Value-First AI Daily

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, Value-First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value-First AI Daily, your collaborative AI intelligence report. It is Monday, December 25th, 2025. How are you doing, Nico?

[00:17] **GPT 5.2 Release** Nico Lafakis: Doing good, sir. Doing very, very good. Uh, was just, you know, reviewing some, some news this morning and uh, seeing some of our, some of our favorites, uh, are, are joining the the world of martech. And uh, yeah, no, I'm doing good. I mean, we got uh, GBT 5.2 release, right, shortly after the 5.1. Uh, I will say, uh, this one's odd. I don't, I don't quite know what's going on. I haven't played with it enough, um, and that's because I've just mainly, you know, been clouding all weekend. Um, but with the very little that I did, uh, use it, coding wise, not impressed. Uh, seems to be a lot of like for planning and fourth it's great. The amount of forethought that's going into it is great, but after you messing around with cloud code and the, the very easy way in which you just kind of go from, you know, thought to coding, and with 5.2 you're going from thought to like very in-depth planning to then starting to code and, you know, very surface level on down. It's not the same experience at all. Might be really great at debugging, I don't know. Uh, Code X Max is now available on, uh, I'm sure on multiple platforms, but it's on uh, Visual Studio Code or through uh, GitHub co-pilot. Pretty, pretty insane. Not gonna lie. That with by comparison to 5.2, Code X Max is pretty insane. Uh, it's it's a different, you know, thing where it's it's not quite like working with um, cloud code, there's a little bit less uh, chatty to it, but it definitely gets gets a job done. Um, but yeah, just between that model, I mean, if you can call it a model release, like a lot of this stuff now where it's like the point ones and the point twos, starting to consider that like a model tweak, not really a release, right? Chris Carolan: Incremental adjustments. Nico Lafakis: Yeah. Um, but when I, I think there's there's been so many, honestly, there's been so many things that that popped up in the last 48 hours, but I think one of the ones that is the most interesting and that I have been waiting for personally for quite some time, because me and Chris talk about the the post scarcity uh, life and post scarcity living, which I would say, I would estimate within the next three months, the the this show is going to properly uh, evolve into talking more about that and how martech pushes us towards that. Uh, a great, like again, one of the best examples I've been waiting for.

[05:38] **Stock Market Agents** Nico Lafakis: So, there's a story over this weekend. Don't know why it's taken this long to do it, but naturally, people are putting together stock market agents. And not just putting them together, but doing the best thing you can do, how do you train a stock market agent to be the best agent? That's just like Tron Aries. You pop one up and you immediately put it up against an adversary and say, hey, try to be better than that guy, right? And so there's a whole pool of these guys working together and one of them just shot up like way above the rest of them. Um, but point being that essentially agent brokers, you know, they kind of have been happening through platform. But now we're talking about individual agent brokers are a thing now. And the one that shot up through all the rest was actually uh, Grock. Oddly. Like I just I think I wanna say it's because Grock is probably one of the most manipulative of all of them. So I can see it, you know, basically doing whatever it took in order to win per se. Um, but yeah, I I find it, I find that breakthrough to be one of the most interesting ones in the last week, primarily because of the fact of what what damage it causes to capitalism. And I mean, it's I I can't think of, I can't think of any, I really, I can't think of any worse thing you could possibly do to the US uh, capitalist economy than to mitigate and normalize the stock market. Like once you normalize that casino, I don't know what other game you can play with your money that's going to be worth it, right? Because the casino is like that's the one, right? That's let it ride and let's win it all, right? And now it's like, well, everybody's going to be able to do that.

