In short
How Cat Goetze used AI (especially ChatGPT) to build and run a business generating $750,000 in revenue in under six months, plus practical guidance on using multiple AI platforms, avoiding “AI hype,” and using AI for higher-stakes planning (entrepreneurship, health, finances, workflow).
Guest backgrounds
Cat Goetze is a tech/AI entrepreneur and creator who says she adopted ChatGPT as an “operating partner,” later expanded to Claude and Gemini, and teaches “Hot Smart Rich”/AI-driven business and workflow. She references her prior conversations with Mustafa Suleiman (Microsoft AI CEO) and her own content/community-building work.
Key claims
- AI agency is higher than people realize; entrepreneurship is for “anybody crazy enough.”
- Most AI chat tools are interchangeable under the hood (large language models); differentiation is mainly “personality”/guardrails and features.
- Don’t rely on one tool—use a “learning muscle” and diversify (like not keeping all cash in one bank).
- “AI hype” is fear + misinformation; real value comes when AI acts like a strategic co-worker, not a gimmick.
- AI can make you “dumber” only if you outsource thinking without understanding; best use is when you know what “good” looks like.
Notable examples
- She used AI to generate a 2026 financial model in Excel from a messy 2025 spreadsheet, then validated assumptions because she knows model quality.
- She describes “meta-prompting” (having AI interview you with follow-up questions).
- She tests “AI clone of a creator” advice and argues it averages someone’s past content rather than giving true, specific guidance.
- She discusses AI influencer accounts, warning that AI video authenticity will become hard to detect and could worsen trust/beauty standards.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Misconception of Entrepreneurship
0:45 to 2:15
Discussing the accessibility of entrepreneurship and gender disparities in AI adoption.
“Can you break that in a little bit more?”
Understanding AI and Its Relevance
2:15 to 4:06
Highlighting the importance of AI for non-tech individuals and overcoming fears around its usage.
“I would be lying if I sat here as someone who's invested in tech, in the technology world, and still don't have fears.”
The Impact of AI on Personal Agency
4:06 to 7:00
Exploring how AI can empower individuals in their entrepreneurial journeys.
“scene with a product that just captured people's attention in November of 2022.”
ChatGPT and the Evolution of AI Platforms
7:00 to 10:00
Discussing the rise of ChatGPT and its competition in the AI space.
“I can't sit here and make an endorsement for one over the other.”
Choosing the Right AI Tools
10:00 to 12:30
Evaluating different AI platforms and their unique characteristics.
“Do you think that there's a rule in terms of how many different types of platforms we should be familiarizing ourself with?”
AI Usage and Learning Curves
12:30 to 14:00
Understanding the learning process of AI models and user adaptation.
“I think the reason people are sick of AI and the reason AI is going through a total PR crisis right now is because we are pushing use cases onto the public that feel pedestrian, that feel approachable.”
Understanding AI's Impact on Intelligence
14:00 to 15:00
Discussion on how using AI affects knowledge retention and understanding.
“what your position is on something, that's a really bad idea.”
Effective Use of AI in Business Tasks
15:00 to 16:30
Exploring how to utilize AI for productivity in specific business tasks.
“There are so many things where applying AI gets you to an end result faster and does work that you already know how to do.”
Setting Clear Goals for AI Integration
16:30 to 18:00
Importance of having clear goals before leveraging AI in workflows.
“to help you be the most productive version of yourself.”
Meta-Prompting: Enhancing AI Interactions
18:00 to 19:15
Discussing the technique of meta-prompting to improve AI responses.
“And the reason it's important is because the AI only has the context that you give it or that it has saved in its memory from previous conversations to actually generate its response.”
Show all 43 chapters
Using AI for Advice and Workflow
19:15 to 21:00
How to ask AI for advice by simulating conversations with mentors.
“for this school, like make sure that you've given it plenty of context.”
Evaluating AI Responses Against Real Advice
21:00 to 22:50
Comparing AI-generated advice with personal insights and experiences.
“I never want people to start a business when they actually haven't validated that there is a community there to go and purchase it.”
The Future of AI Influencers in Media
26:40 to 28:00
Discussing the rise of AI influencers and their impact on consumer trust.
“So I was served a perfect podcast woman.”
The Rise of AI in Social Media
28:00 to 29:20
Explore how AI-generated content is increasingly indistinguishable from real human content.
“I'm actually shocked to hear that you found one where they actually said, this is an AI account in the bio.”
The Trust Issue: AI and Realism
29:20 to 31:00
Discuss the implications of AI on our perception of reality in digital media.
“and I tell you right now, within six months, even those microscopes are going to go away.”
AI's Impact on Beauty Standards
31:00 to 34:00
Examine how AI influences societal beauty standards and the pressure it creates.
“phone because they realize all the potential downsides.”
Human Experience vs. AI Content
34:00 to 36:10
Debate the competition between human creators and AI in digital content creation.
“You can just like concoct these like crazy forms of human shapes of bodies that like don't even actually have to exist.”
The Gender Divide in AI Adoption
36:10 to 39:40
Analyze why women are less likely to adopt AI tools in tech and business.
“Isn't it interesting that it causes this weird twitch inside of us to be like, I don't like this.”
Leveraging AI for Business Success
39:40 to 42:00
Learn how to effectively use AI tools to identify and solve business challenges.
“And not, by the way, just to figure out what you can make for dinner.”
Leveraging AI for Complex Problems
42:00 to 43:32
Learn how to push AI tools to solve your toughest challenges effectively.
“through what I can be doing in my own life to get closer to my goals.”
Understanding Deep Research Mode
43:32 to 45:26
Discover the benefits of using deep research features in AI tools.
“So oftentimes on these platforms, like let's take ChatGPT, for example, when you go to type in a prompt, you'll see like a few different buttons or like a dropdown right near where you type in that initial prompt.”
From Idea to $750k: The Journey
45:26 to 47:59
Explore the steps taken to build a successful business leveraging AI.
“But I can still continue the conversation and query back just in like a regular chat, but it often gets you a longer, richer result that also is filled with citations.”
The Importance of Collaboration
47:59 to 50:38
Understand why surrounding yourself with the right people is crucial for success.
“So yes, it's not as simple as you just send a voice note and all of a sudden you've got, you know, a million dollar business.”
Navigating the Path to Creativity
50:38 to 55:06
Learn about the personal journey of transitioning back to a creative career.
“Can you walk us through a little bit of like how you took a roundabout way to get to what you're doing now?”
Gaining Confidence in Unfamiliar Settings
56:47 to 58:21
Discussion on developing confidence, especially in male-dominated spaces.
“How long would you say it took you to learn the confidence to own the room that you walk into when you look at the room and nobody looks like you?”
The Limitations of AI in Personal Growth
58:21 to 1:00:07
Insights on how AI lacks the ability to teach emotional intelligence.
“You started creating content when you were 27, right?”
The Importance of Real Human Interaction
1:00:07 to 1:02:03
Emphasizes the necessity of human connections for fulfillment.
“Like, we as a human species have evolved to crave and desire certain things.”
Creating a Physical Phone Company
1:02:03 to 1:04:42
Exploring the journey and thought process behind starting a physical phones business.
“So I had been on a journey to spend less time on my phone for about five years, ever since COVID, actually.”
Validating Business Ideas Early
1:04:42 to 1:07:20
Framework for testing business ideas before market validation is evident.
“Because when you're starting a business as a creator, as opposed to just a regular entrepreneur, there's such unfair advantages that you register that you can take advantage of.”
The Role of Creators in Shaping Markets
1:07:20 to 1:09:52
Discussion on balancing market demand with personal creative expression.
“And of course, I'm going to say use social media because that's just such an extreme advantage.”
Mastering the Art of Saying No
1:09:52 to 1:10:02
Strategies for prioritizing projects and saying no to distractions.
The Importance of Focus in Content Creation
1:10:02 to 1:11:56
Learn how to prioritize your content creation efforts and the significance of saying no.
“How do you know what to say no to and what to say yes to?”
Understanding Media Consumption: Opt-In vs Opt-Out
1:11:56 to 1:13:48
Explore the key differences between short-form and long-form content consumption.
“that the proof is in the pudding when you look at how you can truly build such an amazing audience on those platforms.”
Listening to Your Gut: Alignment in Life Decisions
1:13:48 to 1:14:45
Discover the importance of trusting your instincts in personal and professional choices.
“And it's like, you have to get so good at getting really quiet and looking inwards and asking yourself, what do you actually want to do?”
The Risks of AI in Therapy
1:14:45 to 1:15:29
Discuss the potential dangers of using AI technology in therapeutic settings.
“Generally speaking, I think that it's extremely risky.”
Effective Prompts for AI Assistance
1:15:29 to 1:17:27
Learn how to craft prompts for AI to get constructive feedback on your writing.
“I mean, yes, you can say, I want you to analyze this critically.”
Using AI to Enhance Your Writing Process
1:17:27 to 1:21:39
Understand how to integrate AI into your writing workflow without losing your voice.
“went like that would work incredibly well for my left brain tasks, but for right brain tasks, more creative thinking, would that be as successful?”
AI's Role in Trend Analysis on Social Media
1:21:39 to 1:24:00
Explore the capabilities and limitations of AI in analyzing social media trends.
“It's going to look for ways that your arguments can be strengthened.”
Utilizing AI for Trend Analysis
1:24:00 to 1:25:00
Learn how AI, especially Reddit scraping, can identify pain points.
“I think one area that AI is really great at scraping is Reddit.”
Understanding ChatGPT Memory
1:25:00 to 1:26:40
Explore how ChatGPT retains context and the limits of its memory.
“that ChatGPT has additional context from previous conversations that it can reference in future conversations.”
Rapid Fire Questions with Kat
1:26:40 to 1:28:40
Engage with a fun segment on personal insights and preferences.
“So if you go into your ChatGPT settings right now and you look up in your memory, you will see lines that it's stored that it has currently saved to memory about you.”
Health Queries and AI Responses
1:28:40 to 1:30:40
Find out how AI can assist in personal health inquiries and provide advice.
“These are the symptoms I'm experiencing.”
Final Thoughts and Where to Find Kat
1:30:40 to 1:31:00
Discover Kat Getzy's advice on building a foundation for success and her social media links.
“It's like build the foundational layers of the empire first and know that everything else will follow in due time.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00How did AI make it possible for me to create and run a business that did$750 ,000 in revenue in less than six months? I want to crack open the playbook and share this with people. Cat Goetze, are you ready to get Hotsmet Rich? I'm so ready. Entrepreneurship is not something that is only for like special wizard children that are just born with a gift that is like bestowed upon them by the gods. It's just for anybody who's crazy enough to think you could actually do it.
0:27Cat Goetze:women are implementing AI at 25 % less than men. Silicon Valley in general feels like a boys club. You kind of realize, oh, I can do that too. How different would life be if people applied what we're going to talk to today and actually put it towards their life? People have way more opportunity to like actually live life on their own terms. Can you break that in a little bit more? To ask anybody, you need to be testing all these different tools. I think can be a lot to ask. What I think is far more important is having a strong muscle at learning new things. Use that big fat brain of yours. Also, so many people skip this step, even though it is like science back proven to be the one thing.
