Taking Tacit Knowledge and Making It Tangible

11/18/2025

My current thoughts about AI and writing, as a writer working in marketing. 

When any LLM can put out vast quantities of content that is 80-95% almost ready to go out the door/written in voice/tone for a company, why even have writers on your marketing team?

Creating "new data" is the most valuable thing a writer can do. 

Conducting interviews with subject matter experts and take what's locked up in their brain and put pen to paper. Assumption: LLMs/AI have already been trained on all "publicly available data." While it's generally true, it's not 100% true. 

This is why the idea of oral history/capturing family history and genealogy research is so interesting to me. That knowledge, if not recorded, is gone forever when your loved ones pass away. I like the idea of an app that can help preserve this information, but the actual idea is much bigger than just this one thing. It's about everything, not just family history and family stories. It's useful to organizations, especially for marketing strategy too. What types of content will you create when you can create absolutely anything you could think of? And why would you pull from the same library as all your competitors when the most interesting thing about YOU or YOUR company is not what is already publicly available?

It's because people are lazy. 

I am lazy, too. The path of least resistance to get a goal accomplished makes the most sense and preserves the most cognitive resources and energy. 

It is very slow to sit down and have a conversation with someone. Not everyone is good at sitting down and putting their thoughts on paper. I struggle with it too and it's all I do, every day. It's easier to open up the audio transcription and just talk. The simple act of making a record is all you need to do. But that is a big lift for some. 

With the tools available today, whichever or however many LLMs/AI tools you use, in a few minutes, it can take your raw input and it spit out something 80-95% of the way there for you to edit and refine. Basically all steps in the writing process have been eliminated with the exception of raw brain dump data/extraction of information from biological data silos and quality control of the final product. 

It really does come down to asking the right questions. Asking yourself, other people, and also AI the right questions. 

If I were to write a personal memoir, (I wouldn't though) I'd compile the collection of everything I have ever written or created. I wouldn't worry about sorting or organizing it, just collecting it in one place. Browse the collection, add in net new raw data for things I wish I had of written about. Maybe make a short list of important or memorable events that absolutely need their own chapters or sections on. I'd think carefully about what is most important to share that could be maximally useful to other people. I'd think carefully about what I don't want people to know like my kids for instance, remove those bits of at least mark a chapter called "Unhinged,NSFW, If you're my child please skip this chapter (You'll thank me later.)" I don't like the idea of removing uncomfortable things because it's part of my story. A disclaimer will work just fine. I'd write it like I were already dead, very much "Who Cares?" (But I do, and that's why the naughty bits stay in and here's why: People are multi-faceted and terrible and wonderful and how can you actually appreciate the amazing parts when you don't know all the fucked up parts too? I have a bit of a boner for the truth too. That's a turn off for some people. Don't be afraid to ramble when you write. What you spit out is almost as interesting as everything else, besides, people get to glimpse your never-ceasing, annoying-as-fuck internal monologue.)

Then once I had that collection, I'd get AI to put it in a logical order, probably pull out all date metadata because putting things on a timeline makes little more sense. It's easier to follow and understand key decisions when you see where things started and where they ended up. 

I'd use a tool like xmind to start a concept map and include that in the collection. This is also a manual step of taking out tacit knowledge and putting it in a tangible form. It's important because it also helps you highlight the questions YOU have about things that happened and it's interesting to see how you sort it. Probably helps you identify places you didn't write enough about also. 

 Anyway, I know I have some old writings on codifying knowledge. I tried to find them to no avail, and I have one minute to finish this before my job starts. Sometimes you just do the best with what you have. At least you tried and continue to try. Writing doesn't have to be perfect, especially if you want to present the actual truth. 

This is very much not done and I have a lot more to say on the topic, but in the interest of time, this will have to be my record and my attempt at codifying my thoughts on AI, writing, and what humans should focus on if they want to thrive in this new AI for everything world. 

A lot of marketing is shit. 

11/24/2025

What is Good Marketing Dot Com? 

Just a brain dump with no filter today. 

Coffee mug ironically made by Artist with first name Mimi (Mimi Pond), rhymes with MeMe (how i pronounce meme in my brain.) 


