by 15 minute increments. It was just easier, but that's how it's measured. Caper was by far the most fun and hard event to learn out of all with writing events.

And there's a lot of hard throwing events with, but is

John: that 'cause it's wood

Hayden: hard? It's because hard wood. It's I think it's like you've done the broom thing when you were a kid, right? Where you just kind of like balance the broom on your hand. Right. It's just that. Massive, 140 pounds. A massive version of that.

Yeah. The thing that could crush you. Yeah. And so when it gets, you know, you know, you let it, you know, as a young person doing cer when you're first starting out, it's like you let it get away from you a little bit and now all of a sudden, you know, the base only feels like it's three inches away from your body, but the top of it is now four feet back behind you, and now all of a sudden 140 pounds weighs like it's 250 pounds and it's pushing on your shoulder and your, the fulcrum point is your shoulder now.

And you're like, oh gosh, I need to get, get out of this. So, yeah, it's a, it's a dangerous event. I feel like I've seen the most people get hurt from the caver, but a lot of fun. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So much fun though.

Fei: Okay, I have a question. Do you have hobbies where you relax? Like this is, yeah. What do you do yourself?

What do you do to pass the time? Do you have hobbies that are relaxing?

Hayden: I I am actively writing a book with my dad. I'm writing another book. I love reading. I'm big sci-fi fantasy, and I'm the, the, the niche genre that is, well, the not so niche genre anymore, thanks to Dungeon Carl. Carl. But lit, RRP g I've consumed just so many books and so writing, writing a book and my dad has always been huge hugely creative has a massive imagination.

So I'm basically just kind of writing his words down on, on the first book. He has these worlds built in his head and super fun to see. Other than that, like, I like to do judges in dragons. I sorry, did you say I play with my kids? Did you say this was your first book, your second book? Well, I'm writing two books and I've technically already written one book.

I've written one book and it's ready to be published, but it's not, it's actually a nonfiction book. It's actually about how it was supposed to launch when I was at Hero Devs, and it's essentially around how software development like is broken. The whole incentive structure beside, behind software development is broken.

And we're not really building for the, the long term, we're just kind of building for the next funding round. Right. So, but so that one has just kind of been sitting there and I guess I could launch it at one point, but I, I prefer to write fiction. I prefer to write stories. They're more fun.

Fei: Yeah, that is a legitimately beautiful answer.

I'm really,

Hayden: yeah,

Fei: that's not that I, not that I mean to set you up for a, a plug, but are you gonna share updates about this work on LinkedIn? I follow you on LinkedIn. I

Hayden: will. I do, I do want to end up sharing updates around it. I, I've been trying to figure out a different, you know, I've been trying to think about producing my own newsletter, which is something, you know, I'm a big fan of, owned.

Owned media and your own own list, right? LinkedIn can take away everything tomorrow from me. So I've been considering just creating a newsletter on my own and, and starting to keep people updated on the things that aren't just straight marketing which is what I'm trying to, you know, I tend to troll on LinkedIn a lot nowadays and just kind of be a, be a little troll and, you know, you know, hopefully get on some people's nerves and then find my own tribe because some people take LinkedIn way too serious, and other people treat LinkedIn as their own personal snake oil place where they have a story for every day of the year where how they met some billionaire on the train, you know, and they taught him a lesson.

So I I, I get pretty annoyed at the facade of LinkedIn, so I, I try to be a little bit more just in general. Trollish.

Fei: I mean, that's why I follow you.

Hayden: Yeah. I'll just straight up write fiction on people's, like post if they, like, if, if I'm just like, this is the, this is absolutely made up. I'll just write, I'll just comment fiction on it.

Nic: So Hayden, how, how do you think that, you know, these kind of hobbies and phrases into apparel, brands, et cetera, have helped you in your day job?

Hayden: I mean, they, I, there's a level of discipline and confidence that comes from being an athlete. I think writing has always helped me be, be my creative imagination outlet and being a dad. Builds a lot of patience. Hmm. So I think if I were to put all four of those into a pile, I'd say marketing needs all four.

You know, you gotta be disciplined, stay consistent. You got to have the confidence to shoot something out there that people can Absolutely. You know, marketing is half numbers and half art, and a lot of people don't like to do the same art as you do. Right. So it's just like, you have to be confident. You have to have creativity and imagination in order to create memorable things.

Like, you know, when you saw everybody in Suits, John. Right. And you have to, and you have to be patient to deal with everything that comes with your corporate life. And also you know, so I, I think, I think a lot of things that we do in our outside of our life help probably with our, with our work life.

And I think that's pretty true for everybody. For me, that's, that's how I probably I see it. I don't know. That was actually a pretty good answer. I'm surprised I can't help with that. I did not. I was not prepared for that one. Yeah. So kudos the confidence to absolutely say this with conviction, even though I just end up on the spot without AI too.

That's what that that's what is impressing me, honestly, having an effect on me.

Nic: Well, Hayden, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you back on. I'm glad we finally get to get to do your show.

Hayden: Thanks. I'm glad to be back on. Yeah. Thanks for everything and it was really awesome to talk with y'all.

John: Do you have questions or feedback? Reach out to talking Drupal on the socials with the handle Talking Drupal or by email with [email protected]. You can connect with our hosts and other listeners on Drupal Slack in the talking Drupal channel.

Nic: If you would like to be a guest on Talking Drupal or a new show, TD Cafe, click on the guest request button in the [email protected].

John: You can promote your Drupal community event or initiative on Talking Drupal. Learn [email protected] slash td promo.

Nic: And you can get the Talking Drupal newsletter to learn more about a guest host, show news, upcoming shows, and much more, you can sign up for the [email protected] slash newsletter.

And Hayden, if you ever wanna give us a little snippet of something to throw in there you can always reach out on Slack. Sick.

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Nic: All right, Hayden, if our listeners wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Hayden: Just you know, [email protected]. Or good. Follow me on LinkedIn. Connect me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Hayden Ball with lasers coming outta their eyes. Promise you and Faye, how

Nic: about you?

Fei: You know what?

LinkedIn is actually pretty good for getting in touch with me too. So Faye, Lauren on LinkedIn or if you are on the Drupal community Slack, I'm very active there.

Nic: Awesome. And John, how about you?

John: You can find me personally at picozzi.com or on drupal.org and the social media at John Picozzi. And you can find out about eam [email protected].

Nic: And you can find me pretty much everywhere at Nixon van N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

Hayden: If you enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you, y'all. I gotta run to another call. Thanks. It was fun. Thanks, Hayden.

John: Have a good one. Bye.