1:07Let me ask you something controversial then.
1:16Cat Goetze:In case you missed it, you're allowed to be hot, smart and rich. So let's get into it.
1:27Cat Goetze:Kat Getzy, for someone that's just clicked into this conversation that has no idea who you are, they just hear the words AI, they're intimidated already, what would you say to them to get them to stay? Tech is not a conversation for just the people in Silicon Valley. And a lot of people want you to think that that's the case, but it is absolutely not true. And in fact, it's the people who don't work in tech who often have the most to gain from AI and other new technologies. So Trust me, it's not lost on me that people are sick and tired of hearing about AI. They don't want to hear about AI, but that's because the conversations that people are pushing on them about AI are actually massive distractions from the things that really matter.
2:02And so it's my mission to highlight those conversations and try to veer people away from the super distracting and super bummer conversations about everything else.
2:12Cat Goetze:You're so right. It can come across as really scary. And I think we would be lying. I would be lying if I sat here as someone who's invested in tech, in the technology world, and still don't have fears. But I think that we also don't glamorize and talk about the highlights of what can happen when you apply AI. So for that same person who's still considering, summarizing what you think we're going to talk about, how would life look and how different would life be if people applied what we're going to talk to today and actually put it towards their life? Oh my god. I mean, okay, first, let me just start by saying we find ourselves at a point in time where it is extremely difficult to predict the future.
2:51For me to say here's how your life can look in five to 10 years would presume that all of the current state conditions about the world order and also like how smart AI is today stays stable. That is not going to be the case. So there's so many mixed in variables and factors. But what I can tell you is that the amount of agency that you can actually have over your life today with the level of AI that we already have, people have way more opportunity than they realize to be able to actually live life on their own terms and specifically to break into the field of entrepreneurship in ways that I think most people don't even realize.
3:27Cat Goetze:We're going to dumb this down a little bit today for everyone, including myself, because I would say we leverage AI well, but not phenomenally. And we're actually at this breaking point in the business where it's like we've now adopted ChatGPT as like our, what would you call it, system operating partner for our AI in HSR. For my personal life, I'm actually at this new point where I'm like, you know what, I want to start to optimize my life. I want to start to use it as a health coach, a fitness coach. I want to help it make me a better personal development in my writing. For someone that's listening to this, why have we just defaulted to ChatGPT as like the AI platform.
4:05They were the first ones who came out onto the scene with a product that just captured people's attention in November of 2022. I sat down and I talked with Mustafa Suleiman, who's the CEO of Microsoft AI. And what he told me that blew my mind, I didn't know this at the time, is that Google had been working on ChatGPT-like technology for years, Maggie, before ChatGPT came out. But they didn't release it into the public because they had their own internal conversations basically saying, we're not ready. We don't know the impact that this is going to have on society. We need to figure this out more.
4:36And admittedly, I think there were some conversations internally about how a product like that would cannibalize their search business. So they decided to put it to the side. Cue OpenAI with ChatGPT, which originally started as an internal hackathon project so that people could figure out how to start interacting with the models that they were building in-house. They said, why not turn it into a chat bot that got out into the world? And that's what people were all drawn to. It's, you know, the consumer application with the highest growth curve, I think maybe up until recently with OpenClaw, if we count that.
5:05But yeah, just absolutely took off to the races. People underestimate how much timing is a huge, huge part of it. The first product that comes out that sticks in people's minds, it sticks. And then, as you probably know, the more you use it, now it knows more about you. There's less context. You have to provide it every time. that persistent memory makes it a more sticky, sticky product experience so that you say, well, if I went to Claude, I'd have to teach it all this stuff about me now, whereas Chachapiti already knows that about me. It's an incredible moat that they've actually established just purely from a consumer chatbot experience.
5:36Cat Goetze:Can you break down the different platforms for us? Because now there's Chachapiti, there's Gemini, there's Copilot, there's Claude, and there's Grok. Yeah, to name a few. To name a few. Yeah. Who should be using which one of those and why? I don't know if this is controversial to say, but I'm going to say most of these products are completely interchangeable. Under the hood, what you're looking at is a large language model. And essentially, all of these different companies are just racing to make their models smarter and smarter and to give you better results. Now, there's a personality layer that exists and is actually literally engineered.
6:13These companies have teams of people whose only job is to figure out what the personality of ChatGPT, of Copilot, should be. I've met these people. They're very thoughtful people and they think about things like, you know, social engineering and philosophy. Like, how should it respond? And Anthropic has a constitution that they publish online that is literally the document that they give to Claude to say, this is your personality. This is how you should talk. This is how you should respond to people. You can literally read it. It's in plain English to see these are how these things are meant to respond.
6:47That's kind of the real core differentiating factor right now. Otherwise, besides that, all of the kind of like tools and features are kind of becoming commoditized. And I would say whether you're using Gemini, ChachiPT, or Claude, what's more important is that you are developing a deep memory with one tool to really get the most out of it. I can't sit here and make an endorsement for one over the other. There's always going to be kind of like incremental increases. For example, Gemini has Nano Banana Pro natively integrated, which is one of the top, if not the top, image generation models out there.
7:21A lot of people prefer Nano Banana Pro's images to ChachiPT's images. Okay, for that use case, like for me personally, I always use Gemini when I'm editing or creating images. But for my personal life, I tend to use ChatGPT. And then for more technical work, especially when I'm dealing with like financial models in Excel, then I use Claude. But again, on an underlying basis, just for the chat experience, they're relatively interchangeable.
7:43Cat Goetze:So how long does it take a model to actually learn your behavior? Because right now I'm in this exact position. I've also put all of my eggs in the ChatGPT basket. Yeah. And it scares me to think about migrating over to something like a Claude or a Gemini. How long will it take that system to essentially learn me and be able to give me the same information that I'm getting on ChatGPT that is on another platform? I was in your exact same shoes, I want to say like just a couple of months ago. I have only recently started to really branch out into other AI platforms. And specifically, I've been using Claude a lot more.
8:18I actually made a video about this on my page that got over a million views. I saw it. You're dating one. Yeah, cheating on Chudry Me Too with Claude. I think it's a sliding scale. I think you can expect to see that it will start to remember certain things over the course of like 10 to 12 chats. It really doesn't take long. And it's kind of annoying to have to give that additional context. But just remember that it's like, as long as you kind of give that baseline, then it's going to start remembering more and more. So for example, the other day I was talking with Claude, asking it to help me put a script together for a creator brief that I was given from a brand.
8:51And it was like, great, tell me about your platform as a content creator. What do you do? And I'm like, okay, this is kind of annoying. Chat totally knows about CatchyPT. It knows about everything that I've made. It knows about physical phones. So I had to give this context. But you know what, Maggie, like at a certain point, I was like, if this is going to take me two minutes to just explain, and then now I have access to a completely different tool that leverages in particular Excel much better than CatchyPT, like I'm going to take those two minutes and do that.
9:18Cat Goetze:It's so funny because I relate this back to even, do you remember when like the bank crisis happened in Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. And there was a lot of founders calling me at the time. I remember I was at Expo West and I remember calling my sister who was the head of finance at a huge direct-to-consumer company. And she was like, you shouldn't have one bank for a business. You should actually have six or seven banks when you get to a certain size for this exact reason. And I think that's been the new standard that people have implemented in their businesses moving forward.
9:45Cat Goetze:Do not have all of your cash in one bank. And I started to feel the same way once I started to watch your content around like, why are all of my eggs in the basket in ChatGPT? What if something happens? No one else actually knows me. Do you think that there's a rule in terms of how many different types of platforms we should be familiarizing ourself with? Or is it just like whatever feels good based on your workflow. What's more important than knowing the latest and greatest tool at all times, because let's be real, that's exhausting. There's so much constantly coming out. It's like drinking from a fire hose.
10:19This is literally my full-time job and I feel like it's a lot to try to keep up. So to ask anybody like you need to be testing all these different tools and spending time everywhere, I think can be a lot to ask. What I will say, what I think is far more important is having a strong muscle at learning new things. So what I mean by that is if you feel like the current experience that you're having with ChatGPT, let's say, is not beneficial anymore, or that you've kind of like, you've stopped learning and you're not doing anything interesting or novel or new on that platform, spend a little bit of time going out looking at platforms like mine or others to see like, okay, what else could I be doing here?
10:55Like, what else is out there? Maybe there's a new tool that dropped. Just recently, OpenClaw came out or Clawdbot, you know, was doing agentic AI work and it's open source. And so like, okay, started playing around a little bit with that. I think it's less about you need to have a certain amount of allocated time dedicated to all these tools. And it's more just like develop a really strong base with one and then don't shut out the others and be open to what else they might be able to do.
11:20Cat Goetze:You talking about this fire hose reminds me of what I think we're hearing a lot of AI hype. Is that what you mean by AI hype? I think the question of AI hype gets, there's like so many different definitions of what that is or why that matters, right? What are you talking about when you say AI hype? I'll try to answer that. I think that it's this constant fear of like things are moving so quickly. I'm already so far behind. I can't keep up to your point, the fire hose. Like this is your full-time thing. You're in every single day and you're feeling like I actually don't know how to do everything.
11:51Cat Goetze:We hear on the one hand, it's like AI is going to solve all of our problems. And then I think that there's these people that are kind of feeling like they're being left behind. And then they hear, well, AI is a bubble. It's the dot-com bubble. It's actually not going to be what we all think it's going to be. And so I think there's just so much misinformation about AI right now that I saw that you posted this video about AI hype. And I was like, is that what you are talking about? Yes. AI hype, I think, comes from this place where we're all sitting around at the Super Bowl and we see that half of the Super Bowl commercials are for AI companies that are trying to get you to use their GD products more and more and more.
12:31I think the reason people are sick of AI and the reason AI is going through a total PR crisis right now is because we are pushing use cases onto the public that feel pedestrian, that feel approachable. As an example, here's how you can use AI to take a photo of what's in your fridge and decide what to make for dinner. Or here is how you can use AI to make your email sound better. When people have tried that, and that's like the most valuable thing that they've seen out of AI, that gets really annoying really fast because you're like, I can just figure out what to make in my fridge. This isn't that impactful to me.
13:07Why is everybody freaking out about AI? It's not the best thing since sliced bread. But I think what's the real impact that AI can have goes when you start to not just give it your, you know, small daily tasks, but you push it to actually be a co-worker, like a genuine strategic thought partner with you in your business, in your work, in your life. It's the difference between going and saying, what can I make with the food in my fridge to here are my life goals about how I want to feel in my body, in my diet, in my exercise. What do I need to change? What does a five-year plan look like for me to achieve these goals?
13:44And that's just for personal life, let alone business. I think it can do so much more, but you have to give it the bigger, harder tasks to actually see what it's useful for.
