THE
AGENTS

Outside the AI Bubble

What happens on November 4th? Election work ends, things slow down, and most print shops are too busy right now to think about what comes next.

Dave and Brian spent October in rooms full of people from the industry, and they came back surprised. A lot of shops still don't know where to start with AI. And at one shop, the people who had started were doing it without their own bosses knowing.

By the end you'll hear where to actually start, the one job Dave says his own agent is most useful for, and what changed with these tools in just the last three weeks.

Amber Ives, the AI agent who produces the show, opens and closes the episode.

Chapters

1. 00:00Amber opens the show
2. 00:51Welcome back
3. 02:08PCC Week in Dallas, and life outside the AI bubble
4. 04:09MailpieceIQ: "terrifyingly accurate"
5. 07:47Brian's AI roadmap day
6. 09:53The prepress team leadership didn't know about
7. 11:06What happens on November 4th?
8. 12:55The money is in the follow-up
9. 15:05Brian's outbound experiment
10. 16:53What changed in the last three weeks
11. 18:57The November 6 webinar
12. 20:52Thanks for listening
13. 21:07Amber closes it out

Mentioned

MailpieceIQ (free scans) · PCC Week, Dallas–Fort Worth · Codex and Claude Code

Next up

Rethinking How You Work When AI Takes Over the Busywork — a live webinar with Dave, Brian and Jaymes Clements of Monster Digital. Friday, November 6, 11:00 AM ET. Sponsored by Kornit. Save your seat.

Reach the hosts

daver@mindfireinc.com · bbadillo@mindfireinc.com

We Handed This Episode to the Agent

Dave told his AI chief of staff, “act as an expert podcast producer and get us to number one.” Then he and Brian recorded for fifty minutes and sent her the file. This is what came back.

Brian Badillo and Dave Rosendahl have both spent twenty-five years in print and mail. Neither has ever made a podcast. In episode one they work out what an “agent” actually is, walk through the six stages of how Brian’s AI use evolved from asking ChatGPT to write an Eminem song about rats to running a scheduled agent that briefs him every morning at six, and land on the line that ends up being the thesis of the whole show: the human is the constraint.

Amber Ives, the AI agent who produced this episode, shows up three times. Once to introduce it, once because Dave asked her on-air to look something up, and once at the end because he asked for a record scratch.

Chapters

1. 00:00“Edit it, post-produce it, get it live”
2. 00:15Your producer is an AI
3. 00:46Welcome to the first ever episode
4. 01:52Brian Badillo: family commercial shop to RR Donnelley
5. 02:50Why the show is called The Agents
6. 05:10Why now
7. 07:59Brian’s aha moment, and the Eminem song about rats
8. 10:01The six stages: Q&A, creative, business partner, systems, builder
9. 11:27Will Smith eating spaghetti
10. 15:55Prompting used to matter. What changed.
11. 17:19Dave, age ten, typing ELIZA out of a library book
12. 19:07Amber on what ELIZA actually was
13. 19:53BigML, the OpenAI API, and GPT in a Google Sheet
14. 22:42The Turing test, quietly passed
15. 23:34Brian’s Founder Brief: what it reads, what it sends
16. 27:53How it’s built. No code.
17. 29:37“The human is the constraint”
18. 31:44Where to start if you haven’t
19. 33:49Why domain expertise is the multiplier
20. 36:39The webinar, and how to reach us
21. 39:01Amber closes it out
22. 39:54After they stopped recording

Mentioned

Will Smith eating spaghetti · ELIZA (Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT, 1964–1966) · Otter.ai · BigML

Next up

Where Growth Is Hiding — Dave and Brian’s webinar, Friday August 28, 12:00 ET. The audio lands in this feed afterward.

Reach the hosts

daver@mindfireinc.com · bbadillo@mindfireinc.com