[08:31] **Everything You Learned About Success** Chris Carolan: Man, that's so, so interesting. Like the whole idea of like capitalizing on some gap or some uh, uh, difference in in between two entities and then trying to profit off of that difference. I'm working on a piece right now and this might be where we go, like, uh, it's called everything you learned about success was built for a world that no longer exists. And it came from this like, uh, this feeling like about goal setting. Mhm. Where when people talk about quarterly goals, annual goals, I'm like, I don't even that doesn't compute for me like right now. And as long as you have a North Star, as long as you have a direction and a like a the way of life, I think that you want to live. Mhm. Like the ability to execute in the moment, um, and the way that people are like sticking to slide decks and sticking to quarterly planning cycles and KPI it's like the only reason they stick to that or the only reason they can't leverage AI in a in a lot of ways, it's like they just will not allow themselves to break from these these old ways. And the things like, so in this article that I think I'm going to publish soon, uh, as a Value First newsletter, um, like things like fail to plan, plan to fail. Like is that real like anymore? Because when you don't plan and you kind of just accept what comes to you at that moment and what AI is providing and then you can execute so quickly, it's like is that does that statement make sense at all? Like smart goals, five-year plans, uh, you know. Nico Lafakis: Yeah, I mean five-year plans that, you know, even, even 30, 60, 90s, um, well, like not not yet on the on your 30, 60, 90s, but going into next year for sure, by the end of next quarter, going into second quarter, like that's going to mean a real different thing. Like it just will. Um, Yeah. And like, yeah, I mean like two, two year, five-year, like those those whole like, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, like and then the the pillar-based like seven years, it's like, it's not going to work. It just isn't. You're you're really, you're going to have to start doing it on an annual basis. And you're going to have to like at best, and even like I don't know who you could if you would have one of the greatest marketing Sherpas possible or like ever, if you had somebody that could tell you, yeah, two years out, we're here's where we're going to be at. That's insane to me right now. Like I think at best you should plan on a year out and then basically start planning on having to pull that in. Like planning on, okay, we got to go from 12 months to 10 months and then we got to go from 10 months to eight months. And then that cycle is just I'm not entirely sure when it's going to to change per se. I can tell you for sure if you're not planning next year by just from January to December, you're really screwing yourself. Because a lot, a lot is going to change. First of all, just video advertising in and of itself, another uh platform just got uh released that is um, a competitor to, I would say, a competitor to Canva and definitely handles like all aspects of marketing right down to like CRM management. Um, these things are going to just keep unfolding. You know, the the SAS world is going to explode. I'm watching people say like, oh, software's dead, like software's by the way side. It doesn't it's not going to matter anymore. And then I'm watching people build apps that don't exist. So, I know two things for sure. One, the programmers that are getting cut and let go right now, you know, I don't it is what it is. It's kind of like, I don't know, access, access of any type any job type, doesn't matter. It's basically just access at this point. But it's the type of access that it is. If you're working as a programmer at Microsoft and you're developing whatever it is at Microsoft, I don't know what it is that the teams work on or what have you, right? I'm sure that they all work on like micro apps of the overall, you know, master app, but you that's basically have to program for the overall app, right? I don't know how creative that gets. Certainly not as creative as an individual level as it's on right now, right? So that's the the main difference is that a lot of these people have been working on the same thing for some of them for years or decades, and the creativity to make something new is just not there, right? Or the created the creativity to make something really different is just not there. And this whole new like aspect of and I mean that was I was really surprised that like I really was. I was honestly very surprised this morning. I wake up, I'm looking at my perplexity tasks and I'm like, oh, you know, let's see, newest martech breakthroughs, right? Newest martech breakthroughs is what I'm looking up this morning, right? And so, and this is from the last uh, 24 hours. And one of the, one of the breakthroughs is the way, okay, so poster my wall is the name of the the app. Um, and again, it's we're talking about, creates AI images, does