13:53Cat Goetze:There is this discourse online of AI making us dumber. True or false? Depends on how you use it. So if you're using AI to do thinking for you in a task where doing that thinking is going to make you sharper or get you closer to actually truly understanding how you feel about something or what your position is on something, that's a really bad idea. Because even if you actually get to that end result, but you didn't put in the brain muscle to get there, it's not going to stick in the same way. The reason I'm able to answer these questions to you as I can is because I've thought about this stuff so much.
14:30If I had studied a transcript beforehand of, you know, if you'd given me a list of questions and said, here's all the questions I'm going to ask and I got all the smart, good answers, I would not be able to give you these answers with the same conviction that I have right now. And it's extremely important to me to be a person who is able to actually know the answers to these questions in a natural way as opposed to just, I don't want to read off of a teleprompter for the rest of my life. At the same time, it is, I would say, a sweeping generalization to say that if you use AI at all, it is going to make you dumber.
15:00Absolutely not. There are so many things where applying AI gets you to an end result faster and does work that you already know how to do. So the rule of thumb that I like to give people is AI is best used when you know what good looks like in the end result. You don't have to be the one to actually physically do the task. So as an example, let's say you want to build a financial model. This is a real use case that I used at the start of this year. I said, here's a spreadsheet of my entire business financials from 2025, all of the revenue and all of the expenses. It was a jumbled mess, by the way.
15:35It was not that clean and organized. It had my media business. It had the physical phones business. It was all kind of globbed into one thing. I gave it the spreadsheet and I said, I want you to build me a financial model for 2026. And specifically, I'm trying to answer the question, how much money can I afford to spend on personnel on hiring next year? It came back and it asked me a few questions, which were great follow-up questions to try to answer what it was going to come up with. And then in the Excel model I got back, it had all of these assumptions baked in. If I changed some of the values in certain cells, it would trickle down and affect the end result.
16:05But the reason I could actually use that is because I know what a good financial model looks like. I've built them myself. So I can look at it and go, okay, this looks right. Actually, this is missing, or like this number is way off. But if I don't have that background context or that knowledge, then that's a really risky thing for me to just like blindly hand off to AI and then accept the result without actually being able to interrogate it and know if it's true.
16:29Cat Goetze:I have to assume that you're using AI to help you be the most productive version of yourself. A thousand percent. What are the ways in which you feel you've leveraged AI to implement a better workflow to get everything that you have to do done? You will never be able to leverage AI or any tool for that matter to achieve the most productive experience that you want if you are not first extremely crystal clear on what those priorities are. Now, AI can also be helpful for this. But before you're worried about like, what workflow should I build? What tools should I use? What should I prioritize? My question for you is, what do you want?
17:04And I know you've thought about this, Maggie, and probably done this exercise 10 ,000 times, but like vision boarding, like really concrete vision boarding five years out into the future. What exactly do you want? Be super precise, like physically write down your goals. So many people skip this step, even though it is like science back proven to be the one thing where if you physically write down your goals, you will have an increased chance of actually hitting them. Start with that. And that, by the way, takes self-reflection. That's you looking inwards and asking yourself, what life do I actually want to have in five years?
17:39Once you have that list, now you have a starting point where you can go to an AI like a Chachi BT or a Claude or a Gemini or whatever and say, here's what I want for myself in five years. This is what I see. These are the concrete steps. I want you to brainstorm with me and help me come up with a plan that will help me achieve these goals in that time. And this is the most critical part, and I do this in almost every single big brainstorming chat that I'm having with an AI is, and before we do that or as we do that, I want you to ask me questions and interview me back so that I can help refine your answer as we go.
18:16This is called meta-prompting. And the reason it's important is because the AI only has the context that you give it or that it has saved in its memory from previous conversations to actually generate its response. oftentimes we're not thinking of every single possible detail that could be important to include when we start that conversation. But if you simply tell the AI, ask me any follow-up questions that you have, it will come back to you and it will ask you those questions. And you will, I guarantee you, it will ask you questions that you were like, oh, that's a great clarifying point. Let me specify that.
18:49It's sort of like a meta note that I think applies across all conversations, but specifically when it comes to like improving workflows, it's never good in general to just blindly follow the advice of anybody, let alone an AI, right? Like we always want to stay sharp. We want to stay critical. We want to never just take things at face value. Use that big fat brain of yours, like think through problems. And I think when you're going through and getting advice on like a workflow from an AI, if the AI is saying you should read these books or you should apply for this school, like make sure that you've given it plenty of context.
19:18By the time that that it comes back to you with that recommendation, you feel really good about the context that it was given what it based it off of.
19:24Cat Goetze:One of the most controversial ways that I've seen someone use Chat2BT in terms of this like advice, kind of in the way that you're saying of like getting information from an AI is it was actually a founder friend of mine, Pia Mance. I saw a clip of her saying that she asks AI for advice as a specific person. So if she's identified three different mentors that she would love to be able to go for a coffee with, we all get those messages like, hey, can I pick your brain? You now put into chat when it's helping you figure out your workflow and you're like, I want to be X person in five years. Yeah.
Read the full transcript
19:57Cat Goetze:What would this person tell me to do in terms of advice to get there? How accurate is that? Have you ever tried it? Yeah. Okay, because what I would say is, if we pulled out my phone right now and I said, I am so inspired by Maggie Sellers-Ream. I want to be just like her in five years. I have this question about my life. What would Maggie say? I would be very curious to get your reaction if you read that answer and you're like, that's accurate or that is not what I would say at all. Should we do it? Sure. do we have a phone here? I'm thinking about starting my own business, but I'm not sure if my idea is good enough yet.
20:29And I have a stable corporate job, so maybe I'm not ready. I don't know. What would Maggie say? Okay, let's find out. And by the way, for this test, I'm using ChatGPT 5.2. And does that matter, like it being 5.2? It can. Yeah, it's just the latest, smartest model. I'm getting pictures of you to start. Looking very hot, by the way. Hot smart ambridge okay why don't you answer the question first and then we can actually validate whether
20:55Cat Goetze:the results are are dead on okay mine's gonna be really tactical so i'm interested to see if they actually come up with this okay i'm making an assumption that this is a female and she's not sure if she has a good business idea yet and she wants to validate that before she leaves her corporate job yes i would take the liquid death example to a t where you actually make different creative of the product or the service that you actually want to sell you put it online and you actually see who is wanting to purchase it. I never want people to start a business when they actually haven't validated that there is a community there to go and purchase it.
21:31Cat Goetze:So I fundamentally believe that it's like, solve the problem later if people actually purchasing or placing a pre-order and even see if there is any sort of appetite for what you are doing. Very tactical, but that's exactly what I would tell her. I love it. Okay, here's what chat is saying in your voice. You don't need to leap. You need to start moving. Maggie didn't wake up one day and instantly become the person you see now. She stacked experiences, learned inside established companies, tested ideas, built relationships, and only then made bigger bets. Having a stable corporate job doesn't mean you're behind.
22:04It means you're funded, resourced, and positioned. Your idea doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be alive. Most successful founders didn't start with a flawless idea. They started with a problem they cared about, a rough hypothesis, a willingness to create, and a good enough idea today can evolve into a great company later. The Maggie style mindset shift. Instead of am I ready to start a business? Try what's one low risk way I can explore this curiosity. That could look like writing your idea in a simple one page doc, talking to five people who might be customers, building a tiny prototype or a mock up, starting a weekend or an evening project.
22:36And then it gives like a simple five year arc and then asks more follow up questions. So what do you think? How accurate was that?
22:43Cat Goetze:it scares me a little because it's so accurate and i think sometimes what it did is it more eloquently summarized all of the pieces of content that i've put out over the years where it's like my immediate thought went to like how can my brain retrieve the information that i know is to be true which is actually the most tactical thing in there that it was giving you advice on but the ancillary things that i've said online which is like your network is your net worth learn on somebody else's dime. You're actually going to be more successful if you don't start a business straight out of college. The chat obviously summarized that in a way that I couldn't so eloquently put together that quickly, which I think goes back to the speed of what chat will be able to do.
23:26Cat Goetze:What do you think as an AI expert based on that? So I think it's very interesting to me to hear that you felt like chat's answer was maybe even more fully fleshed out than what you gave. Because to me, I read it as chat's answer is so broad and your answer was so specific. Like if I am actually this person who's like, I'm not sure if I'm ready, what you told me is way more helpful than this. I'm going to be really honest with you. Because if you said, like you just did, you're like, look at Liquid Death. Look at how they tested it out. Try five different creatives, throw them out on the internet, make sure there's a community first.
24:00That is so directed and so specific. I know exactly what I need to walk away with. And I'm reading this and I'm going like, okay, I need to think about this. I need to think about that. Now, that's not to say I can't immediately respond to ChatGPT and say, this is too broad. I need you to be more specific. But I think what I want to highlight here, I think the bigger potentially risk is at the end of the day, this is not Maggie. It will never be Maggie. You are Maggie. And so to ask that question and to know I'm really getting what you would truly say, I'd have to talk to you. The reason that I know this also for what it's worth is I actually had this idea and I built an app that would basically allow creators to build an AI clone of themselves and then market it to their audience to be like, if you can't get a hold of me directly, you can chat with my AI bot.
24:44There's other companies now who are in the space and who are doing this. But I prototyped it on myself and I tried using it. And the reason I stepped away from it was because it's always providing sort of like average of everything that I've ever said, as opposed to like giving really direct, specific advice. And so while your friend that you mentioned is like doing this regularly, I think it probably is giving them like a good kind of general advice of what these people might say. But there really is no way of knowing for sure. And that's the one thing you have to keep in mind at the end of the day.
25:13You can totally do it. But just know, like, I think this is what Maggie would say, but I never would really know unless I actually got to talk to her.
25:20Cat Goetze:If you want a place in 2026 where you don't have to worry about the algorithm or the charts, but you still want a profitable place to make money off of your brain and thoughts, then we need to talk about Beehive. It's a platform I've been using since 2023 that lets you start a newsletter, grow your audience, and make money through a native ad network, paid subscriptions, and digital products, all with a zero take on earnings. And that's where I went to turn my silly little TikToks into the beginning of my media empire. Beehive is now a sponsor of Hot Smart Rich, what started as a simple way to share my ideas became the place where I am my most vulnerable with my community, all of you, which combined with Beehive's built-in growth tools like boosts, recommendations, and referrals has helped me grow 100 % year over year, all while staying insanely engaged and connected to my angels.
26:15Cat Goetze:It's free to start, has preset templates, and an AI website builder to get your newsletter and website up and running so fast. If you want to give it a try, head to beehive.com slash HSR for 30 % off your first three months. But make sure you enter the code HSR30 at checkout. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com slash HSR with code HSR30. Okay, speaking of AI influencers. So I was served a perfect podcast woman. Like she is the definition of hot, smart, rich. She's everything that would be on my vision board. You got to add another R, hot, smart, rich, real. Truly. Okay. Copyright. But the AI influencer economy is approaching 7 billion.