Good marketing is about good communication. 

A bunch of sensitive babies worried about bad optics ruined things for the rest of us.

The past few years I haven't really seen anything that's blown my socks off when it comes to marketing. Is marketing dying or have things just gotten boring and predictable?

If it does blow my socks off or interest me, it is basically is thoroughly human and weird and specific and DIRECT. Maybe I've been working in marketing too long?! Maybe I've been alive too long, or maybe...

People just got lazy as fuck. and Scared to be weird and awesome? Scared of being cringe? Scared of sharing what they actually think? Why?  

That is disappointing because that is what makes things interesting. When we're all allowed to be ourselves and express our interests and weird thoughts. I think the perversion of culture is when people can longer express their individuality when in groups and participating in group communications. We may already be the borg, but can we also, like NOT be THAT borg. Can we be a better, smarter, stronger, and perhaps humorous borg? A borg that likes sex and isn't afraid to be a little off color here and there? A borg that occasionally curses and says what they are feeling? Wait, I think I mean, not the borg. (Yes)

I know there's a lot on this topic so I'll keep my rant high level today. Cancel culture = a bunch of sensitive babies who are more worried about bad optics than actually living the full experience tried to ruin the party for everyone. What it has in common with the borg is it's group think at scale supercharged by echo chambers on social media and FRANKLY, I'm a little pissed off about this one OVERCOMPLICATED PERMISSION SETTINGS ON DIGITAL SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS THAT ALLOW USERS TO MAKE SAFE SPACES SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO HEAR THINGS THEY DON'T LIKE. 

Feels more like a culture war than anything and it made a lot of things suck balls. And who is to blame? Well, don't point any fingers until you have all the information because you'll look like a fool when the narrative keeps getting even more and more ridiculous and complicated. I'll take one punch and maybe it's an easy one - Technology companies who didn't have the balls to stand up for freedom of speech and got pressured by government, NGOs, and whiny babies who didn't want their feelings hurt. And UX designers that didn't simplify the requirements and made information basically impossible to find. Yes, YOU Apple. YOU. 

Really good marketing (and direct communication) might piss you off. It might make you laugh, but it certainly is not boring. I question a lot of the work I do these days if it's really useful or valuable to someone. It needs to be entertaining. Super honest and direct. Or very, very, very educational and practical. Immediately useful. Immediately invoke a response or get indexed by the reader. Otherwise why bother? And why not all of those things all at once? 

If not, why even do it?  Cause I certainly don't want to read abunch of nothing and come away feeling like I got brain wiped because I had to listen to someone talk about something that has no value and no usefulness to me whatsoever. I don't want to feel included. I want to find answers to questions and learn new perspectives and insights from individuals who used their own data set, trained on their own learnings, and smush together all the weird sources that ever shaped them into their unique take on something. 

Why not just let creative marketing folks be their weird selves? Is everyone really that afraid of bad optics? (YES.) 

Why? When did that happen and when did everyone get so uptight about everything? And how do you reverse it? How is being "human" in your marketing discarding every part of you that makes you YOU? Why did things really become named the exact opposite of what they are supposed to be there for? Whose dystopian nightmare novel is this and how do I tell them they fell into one of the oldest storylines known to contemporary culture and how they could make so much more money and maximize happiness and human flourishing if they'd inject a little hope and tone down the fear/greed messaging. 

When I was trying to grow fifteen years ago I would try to do something every day that put me in an uncomfortable position or challenge myself in some way. I thought that was a pretty good mantra for learning and experimenting. At work this is more difficult to do. Why? Because so much energy is spent into convincing others internally that HOW you want to execute a directive is more important than actually achieving the desired result. There are so many unspoken rules in life, and especially in work. It's an exhausting framework to experience. I kind of wish everyone would just go take mushrooms or something or have a life changing event and just WAKE UP. Tired of being alone on the island of, why are we still doing it this way and what are you so afraid of?   

A broken record

Tonight, they're going to say SHIT on television. I always loved that episode of Southpark because it was so over the top. When you really want to drive a point home, just keep saying it over and over again. That's the marketing equivalent of using repetition when you want to make sure you (or someone else) really remember something.