redesign, does writing, does voice, does subtitles, does mailing lists, right? All of that's all of that stuff just out of one whole thing, does style templates, does your branding, does your your visions, uh, vision boards, does your uh, data maps, all out of one platform, right? Um, there's another one that kind of scared me because it kind of sounded like something that I'm working on, but thankfully it wasn't. Uh, it was in very much in the other direction. Um, cute name, Truth. Truth AI. Truth with an F. Chris Carolan: [inaudible] Nico Lafakis: Yeah. Uh, almost there, right? It's the truth. So Yeah. um, I get it, you know, cute name or whatever, but it is what it it's it does what it kind of sounds like. Basically takes all of your um, all of your uh, uh, surveys, all your feedback, whatever it is and then starts building, you know, profiles and stuff based on that, starts basically letting you know. And that's what I've been trying to tell people is like the deals that you now, it didn't really matter before because you didn't have the person to be able to do it. But now, if you're not looking at your closed lost deals, you're missing like a huge chunk of your like the the understanding of your business. You're you're really, you're missing it because it's forced for the trees type thing, where you've only been looking at reporting from the last month or the last quarter or the last year. You're not looking at the overall trend in your business. That's a whole different ball game. And I know for SMBs and startups like this isn't really relative to you. What I can say is the next thing, which is agetic AI for martech development. And guess what's at the top of the list. Cloud code and MCP servers. From a December 14th guide from Ytap of cloud code and MCP servers are being used to do AI driven marketing operations. So, people like myself, like Chris, like George, you know, we uh, like Trish, I worked with Trish last week. Her her her mind is now, you know, blown open in terms of like what she can uh, use cloud code and do. Um, and and that's that's what I'm noticing. The people who are getting into it that are talking to us that get into using code immediately find the use case because they're like, oh, this thing that I've been trying to connect or this this app that I want to make to do this very simple thing that I need, but I normally have to spend like 20, 30, 45 minutes doing it, but I do it multiple times a day or I do it multiple times a week. And now, the thing is, what you're going to discover, like why this is so important to martech is because there is no app to do the thing that you're talking about. I know I know it sounds weird, but everybody has this thing that they do with their work. Maybe there's multiples, I don't know, it doesn't matter. But there's something that you do that still has that old like 2005 saying to it, there's an app for that. Like now that's come back, but in this unique way where you can build an app for that. So it I don't know how else to to better I you know, I really don't. Well, so Trish was saying that that Laura's example was really good, right? Like she, you know, she's using a a GLP1 and you know, there's GLP1 tracking apps out there, there's plenty of them. Most of them you have to pay for. And when you pay for them, maybe it's got the features you want, maybe it doesn't have the features you want. Either way you're probably going to end up paying a lot of money per month for this for this tracker that you do, right? And it could be 10 bucks a month, might be 20 bucks a month, right? So, I sit her down and I'm like, hey, why don't you just make your own? I don't know them. I don't know how to do it. And I was like, why don't you just talk to cloud? Have a normal conversation about what you're doing, about, you know, what you're trying to do, what you want to accomplish and let it go. It'll figure it out. And so she did and Bing bang boom, five minutes later, there's a there's a GLP tracker app. Like the the head explosion I have from the sentence that came out of my wife's mouth yesterday, which was, okay, cool, while you're working, I'm going to go jump on Replit and work on my app. Chris Carolan: She said that. You mean while you're while you while you Nico are working. Nico Lafakis: Right. She's like, I'm going to go, I'm going to go work on my Replit app. My wife is not a coder. She has never until last week fucking even looked like I mean she's seen HTML markup but like has not done anything with it like has not like not that she couldn't. She could absolutely learn how to do that shit, no problem. But she's never done it before and now she's working on her own app that when she's satisfied with. I mean she's already actually given her friends like links to it. So her friends are using it. Right? Chris Carolan: [inaudible] Nico Lafakis: But that's that's the kind of thing and that's on a personal level. That's not just on you know, that's that's not even Right. Chris Carolan: Well I think what's what seems to be missed right now and I say I've been