A big part of my personal life is whole foods, which is a foundational part of how our family operates. My husband prepares every meal from scratch—from homemade sourdough to scratch sauces to kombucha. So this week’s episode is a special one with Melissa Griffiths, the creative soul behind Bless This Mess, a long-running food and lifestyle brand that celebrates simple cooking, slow living, and the beauty of everyday family life.
For more than fifteen years, Melissa has shared approachable recipes, homesteading inspiration, and routines with a community of home cooks looking to bring more peace and purpose into their homes. We talk about how she balances using AI for automating texts yet prioritizing human creativity in core content creation. And even though this episode isn’t about writing books, it’s about writing meaningful content that speaks to your audience, especially through sharing real stories and shared values to deepen audience engagement.
We also discuss facing the challenges of business shifts, like with traffic and revenue, and looking at new product development. The overarching theme is connecting and engaging with your audience and finding where you fit in and meet a need.
As a mother of five, Melissa built her business in the margins of family life, testing recipes during naptime, photographing meals at her kitchen table, and shaping her work around the seasons of motherhood. Her work isn’t just about food, it’s about reclaiming time, joy, and connection in a world that often demands more than we have.
If you’re interested in reclaiming a more meaningful lifestyle through food and community, this episode is for you.
Learn more about Melissa:
- Website
- Instagram @blessthismessblog
Recommended books:
- Raising Securely Attached Kid, by Lisa Damour
- The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, by Eli Harwood
Follow me on:
- Instagram @stacyennis
- Facebook @stacyenniscreative
- YouTube @stacyennisauthor
To submit a question, email hello@stacyennis.com or visit stacyennis.com/contact and fill out the form on the page.
How to write, create, and sell beyond the algorithm | Episode 256 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. This week we get to talk not only about business because of course I love talking about that on this podcast, but we’re also going to talk about food and lifestyle. I don’t talk about this too much on the podcast, but a big part of my personal life is Whole Foods. I am not the cook in our family, it’s my husband. He serves us amazing from scratch meals every single time. We like. Every meal that we have, from breakfast all the way through the day is homemade sourdough from scratch sauces, we make ferments, we make kombucha. We do all of the things in our home. And it is this whole side to my life that I don’t think very many people know about.
Stacy: But it is such a foundational part of how we operate as a family and I think also how I have energy to show up in the way that I do in the various aspects of my life. And so that’s why I’m especially excited to welcome today’s guest who embodies a lot of the things that I continue to aspire to and for many years was learning about as we transitioned our food, culture and lifestyle in our family. So let me introduce you to this week’s guest.
Stacy: All focused on building a life that is beyond better. Melissa Griffiths, the creative soul behind Bless this Mess, a long running food and lifestyle brand that celebrates simple cooking, slow living and the beauty of everyday life. For more than 15 years, she has shared approachable recipes, homesteading inspiration and family based routines with a community of home cooks learning to bring more peace and purpose into their homes. Melissa, welcome.
Melissa: So glad to be here.
Stacy: It was interesting when I was prepping to talk with you because as I was learning more about you and your work and looking at your beautiful website, I started thinking about our own food journey and how we’ve really, over the last, I would say five years, completely changed our entire family culture through food. A lot of the changes that we made in our food ended up impacting how we function as a family, how we plan things as a family. Because when you’re eating in a specific way, you actually have to do a lot of planning and prep and that changes how you shop and there’s so many positive things that we’ve experienced in really being thoughtful with our food as a family. I would love to know a little bit about your early roots.
Stacy: Now you have this really successful website and you share all about your life and your food and recipes, but I’d love to know how you got started and then we’ll talk a little bit about the business you built as well.
Melissa: Yeah, I grew up indiana, so I was a Midwestern kid with super traditional Midwestern roots. And my mom was a great baker. She made a lot of like, cookies and pies and rolls and a pretty traditional mom home cook. She had the same 10 things that she liked to make and that she was good at, and that’s what we ate. And. And from a really early age, I gardened with my dad. So my dad would let me have a little plot of land or a little corner where he’d let me grow whatever I wanted. So I dabbled in herbs and flowers from like the age of 9 or 10 on, and then I naturally wanted to bring those into the kitchen with me. So I remember very early, I would call it doctoring up the pasta sauce.