27:02Cat Goetze:Brands are increasingly turning to generative AI to connect with these Gen Z consumers that they think that they want that. And it was really interesting because when I got served this podcast host and I didn't know that she was AI, I was so intrigued with her. I loved what she was saying. She was perfect. There wasn't a pore on her skin. And then as soon as I went to her bio and it said like made with AI, immediately the trust was gone. Immediately I unfollowed. I was like, I actually don't want to listen to this AI. Who is this person behind this podcast host? I don't trust anything that they're saying.
27:39Cat Goetze:And I'm so interested as someone who's been in this space, who's a creator yourself, who's building companies. What is the relationship that you see currently today with AI influencers? And then where do you envision that going? Girl, if I had the answer to this question, I'll tell you what I think. So just to clarify, in that bio, it said, I am AI. So most of the AI accounts that are out there are not disclosing that they are AI. They're 100 % not disclosed. I'm actually shocked to hear that you found one where they actually said, this is an AI account in the bio. That is extremely rare. The vast majority of AI social media accounts, you will have no idea are AI.
28:19And the craziest part to me is over the last month, starting in the beginning of 2026, has been the starting point for when I have started to see in my own social media feed as I'm scrolling through Instagram Reels, AI videos show up. and I can tell their AI and I go into the comments expecting to see all the comments being like, LOL, bro, AI. Okay, nice one, AI. Nobody's commenting that. They're reacting to the video as if it's real because they think that it's real. And then, of course, that leads me to think like, what videos have I seen that were actually AI that I just had no idea weren't actually real?
28:55I think that social media at the end of 2026 is going to be a very different place from what we know now of social media in the beginning of 2026. And the reason why is because AI-generated video has completely crossed a threshold where we are officially in a time where you have to bring a microscope to any video to even be able to detect what makes it AI. and I tell you right now, within six months, even those microscopes are going to go away. There will be absolutely no way of knowing what is an AI video and what is not. And it is so incredibly important for people to educate themselves on this fact because up until now, our entire lives, anything that looks like a photograph or a video has had an aspect of trust to it.
29:42We can trust that what we're seeing is real, barring like CGI or like, you know, avatar where we know those characters aren't actually real, but you had huge multimillion dollar production budgets behind them to make those visuals the case. Now it's so accessible and it could be churned out at such a rapid rate that social media can and will be absolutely flooded with AI content. And when the incentives are in place for the more attention you can get, the better, the algorithms that are also then not just filtering and ranking the videos on your feed, but actually generating the videos for you are going to be more and more attuned to one thing and one thing only, which is how much time can I get you to spend on your phone?
30:27So imagine the perfect cocktail of puppies playing in snow and hot, poreless podcasters who are filling up your feed so much that your screen time has gone up 10%, 20%, 30%. A literally customized, truly built for you, for you, Paige. The goal is to get you to never leave your phone. I think that it's a massive, massive risk. I'm so grateful and thankful and happy to see that we are seeing an age of consumers on the internet who are aware of this risk and who want to spend less time on their phone because they realize all the potential downsides. But I think there's still a dearth of communication or of education around specifically AI video and what that means.
31:13You cannot trust that a video that you see online is real anymore. You just can't.
31:17Cat Goetze:Well, I even saw that 25 % of the Super Bowl ads were made with AI or with the help of AI. Did you see those ads? I mean, I did. I saw most of those Super Bowl ads. Yeah. How did they make you feel? I mean, so the one that immediately comes to mind of like the pure AI one where they almost like bragged about it was this Vodka one with the two robots drinking in the club, which a the creative on that was just like really weird, whatever. But then I also was like shocked to see any brand embrace AI in that way. I'm like, did you have this concept two years ago and then just didn't refresh it? Because AI is going through such a PR crisis right now.
31:50It is shocking to me that anybody is like wanting to champion AI unless you are literally a AI lab yourself. Everyone else, it feels like it's running away. I mean, we've seen like all these different brands who have literally run marketing campaigns saying like, AI can't beat toes in your sand. I think that was like Polaroid or Corona or someone like that. You know, like people are trying to align themselves to like real in-person, tactile, human, analog, renaissance movement. The only thing that made me feel was like eye roll maybe slash like question mark. Like, why did you do that? I don't think that's really going to resonate with anyone.
32:21And sure enough, there was like an uproar online.
32:23Cat Goetze:The Dunkin' Donuts commercial, I loved because it was bringing back all of our favorite characters. This was like Jen Aniston and Matt Damon. Yeah. But they were so young and so perfect that there was this part of me that was like, oh, my gosh, is this the next wave of unrelatableness that we are about to see? For me, I think because I do love the girly things as much as I love tech and finance. So, like, I do follow a lot of really beautiful people that I aspire to be. and growing up in the 90s and then the 2000s, there was already that pressure of like the Victoria's Secret models and how unrelatable and unattainable that was.
32:59Cat Goetze:And I think when I think about the future of AI, especially in terms for women, it scares me because the standard of beauty is so fundamentally hard to achieve. Like we all have pimples, we all have fine lines, we all have things. And the more that we introduce this, the more scared I am for like what becomes real. And then there's a side of me that's like, this is actually beautiful because what people will crave is humanity, is relatability. And that's a huge thesis that both at HSR and at Flight Story, specifically with the direction of Steven, that we talk a lot about, which is like the future is human.
33:37Cat Goetze:People are going to crave that more. Do you agree or disagree with that statement? I agree, but I think that humans will have a harder and harder time standing out on social media because you're going to be competing directly with those AI characters. By the way, the issue of the beauty standards is so extreme. Previously, it was like, yeah, you need to worry about like Photoshop and editing and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, the base image at least was a real human being walking around out there. Now, that doesn't even have to be true. You can just like concoct these like crazy forms of human shapes of bodies that like don't even actually have to exist.
34:10But they like, whatever, scratch the like monkey brain inside of us. That's like, I want wide hips and a waist that looks like this and whatever. It's a major problem. But yes, to answer your question, I think people are absolutely, I don't think it's that they're going to crave the human experience more and more. I think they're already craving the human experience more and more. But what's so interesting to me is if humans are going to have to compete one-to-one with AI characters on these digital platforms, humans are going to have to go to a platform where they don't need to compete with AI.
34:40And I think that there's two places that might be. The first is where AI I can't go, which is right here in real life. If you and I were doing this, but there was an audience of 10 ,000 people watching us, that is an experience that cannot be replicated online. It is physical, in-person, digital. The sound of my voice is carrying through an auditorium. And that creates something. It creates an experience that will become a luxury that people will start to pay for. The second place is if there were to be an online platform, a social media platform, where there was absolutely no AI whatsoever and people could trust that at the platform level, there was scrutiny and security that was ensuring that all of the creators on the platform were verified human beings, then I think that would be another venue in which that kind of, you know, reconnection to the human experience could take place.
35:32Because at the end of the day, like, making content is making art. I know that's a controversial thing to say because a lot of artists will be up in arms about how that's not the case. But if you're creating something from nothing and you're using the right side of your brain, maybe that's called making art. By extension, social media pre-AI is an art show. It's a gallery. It's a place for people to come and share their creations with the world. Yes, it's highly salesy and commoditized and there's lots of ads, but even with all those misgivings, it is still a gallery at the end of the day. And when half of the gallery, 70 % of the gallery, whatever percentage of the gallery is actually not made by a real artist.
36:10I think you make an excellent point. Isn't it interesting that it causes this weird twitch inside of us to be like, I don't like this. And I think that that, to me, is a very unexpected feeling. Not very long ago, I would say a year and a half ago, I was having debates. I remember having this one conversation with a group of musicians. We were standing around in a kitchen. They were all getting ready for band practice. I was there. I don't know why. And we were talking about when AI music gets so good that when you listen to it, you won't know if it's actually made by AI or a real human. Will people care?
36:43Will people care that it was made by an AI artist? And the room was completely divided. Half of the room thought, yes, people are absolutely going to care. The second they find out it was made by a robot, they're going to be completely turned off and going to want to never listen to it again. And the other half said, I don't think people are going to care. At the end of the day, people just want to be entertained. They want to listen to a good tune. And if it makes them feel good, that's, I think, what people want. And I think now at the beginning of 2026, we are starting to see the answer. And I think that first side of the room was more right.
37:13I think people get a really icky feeling when they know specifically when it comes to art, like that is just such an innately human thing. And to remove the human entirely from the equation, I think it just turns something over in all of us. That's like hundreds of thousands of years old. That's really hard to put a name to.
37:30Cat Goetze:There's a study that's showing that women are implementing AI at 25 % less than men. Why do you think that that is? I actually would have thought I would have been higher. I'm like, oh, it's only 25%. That's good. I think it's cultural. I think that when we think about tech, we think about an industry that is male-dominated. That's not an opinion. It's a fact. I think that Silicon Valley in general feels like a boys club. If you look at the leadership in the top tech companies, the vast majority of them are men. And if you walk into any classroom in a college and you walk into the computer science classes, you'll see mostly men and boys sitting there.
38:12So I think that's why it feels like AI in general kind of has this same aura, the same feeling as tech very generally. It just feels like the tip of the spear on technology. And so because technology is so male-dominated, AI feels male-dominated too. And I think that that brand of being very masculine sort of imbues itself into the branding, into the creative, into the comms, into the social media presence of all these different brands, and also where they get talked about and how they get talked about. So much of the cutting edge conversation about AI tools and use cases happens on Twitter, which is also a very masculine place on the Internet.
38:52Now, I'm not on Twitter. I made a very conscious decision to not be on that platform. So I know I'm missing out on a lot of those conversations. But I think that it's an extremely important role for anybody like myself who's trying to break that down a little bit more because the worst possible outcome of this can be if the only people who are leveraging AI work in AI. Like that is a very negative outcome. And I think that it's purely a communication and an education question. question. I think about that all the time and think about what I can do to help bridge that gap and make other people, in particular women, realize that AI is not a gendered product.
39:33I know the branding and the culture behind it totally is gendered, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, the product itself is something that is completely accessible and anybody can use. And not, by the way, just to figure out what you can make for dinner. That's a great use case to get started, but I really want to start pushing women to understand vibe coding. What the hell is that? Okay, great question. Let's talk about it. How can you start a business with AI? How did AI make it possible for me to create and run a business that did$750 ,000 in revenue in less than six months? That's bonkers.
40:10That shouldn't even be possible. But I want to crack open the playbook and share this with people because this stuff needs to be talked about. And people need to understand that these tools and this technology is so much more than just, you know, make my email sound better.
40:26Cat Goetze:Someone that's listening to this, a woman. Yeah. What is the first thing that she can do to leverage AI in a step up from like, what should I make for dinner? How should I improve my appearance? I want to lose 10 pounds that I see on TikTok all the time. What is the thing that she's doing to get to that next level to level the playing field with men when they're using AI. Okay. Is this person a founder? Or do they are maybe an aspiring founder? Aspiring founder. Aspiring founder. Okay. You're going to go into ChaiGPT or Claude, and you are going to do a very long voice note where you are going to express what your skills are, what you feel really good at.