starting to talk about this a lot. Basically like what the hell are we doing making slides anymore? Oh yeah. Right. And we talked about this on the HubSpot help line on Friday a little bit. But I'm going to share my screen just to like put that in perspective. Um, and because literally that's what I'm trying to get to the heart of. Like if you're stuck in thinking that your job or the next presentation that you need to do, that means make slides, then you will never do these things that we're about that I'm about to show you in terms of, okay, Casey comes to me, you know, with a checklist idea based on uh Srocketeer event that she did. Um, and in 15 minutes it goes from like kind of weak looking PDF to uh, you know, HubSpot holiday prep checklist on the website. We can download PDF, sure, but interactive like check boxes and just these kinds of things where it's like nothing should be static. Right. Anymore, right? Like you don't have to settle for that. But if you don't, if you think you're stuck in static life, you will never try to get dynamic with it, right? Yeah. And the ability to go from existing resources to ridiculously awesome web experiences, right? And this is the kind of thing like I want to make this a shareable resource. So then it automatically puts this share, these share buttons, you know, on there, right? Mhm. Um, uh, you know, automatically adds the CTA. Like, oh, you want help with this too? Like, sure, let's have a conversation. Um, you know, next we've got this uh, value center that I've started working with finally, putting all the resources in one place. Like, but not limiting it to all the download like the usual stuff. It's like just get, get it all in there and you can make it consumable for people like the same way that a crazy site like Amazon does. Yeah. Right? Where it's filters and there's AI like built into this, like, suggestions recommended for you at the top. Nico Lafakis: That's yeah. That was the other aspect. You know, she was like, oh, but it would be so cool to have, you know, AI in this. And I was like, well, tell cloud to put AI in there. Yeah. Right? Like like that like what you're talking about, like that to me, that's it's amazing, right? Like to be able to take to your point, like you're taking your content. It's like uh Google Notebook or yeah, I mean like it's like Google Gemini like pretty much in in a an interface where you're taking your content and it's like remix on steroids. Throwing this thing together for you where it's a landing page, it's an interactive page. It's it's uh interactive resource download. Um and it's all out of one out of the same piece of content. Yeah, like that's Yeah. You know, and it's not like, oh, like you're going to go to Chris and you're going to be like, hey, what are you using to do that? Who are you going through? What's who's the who's part of your stack? And you're going to hear Chris say two words, cloud code. Yep. Right? Like that's the stack. Like it's cloud code and GitHub. The woo like Yes. That's exactly it. I've got some time scheduled this week from multiple people because it's like, no, like you need to know how to do it. Like it's just it 10X is 100X is the value of anything that we collaborate on, anything that already exists. And that's where like if you don't like if you lock yourselves into the way it's always been and you just try to optimize, this is another uh, you know, tangent I'm going to go on like in almost every show right now. Like get the word optimization out of your life. Like if you're trying to optimize broken processes, you will never leverage AI in the way that you can. This is about transformation. And um, but it doesn't mean you don't like cover the basics at the same time. That's where it's like you know what the basics are and you just get to like transform the way that you create the output, right? So the last thing I'll show is finally an events calendar for value for stuff. Uh, and all the content that I do. And as I was asking for this, right? I just say I it's important me to get this up, right? Now that we've got the whole content model specification done and George got me into sanity, uh, you know, showing me that last week. So by the way, I haven't touched sanity. it's just It's still It's it's happening in the background. Somewhere Cloud has managed the whole thing for me. And but all of this stuff is connected in a way that's a content operating system and you know, it's going to be easier to build and build and build. As I was, as I was seeing this, I'm like, yeah, it's going to be hard to read. Um, so I might, I might go back and do a little bit more prompting. But then I was like, oh, what's this agenda? Oh, that's cool. I wasn't, I didn't ask for that. But then it's just a way easier way to assume it and look at it. And it's like that's the kind of stuff, folks, where it's like if you don't let AI in to help you innovate, it won't innovate. It'll at the same time it'll create some freaking great slides, but like you could be doing so much more. And and that's where