Melissa: Like, my mom would get a jar of prego and I would say, mom, can we like saute some onions and peppers and then can we add some herbs? And so I would like, take her jar of pasta sauce and I would just add things to it and she would let me, and I would make pasta salads and just like throw things together with a store bought salad dressing as kind of the base. But I would like add my herbs and add my tomatoes and try a cucumber or do these different things. I just have really early memories of my mom just letting me play in the kitchen and bring my garden inside and like, just try things over and over again. And I did weird, wonky things.
Melissa: I tried to make a key lime pie once and I curdled it and I added too much green food coloring. So it was like this curdled Grinch green key lime pie. And I still served it to everybody. It was like, for my 16th birthday party. And I just had the space in my kitchen at home to try new things. And I had a lot of fun doing it. And I think that’s where, like, my joy started.
Stacy: I love that early exploration very much that holds true for me too. My love of books, love of writing led me to study this field and then eventually grow business in this area. And I know that you and I actually started our businesses or I, I Also started my business in 2009, which I believe is when you started your blog. And it was such a different time back then, starting an online business. And you know, today I just think about all the things that took me like months to figure out that you can do in an afternoon. Today it’s just totally a different time.
Stacy: I’d be curious to know, you know, you obviously had the advantage in the early years of being early to market with blogging, but now we’re in such an interesting time and I’d love to hear a little bit about what you’re thinking about as you run your business online. Maybe you could start with telling our listeners, our viewers, a little bit about your business, what you do, you know, of course I’ve shared. You have amazing recipes online, but maybe you could share a little bit about how you monetize that as well so people understand your business structure. And I’d love to know how you’re thinking about your business as we enter this really weird phase of AI and all the shakeup, super weird phase.
Melissa: Right. It’s such an awkward time to be online. I started right just like everyone else, just writing on a blog, spot, blog. And then I watched other people get into the niche of food and recipes. And so I transitioned to only writing about that and not, you know, family pictures and stuff too. I left off some of that, but I was still writing about my family within the context of food and monetization came through traffic. I worked really hard at driving traffic to the site through social media and search engine optimization, which I was a pretty early adopter of. So in 2013, 14, 15, I’m just hearing about the search engine optimization idea and writing to be found. And I did it well, and I did it well for a long time. And so I have also lost.
Melissa: And so my business model was get traffic and run ads. Like most food bloggers, we offer all this free content if you put up with our display ads. And so I would say 95% of my income was traffic based on through an ad agency who did my ad display. And I was really Google heavy. I have not catered as much to social media in the last eight years as I maybe could have. And Pinterest played a big role in the beginning because it was an easy traffic driver. And that has pretty much dried up. So between Pinterest and Google, I was, you know, driving millions of people a month to the website. And then the display ads were how I would generate an income from that. And the last few years, as things have shifted so wildly online.
Melissa: I have lost like 70% of my traffic which has been super significant and very eye opening. But I knew it. I knew all my eggs were in one basket and I knew that my revenue streams were really narrow. I was in traffic only Google traffic specifically for display ads. And when 2020 came around my husband had just left full time employment in September of 19 and so we’re hitting the pandemic four or five months later and he. That was like our very first four.
Stacy: Months of him not amazing timing right.
Melissa: Not being traditionally employed as an engineer and I really did like I knew that I was narrow and so that’s when I wrote cookbooks and I really started working on my email so that helped. So I have these things in place now. So looking forward I feel like that pendulum was really like really heavy to the side of like personal and relatable and doing these things and then it swung really far over to don’t talk to me about your grandma, you know what I mean? Just give me the recipe as fast as you can.
Stacy: Like the.
Melissa: The user just wanted. I was just writing for user intent for a long time because they had no. They didn’t care. I. You know what I mean? I’m reaching millions of people who are kind of like one off wonders. I have my core base of people who show up regularly but it is not the bulk majority of who is visiting the site. And I feel like we have kind of swung the pendulum has swung back to like showing up as a human. So moving forward in this AI age I am looking at ways to nicely package everything I’ve worked on for all of these years. You know what I mean? They have thousands of recipes and multiple books and many more free ebook kind of things or not free but non printed books.
Melissa: And so I have been working really hard on how can I package this really nicely in terms of community and in humanness. What is making me a human and why would you want to listen to me and be a part of what I have to share? What’s the unique methodology that is really going to help your life? Because we’re so busy. Like that has not changed and so how can I be of use to my our audience in mass in a very clear way.
