All right, time to confess. This spring I let mauriciopina.com expire. I missed the renewal (yes, the guy who builds websites for a living missed his own renewal), and by the time I caught it, somebody else had registered it. Now that address is a spam site selling stuff I would never put my name on. Shocker, I know.
So I got to work. With an AI working right beside me, I rebuilt my writing post by post out of old internet archives, and it took more late nights than I'd like to admit. We got 55 posts back, rebuilt the pictures and put it all back up at moepina.com, which is the name people actually call me anyway. I've always written somewhere, going back to old WordPress sites, Xanga, MySpace and Blogger, so I wasn't about to let all of that go. If you remember Xanga, you're showing your age right along with me.
Here's what stuck with me, though. The AI did great work, and it never once cared that it was my name on those posts, because it would have rebuilt anybody's the same way. Caring whose name is on it is my job, not the machine's, and I've been chewing on that one all year.
Still a Bubble, and I'm Still Building
This has been the most productive year of my working life, and a big reason is AI. I spend a lot of late nights writing code with it, and I love it (I'm a tech guy, what can I say). I've been in technology for 25 years now, and I've built through the dot com era, the rise of search and the panic cycles that came with it, the social media boom and now this one.
Last November I wrote that I think we're in an AI bubble, and I still do. The money is running way ahead of the real returns, and I've seen this movie before. If you think all of this is going to make everybody rich by next Tuesday, well...sorry to burst your bubble. But I know what you're thinking. "Moe, if you really think it's a bubble, why are you up at night building on it?" Hear me out real quick. A bubble means the money got ahead of the returns. It doesn't mean the work is fake. My clients still need to get found and my campaigns still need to reach people, and none of that changes when the money cools off, so I'm building through it.
What the Navy Taught Me About AI
I joined the Navy right out of high school and spent about four years as an aviation electronics technician working on Super Hornets, and two of those years went to studying electrical engineering. Straight out of the Navy I started my first company at 21, building websites by hand. When you're diagnosing avionics on a flight line, you learn real quick that guessing isn't a diagnostic method. You isolate the problem, you test it and you verify it, and to this day I troubleshoot a stalled website the way I was trained to troubleshoot an aircraft.
Think about it this way. If your mechanic kept swapping parts on your truck until the noise went away, you'd find a new mechanic. It's no different with AI, which will hand you an answer fast and with plenty of confidence, so you'd better check it before you trust it.
Building Moe Than Websites
Ten years ago Stephanie Hawk and I started Cobalt Digital Marketing, and I moved home to Brownsville to be closer to family. I'm the chief technology officer, so the tech side lands on my desk.
Ten years in, every agency owner I know has had the same argument with himself late at night. Is this stuff going to replace us? Here's my answer, and I believe it harder this year than I did last year. AI doesn't replace people who are good at what they do. It exposes the ones who aren't. It takes whatever you already are and makes it bigger, which cuts both ways. So this year at Cobalt we did the boring work. We wrote things down, we built our own systems and we tightened up every process we'd been getting away with. None of that is exciting, but behind every one of those calls is somebody on my team with a family of their own, and I don't get to gamble with that.
Between Cobalt, the campaigns and RGV Dads, I've got my hand in a lot of different cookie jars right now. So instead of waiting around for somebody else to build the tools we need, we've been building our own.
I can't give away too much, but here's enough to get you curious. At Cobalt we built our own website builder and content system. It takes a business off whatever platform it's been stuck on, rebuilds the site the right way and gives the owner a place to change it without calling us for every comma. It's like finally getting your own set of keys instead of calling the landlord every time you want to hang a picture. Why should you have to call your agency to fix a typo on your own website? You shouldn't.
We also built an engine that watches how our clients show up in search and, more and more, inside the answers AI tools give when somebody asks who they should call. Let's say, for example, you run a bakery here in Brownsville. When somebody asks one of these tools where to get good pan dulce, you want your name in that answer, and I believe that's where the next few years of my industry are going to be decided. So here's the million dollar question for you. Does your name come up, or does somebody else's?
Then there's Moe Done, which I built just for me (and yes, I named it after myself). It's a task app that learns what actually matters to me from what I do, not what I say, and it puts the next right thing in front of me. If I keep pushing the same thing to tomorrow, it eventually asks me a question: is this dead, or is it just hard? Talk about a little fire under your feet! "Ok Moe, so how does any of it work?" Nice try. I'm keeping the secret sauce to myself on that one.
Six Weeks to Election Night
Which brings me to politics. I work on campaigns here in Cameron County, and this year I ran them through the primaries and we won. Winning a primary is great, but all it really gets you is the chance to go do the whole thing again. Election night is November 3, which as I write this is about six weeks out, and if you've never worked a campaign, believe me, six weeks goes by fast.
You can't run a good campaign on bad data, so let me tell you about the part I'm proudest of. With Schools Vote we started out ranking the schools in the Valley by how many of their own employees actually voted, and now we work with data for almost all of the Rio Grande Valley. We clean it until it tells the truth. What does clean mean? Basically, phone numbers matched to the right person, addresses from the current rolls and party affiliation taken from the primaries people actually voted in, not guessed. That changed how our campaigns spend their money, because we stopped paying to knock on doors that aren't there anymore, and if you've ever block walked in this Valley heat, you know nobody wants to waste a single step.
Then there's Moe Intelligence. It's mine and it's proprietary, and it lives inside the campaigns I work on. What it does is read an entire electorate the way a great field director would, working out who's likely to show up, which way they lean and where a race is really going to be won or lost, down to the precinct. I ask it a question the way I'd ask a person, and it comes back with a list our volunteers can walk that same afternoon. Of course, it can tell us which doors to knock on, but it still takes a person to knock, and it takes somebody the people inside that house will trust.
Being a Dad
I'm the president of RGV Dads, and this summer we held the RGV Dads Summit. We had 20 dads give up a Saturday morning to hear how to protect their kids from the phones in their pockets, and I spent a month getting ready for that talk. According to the Pew Research Center, 46 percent of teenagers say their parent gets distracted by a phone while they're trying to talk to them.
I told the room they ought to sit with that number for a minute, and I wasn't up there acting like I had it all figured out either. A guy who spends as many nights on a laptop as I do has no business pointing fingers. I have one daughter, Amberlee, and back in January I wrote that I want to be a better father, more present, more patient and more intentional. I still mean every word of that, and I'm putting it in writing again so you can hold me to it.
Being a Husband
In that same post from January I wrote that I want to be a better husband too, along with a better leader and a better friend. There is no way to sugarcoat this. Every late night I spend building something is time I'm not spending with my family, and I don't always get that balance right.
I've got a feeling that plenty of men in my position are dealing with the same thing and keeping it to themselves. If that's you, you're not the only one. Come find us at RGV Dads, or give our weekly podcast, DadLab RGV, a listen.
Where That Leaves Me
So that's where all of this leaves me. The AI can knock out code faster than I ever could by hand, and I'm grateful for every bit of it. But it can't carry my name, or the promises I make at home, or the trust somebody puts in a campaign. That part is still on me.
Here's the plan. For the next six weeks I'm counting down to election night. After that there's more building to do at Cobalt and more writing to do right here at moepina.com (don't worry, I'll be renewing this one on time). And if you're a parent reading this on your phone, do me a favor and put it down the next time your kid starts talking to you. I'll be working on the same thing.