Says Who?

Someone on LinkedIn told me the trick to getting AI to sound like you: let it interview you first, exactly fifteen questions. Not ten. Not twenty. Fifteen. Two people asked why. Twenty people cheered anyway. That's not really a post about prompting. It's an opinion wearing a fact's clothes — and it happens constantly, everywhere, not just in AI hype. I watched the same move in a vendor pitch the next day: three unrelated products, the exact same "90% time savings" claim on each, and a cited study from a source nobody could locate. This episode is about why claims like this get through unquestioned — not because people are gullible, but because questioning takes knowledge, confidence, and social permission most rooms don't have in the moment. And it's about the harder lesson I learned the expensive way: asking the question isn't enough if you talk yourself out of a bad answer anyway. Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.