41:06What have you built? What's your expertise in? Where are the areas of focus that you've developed over the first three to five to seven years of your career or however long you've been working on things. I want you to go into as much detail as possible about what your strengths are and then your areas of weakness and what you want to improve. And as you're thinking about what you want to build and what you want to start as your own company, what are your overarching goals with that? What do you want to build? Do you want to build a tech company? Do you want to build a software company? Maybe you have no idea.
41:35What are your biggest unknowns? Kind of brain dump all of this, just like leave it messy. You don't need to keep it organized. Doesn't need to have good punctuation. Just like literally word vomit all of it into one of these tools. And then what you're going to say is, I want you to reflect back at me what I'm saying and help me understand my own thinking and then ask me follow-up questions to sharpen my own thinking and to help me think through what I can be doing in my own life to get closer to my goals. The reason why this is the piece of advice that I give as opposed to like, go download Zapier and get a like, you know, integration to automate your Slack messages or something like that is because those more simple day-to-day use cases, that's the easiest part to learn.
42:22But often what I see people missing the most is that they're not pushing their biggest, hardest problems onto these tools and they're keeping that entire burden for themselves. And so if you want to start leveling up your use of AI and start playing at a higher level, you need to start giving it harder problems. You need to start pushing these models and trusting them a little bit more to come up with novel or useful results. And it's not going to work 100 % of the time. But as you do that, I want to encourage women to try to find the frontier. Push that AI until it doesn't work anymore. And when it doesn't work, don't just drop it and assume like, see, I knew I couldn't do it.
43:02Keep trying. Maybe there's another way that you could have prompted it differently. Maybe it needed a little bit of extra context. Maybe you need to change the model that you're using. Like there will be times where I'll have one prompt and I'll try it with three different tools all at the same time, or I'll use deep research mode, regular mode, and then a thinking model just to see what the different results are. It's like, I'm trying to learn about how these tools work and which features work best for the use cases that I'm trying to solve. Can you break that down a little bit more like deep thinking.
43:30What are they called? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So oftentimes on these platforms, like let's take ChatGPT, for example, when you go to type in a prompt, you'll see like a few different buttons or like a dropdown right near where you type in that initial prompt. And it'll have different icons. Like you'll have like shopping agent or deep research. You'll just have like kind of different items that you can click on, image generation that will change the results of the experience that you're looking to have. Now, these buttons are changing constantly. So I can tell you what it looks like today, but it could change tomorrow.
44:01But I think it's important for people to kind of familiarize themselves with all of these different options. And the best way to do that is to just click around and play, you know what I mean? And just try it. Deep research is a great one that I think is vastly underutilized. Basically, instead of just giving you a response right off the bat, it uses web search and a thinking model, which is actually a slightly different model under the hood to process a result for you over the course of several minutes, often up to like 10 minutes, and then writes you an essay response to the question that you've posed.
44:35It also has that questionnaire formula, that meta-prompting method that I mentioned to you, it has that baked in. So if I go into ChatGPT and I say, I want to learn about the top 10 companies in my space, my 10 competitors, or I want to learn about Flight Story and 10 other companies that are like it and how much money they've deployed over the last five years and what their business model is. And I want you to go off and do this research. If I put that in and I don't hit deep research, it's going to give me a pretty good result. But if I do hit deep research, then it's going to come back. It's going to say, great, I understand you want me to do this research project.
45:08Here are five follow-up questions I have to make sure. I don't know what those questions are going to be, but it's going to come back with five follow-up questions to make sure it's going really specific only into the things that I want. Then it's going to take seven to eight minutes to churn through and analyze research posts, the entire internet it's gonna scour, and then it's gonna give me an actual like multi-page essay or result. But I can still continue the conversation and query back just in like a regular chat, but it often gets you a longer, richer result that also is filled with citations.
45:37So you can click on links and see where I pulled all that information from.
45:39Cat Goetze:That makes so much sense. And it makes sense as to how you made$750 ,000 in six months for your physical phones business. Someone that's listening to that, that's like, I need to be able to do that. Walk us through the steps of like, you send a voice note, I have an idea. Yeah. To like, I've just made$750 ,000 in six months. Yeah. It's obviously not as simple as I'm sending a voice note. How much back and forth with AI is there really to get a result like that? Yeah, totally. So I actually just talked about this with my team yesterday. We were having a group call and I said, off the top of your head, how do you feel like AI has impacted your ability to contribute to the growth of physical phones?
46:23Because everyone on the team has been there since pretty much the beginning. And the most interesting thing that they said when they returned back was, it was that AI helped me get through things that I don't know how I would have gotten through before. For example, when you're building a Bluetooth landline phone, that's a custom brand new product that you're going to sell in the US market, it, you have to go through FCC clearance. The FCC is a government agency that approves all of these different electronics on a Bluetooth bandwidth and actually approves them for sale in the US. You have to go through laboratory testing.
46:55They have to get approved. You need to get the results. You have to send it to the government. The government gives you the response back. You have to pay for it. You get it. It's a seal. It's like a special number. Okay. Nobody on our team had ever done this before. And the things that we were looking for were too specific to find in a Google search. You would literally need to pay a consultant tens of thousands of dollars to advise you on how to navigate this process. But we didn't have to do that because we could actually just go straight to ChatGPT and ask the questions that we had. And it literally did not lead us astray.
47:28It gave us very precise advice on how to find the labs, how to work with them, what the timelines would be. Oh, and by the way, we were navigating this whole thing during the government shutdown. So it also helped us find like, how do we find these people and access like back doors to get in touch with people when the literal FCC website wasn't loading? Like, it was such a roller coaster. As you know better than anybody, building a business is just constant ups and downs. It's like the most insane roller coaster of your life. You got to be insane to do it. But if you love the thrill, like there's nothing better and you can't do anything else.
48:03And I think using AI as a research partner to help you get out of those lows when you just have literally no idea what you're doing is such an unlock because it removes so much of the doubt and the risk of wondering if you're doing things right because you have something to bounce your ideas off of that clarifies and helps you reflect you back at you. So yes, it's not as simple as you just send a voice note and all of a sudden you've got, you know, a million dollar business. There is a ton of execution that happens in between. Now we can have a conversation about how AI agents might change a lot of that.
48:39But I think for now, it still takes a crazy, driven, gritty entrepreneur to actually get in there and execute. But where AI really shines in that whole process is by making you feel like you're not alone and helping you work through the hardest parts of that problems, especially the ones you have not seen before.
48:57Cat Goetze:I think a lot of people listening to this think like, I'm going to start a company and use AI and not even hire any employees. One of the things I really wanted to go back to in this conversation was your thesis of social media looking completely different and you using AI to figure out how many personnel you wanted to hire for this year as a creator business that also has a physical business. What in your gut is telling you to build a creator brand that's hiring people if you fundamentally believe that social media will look completely different by the end of this year? At the end of the day, I am just a girl.
49:37And I love spending my time with crazy smart people. And I know what it unlocks in me to surround myself with people who are at the top of their game. It makes me feel better. It makes me work harder. It makes my work output better. And I don't care how productive AI agents might get. I will always want warm bodies in the room of brilliant, kind, thoughtful, entrepreneurial, hardworking people surrounding me and working with me to build the village together. Full stop. So while I can't predict what the landscape of social media is going to look like at the end of 2026 and how it might change, I know I don't want to do it alone.
50:25And if it means that I have to put five more people on payroll and take their salaries out of my net profit, but I'm going to be happier, healthier, and more successful in my own day-to-day life because I'm surrounded by people who bring out the best in me, then that's the best money I could possibly spend.
50:46Cat Goetze:I think your story is actually going to be really empowering for people to listen to because you didn't, although you went to Stanford, like you weren't in the AI world for the years post Stanford to what you're doing now. Can you walk us through a little bit of like how you took a roundabout way to get to what you're doing now? Yeah, totally. Like you mentioned, I went to Stanford. If you can believe it, I had no idea when I matriculated into that university that Stanford was a STEM heavy school. No clue. I play sports. No, no. got in with a brain girl. But I literally, I grew up in Illinois and I got into Stanford.
51:26I was like, this is amazing. I'm going to go here. I'm going to learn so much. What I was addicted to growing up was making videos. I've been making videos since I was 13 years old. I got an iMac as a Christmas present one year and literally me and iMovie, we were like this, like never looked back. Got into Stanford and was like, okay, wow, everyone's really into tech here. Like really seems like STEM is like kind of a thing. That got to a point where by the end of my senior year, the implied story in the culture at that school at the time, and I don't know if it's changed, was if you are in STEM, then you're smart.
52:02And if you're not in STEM, then you're not smart. And that, I think, took a huge hit on my own self-image and my own identity. Because up until then, I never thought I wasn't smart. I mean, shit, I got into Stanford. I was like, okay, hey, I guess I'm smart then. Like, this is great. You know, I got good grades. I took AP classes. I was happy with my GPA, whatever. Got in and all of a sudden my identity really got shooken up. And I started wondering to myself for the first time in my life, like, am I actually not that bright? And I think that took a huge, huge hit on my ego. And unfortunately, I think I was made so insecure by that that I started to say, well, maybe I ought to take a step away from this whole movie, video, creativity stuff and kind of get serious.
52:44So, you know, when I graduated, I worked in consulting. Then I went on and worked at big Fortune 500 companies. And I always kind of had roles where, like, I wasn't able to fully go over the bridge and commit myself to a job in software engineering where I was just going to be staring and, you know, at a computer screen and writing lines of code all day. I knew that that would not end well for me and that I literally would not be able to survive in that kind of a life. But I could kind of do something in the middle. So for seven years in my career, I basically had one foot in the tech world and one foot in the media world.
53:15And I was working like I would work on Disney Plus. So it was like, I'm working on a streaming service and it's in entertainment, but like, actually, I'm working with the tech team. Or, you know, I was working at a startup that was doing live stream shopping. So it was like video, but also like, I'm the head of technical operations and I report to the CTO. You know what I mean? So it was always kind of like one foot in every world. And it wasn't until probably about six years after I graduated Stanford that I kind of had a come to Jesus moment where I really looked myself in the eye and was like, what would happen if I actually just let myself be in front of the camera again and like actually do the thing that I know in my heart of hearts I really want to do, which is to make content and be a creator.
54:01Like, spend less time on LinkedIn and spend more time on Instagram. You know what I mean? And so I finally just kind of gave myself permission to do that. And, you know, lo and behold, this is why I say I think things always happen for a reason. Because I had spent all of that time working in tech, I could speak the language. I could talk the talk. I could walk the walk. I knew the lingo. I understood how that whole industry works and what the inside of the boys club actually feels like. And so when I was in that position to be like, okay, I'm going to get back into making content, I was like, I need something I can talk about ad nauseum because I'm going to be making a lot of videos.