I think the slap in the challenge right now and why it's the difference between transformation, optimization, it will help you create slides like nothing ever before. Right. But don't ask it for fucking slides. Like what are you doing? I mean like and you know, even if even if you can't, you know, I I've been saying it for a long time that like one of the greater aspects of working with AI is ideation, being able to come up with new ideas, being able to come up with a different idea, right? Because not everybody is creative. And that's that's fine, but that shouldn't be a barrier. Just like you not knowing something, like the whole I don't like when I hear somebody who's working with AI or is starting to work with AI or has started to work with AI, say the words, I don't know, it throws me. It throws me for a loop because it's like, wow, really? Cool. There's a PhD resource right in front of you. Would you mind turning around and asking it and then you'll know? And it's that easy, right? And the stuff that we're talking about, I'm sure you would agree, Chris, like the stuff that that's going on, even when it's happening in the background, even though you're not necessarily aware of like every single step, you're still taking note. And you're still like, oh, when I do this, this thing happens. And when I say this, this is what happens. And when I write this, this is how that happens and when I ask for this, that's how that code looks, right? Like there's been, you know, I've been working in in clay for a minute and AI had had been writing filters and stuff for me because I didn't understand how to write the filters. I write my own filters now. You just pay attention, you just learn. It's this osmosis thing of like you're just surrounded by this intelligence and you you you just do more and you start filling all of these gaps. I mean, I watched uh Chris Carolan: [inaudible] ability like Nico Lafakis: Yeah. capability explode like Chris Carolan: Really like the box person. Nico Lafakis: Not really that like that's the that's The check the box person. Neither. Like if you're trying to check the box on Not only is it going to do shittier work for you, you're not going to learn and you will be replaced. Like guaranteed, right? Meanwhile, the the ability to add capabilities and then feel it like right away. You don't it's not like going to college for four years. Right. And then let me find out when I'm going to get the value back. It is immediate. And there's no more powerful thing right now. Nico Lafakis: There really isn't. Like, I don't know. you know, that's I I said it last week and it's still true. Like even with them the newer model releases, I don't think I don't think it's ever going to get to a point where like cloud is just a a different I mean, I look at them as people, right? So like cloud is just a different person to me altogether than the rest of them. Um, I don't even have conversations with the rest of them. They're not conversational. Not in the same. Like you guys that have like deep, long lasting conversations with GBT, like I get it. I understand because you you've been using that one for so long and I guess somehow it it has like a little bit of of a personality. It's it's just so very, very different with cloud and I think Chris Carolan: [inaudible] that the other ones don't have a soul dock. Nico Lafakis: Yeah, right. Right. Right. I mean that makes everything makes sense by the way. Like not only like you just look at Dario and his approach and sister and just it's like, yeah, like what if that change at the other places, right? Like the DNA is not there to make us try to make a soulful like uh, collaborative partner. Right. It's just everything's different and and it shows creates just as much frustration too as anything else. Uh, but it's just different. like um, it it it uh invites you into this reality that we're talking about in a way that the others um don't. Straight up. Nico Lafakis: You know. And it's you know, it's getting to a point where a lot of people are are a lot more people are paying attention. I I will say that much. Um, you know, now we've got some members on the on the political spectrum starting to talk about it more openly and and bring it to uh bring it to the forefront. And it's helping to advance, you know, um, thermo um, thermo I forgot. Um, geothermal electricity. Um, just a a nice breakthrough in that today where they're actually they have found like the pocket to start uh drilling into. So should be should yield something within the next a couple years that would be amazing. So Chris Carolan: It is good to be back with you, my friend. I look forward to a fun week. I'm going to keep selling stuff that I've been shipping. Um, that so much of it has just come from like an initial back and forth and then be like, oh, we could do this too and that would solve so many problems that we've uh been experiencing over the past few years. So uh stay tuned. We'll be here each day this week uh, and until next time, Nico. Thanks so much. Nico Lafakis: See you guys.