Stacy: So how like what are you doing differently then in your business right now that so far like have you gotten any early insight into is it working? You know are you still kind of experimenting, exploring what are you doing right now?
Melissa: I have some pretty clear direction in like product offering. I really want to have, like, bundles. I want it to be like a.
Melissa: No, a one click. Really, really simple, like, purchase option that people are like, of course I would buy that. And my very first one, like, I’m in the middle of getting it set up, is sourdough. Because I wrote a cookbook around sourdough. I really like it. I have a wonderful story. My starter is really powerful. Like, the way that I came by. It’s a pretty magical starter. So. So I’m in the offering. Like, I’m trying to dehydrate enough sourdough that I can my starter so that I can sell it to you. I want to be in your kitchen with you. And I think that physical cookbooks and physical books in general are already making a comeback. I think that, like, the analog movement is not as far out as we feel like it is.
Melissa: People are already tired of Internet recipes because of AI slop. And I think, like, I still buy physical all the books because I like them in my hand. And I don’t think that is. Is a dying breed. I think that more and more people are saying, no, I don’t want to look at my screen to read. I don’t want to look at my screen to figure out knitting and to figure out sourdough. And so I’m trying to, like, figure out a more analog way of reaching people. And I think I’m gonna do, like, a. Like a little teeny printed. You remember, we’re like the age of magazines. I want to bring back that feeling, even if it’s quarterly.
Melissa: I’ve been playing with the idea of, like, producing some kind of, like, quarterly magazine that feels fun and light, that has some tips about, you know, cooking, mostly because that’s what I’m known for. But I want to show up more as a whole person on the Internet than I have in recent years. And I want to talk about our move to Vermont and alternative lifestyles and maybe my new knitting project. Like, I think that there is enough room to be a whole person, even within a niche.
Stacy: I really align with everything you’re saying. And I’ve. It’s interesting because I’ve. I’ve run an online business like you since 2009. And it’s only. I mean, for pretty much that whole time, I’ve really loved having the online aspect, but it’s in the last couple of years that I’ve been really craving more in person. Before we hopped on, Rita, the producer of this podcast, and I were talking about the London Book Fair, which we are going to Be in person to meet face to face. I’m hosting a writing retreat in November of this year. So you know all these things. And then also were also talking about some physical products that we’d love to develop and sell. And I. To your point, I think we’re already swinging that direction. I think people are.
Stacy: I know I’m getting tired of watching a video and then going, wait, was that real? Oh no. You know, it’s, it’s doing something to us. And I think people are already starting to go, wait a second, this is not fun. I don’t like this. Like we are humans. We should connect with humans.
Melissa: I completely agree. And we moved recently, we moved across the country six months ago. And I have had a new journey of making friends and re establishing community as an adult. And I feel like I have learned so much. It’s been such a powerful experience and I would like to share parts of that. I know that I am not alone in this pursuit or this desire to have adult friends and to build community. And it’s something that I feel like I have done well. So even like community building online is still something that I feel so excited to talk about. And then the same thing like teach classes in my home and show up at the farmer’s market and be a real person in my real life is super important to me.
Melissa: And so like finding the bridge to bring that into the digital business that I have created is where I’m at. Like I’m still walking the bridge. I’m still trying to figure it out.
Stacy: Yeah. And it’s interesting. I’m to your point specifically in the recipe space. I’m, I’m sure that there’s been a really interesting like almost over correction from users. So you know, they go into ChatGPT to get their recipes and then they find out like the recipes kind of suck. So they’re like, now they want to go to back to the bloggers. But then now the bloggers haven’t had as much traffic. So you know, I think there and you know, also watching my husband use some AI tools in his own cooking and baking. If you have food allergies, if you’re making gluten free, if you want alternative sugar sources, it’s amazing for that because you can calculate exactly what you need to replace a specific thing in a recipe and sometimes it just gives the weirdest, it’s the weirdest substitutions. They don’t make any sense.
Stacy: And then you miss also that human tried and tested. And I think Your industry is a microcosm of the larger. Every single other industry out there where we’re learning that the human touch kind of matters. Like, it’s actually a really important piece to this being useful and helpful and meaningful.
Melissa: I completely agree. And I hope that. I hope that I can stay relevant. This is how I have fed my family for all of these years. It’s a scary reality to say, okay, at what point, like, do I need to go work at the bakery in town or can I pivot enough to. To keep. Keep working like this?
Stacy: Yeah, I think, I mean, it seems like you have such a entrepreneurial mind that I, I am. I have no doubt that you will figure it out and then you’ll probably share it with other people in your space so that. So everybody can be successful. Because I, I think that’s another nice thing about industry is I imagine that the food blogging industry is similar to my part of the publishing industry. It’s like you want everybody to be successful and you want to share and grow together.
Melissa: Yeah, it’s very collaborative.
Stacy: Yeah, I love that. I can’t imagine being in a cutthroat industry where people don’t want to help each other. That’s not a nice space to be. So you have mentioned that you moved from Utah to Vermont. And one of the things that I love about your story is that this is also location independence. So we talk a lot about location independence and in relation to moving abroad, largely because I’m in Portugal and I’ve lived in a bunch of other countries and some of our guests do the same or have done the same. But location independence, number one, it doesn’t actually mean that you move, it just means you can. And number two, it can look a lot of different ways.
Stacy: So it can look like moving from Idaho to Portugal, or it can look like moving from Utah to Vermont or having two homes, you know, living part time here and part time there’s. I’m curious to know for you what inspired that change and how has your life changed in. In the last. I know it’s been about six months at this point of this recording since you’ve done that. So maybe you can share a little bit about your own location independent journey.
Melissa: Yeah, I think we knew for a long time that were location independent, but we chose our very rural southern Utah because that’s where family was and were involved in a. A family business there. It was a hardware grocery. And so that’s what we planned on doing long term for retirement. So we. My. My husband Built the store and were taking a break from it because his parents were still working in it and were kind of waiting for them to retire. And like our move was kind of like happened because of hard things, which is okay and because we had the flexibility. So they ended up selling the grocery store to a different sibling, which we did not expect. So we kind of like lost this long term retirement plan and what we wanted to like why were in town.
Melissa: And so that loss of our store really like set us free in a way. And so now, I mean we had built our dream house and you know what I mean, we had really put a lot into the community that were in. And so that loss like opened up a well of possibility that we didn’t necessarily want at the time. But the location independence made it doable. We did not have to stay and be super uncomfortable or I mean it was a town of 600. There are not a lot of job, other job opportunities or these like larger projects that we’re hoping to retire with. And so it really did open the door to say, okay, what are we doing? What are, what does life look like? I, I was, you know, almost 40. It was right before my 40th birthday.
Melissa: I have five kids. My kids are out of elementary years. I mean they’re in elementary, but they’re not babies and toddlers. We’re all in school. I have some high schoolers. I have a lot of flexibility in my life really. And so we just opened up this door of like, okay, what do we really want to do? And so we kind of looked all over the country, which was really exciting. And then we also followed business pursuits like what. Where does it make the most sense to put our time and our money for a new future retirement plan? And so we did do a lot of looking. We looked all over the country and then when we landed here and realized it fit so many things that were excited about, like seasonality, being near a coast, places to ski, you know what I mean?
Melissa: Like a still a small town community, but really pretty. Like it had so many things that we wanted that the move has been wonderful. Wonderful. It’s even though it was hard, the reason why were moving and leaving, it has been such a soft place to land and a hard reset at 40 is magical. I, I think I would have if you would have told 30 year old me that. Right. Because we’re still building our businesses and we’re still building our dream house. We’re still like bringing these babies home. To this little teeny town and investing so much into it. So if you would have told 30 year old me that I was going to leave it all, I would have been crushed.
Melissa: But now that I am like over that hump, it has been an unexpected gift, like a loosening up of structures and ties and ways of being that weren’t working for us and resetting into new priorities and new things that are important to us that we learned in our middle age. And so it’s been amazing and we’re so glad that were able to do it.
Stacy: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you talk about that. All the moves, I mean, I’ve done so many different moves. We’ve lived in four countries outside of the US and we’ve been here in Portugal. Actually we moved about the time your husband stepped away from his job because we said September of 2019. Right. So that’s when it was end of August that we moved here. And one of the things that I really value about being in new places is at least in the beginning, I’m in a small town, not 600, but it’s a pretty small town. And so this isn’t necessarily hold true now, but in the beginning you don’t know anybody, nobody has any preconceptions about you. You don’t have family obligations. You really get to kind of step into anything you want.
Stacy: You can really explore who you are and who you want to spend time with and kind of create the environment that you want to create for yourself. Whereas when, you know, for me, I grew up in Boise, it’s obviously much bigger town than your city than you’re from, but still you have people you went to kindergarten with and you know, you have all of these kind of ties and you also have expectations. You have a certain pathway that spread and put in front of you. And that’s kind of the expected route. It is, it’s the expected route and you just kind of march along and that is just the path. And then when you disrupt everything and you go somewhere new and then there’s no roadmap anymore and you have to actually just create your own map and define your own life.
Stacy: I think it like forces something. Either you either you run back with your tail between your legs and you’re like no thank you, or you really create something new for yourself.
Melissa: We have had such a similar experience and we moved to a town of about 8,000. So like growing that much, like it feels dreamy, like we can get pizza on the weekend and I can walk to a giant, beautiful library. And you know what I mean? Like, even some of the amenities of a larger town have just been fun. And you’re right, I think that we knew that too, because of life and experience, that were either going to really wish that we hadn’t or were going to step into this wholeheartedly and just really embrace this new way of being. And we’ve done that. And it’s been a gift to our kids also.
Melissa: Like, just a lot of change for them and a lot of opportunities to grow and to learn about themselves and to see new people and new places and new ways of being. It’s really opened up a well of possibility for their futures as well. I have a daughter who’s now going to a college in the fall in Vermont. And she would not have ever been there if we had not have done that. Like, it’s kind of changing the trajectory of their lives and that feels huge.
Stacy: It’s interesting too, because a lot of your brand and business has been built off of, you know, your, you were a stay at home mom, you had all your homeschooling, not stay at home mom. That wasn’t the right way to put it. I should say homeschooled mom, homeschooling mom, work at home mom is what I should say. And, you know, building this kind of space that you had with your family and now your kids, you mentioned are in school and you’re in this kind of new phase, how is this impacting you? Not like just putting aside AI and business strategies and stuff, but as you’re kind of navigating this new life and this shifting of identity in some ways, how is that impacting how you show up as a creator?
Melissa: I think that the timing is nice that so much would kind of like fall apart natively online. While so much of my own life was essentially falling apart. Because it then, now I can rebuild it because I, I just met with a business coach last week about feeling so lost in this because I was like, homeschool and being home with my kids and gardening and flowers and building this house, like my life was intertwined with the brand to an extent. And so it was really helpful to talk to someone who was outside of my own brain and here like, okay, but this is what it can look like and here’s how you can package it. Because I, I love the homesteading kind of things and I, I don’t do that. I barely have a yard here.
Melissa: It’s, it’s very different than what we came from. And so I’m having, as someone who has created content around their life and their lifestyle also, like, what does that mean moving forward? What does that look like? And I’m still figuring it out.
Stacy: I’m sure that there’s a component of that is going to be very inspirational to your audience. I know that you said you have a mix of people, some that follow your content and are regular visitors and probably more interested in you as a human. And then you have some that just come for the, you know, that whatever recipe they’re looking for. And I would hope, you know, I’ll just applying this to my own life. I’d hope if I have a major change that the people aren’t like, well, I’m not interested anymore. It’s. It’s more like maybe there are some of your audience out there that are like, Melissa’s doing something really different. I wonder if I could do something like that with my life. Has that played into some of your content ideas as you’ve been kind of navigating?
Melissa: And I told myself also, like, if it doesn’t align with everyone, like, they’ll fall away and you’ll just still come up with people who it does align more with. There are so many people online, there’s so many ways to reach them. And I just have to, like, trust the process that the right people with this new messaging will still be there and it will draw new people who did not know me before, who did not need the other parts. And the people who were really there for, know, homeschooling and major gardening, they can move on. You know what I mean? There’s other people who are doing it well and they can find that content from someone else. I’ve just had to like, trust the process because I built it from nothing, right.
Melissa: And now I have all these 15 years worth of skills and tools and ideas and what worked and what didn’t work and how to figure things out and how to look at analytics to move forward. I’m not starting at square one anymore. Even though, like, the direction I am facing has changed. I’m not where I was 15 years ago.
Stacy: Yeah, you gotta approach it. Also knowing that business has seasons and changes and that’s just being an entrepreneur. It’s just part of the process.
Melissa: I know that’s really painful. I don’t know if enough people talk about that. I just thought that I was going to like, grow year over year. And so when that stopped happening, around 2023, it felt like a moral Failing. Like, I’ve gone to therapy about losing monetary success in my business and I’ve really had to work on this idea that things do.
Stacy: Like.
Melissa: Someone I just talked to recently, he’s like, things inhale and things exhale and that’s the way of life. And I was like, thank you. Because something inside of me did make it a moral failing for a long time to lose a significant portion of my business. Like, it felt horrible. But when you just like lean on the, like, I mean, this is how things work. This. There’s a birth, death and rebirth cycle in nature. And the inhale and the exhale as a way of being was so much kinder than what I was making it in my mind.
Stacy: I mean, I feel like that applies to so many other things too. I mean, that’s business, but it’s also relationships and you know, parenting. I know I’ve definitely been through seasons and my kids aren’t quite the same age as yours, but although you have like, don’t you have five kids? So it’s probably pretty big range. But I have a 10 year old and a 13 year old and you know, I go through seasons where I feel like a great mom and then seasons where it’s really hard and I have to really kind of dig within myself and find my way through it. And I think, you know, one of the things that I noticed about your work and how you show up is values and ethics and just humanity are really central to you and your online presence.
Stacy: And again, back looping back to our kind of the technology shakeup and the things that are kind of messing with all of us right now, I think that the people that continue to hold that humanity and they are ethical and values led that will like, that will help you find the way forward to an even better place.
Melissa: I agree. And I have to trust that process.
Stacy: Yeah, yeah. And it’s, and it’s an interesting space also when you have no idea what the. Like, if only we had a crystal ball that we can know exactly what’s coming. You know, in our industry, it’s a really interesting space just being in books because, you know, I’m noticing that a lot of people are just outsourcing their thinking. I mean, and I would even think in recipes there’s like a creative process to even if you get a recipe to follow to try and fail and like learn through it. And I’m hopeful that people will realize that it’s not always the best option to shut your brain down. Like, you need to activate some of that creativity and problem solving and going through hard stuff to figure out, like how to create something meaningful.
Melissa: Yeah. And I think if I’m willing to do it, those kind of people who resonate with that message and who are AI weary like me, I don’t really use it. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it. I don’t want to do it. Like, I am not someone who behind the scenes is using it. And then I’m saying it ruined my life. I’m like, no, I, I don’t like it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t. Look, I’m not into it. And so I just, I have to believe that there are enough people who are similarly aligned in those things that I value, that if I keep producing content and value and education around those things that are core to inside of me that those other people will find me too.
Melissa: And if you love AI and like, use it for all your recipes. Like, I’m probably not your woman anyways. And I like what you said. Like your husband, like recipe substitutions and alternative sugars. Like my husband, he does have a job now. We moved here for work for him. Just to like lighten some of this pressure off of me after these hard years. And he is using it a lot in very helpful ways to troubleshoot this giant boiler system. Like, it knows a ton. It would have taken him so many YouTube videos and so many manuals reading the whole thing and he can just plug it in. I know that there’s a time and place for it and I’m just not the one who’s going to embrace it very well.
Stacy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think just acknowledging that and then building your business in a direction that feels aligned. And every business owner that operates any kind of online aspect of their business has to reckon with this at some point. Are you building in some AI aspect to your business? How are you using it in your business? Where are you not using it? This is just a decision that we have to make and we have to learn. But you also don’t want to bury your head in the sand and pretend like it’s not there. Because that’s also. I think people also need guidance.
Melissa: Yes. One thing that I am using it for that I think everyone should know about. I was just telling a friend they make an AI plugin tool for alt text for images. So if you’re running a website, because alt text is one of those behind the scenes and you need to be like compliant with some of the ADA things. And alt text is important for screen readers. And so I have for years been manually writing in a short description of what my image is. So if you are on a screen reader, it will read it to you and you can know what’s going on and they have a tool that will auto populate and it’s very good alt texts for your images. Like I don’t like I would spend hours, do you know what I mean?
Melissa: If I’m uploading 800 photos like per minutes per photo. You know what I mean? Even if I’m 30 seconds per photo, that’s a lot of time. So there are some places like you don’t need my exposure expertise for an alt text of a photo.
Stacy: Yeah.
Melissa: And, and I feel fine about that. So some of those things like do find out what it’s great at. I don’t want it to be recipe creation and I don’t want it to be photos. Alt text. Yes, let’s do that.
Stacy: There’s, it’s similar in my area, there’s a bunch of things that it’s really useful for like formatting endnotes in your book. I mean actually you need a human to review it because it’s about 70% accurate, but it still is going to save you probably like six to eight hours of time. If you’re formatting these on a like normal nonfiction book or like there’s that one research study that you remembered and you only remember these few things, it could probably find it for you. You know, it’s like those kind of things. There’s so many useful ways to use it, but replacing the human and replacing the thinking is never going to be it.
Melissa: And the creativity and the art and the voice, like some of that, like I don’t want that replaced. Let’s use it for endnote formatting A hundred percent all day long.
Stacy: Yeah, yeah. And I, I mean we’re just going to continue to grapple with these things over time.
Melissa: Right.
Stacy: And as we learn into it. But to your point, I do think in your space and in so many spaces, people are already asking for humans. Like please, I just want to work. I just want to know what I. I want to know the thing is real. This is, I think where people are. They’re just not trusting reality anymore. Like did you actually write this email to me? You know, it’s a weird space. I just had a. I completely agree. I just had this weird scam happen where I got pitched for one of my co authored books for like a book club and it was a fake book club, an AI agent. And I got two separate ones for two separate cities. One in Toronto, one in London. And yeah, like I. Thankfully there was enough off about it that I was like.
Stacy: And I googled it or whatever, searched it up and yeah, and I was like, oh my gosh, are you serious? So now we have these like dynamic AI agents that are scamming us on. Like it’s just bizarre. It’s just such a weird space.
Melissa: Yeah. Another common scam is podcast interviews. So they’ll pitch you like, hey, do you want to be on this podcast about these things? And it seems very real. And then they want to do a live on Instagram or Facebook. And so if you get on to do it somehow they like magically steal your Facebook page or your Instagram page. So like that’s another scam for people to be wary of because it looks so real and it’s so frustrating. I have a friend who lost like a 1.5 million follower Facebook page through that scam.
Stacy: Oh no. Was she was able to get it back?
Melissa: No, it’s been over a year now. It’s just gone. I mean it’s there and it’s weird and you know what I mean, spammy and porny and gross. But it like ruined her Facebook page. She never recovered it. Oh wow.
Stacy: Yeah, those are the. That’s. And so you can understand also why people are a bit distrustful, you know, even of legitimate people and legitimate websites. And that’s why I think actually like human personal brands are going to become even more important over time because people will know, okay, Melissa is the real deal. If I go to Melissa’s page, it’s actual recipes. It’s not junk. It’s really testing it. It’s good. You know, I hope that’s the same with my work as well in books. And I just, I like how you’re thinking about this forward and I’m sure our listeners are have their own kind of things they’re noodling on in AI in their industries.
Stacy: Melissa, I want to ask you the question that I ask all of our guests and that is if you could recommend one book to listeners and it’s one that has impacted your life in a meaningful way, what would it be and why?
Melissa: I am a big. Can I do two?
Stacy: Yeah, go for it.
Melissa: But you gotta rank for us. I would hope that most of your people are moms or do you have a lot of moms are we trying to say?
Stacy: We have, we do have a majority female audience but we have a lot of men that listen to and I.
Melissa: Don’t know, but parents. These both fit. So there’s one called the Emotional Lives of Teenagers.
Stacy: Okay.
Melissa: I just feel like if someone like it’s almost repairing my inner teenager. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s showing up for me. Like if someone would have just said this to me when I was a kid, like maybe things wouldn’t have felt so big and so hard. And it’s helped me immensely as a mother. And then the second and number two is raising securely attached kids. And that one spans wider. It has like kid, toddler, elementary teen and even into adult children. And I just think that they have similar veins in like we need to hold space for them and it’s not gentle parenting but it’s having space for them to have an emotional experience and how we relate to them in their world in that time.
Melissa: And I, both of them have been so helpful to me as a mom because I have kids. My kids are 18, 16, 14, 12 and 10. So I have, I kind of have the gamut right now. And I loved both of those.
Stacy: Oh, those are sound like great recommendations. And my daughter just turned 13, so I’m. I’m right in that space.
Melissa: Yeah. Start with the securely attached kids because it would fit. It would, it kind of fits everybody.
Stacy: Okay, I will check that out. It was. It’s funny because my daughter is like starting to listen to music that I listen to at her age. Like it’s brand new. Like I’ve never heard of some of these bands. And then I’m like, oh no, I’m like parenting myself right now. And like how do I do this? I don’t remember. So it’ll be helpful.
Melissa: I think that has been the gift of parenting is like a reparenting of self. And then some of what you were saying about people and AI. It is so fun to have an 18 year old who is just on the verge of launching. She’s a senior, she’s going to go to college. She’s way into like music I listened to in high school and the fashion and the jeans. But also like they are so smart because they have been raised in such a generation where like this is just reality for them.
Stacy: There’s.
Melissa: They did not know a before and they are smart. They can spot AI. They don’t put up with like people’s crap. They love records and real books and slow fashion. Like this is such a Cool generation. And I just think that like our turmoil is already like they’ve already processed it. They just are going to be okay because this is all they’ve ever known. And it’s so refreshing for me as a mom and an online business owner to see like these people be like, no, like, we’re not going to do that. She doesn’t even like Snapchat because she’s like, no, like there are real people in this world. I’m going to the baseball game, I’m going to the basketball game, I’m going to run. I’m. You know what I mean?
Melissa: I’m going to play a sport and I’m going to volunteer at the dog shelter because she is just seeing the harm that has happened from people being online. Not like too much, but in kind of the wild west. I feel like she was a little bit older than her, were like raised in this without parameters world and we’re swinging back to being like, oh, maybe children should not have free reign of the Internet. And so she has witnessed enough people just older than her that were raised without restraint and they’re like, we’re not doing that. It’s so fun.
Stacy: It’s nice to hear. I mean I, I felt similarly about my daughter. She’s 13 and I mean she’s, she just, we always take phones when kids come to our house. They have to leave it in the kitchen and she doesn’t have a phone and she’s always like so happy when the phones are away because she’s like, I get to talk to my friends, you know, I think they really crave connection just like we do, just like our clients do and your readers.
Melissa: Yeah, my 14 year old still doesn’t have a phone. Like, I mean eventually you do it and I have like that could be its whole own conversation of social media and children and what it can look like. Because I don’t want her to go to college and just be like, oh, now I have everything. So like the slow implementation so that she has enough brain space to kind of process what’s happening has been a really interesting thing to watch. And my 16 year old still doesn’t currently have. He has a phone but he doesn’t have social media. Just feel like, like giving them some support around. This has been really fun to watch.
Stacy: Yeah, it’s amazing, right?
Melissa: They want to be people with people.
Stacy: Yeah. And also like they still need that connection. We just got a house phone for our daughter so she has like a landline phone. But then I’m. Yeah, there’s. Yeah, there’s so many things to consider about this and how to, you know, help them connect with each other, but protect them. And this has been such a rich conversation. Melissa, business life. I think you also have a whole other book in you that you could write about your life and your parenting and your work and food. Thank you so much for being with me today. And I want to make sure that our audience can find you. Where is the best place to find you? Follow along, get some of your resources, buy your cookbooks.
Melissa: Yeah, if you need a recipe, do the recipe like cornbread, Bless this mess, or Bless this mess chocolate chip cookies. Bless this mess sourdough. I have 2,000 recipes, so I probably have what I have a delightful potato corn chowder that you might like right now or really easy, you know, chicken in the crock pot. So you can find me at Bless this Mess on the blog and then Bless this Mess blog on social media. I am pretty Instagram. I love Instagram. So Instagram Stories is where I’m showing, like, my daily three feet of snow and my walks with the dogs in beautiful Vermont. And, you know, the new places I’m volunteering, so you can find me online in those places.
Stacy: We’ll be sure to link to that in our show notes, and I’m assuming that they can get your cookbooks on your website or on Amazon as well.
Melissa: So.
Stacy: So we’ll be sure to add any links that you’d like us to add, Melissa, so our audience can get your amazing food recipes. Thank you. And thank you so much for joining me. To you, our listeners, our viewers, I hope that you got a lot out of this conversation. You know where to find good recipes now, and since you’re still here, you must have really enjoyed this conversation. So do be sure that you are following or subscribed so you don’t miss future episodes, future conversations. And if you have 30 seconds to rate and review the podcast or leave a comment on YouTube, I would hugely appreciate it because it helps me reach more people with the message of living a life that is not just better, but beyond better.
Stacy: I also, as always, have to thank Rita Domingues for producing this fine podcast, because without her, you would not be watching or listening to this right now. She is truly the engine behind everything. I’m just the face. She makes everything else happen. And I will be back with you before you know it.
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