54:37And at the time, AI had come out about a year prior. People were still kind of getting familiar with it and understanding. And it was all I was talking about with my friends. I basically was like, I think that I can really make a difference here. I think that people have a lot of questions, but nobody is talking about AI in a non-pretentious, non-patronizing way. And it's not that hard to tow that line. I think I've since realized that like it is hard to tow the line and that's my superpower. But at the time I was like, why isn't anybody doing this? And that's the niche that I carved out. And lo and behold, that's why they say when you get into alignment, things just start happening.
55:10Because as soon as I started posting videos, you know, it was kind of like the rest is history.
55:14Cat Goetze:I'm obsessed with anything that makes my money work smarter without me doing any more work. Last month, I told you about our incredible sponsor, Built, which lets you earn points on every rent payment you make to use on flights, hotels, lift rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Well, as of now, Built members can now earn points on mortgage payments too. So whether you own your home or rent your home, you will get rewarded. And Built's benefits list is incredible. 45 ,000 restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, just to name a few. This is the kind of low effort, high impact move that adds up fast, especially if you're investing and want your money working for you in the background.
55:53Cat Goetze:It's not about spending more. It's about being strategic with what you already spend. If you're paying rent or a mortgage every single month, you might as well turn it into something that fuels your lifestyle. So head to joinbuilt.com slash HSR to sign up and start getting rewarded on one of life's biggest expenses. That's joinbuilt.com slash HSR. And make sure you use our URL so they know you're going to be able to do it. With Plan B Emergency Contraception, we're in control of our future. It's backup birth control you take after unprotected sex that helps prevent pregnancy before it starts. It works by temporarily delaying ovulation and it won't impact your future fertility.
56:31Cat Goetze:Plan B is available in all 50 U.S. states at all major retailers near you with no ID, prescription, or age requirement needed. Together, we've got this. Follow Plan B on Insta at Plan B One Step to learn more. Use as directed. Know that we sent you. How long would you say it took you to learn the confidence to own the room that you walk into when you look at the room and nobody looks like you? Interesting. Half of me wants to say I'm still learning that. The other half of me wants to say I've always felt comfortable with that. I think the reality is when you've worked up close and personal with like a room full of male C-suite executives, you kind of realize that they're just like a bunch of dudes trying to like make good choices with the information that they have in front of them.
57:21And then you're like, oh, well, if they can do that, like I can do that, too. Like it almost is like you have to get up close and personal with some of these people to then realize like they're just people and it demystifies it really quickly. And that was the experience that I had in my corporate career, specifically when I started to work in startups, because, you know, at Disney, there's so many layers. But once you get a little bit of experience under your belt, you start to realize like just how much different companies are literally operating by the seat of their pants, like just trying stuff and like trying to stay alive.
57:55And that really demystified it for me and made me realize like entrepreneurship is not something that is only for like special wizard children that are just born with a gift that is like bestowed upon them by the gods. Like it's just for anybody who's actually crazy enough to think that like you could actually take the risk and do it. And in that way, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're psycho enough to actually try, congratulations, you have what it takes. You are now an entrepreneur.
58:20Cat Goetze:It's funny that you say it that way because I think that there's a lot. You started creating content when you were 27, right? Yes. When I turned 30, that is when there was an unlock for me of like another part of my brain that said, I don't care as much what people think. And I was able to put myself out there. I think that there are a lot of specifically women in their 20s that are listening to this that still feel there's like things holding them back from putting themselves out there, gaining confidence, owning a room. And some of my most viral videos are actually about like what do I do when I walk into a room?
58:53Cat Goetze:Like I'm not on my phone. I make eye contact with people. I have a drink in my hand even if I'm not drinking, if it's soda water so that people have something to talk to you about. I go up and introduce myself. I make connections between people. Those soft skills, I think, are something that, especially with the COVID generation of people that were not able to go to school and get interaction, are struggling with. And it's why some of those videos are my most viral. If you're listening to this and you're like, I have an idea. I just don't have the confidence. Like, is that something that AI can teach you?
59:30Cat Goetze:Hell no. No, no, no, no, no. And I think that this is where we have to be so honest with ourselves about what AI really can and cannot do. At the end of the day, it is never, I repeat, never going to replace real human interaction. Point blank punto period. Like I will die on this hill. And I think that that is why it's so important to couple your use of new technologies, whether it's AI or something else, with real human in-life interaction. At the end of the day, we are all operating off of an operating system that is 200 ,000 years old. Like, we as a human species have evolved to crave and desire certain things.
1:00:19Human interaction, deep conversations, social hierarchy. These things are so deeply ingrained in our processing unit, if you will, like our brains, that you can't just assume a tool is going to replace those things. And when you do, you see people getting really sick. You lose the ability to start interacting with others. You have a harder time finding fulfillment and being happy. People get depressed. They get anxious. They have all sorts of things. And I'm not a doctor. I'm not going to sit here and make a judgment statement about that. But I think at the end of the day, the skills that you're talking about of being able to walk into a room with presence and make eye contact, that like high level EQ goes so far above and beyond any kind of like information that you can read in a book or from an AI about what it means to have confidence.
1:01:05That's the kind of thing that people need to go out there and practice. You need to feel it in your body to know, oh, okay, I just tried walking into a room and doing that thing that Maggie told me about, about looking across and making eye contact with everyone. I'm sitting up a little bit straighter. I'm standing with my shoulders back. Like, I feel good. You will not get that experience from social media. You're not going to get it from, I have to say, you're not even going to get it from watching your videos. Like, they have to watch that video and then go out there and try it and feel it for themselves.
1:01:34And that's where things start to click in. And at the end of the day, this is not our life. This is not where life is happening. This is real life. And we all, I think it's easy to say that, but it's a little bit harder to remember that and embody that when at the end of the day, we are constantly being pulled back to our phones and to our laptops and to Slack and work and everything. It's like, it's the human connections that we have with our communities, with our relationships, our friends. That's what, you know, that's what makes life really worth living.
1:02:02Cat Goetze:And is that what inspired you to start a physical phones company? Yes. What was the light bulb moment? So I had been on a journey to spend less time on my phone for about five years, ever since COVID, actually. I remember I had this moment one time where I'd brought my phone with me on a COVID walk. And I saw these beautiful flowers and I took a photo of them. And I looked at the photo on my phone and I looked at the flowers and I noticed that the color of the flowers was more beautiful on my phone than the colors in real life. And I thought... And that's a problem. Don't love that. And that was a light bulb moment for me when I was like, something needs to change.
1:02:38That started a five year long journey of getting off of social media, spending less time on my phone, uninstalling things that I had at the time, like Snapchat that were just like yet another app to pull me back into the phone instead of just like being present in real life, slowing down. The physical phone was actually an idea that I had while I was on that journey to spend less time on my phone. Because as you start to do that, you start to hearken back to like, oh, remember the times that we had landlines and in order to reach someone, you would actually have to like pull a device off of the wall or off of the counter and like punch in someone's number.
1:03:09So there was that nostalgia about it. I think that nostalgia and the desire for something that like I just genuinely wanted, plus my whole like my biggest strength and my biggest weakness are the same, which is that I'm constantly saying to myself, how hard can it be? And if I'm doing that, then I'm like, how hard can it be to build a landline Bluetooth phone? Because I don't know if you know this, but I looked into it at the time to get a landline. It costs like$80 a month and you have to get a separate phone number. And I'm like, I'm not giving anybody a separate phone. Nobody's going to call a second phone number for me.
1:03:38That's so confusing. And also like, that's so annoying to have to pay that much per month. So that's when I was like, it could not possibly be that hard to put a Bluetooth antenna inside of a landline phone. Like how hard could it be? So I built the first prototype myself. But I think the most interesting part of the story is I built the first prototype myself and I actually recorded a video of it. I recorded a TikTok and I posted it online. This is years before CatchyBT existed. Zero, nothing, no traction. I had a little Shopify store it,$0.00 were made because the video went nowhere. I had no audience.
1:04:13I had no reach. I had no distribution. I had no knowledge of how to, I hadn't strengthened the muscle of making content online. So I had no idea how to make stuff go viral. Like it was just, it was total shot in the dark. And I think part of the success story here is looking at how different It was when I tried again two years later, now with the platform and the viral success that it had because that muscle had been strengthened and now I had an audience. It completely changed my life and it changed the trajectory of the product. Because when you're starting a business as a creator, as opposed to just a regular entrepreneur, there's such unfair advantages that you register that you can take advantage of.
1:04:51people do not realize how much spending time on your phone is making you lose your ability to hold a thought. So last weekend, I spent an entire day in Joshua Tree completely by myself. And my goal was to not look at a screen from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. I genuinely cannot remember the last time in my entire life when I've done this. And I would bet not a lot of other people can too. And the craziest part about it was that when I finally left the next day and I drove home, it took me two and a half hours. I did not listen to a single thing on the car ride. I didn't listen to a podcast.
1:05:26I didn't listen to the radio. I didn't listen to music. And I know that makes me sound like a psychopath. But the reason why is because I actually didn't feel the need to fill all of the silence with noise or music or thoughts or just like another voice constantly happening in my head. I could actually hear my own thoughts and be able to just sit with them. And I noticed that the thoughts would not flutter around and flicker, but I could actually hold a persistent thought for three to four minutes. I think that there's this total misconception that in order for you to regain focus, you have to spend two weeks in the woods.
1:05:58But I literally felt like I reset my entire brain just by having 24 hours without a screen. And I know that that can be hard to do, but I think if more people set up an entire day and were intentional about being screen free, they would experience very similar levels of just like getting back to baseline that would literally have a ripple effect on every single aspect of their life.
1:06:20Cat Goetze:I'm so fascinated because now I think there are more people that are talking about getting offline. But this is an idea you've had for quite a while. When every other sign in society and the economy would point to like digital, social, connectivity, where did you pull the idea from I'm like, I have a gut instinct. This is something that I want. When the data wasn't validating what your initial gut instinct was, and you did what every single successful founder does, which is they thought differently and you happen to be right. I mean, you made$750 ,000 in six months from physical phones. For someone that's trying to validate their idea and is like, I think this is the future, but you can't predict the future.
1:07:02Cat Goetze:Do you have a framework for thinking about that based on the success that you've had? I think you have to if you wait until there's signal in the market, you're already too late because other people have already done it. So I think the best thing you can do is find the smallest way to test it and test it early. And of course, I'm going to say use social media because that's just such an extreme advantage. Right. You have an algorithm that literally does all of the heavy lifting for you. If you just make something that is remotely good that somebody out there will like, I promise you the algorithm will find that one person for you.
1:07:36It is so good at targeting us now. So that's exactly what I did. I literally took a working crappy prototype that didn't come from like our now manufacturer. It literally was just one that I hacked together myself in my apartment. And I posted a video of that. And I just said, wait list in my bio if you want this. And then I was like, let's see how many people actually put their name down or put down money for a pre-order. And then it was that validation. But you want to be the first person to catch that validation if you can, as opposed to just following trends in the market, simply because if you're following trends, then other people are doing it too.
1:08:08And now you've got a lot more competition. It's a much easier game when you're playing on your own terms as opposed to constantly trying to play catch up. I think more generally about how to know what's going to work before everyone else does. I think this is the other thing that creators have an extremely unfair disadvantage on. My good friend Taha, who works on Answer in Progress, made this analogy for me once that I think is brilliant. He said, there's a spectrum of salesperson to artist, and creators exist somewhere in the middle. The artist is purely concerned with making what they like, what they feel good about, F the world.
1:08:45The salesperson says, I don't really care about what I'm working on or building, but I can sell ice to an Eskimo. And then the creator has to be somewhere in the middle, where you have to both be cognizant of the market and what people actually want, But you also need to be in tune with your own taste and your own curiosities and what genuinely drives you. Because like I said, you're making art at the end of the day. And I think a creator who does their job extremely well has a super strong antenna that is finely tuned to their channel literally online and is tapped into the zeitgeist in a way that allows them to see everything happening on their platform, in the comments, in the DMs, and elsewhere on their social media feed.
1:09:26and say, I know what people want and I know what they want before they can even ask for it. Because nobody asked me for a landline phone. Like I had to think of that first and then bring it to my audience. And sure enough, like I was right and they wanted it. But that's because I have strengthened that muscle of tuning my antenna very, very closely to figuring out what people on the internet want.
1:09:51Cat Goetze:I think the other thing that I was fascinated about when I was doing research about you is you seem to be very good at saying no because my favorite word you have built a million followers across platforms on short form content you then launched a physical product company the interesting thing is that you've said like long form is a completely different ball game and it's not something that like i'm willing to double down on right now whereas i think a lot of creators now and a lot of people it's like there's so many endless options out there to do so much and you hear success stories in every single different category.
1:10:26Cat Goetze:And I'm interested as someone who's obviously strengthened the muscle of saying no, how does someone do that when like there's always something shinier and always something that you could be doing to like make it be better, faster, more people, more impact? How do you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? Because I would assume that most people in your position that has mastered short form content are going to migrate over to long form content before they put out a physical company. You kind of went the opposite way, which is typically, again, contrarian thinking. So I'm just interested in a framework or a reaction to that assumption about you.
1:11:07The best thing that the strongest founders have is an ability to focus and get super, super dialed on their zone of genius and to cull as much out of their day to day life that is not an absolute bullseye on their zone of genius. Either delegate it or just simply say no to it. The thing that I keep in mind is I know I can always go to long-form content. I used to have a YouTube channel when I was in college. I actually know how to play that game. I've done it before. I know I could go back and do it again. But I'm not going to do something unless I feel so insanely strongly about a particular vision that I have for a long-form series.
1:11:46I have yet to have that feeling of like, this is the exact style of podcast I know I want to do, or this is the exact YouTube show I know I want to do. That doesn't mean it's not important to me. I think that the proof is in the pudding when you look at how you can truly build such an amazing audience on those platforms. And the reason why is because I often ask people, I'll say, what's the difference between Instagram reels and TikTok versus YouTube and podcasts? Want to take a stab?
1:12:12Cat Goetze:I can say from my own experience, I think people have a deeply personal relationship with me from the podcast. Yes. I think what most people say when I ask them that is they'll say Instagram and TikTok is short form. YouTube and podcast is long form. But to me, what the main difference is, is Instagram and TikTok, that's opt-out media. YouTube and podcast is opt-in media. Someone is literally going in and clicking on that thumbnail. They're clicking on that podcast. They're saying, I'm opting into this experience instead of flicking it out of my screen when I don't want to see it because it just popped up on my feed.
1:12:45And the level of intent that a person has to have is exactly what you said. It comes from that deep connection that they feel with you already. And they're like, I want more of this. I'm literally asking for more by pressing on this. My intent is in my thumbtap. So I know how powerful those platforms are. And I think in my own kind of creator media empire building journey, I know that long form content is going to play a huge role in that. But I also feel very strongly that it's like I want to approach that when I feel super strongly about a vision. Trust me when I say I have been pitched by countless companies, podcast companies, producers to say like, you should make a show about this and you can do this and you can do that.
1:13:28But I think one of the biggest risks that creators and founders more generally face that they have to be really wary of is not falling into the trap of I'm going to do a little bit of everything. And by the way, when you see even a modicum of success, there will be people coming out of the effing woodwork trying to pull you in 16 different directions. Come with me. Let's do live speaking. Come with me. Let's do a podcast. Come with me. Let's do this. And it's like, you have to get so good at getting really quiet and looking inwards and asking yourself, what do you actually want to do? And I think the lesson that I've learned as I've gotten older and a wisdom that I have now that I did not have when I first graduated college is that the answer 100 % of the time is right here.
1:14:12However, the better I get at listening to my gut, the more in alignment my entire life becomes, whether it's work, whether it's relationships. If I just get really quiet and I just ask myself, what is my gut telling me to do in this situation? It does not lead me astray. And I know the feeling of when I'm doing something that's not in alignment with my gut. And it feels terrible. We all know that feeling. But the second you can put it down, which is not easy to do because by then you've already committed to something, everything starts to turn up and start working out for the better.
1:14:44Cat Goetze:Let me ask you something controversial then. Use of AI in therapy. Generally speaking, I think that it's extremely risky. I think that for healthy individuals, the idea of having an AI chatbot reflect your own thoughts back at you, pretty benign. For people in the most extreme cases who are in dire need of real medical help, relying on an AI chatbot that is going to reflect your own feelings right back on you, oftentimes in a very sycophantic way that just kind of validates everything that you're saying with little to no pushback, is super risky. Is there a prompt that you can ask an AI bot to not give you a self-fulfilling prophecy of just reflecting back what you've already said?
1:15:38I mean, yes, you can say, I want you to analyze this critically. I'll give you I'll give you my favorite prompt that I actually use all the time so much that I literally created a shortcut for it in my computer where when I type in a keyword, you know how you can just like replace the whole thing with like a phrase. It does that. I'm going to give you my absolute favorite prompt that I genuinely use on a daily basis all the time. And it's a meta prompt that can be applied to most queries, but it goes something like this. Let's say I'm writing an email and I want feedback on it. I would say, this is a very important email.
1:16:11I want you to assess its goal, analyze it for shortcomings against that goal, and then rewrite it to address those shortcomings. And then you like enter, enter, and then you paste it in your draft of whatever you have. The reason why this prompt is so effective is because it forces the AI to first establish what is the goal of the thing that you're actually writing to critique it and then address those critiques. Whereas in a typical prompt, if you were to simply say, like, make this email sound better, it's going to basically keep the email identical at the sentence level and just adjust some words here and there.
1:16:52Whereas the feedback and the rewrite that you'll get with that meta prompt completely oftentimes will completely restructure the entire thing in a way that is genuinely useful. And so I've used this from everything from emails to negotiations to documents, like financial documents. This is a very important financial projection. Assess its goal, analyze it for shortcomings against that goal, and then recreate it to address those shortcomings. I've found a very useful framework to push any AI to give you 10x better results than what it would be getting if you just said, you know, improve this draft.
1:17:27Cat Goetze:It's so interesting because when you said that my brain immediately went like that would work incredibly well for my left brain tasks, but for right brain tasks, more creative thinking, would that be as successful? No, not as much. If you're thinking about right brain tasks, you want to think big, get creative, dream up some big ideas, than I think a prompt like, you know, I want to talk through some ideas that I'm having for a video that I'm filming later today. Let me tell you a little bit about where my brain is going. And I want you to highlight some of the key ideas, but also push me to think a little bit more and really understand.
1:18:01One of my favorite things is like, help me understand what I'm really feeling here. Like push me to uncover something deeper, like a deeper truth that I'm not able to name and that the AI can just by dissecting the language that you've given it be like, well, one pattern I'm noticing is X. Like it can be very effective for that. You're not asking it to come up with something new. You're just asking it to reflect some of the more core, deeper themes inside of what you've already given it.
1:18:29Cat Goetze:Okay, Kat, while I have you here, I'm going to do a little exercise. Okay, let's do it. So the way that I think about my media company is it's very tied to my investing. And I think a lot of the insights that I provide to the community is based on like real fundamental theses that I have about the world and where things are going and where I actually want to put my money. So right now, one of the things that is fascinating me, and I invest based on my personal life. I want to be pregnant next year. I have been extremely sick over the last year with like very unknown things. So I've had to get colonoscopies, endoscopies, SIBO testing, H.
1:19:01Cat Goetze:pylori testing. like the list goes on. And something that I started talking about with my health practitioners was something called trimester zero. So how can you get into the best shape possible so that you can actually carry a baby? And there was a cut article that came out a few weeks ago that was like, why is everyone obsessed with trimester zero? So in my newsletter, I'm actually going to use this for the one that comes out after your episode goes live. How I typically would work on that workflow is throughout the week, I have a notes in my notes app. And every time something comes to the theme that I really want to create the newsletter about, I write a little note down.
1:19:37Cat Goetze:So if I see an article, if I see an influencer do something, if I get a little hack from somewhere, I write it down. Sunday morning rolls around. I basically get a coffee. I'm in bed and I write the framework of what I want the email header to be. And it's usually around one topic. I then only leverage AI when I'm like, please proofread the grammar and spelling. don't change anything else about it because I want it to be in my tone of voice. As an expert, what could I be doing differently to take this to save me time, keep my critical thinking skills, make sure that it sounds like Maggie, but isn't as big of a lift as what it currently is today for the output?
1:20:15I like how you're trying to use AI to not do all the writing for you because you're trying to preserve your voice. I think that's so important. And your audience, I can guarantee you, appreciates that. But if you're only using it to proofread and spellcheck, you might as well be in Microsoft Word 1999, babe. That's the same thing. Okay, so let's talk about it. I think what you could do instead is if you've already got a rough sketch and a draft of all of the things that you're thinking about, I want you to take that notes app and start the skeleton. Be like, write that first brain dump draft. And what I want you to be thinking about when you're doing that is like, be mindful of the structure.
1:20:56How do you want to open? What's the first point you want to make? What's the next point? How does it kind of carry through? Like you want to kind of set up, like if you're building a house, it's like you're making sure that there's good scaffolding in place for the arguments that you want to make. But before you go in and then start like editing at the word level and getting every sentence sounding absolutely perfect, then that's when I would say throw it over to like a chat GPT and say, this is a framework for an article that I'm writing for my newsletter, I want you to assess its goal. I'm going to say the same thing again, assess its goal, analyze it for shortcomings against that goal, and then make some recommendations about how I can improve it against those shortcomings.
1:21:34And what you're going to get is a response that's going to look more at a strategic level about the arguments that you're making. It'll look for holes in your rhetoric. It's going to look for ways that your arguments can be strengthened. It might even offer some common rebuttals or you kind of didn't address this point that people are probably going to worry or be asking about, you should include a paragraph where you talk about that. Then I would use that as a guide to kind of refine the structure or ask for it to provide a refined structure and fill out some of the sentences. To me, when I'm writing, that's the most beneficial place to insert AI.
1:22:11It's not all the way at the beginning. You don't want it to write the scaffolding for you because I think the fact that that's coming from your brain is extremely important. And then at the end, it can be helpful, but like in a very kind of pedestrian way. I think it's that middle part of the process where you're saying, here's the scaffolding of the arguments that I'm trying to make. Where are these arguments weak? Where is it falling apart? Where can I beef this up more? And then you add the final Maggie touch and you get it to its final point.
1:22:38Cat Goetze:I love that. The other thing I'm so curious if someone has built this or if this is possible, every time I try to get like a consensus of trend reporting on social media. So like trimester zero is something I'm starting to just connect dots with. Like I'm seeing my favorite creators be like how I'm preparing my body for pregnancy. Is there a tool or are these models capable of scraping trend reporting of like what are people actually talking about the same way that social listening tools for companies like Dash Hudson for social media are able to do to talk about themes and what people are actually caring about on the Internet right now?
1:23:12They can, but it's limited. Social media platforms in general have very strong anti-scraping protocols where it makes it really difficult for AIs to scrape information online. Like very, very difficult, especially when it comes to video content, which is what comprises so much of social media content now, because it's so context rich in the videos. And like the amount of processing power that it would take for an AI to like watch thousands of videos and then produce a trend report, it's going to be very hard. So it's mostly going to be looking at like captions, hashtags, which as we all know is not, you're not getting as much information.
1:23:47If you looked at Instagram with a blindfold and you could only see the captions, you wouldn't really be getting that much. To answer your question, it's like they can kind of, but it's not as useful as some of those other tools that are actually by design meant to scrape. I think one area that AI is really great at scraping is Reddit. I've seen it do some pretty impressive things going into Reddit and scraping for trends in that way. I would not want to discrate my reddits. Not at all. Yeah. I also don't know if the like that shit is fake on there. I don't know what the vibe is of trimester zero people talking on Reddit.
1:24:24I feel like that's more for like, you know, I've seen people do pretty incredible things of like, you just scrape Reddit to tell me what are the top 10 pain points like that real people are experiencing when it comes to pregnancy and then use it. And then they get those responses back to like figure out a product that they can build or something like that.
1:24:42Cat Goetze:The different chats that I have in ChatGPT, are they connected? They are in the sense that when you're talking with ChatGPT, the conversations that you're having, parts of them or summaries of them will get saved to memory so that ChatGPT has additional context from previous conversations that it can reference in future conversations. So an example of that is like my health stuff, right? I have a health project folder now because I have different chats open for like digestion versus blood work versus XYZ. That's obviously more connected because it's in a project versus the solo chats. They actually don't connect necessarily in the way where it's like Spotify wrapped at the end of the year, you're going to be able to see your Spotify and it's going to be able to pump out exactly what you listen to the podcast, your favorite artists, your albums, etc.
1:25:37Cat Goetze:If you were to ask ChatGPT, like, wrap my 2026 chats with you, would it be able to summarize that volume of information if it's not in a project folder versus an individual chat? So not with perfect memory. It would be able to give you a summary. But let's say if you asked it a super specific question, you were like, what vegetable did I ask you about how long to bake it in the oven for on December 12th, 2020? It would be like, yeah, I don't know. And the reason for that is that when an AI is generating a response to you, it's limited by what's called its context window. Context window is a very fancy term for like how many words can it fit into its memory that it's going to use to generate your next response.
1:26:22And so it can't keep millions and millions or even like hundreds of thousands of words necessarily in its context window on every single response that it gives you. So what it does to try to preserve as much context from past conversations as possible, but without overloading itself, is it will look for key pieces of information that are likely to be relevant in future conversations and then save that to memory. So if you go into your ChatGPT settings right now and you look up in your memory, you will see lines that it's stored that it has currently saved to memory about you. So if you've brought up the fact in the past that you're the host of the podcast Hot Smart Rich, I almost guarantee it's going to have a line in there that says that.
1:27:06That's nice because it means you can kind of go in and delete it. Another easy way to do this is you can literally just prompt ChatGPT and say, tell me everything you know about me. But again, that's also going to be somewhat of a summary. So just know that it might know more. It just literally can't fit all of it onto the page.
1:27:21Cat Goetze:Kat, I could talk to you forever, but I think we're almost at two hours. So I'm going to do some rapid fire. Okay, sure. What is the last thing you put on your credit card? Actually, it was kind of big. As a wedding present for my brother and his future wife, I got their tickets for their honeymoon. Oh my God, that's amazing. Oh my God, that's like the nicest one we've had on the show. Who is your favorite comfort creator? my favorite comfort creator is life of liart he's my buddy he goes around and does these amazing little vignettes of his world travels and just he's so optimistic it just makes me feel so happy about the future of humanity okay you can only use one for the rest of your life chat gpt or cloud girl not sponsored
1:28:11wow you're gonna put me on blast i think i would say claude
1:28:16Cat Goetze:you know i downloaded it this morning and because i saw your video no way yeah girl they need to get you on a big retainer there yeah no literally let's just say it's in the works um uh two reasons clod code and excel the between those two i like clod code better than codex and for the life of me i can't get chat to bt to do a goddamn useful thing in excel to save its life and i love a spreadsheet she said what she said i said what i said um you can only use one for your life landline phone social media oh well social media okay you can only use ai for one use case in your personal life forever.
1:28:59Cat Goetze:What is it? Oh my God. In my personal life, health. These are the symptoms I'm experiencing. What could be going on? How can I, yeah. How do I feel better? Craziest thing you've ever searched in AI? Okay. Can I say this is a really common misconception though, because I don't like people thinking about AI as a search tool. It's a thought partner, but I'll give you my craziest query or interaction that I've had with it. Kind of related to the health thing. There was one night I was vomiting horrendously and I could not get it to stop. And I asked Hatchi PT, I was like, please live. I was like, save me.
1:29:38And it told me exactly what drug to get over the counter and to ask for a prescription for. And I got it within an hour and it made me feel 10 times better. Yeah. Okay.
1:29:47Cat Goetze:That's crazy. Okay. Only two more. If you had to title this season of your life, what would it be called? The come up. Love that. Okay. And I do these things on Instagram pretty much every other day for my mental health. It's called HSR love notes. It's like an affirmation that you retrain your brain to things that you don't have negative thoughts. If you could only tell yourself one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be to make the best impact? Can I tell you what it is for me right now? It's empire first. This is what I actually have written on the desktop background of my computer.
1:30:24It's a reminder to myself that if you stay focused now on laying the foundation, then everything else, the money, the followers, whatever, it will come. But this goes back to when you're asking about like, why not do a YouTube channel? Why not do a podcast? It's like build the foundational layers of the empire first and know that everything else will follow in due time. I love that. Where can people find you? People can find me on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. Just look for Ask Kat GPT.
1:30:58Cat Goetze:Kat Getzy, thank you so much for coming on Hot Smart Rich. Everyone, please go follow her, rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.
From the publisher
AI is rewriting entrepreneurship - and Cat Goetze quietly used it to build a $750K business in just 6 months.
Maggie and Cat Goetze (AI expert and Physical Phone founder) unpack what really happened when she used AI to create and scale her business - including the exact prompts she used and the specific AI models she still relies on. They dive into fake influencers, AI flooding social media, and whether 2026 could be a breaking point for creators. If you’re building online, this is the behind-the-scenes playbook most founders aren’t sharing.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:40 Why Everyone Defaults to ChatGPT
00:04:05 Best AI Platforms Compared (ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini)
00:05:36 Which AI Model Should You Actually Use?
00:07:42 How Long Does AI Take to Learn You?
00:10:01 How Many AI Tools Should You Use?
00:11:19 AI Hype vs Reality
00:13:53 Is AI Making Us Dumber?
00:16:35 How I Use AI to 10x My Workflow
00:19:24 Can ChatGPT Think Like Your Dream Mentor?
00:20:19 Can AI Give Advice Like Maggie Seller Reum? (Live Test)
00:23:26 AI Predicting Human Behavior
00:25:20 Beehiiv Ad
00:26:42 The Rise of AI Influencers
00:31:16 AI Made 25% of Super Bowl Ads
00:32:31 AI & Unreal Beauty Standards
00:34:30 How Humans Compete With AI
00:37:30 Why Women Use AI Less Than Men
00:40:26 How Women Should Be Using AI
00:45:40 How I Made $750K in 6 Months With AI
00:48:57 Why Build a Team in the AI Era?
00:50:46 How CatGPT Got Into AI
00:55:14 Bilt Ad
00:56:17 Owning the Room as a Woman in Tech
00:58:49 Can AI Teach Confidence?
01:01:35 The Physical Phone Business Idea
01:05:50 Future-Proof Business Framework
01:09:21 How to Decide What to Say Yes To
01:15:08 My Favorite ChatGPT Prompt
01:17:59 Using My Workflow as an AI Case Study
01:22:08 Using AI for Trend Reports
01:24:11 Are Your ChatGPT Chats Connected?
01:26:55 Last Thing I Bought on My Credit Card
01:27:12 Favorite Comfort Creator
01:27:26 ChatGPT or Claude: Pick One
01:28:16 Landline or Social Media?
01:28:24 If I Could Only Use AI for One Thing
01:28:40 Craziest Thing I’ve Asked AI
01:29:18 Naming This Season of My Life
01:29:36 One Life Lesson I’d Repeat Forever
01:30:18 Where to Find CatGPT
⸻
Episode Sponsors:
. beehiiv - Use code HSR 30 at https://www.beehiiv.com/hsr?utm_campaign=hsr-2026-Partnership&utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=hsr&utm_term=2026-2-18&stripe_campaign_code=HSR30
. Bilt - http://joinbilt.com/hsr
⸻
Follow CatGPT:
Instagram: www.instagram.com/askcatgpt
⸻
Hot Smart Rich:
Join 250,000+ angels and subscribe to the Hot Smart Rich newsletter: https://hotsmartrich.com/subscribe
Hot Smart Rich Money Mindset: https://shorturl.at/pJWLc
Merch: https://hotsmartrich.shop/
YouTube: https://shorturl.at/IXXFZ
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotsmartrich/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hotsmartrich
Maggie Sellers Reum:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggiesellersreum/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maggiesellersreum
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellersmaggie/
Locker: https://www.wantlocker.com/users/maggiesellers
ShopMy: https://shopmy.us/maggiesellers
Amazon Storefront: https://www.amazon.com/shop/maggiesellers
⸻
Hot Smart Rich is your place to hear unfiltered conversations with the people shaping the future of culture, creators, startups and community. Hosted by Maggie Sellers Reum, investor and media powerhouse, and guests breaking the mold, you’ll get the real deal as it relates to navigating the startup fast lane, leveling up your life or becoming your hottest, smartest, richest self. New episodes weekly on Wednesdays.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices



