Episode 235: Fireside Chat - AI, Presidential Elections, CAOS & Iterating in Business

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business.

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So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Micah, you're on baby watch, dude.

Yes. Yeah, I know. I didn't know if I was going to make it to this one today, but I know.

I know. How far are you from the hospital?

Only 5 minutes. Yeah. So, yeah. So we feel good there. But we're in that period that you two obviously know about having kids. What, 5 of them between the two of you? Where in the last 2 weeks where every day you think is the day that you're going to the hospital. So it's very much like a hurry up and wait and very anxious. And now my wife's doing all of the things that to like, I don't know, we've resorted to like the old wives' tales things, right? Of like things that'll make you go into labor. So because we're ready.

That's awesome. Oh, we're excited for you, man. This might be your last fireside chat for a little bit of time.

We'll see. Yeah, because I know we're doing these, we're recording these every week. So yeah, it might be. Give me a couple of weeks on that one.

All right.

Or it could be a sleepless, really hilarious one next week.

It could be.

Micah unplugged everybody on 2 hours of sleep.

Mike, let me tell you what the problem is.

I solved everybody's problems. Okay.

Yeah.

All right. So what you guys got on the docket for the day? What topics you guys got?

David?

I'll kick it over to Mike. I feel like he's got his topic prepared, ready to roll.

I don't know. All I keep hearing from David is just keep building the team, moving around, moving these people here, moving these people over here. Shuffling things around, sharing with Bradley.

We got third office we're opening up here June 1st. So, uh, yeah, building, building the team, hiring the team, training the team, all those, all the things right now.

So, David, how many, how many people they— how many people in the end, whenever everything is live, how many people will you have on your team now, uh, when we're, we're fully staffed? Yeah.

Um, let's see, we'll have 4 in Bethesda, or probably 3 in Potomac, another 3 in Potomac. Um, so that gets me to 10 sales, and then, uh, another 4, uh, on service. And then, uh, so that's 14. So we'll probably be between like 15 and 20, I think, about leaders and sales and service.

All right, so I got a question about that. Okay, Mike, is you, you guys have obviously seen it a little bit too with, um, at Club Capital, but you've had to go from— I mean, the number that I've always had in the back of my mind about how many people one person can have report to them is 6. I think that that actually came from, uh, the Navy SEALs came up with that, and some other people have kind of shared that. So you've had to obviously start going to where you are leading leaders, right? So you're leading leaders who then lead other people. Like, what has been some of the biggest learnings that you've had with doing—

Yeah, you know, I think, uh, maybe some of the biggest learnings— I think there's a reason that number 6 too, by the way. Uh, it's just, uh, if you ever— I think it may be coming out of a— I think it's like Malcolm Gladwell book, but we're hardwired to only be close to 6 close friends and family. And 150 acquaintances. You ever heard those numbers before?

No.

Every— go down a little science path for you for a second, but every like, uh, social mammal, if you want to think about it, has a different brain size based on the number of social capacity that they're able to essentially interact with. Obviously we're one of the most intelligent animals, right? So like, ours is pre-wired to have 150 acquaintances. And we can have 6 close friends or family. So it just makes it interesting from a management perspective of like, maybe that's why you can no longer— you can't have more than 6 direct reports, right? And adequately, adequately take care of them. So just that number has come up before. So just—

who are the 6, David? We want to know who's in the David inner circle. That's what we want to know. Put it on the podcast. These are my 6. Everybody else, you're on the— you're in the outer rung.

So I don't know if we want to go down like a total rabbit hole, but David's got a business plan off of this 6 in 150. He's got his whole new social network that he wants to create based on 6 in 150. Like, screw the, the, the current social media, uh, uh, you know, kind of models that are out there today. And, and it's almost like a and build it off of that, build it off of this, like, not necessarily exclusivity, but you do it based upon, like, kind of the science. When you do it based upon the science, it actually creates this kind of, like, kind of almost like exclusivity behind it. If you limit your social networks to only allow 150 connections instead of, you know, to be honest, I don't think any of the three of us are actually big social media people. Um, we utilize social media for work and things like that. But like, I think generally we're not big social media people. That being said, how many friends do you, you know, we all have Facebook accounts. How many friends are on there? I don't know. Probably a thousand. I haven't looked, but probably a thousand or more, right? And, or something like that. 500. It's a lot. It's definitely people I don't talk to all the time, right? And so this idea of like, hey, if you could, if you have to cap it at X, First off, it'd be a lot more tailored content.

You're kicking out, right? So if I wanted to add Bradley, who's your 151, who's not, who's leaving, right? So just a different set. But Bradley, I probably have heard you talk about this on the podcast, but going back to that 6, it's like we all get like we're the average of our 5 closest friends from happiness, wealth, You know, I hear that over and over again. So it just makes sense when you, when you kind of link in that science component to it from what I've heard as well.

It does. It does. You know, there's actually somebody I was thinking two things. One, there was a TikTok or YouTube or probably both star that went to a something in Vegas, like a conference. And I don't know who it is. I couldn't remember, but they were using it as representation. That this person had several million followers on social media, but they had not made any deep connections. And so this person has all these people whenever they're doing live streaming or whatever, and they went to this conference and they were gonna set up and they were gonna have this booth and they were expecting thousands of people to like line up to get an autograph and a picture. And apparently there was like 5 people that showed up, seriously. And so what they were saying is, is that, you know, that's fine to have that, but they had not developed any true meaningful conversation, like connections with their audience at all. And I thought that that was just really— I don't know, it really sat with me quite a bit to say, yeah, I mean, you, you, you can't have a million people that just adore you. I mean, there's a handful of people like Oprah, The Rock, etc., but at the end of the day, social media has created this kind of weird place to where these people have a lot of followers, but nobody is going to actually show up, go out of their way, drive, fly to go see this person, even though they've got a million followers. Isn't that interesting?

Well, it's, it's like, uh, this kind of goes into my business idea, so Micah, thanks for bringing this up, right? But it, I think it kind of in the social media companies were built upon eyeballs and audience and distracting us, right? And not about how we're actually socially wired.

Yeah.

So that's, I think, to your point, that's why you have so much like teen depression and so many people have issues with social media because they have, they're trying to get all these eyeballs or try to get this big audience, but they don't have any true connection with those eyeballs or that audience, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, I think that's the whole issue with it.

right?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, for sure. So, um, all right, so we're going to take this, uh, we're going to do this real time. I'm actually kind of curious because I have this on one of my topics I want— I wanted to discuss. I've got this framework called CAOS. C-A-O-S. CAOS. Okay, so CAOS stands for, uh, concept, audience, offer, sales. Concept, audience, offer, sales. So this has been really helpful for me because I really like frameworks. I have to try to like get my hands around something. So I like to try to go back to a framework. So I've got this business idea which I'll probably share on the podcast at some point myself. And so this has helped me to kind of go through like I literally on my— in my notebook write down, okay, like what's the concept of the business? Concept as in like I can tell somebody this is what it is and they get it. They're like, okay, I got it. That's cool. Audience. Who is the audience? I mean, you guys have heard like, who's your avatar? You know, who's your dream client avatar? Who's your ideal client avatar? Your ICA, whatever. Who are you trying to target? Offer. What's the thing that somebody has a credit card they can actually buy? Like, what am I— what are you actually selling? Is it a service? Is it a product? Whatever it What is it and how do you— what's your pricing structure around that? And then sales is, okay, cool, we got the concept, we know who you're targeting, we know what the offer is. How are you actually going to get sales? So it gets into like, what's your marketing strategy? And then how are you going to actually like, what's your sales system that you're going to have? What do you guys think about that framework?

Yeah, I mean, I think it makes total sense. I think I think having frameworks like that though are incredibly helpful, right? I think a lot of times people will sit down and think of a business idea and try and wing it, right? But I mean, those are the fundamental things of a business plan right there. I mean, there's, you know, make a business plan pretty complex, but you can boil it down to those 4, you know, those 4 steps right there. To understand, you know, okay, what is it? How are we going to go about, you know, finding an audience and selling it, right? So makes sense.

Yeah. So David, what's the concept of your social media company?

I really didn't think we were going to get down this path today, but I'm game if you want. This is truly hypothetical, right? It's not something I'm like actively—

No, he's actually taking investors, folks. We're going to— we're actually going through— we're We're going through a seed round. So if you'd actually like to invest in the social media company, it's david@—

Yeah, I think technically though, disclaimer here, this is not something he is actively—

He is not doing it for people listening. He's not doing this.

This is not outside business activity.

Yeah, so what's the concept? Is that what you're asking? And it's like, yeah, what's the concept?

Yeah, so I would say, David, don't be afraid to talk about it, right? It's all about execution.

Uh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I guess I'll start with that too. Just like, uh, then Bradley, maybe this is, this is something that's helped me and Micah. I think we've shared this on our team, but like, you know, there's a million different ideas out there, um, you know, whether it's, you know, inside your current business or new businesses, etc., right? But I, and I stole this like most of the things I say or, or share, but like, uh, the one guy shared that, uh, you know, the business idea is your, the idea multiplied by the execution or the implementation, and that's the value of the idea, right? Um, so that, that's really just helped me with some of these things, right? Like let's say, you know, going through that framework, you, you identify, you know, whatever, you know, whether it's for your insurance agency or another type of business, you, You identify it's a billion-dollar market, okay?

It—

well, if you only implement it 10%, okay, that's how you get the true value of what this business idea is, right? So that's only a $100,000 idea if you implement 10% on a million-dollar idea, right? Um, so that's just been helpful, is just in terms of thinking about things by— it gets multiplied by the implementation. Um, so you can have the biggest idea out there, but if you implement it 1%, it's not going to be Yeah, not gonna end up to be very much. Okay.

All right, so what— wait a minute, this is good, this is good because we're going to go down this path.

So it's idea times implementation, times implementation, right, equals the value of the idea or business.

Man, this is good because I'm— you keep talking because I'm going to pull something up. Okay, I want you to see something I've got. No joke, you've actually given me You don't know this, you've given me a formula now to go for success with a maxim. This is good. We're doing this. This is why a fireside chat actually is, is, is really good, because I'm going to pull this up and I'm going to show you something so you can actually see it. So, um, what, uh, who would the, uh, who would the audience be?

Well, so we covered concept, right? Did we cover concept?

We cover concept, or is that—

yeah, no, concept is the social media company for what?

For what would you say?

For what? Yeah, social media. So, so define the concept there.

Yeah, I'm gonna hash some of this out, you know, as we go. Again, this isn't fully fleshed. That's good. This was like, uh, Mike over a cup of coffee. I'm like, hey, I got this idea, somebody should do this, right? That's what this—

that's this, that's what this conversation is, is it's a, it's over, it's middle of the day, we're having a beer.

Um, but yeah, you know, I think it would just be, you know, as opposed to a social media company that, uh, you know, is indefinite, you can have a, you know, the whole game is to get, uh, as many followers as you can, etc. I would limit it to 6 close, uh, call them you know, family or intimate friends, whatever you want to name them, right? And then 150 acquaintances that you're able to have. And then based on that, I would— you would come up with some type of rating system where if The Rock, you mentioned him earlier, follows you, uh, that's weighted heavier than somebody else. So now all of a sudden you have this social dynamic where you're trying to acquire there could be different metrics for this, but the 150 best acquaintances, not a million average, per se, acquaintances. So now you have this social game which kind of takes place in our society anyway, where you're trying to get the best followers, your closest friends, etc., so you can build up your influence, so your message truly matters based on your 150 followers, based on the content that you put out there. Um, kind of like a, maybe a little bit of a truth serum. So you're just not blasting out to a million people, but, um, there's a rating system to, to you and your friend group. Um, and it's a competitive thing, right? To see who can—

I think it was some of what you talked about too is like trying to have, um, blend kind of like Facebook and LinkedIn, right? Or something like that, right? So that it's not just you know, because a lot of times, I mean, I guess I can't say this per se, but like, you know, especially on Facebook, it tends to be a personal profile, tends to be a personal profile, even when, you know, people try to use it for business, right? And then LinkedIn is generally nothing but business, right? And so on LinkedIn, you'll have your own set of followers, but then on Facebook, you might not be connected to like 90% of people, right, that you're connected to on LinkedIn. It's just like so different. Where what have you truly created in this mindset of, or framework of 6 and 150, right? You know, they have to cross both, right? You don't have a whole set of just business acquaintances over here and then a whole set of, you know, just personal over here. It's what if you had to pick 150 across both? Um, who would that be?

There could be a subcategory for your, you know, celebrities that have a, you know, a million, you know, other ones, but then they also, you know, they're 150 is what they, you know, there's some rating system for that, right, of who those 150 are, right?

I think, I, I think I kind of agree with you though, that naturally the more that I think about this I do think that there's a way. Now, some people would, it would cause maybe, you know, potentially a little bit of rift if somebody, you'd have to think through this to where, you know, I'm in, you're in my, like I consider you part of my 6, but you don't consider me part of your 6 kind of thing.

Oh, no.

You know?

I think that creates the whole dynamic, right? So, yeah.

Well, that's what I said. I'm like, David, you're, you're really trying to go down a social experiment here. Like, I don't know. I don't know if this is going to be good at the end.

Yeah.

At the same— well, I think the argument there is, has social media been a positive anyway? Like, you know, I mean, there's certain good things that it's— that you can list off a number of good things, right? But I think it's pretty easy to list off a number of bad things too.

So this is why we get to— this is why we get to, uh, in chaos We just stopped at concept. This is a bad concept. Like, nope, we're not even there. Or if you're using David's formula, idea, it's a 1. Okay, that's a full-on go. No, no, I'm just kidding, David. Hey, do you see this screen though? Can you see my screen?

Yeah, I do. Yeah, I'll give you a real quick additional on concept. I think part of this is, you know, you have a social rank. You should also Uh, just like Uber ranks you as a customer, um, I think you should have a, uh, consumer ranking because I think it's— oh, I think it's lopsided right now that as consumers you're able to review a business but the business doesn't get to review you.

Um, you know, so, man, that is so good.

Yeah, so I think there should be a universal— not like in the app for Uber, but a universal consumer, uh, business rating, right? So this kind of all factors into this idea of like, you know, again, I think it kind of gets into a social experiment. You know, maybe China's trying to do this. I think they're doing something like this where they're ranking every citizen, right? But it's kind of like gamifying what we want to gamify, right?

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Hey, that is actually— am I not mistaken that I think Airbnb does this? So if you— obviously you're ranking, they also rank you too. And Uber does it, I think, right? So I think that they are starting to do that. Yes, that is a good idea because, man, there are absolutely customers and clients that you can go, "F, F, we'll drop your butt, you know, we drop you right now." But, you know, I mean, that makes sense. You know, everybody has the customers. It's like, man, goodness, you know, they're not the best customers. The best customers refer, Uh, they'll leave testimonials for you, and they, they pay the best prices, you know. I mean, they, they just are. If you could just replicate those clients across the board— and so I, I think that there's actually something to that, David.

I agree with you on that one. Or they're just nice people, right? I mean, you know, we've all had interactions with, with clients that you go Oh my gosh, like this was a horrible interaction, you know, with a person, let alone a client, right? So unfortunately, you know, you have those, right? And there's really not necessarily that you want to do anything right away, right? Or right off the bat. But, you know, we've all been in situations where possibly a disgruntled client will put up a review against your business and the business really doesn't have, can't do much, right? I mean, you have nothing to do there besides respond on this social media type platform, you know, some sort of canned language normally, right? I mean, it's like, as much as you want to be able to address them or something, you know, a lot of times there's context to situations that as a business, you're really, you know, you don't want to put yourself in saying that, right? In some sort of argument on some social media channel. But there's no way to like, say, you know, hey, this, you know, like, what if there was a rating on that person, you know, that put that where Oh, 70 other businesses rated this person a 2. Like, you know, it seems like they have— they're the problem at the businesses, right?

100%.

No, that's a good— that's a good point. There's a new, uh, cocktail, uh, place in Auburn. It's in, uh, uh, Session Cocktails, I believe, something like that. And I knew it was in Tuscaloosa, and now it's in— now it's in Auburn, and they're— they're expanding. I think they're gonna get up to Oxford, real high end, you know, for a college town. I mean, it's really, really, really nice. And I was looking at the reviews. I don't know why. A friend of mine sent it to me. And so I was looking at it and they were all pretty amazing except this one was awful. I mean, and it was really attacking the manager of basically saying like, you guys, we've been waiting, we waited 45 minutes and you saw somebody that you liked and you put them in front of us and all that sort of thing. A couple of things with that one. Is the manager, or I guess the owner, responded to that comment with a pretty nice long message that said, hey, thanks so much for taking the time. Sorry you had that experience, etc. I really, I read that and I thought, man, that's awesome that they took the time to respond to that. Because even because if that negative review just sat there, and they didn't respond to it, and they only responded to the positive ones, you'd be like, well, you kind of sticking your head in the sand. And to my— to the point we're talking about with customers, what if there was a way for that restaurant or whatever to almost say, hey, you know what, this person in this case, let's say that they were just completely obliterated, that they got drunk, they caused an issue, they broke stuff inside. They would want everybody to know, hey, we're just not going to let that customer, you know, back in as an example. Like, we're just not going to do business with that customer so they can leave negative reviews or whatever. I think that there is something to that, that not that the business needs to be able to fight back per se, but at the same time, the customer is not always right. You know that saying, like, I don't agree with that saying at all. I just don't. They're not always right. There's a, there's a great way to be able to treat people, but sometimes customers are— they just will go off and say things that are just not fair to the business and can actually be really hurtful. To the, to the company. So I, I actually, I'm in on this idea.

Yeah, there's a couple things. I can give a couple examples here, but there's a, there's a Latin phrase for this too, and I think I'm probably going to butcher it. But, uh, Mike, I don't know if you've ever heard this. We used to be in this world where it was very much— it's called, I believe it's called caveat emptor, right? Which is buyer beware. Okay. And now with social media and customer choice and etc., now it's like caveat venditor, where it's like seller beware. So those are the two Latin phrases for it somehow. I don't know how that came to be, but those are the two things. And we've kind of shifted to that, you know, obviously customer, especially, you know, any business owner I think you talk to, you know, with Yelp and, uh, you know, online reviews, it's really shifted heavily to the consumer, right? So it's almost like balancing out that power where it's like both parties get the rate, just like on Uber, just like on Airbnb, right?

I agree. I think that's—

I think—

I know— I think that there's actually something to that.

Okay.

Okay, I got a topic I want to talk to you guys about. Micah, I thought we could, we could talk about this one without giving away too much, but there's a bigger concept. And not— here's what I was thinking about. Let's talk about iterating along the way. Like, uh, David, I sent you a Loom video that was kind of an update of something that we're going to be doing and launching here pretty soon with the podcast. And Micah was making me think like you and I've had some, some, some really good chats and, you know, the team has been working for the last 30 days or so on some stuff and we've made a pivot, right? We've, we've kind of iterated, uh, from what we were initially going to do. And I'm just kind of curious, where do we think that the balance is of iterating along the way, making slight pivots improving, and then at times say, man, we're just jumping from one thing to the next to the next. Does that make sense, Micah? Like, you know, no, you need to kind of stick with something. So like, when people talk about iterating or pivoting, that's looked at in a positive way, but then if you just keep switching things, you don't actually make forward momentum. So I think like the example we've recently had where we've kind of decided to switch platforms just a little bit to make it a little easier, make it easier to access. Like, those were good moves, and I feel like that that is iterating versus we're not just completely abandoning the idea.

So I think there's, there's a couple aspects to this. I think it's really important that, um, you know, as a leader of a team, that you don't seem all over the place and that you don't know, you know, what's going on. Right. And I think if you do just change up stuff, you know, very frequently, you can risk looking that way. Right. Unless it's done the right way or for the right reasons, right? Because you don't want to seem like, all right, now it's just another change and here we go. And, you know, what are we doing here? What's the path, right? You know, where I think, you know, iterating on things and, you know, really, you know, kind of the lean model, right, of scaling a business and building a product. Is to iterate, right? But it's all about data, right? You're trying to use like, there's clear outcomes in mind, right? Of, okay, let's, you know, let's look at a certain process. We want to do things a certain way. Why, right? So it's what is the end goal, right? What are we trying to achieve with this, right? And then if you start to iterate and you're able to effectively communicate to your team why you might want to iterate, right, or get feedback from the team that helps you iterate is because of needing to get closer to achieving that goal, right, then that's why you should iterate, right? Like you should be changing the process to get continuously better and better and better. Review what's working now, you know, what's going well, what's not, where should we be making changes, right? That helps us get to or surpass the goals and targets that we have, right? And so I, you know, I think it's very healthy to iterate, but, you know, you have to do so on a regular cadence, right? If you're just doing things kind of all over the place without no set kind of timeline, it can be, it can be very hard for the team to kind of get behind this because they just feel like they're always changing stuff, right? And even for yourself, it's like, wait, what am I working on now, right? But if on a regular cadence, um, you know, you're looking at things and evaluating and saying, you know, is what we're doing right now working? You know, what's going well, what's not? Is it helping us really achieve the goal that we want? Is there things that we could be doing differently, right? And if you identify those, yeah, change. Don't just be, you know, kind of this old, you know, large, you know, kind of the way large businesses have been looked at in the past, right, of, of, uh, you know, it takes them a year to be able to change what they're doing, right? No, change what you're doing now, right? If, if you can do so kind of on this more of like a lean method and, you know, be able to do a quick change, adapt, and get to where you want to be quicker. I mean, I think iterating and changing is very much necessary and very capable for small businesses to be able to do that. And if they don't do that, I think they're, you know, not that they need to be changing everything that they're doing, but, you know, I think small businesses, you know, are very poised to be able to, you know, achieve their goals, I think, quicker because they're able to be a little bit more nimble and quick. I mean, I know, David, I know you iterate, you know, certainly a bit on your end and try different models and see what's working. If it's not working, okay, let's go back to the drawing board, right? And that might be quarterly, right? Might be like, all right, let's test something out for a quarter. I mean, something has to— you do need to test things out. What's that?

I said it depends on the situation.

Yeah, right. I mean, you might need to have to make a quick change, but, but I mean, I think, um, you know, generally you, you got to be able to make quick decisions, right? Um, you know, as a leader, and you should be able to do that, you know, driven by results and outcomes and, you know, let the, you know, let the data kind of speak for itself of whether something's working or not.

Bradley, and it's kind of like, I think Micah said this, uh, it kind of goes, I think it's been in stages, and Micah kind of hit on all these points, but it starts out with goals, right? So we all have goals in mind, um, and trying to achieve those goals, we run into problems, uh, hitting those problems, you diagnose the problem, and then you make an iteration to get closer to that goal line, right? And you know, no matter what that goal is, you're always kind of going through this iteration cycle of that trying trying to get closer and closer to that goal line. It's maybe just a different kind of process to think about it. I think we're always iterating. You're never exactly hitting your goals, right? You're over, you're under. So you're always kind of like in that circle loop of like, what's the problem diagnosis? What do we need to do to get closer to the line? What's the problem diagnosis? How are we getting closer to the line?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I can look back. I came across a Google document from about 2 and a half years ago. And, um, I was looking at it and I thought, man, it's pretty amazing how much my thoughts have changed and skills have leveled up and how much— like, I, I could see then what I was trying to accomplish, but then I just didn't have the perspective that I do now on certain things, whether it's the concept of the business, who I was trying to target, what the pricing structure was going to be, etc. It was like, I can look back now and draw a straight line, but at the time I couldn't. But yet it was all of those little things stacking above it, so stacking on top of one another over the last 2 and a half years in this particular case that has really, um, I don't know, it's pretty cool. Like, they all were directionally correct, but, um, I wouldn't have known then what I know now. That's all. I mean, but anyway, all right, I got one last thing. So, uh, have you guys been playing with AI any?

A little bit.

Yeah. What, what tool have you played around with?

ChatGPT.

Yeah. Yeah. Micah, what about you?

Same. Yeah, we have a login, uh, for the business, and I actually just heard they're coming out with like a business, um, login. Yeah, they're coming out with it so that it's for business. So many people are starting to use it. That they're going to have like an enterprise version so that like we as business owners could purchase it and then like add our team, um, to it as well. I also saw an article today that they're— who did I see? A large company is like shutting it down, um, that their employees can't use it because there's been like, I don't know, like data breach or something like that. There may be like putting things in ChatGPT that they shouldn't, right? Um, I think is, is what happened there. So, I mean, you know, this type of— what's happening in AI is moving wildly fast, so it's, um, it's not surprising that some things are gonna not go the right way.

Catch up quick on this.

It seems like what—

there needs to be regulation on it quickly.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, if— when you have some of the brightest minds, I feel like, current living minds saying that this is one of the biggest inventions since electricity. Yeah, there probably needs to be regulation around it. And because they say at first people were saying biggest invention since the internet, and then they're kind of going past that now. They're like, no, this is like way past internet. And, you know, saying a lot of people will— I mean, just what it's capable of is a lot. I mean, I think losing, you know, people losing jobs, you know, being able to do things that currently you pay people for, you know, it sounds really super, super interesting. And what I did hear about it though right now is as powerful as it is, it's still still at such early stages. Not, not to say, not to discount it by any means, but the applications— what do I hear— the applications of it are a mile wide, right? I mean, you could use it everywhere, but like, they're really about an inch deep on like in each application right now, right? Um, which is still to say they've done quite a bit. Um, and, and that's the exciting part though, is how broad, uh, of a spectrum like you're going to be able to impact. So I think it's really cool. We started to dabble with it a little bit on our end. Um, I mean, just quick stuff like that we've done is like email responses and things like that, coming up with email responses for clients, coming up with— I mean, we're super interested in it. We've been playing around with things like, uh, you know, looking up certain tax code. Um, and, you know, bottom line, it's just a better— it's like a better Google, right? Um, you know, if, if people out there don't think that, you know, uh, uh, you know, their accountants Google things, I mean, you know, I mean, we're just as human as, as anyone else, right? And if you need to look something up, a lot of times you'll Google, you know, certain codes or things like that to make sure that you're finding, you know, doing the right thing or finding some of the right tax savings for people. And so we've been testing it out on like, you know, looking at, you know, if it can come up with the right codes or the right reasoning behind why, you know, X, Y, or Z needs to be done on a tax return. And it's been accurate like to a T and it's done it very well. You know, where if you Google something, you still got to do, you know, your own research generally, um, you know, and so kind of read through the articles and stuff like that and find stuff. Um, and Google is getting better and better, obviously, and they're going to release their own here soon. Uh, but what we found with ChatGPT is it just, it just does an amazing job of like sifting through the information and presenting you exactly what you need to know. And like in a very like paragraph form, like without you going to do it. So it's been super interesting. And I mean, in essence, on our end, we've been like fact-checking it though, right? We've been like, all right, let's look up some things and then let's see if— let's make sure that's right. You know, either some things that we know are right, you know, that we look up and we're like, okay, cool, it's pulling up the right stuff, or some things that we don't know and then we go fact-check it ourselves. Um, but it's, it's been amazing from what we've seen thus far.

Yeah, Bradley, so I gotta do— I was gonna say, look at— I've just ran in certain like sales emails or sales texts, and you can put in whatever product or service you're offering and, you know, say write me a text message or write me an email on this thing. And it's pretty wild how detailed and accurate it is, right?

It's amazing.

Or recommendations, right? Like, what should I, you know, have for this, and it will give you a pretty accurate recommendation, right?

Yeah. Uh, I had somebody send me— so there's two things with this. I had somebody send me a text message asking if I could create something like a letter basically and send to them. And, you know, I was like, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll do that and send it to them. So normally that would have been, you know, get back to number one. I'd had to put it on my to-do list, right? Because I mean, I could have given it to Lauren, my EA, but I was like, she wouldn't have context. And so I literally, and I was thinking, okay, I got to put on my to-do list. I got to go back to the office. I got to type it out. I got to do this. I got to, you know, like the whole thing would have taken me maybe 30 minutes to do, maybe something like that. So I thought I was standing in line at, um, Cava, this place kind of like Chipotle.

But that's the place, and I said, huh, that's it, that's the born business, it was started here, man.

Cava is awesome. Cava is awesome. I should just buy stock in Cava because I eat there enough to, uh, to make sure the stock does well. But anyway, so no joke, I took the text message and I thought, I'm just going to see what— I'm just going to see, uh, what this thing could do. So I took it, copied the text message, threw it in ChatGPT and said, help me out here. That's what I said. That was the prompt. And it spit this answer out. I was like, wow, that's pretty amazing. I hit the copy, I put it in a Google Doc. I took the Google Doc because it needed my signature, took the Google Doc, saved it on my phone, sent it to GoodNotes. Signed it with my finger on my phone and sent it to her in a PDF. The whole process was 3 minutes. I hadn't even— I was standing in line of coffee, I hadn't even ordered, and I thought, man, that's amazing. Like, that's amazing. Like, the same thing I did, and it helped me do that, and I changed like maybe 2 sentences on it, uh, just real quick. I was like, let me edit this out, and, uh, and, and it was done. And I thought, man, that, that right now is super powerful because that helped me. I didn't have to worry about doing that and turned it around. And she, you know, then here's the thing, then the client comes back and says, that's amazing. How did you do that that fast? I was like, hey, you know, I just knocked it out real quick. No big deal. I didn't say, well, ChatGPT, you know, made me look like a superstar.

And I sit here waiting on your email all day, every day, and whatever you need.

Yeah, I got it. All right, so I got, I got this context I want to share with you guys and we'll wrap up. So, um, I had somebody share this with me, so this is not an original Bradley thought, but I thought it was amazingly fascinating. And they said, if you pay attention to U.S. presidential elections— now the person telling me this is an Australian who lives in London, and so he knows a lot about presidential elections— and he said, if you go all the way back —obviously, we call these fireside chats. So, ironically, he said, if you go all the way back to the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt, those are like in the '30s or so. That was the moment that radio overtook newspapers because he used the fireside chats to help him get elected. Fast forward a number of years, and in the 1960s, presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. That's the moment TV overtook radio because Kennedy was so much better in that debate than Nixon was. He smashed him. You know, Nixon was sweating, literally. People, people saw that. And so that was the moment that TV overtook radio. Fast forward to 2008, and then the next big, uh, kind of U.S. presidential thing happened, and that was Obama using social media. That was the first time that social media had really come on, come on, and Obama used it obviously to help him get elected. Fast forward to 2016, and when the Trump campaign used data, data analytics— I mean, obviously everything with you know, Cambridge Analytica and all that sort of thing. Look, nobody write me in about politics. This is not about politics. It's about looking at the presidential elections. And then now in 2024, next year, what's going to be present? AI. AI is going to impact the 2024 presidential elections because there's already been videos and pictures of presidential candidates that are not real. People have used AI to create things of different people being, you know, whether it's arrested or doing things, and you're like, wait a minute. So here's what it comes down to. We're going to get to where with AI moving forward, we're not going to be able to trust our eyes and our ears. Up to this point, we've been able to do that. Now I have to go, whoa, wait a minute, is that actually— is that actually Bradley doing that? And I'll just tell you guys Ali, kudos to you on this. He sent me something and said, hey, I got this thing, got this idea, I want to test it. He used something— Ali, tell me what it is, I don't know what the software was— he used something that he fed into an AI my voice, sent it back to me and said, hey, what do you think about this? I was like, wow, that is unbelievable. To the point to where it's pretty scary. Now, is it? I think people could pick up on it, but it was probably 90%. You know, there's a few words I'll say that are pretty Southern that come out. It was unbelievable.

So now I'll have to come on and say some words that are Southern.

Some words that are Southern.

You say some words that are not Southern.

Oh, okay, okay. But anyway, to the point, um, I won't go— well, I'll have to save that one, okay, for another one. But, uh, the scam is— and that— isn't that kind of cool to look back at the presidential elections and see these moments? Because here's the thing, if you— if I— looking back on it, and I'm not— we— you mentioned earlier, and I agree with you, like, social media is just not my thing. I mean, I get— people could give me all the reasons why I need to be more active on social media. I don't need to hear it. I know. Um, but if, if looking back on it though, seriously, this is my thoughts on this. Looking back on it, if in that moment I would have said, man, this social media thing is really a deal, and I would have gone all in on social media, how impactful would that have been? Would that have been in 2008 had I done that and paid attention to what Obama was doing? And I look at this now And I was telling some people the other day, I'm not missing this wave. I'm not missing this wave. Like, I get people are concerned about it and there's like, oh, where's this going to go? Look, I, I am going to build the businesses off the backs of ChatGPT and AI, whether what people like it or not. Like, there is something here. I'm not missing this wave. And so I don't know how to surf right now, but I'm going to learn how to surf. I'm not going to get dumped by the AI wave. I'm just not going to do it. And so my feeling is, is if I stay abreast to these tools, which maybe another episode we can talk about some of the tools I've looked at and actually used, um, that are actually pretty amazing— I mean, ChatGPT obviously being one of them, but there's several other ones, um— I think that that helps me to be able to be nimble so that if there is disruption, I'm ahead of the curve and I can capitalize on that while there's an opportunity, because I don't want to miss this wave. And so Anyway, thought I'd share that. Thoughts, and we'll close it out.

I'll give you, well, two comments on that. First off, all the scams going on, right? So you can use, you know, the, the, the new tools for great power and also like great, you know, disruption, right? The scams where they're copying your voice and calling your spouse and telling them to do X, Y, and Z with money, or et cetera, right? That's all existing out there, right? Um, uh, but, uh, to Micah's— I think Micah said, you just hinted at it— my idea is you know, with new technology. I think presidential election campaign is fascinating to kind of hear about the new mediums and how they come up. But, you know, right now it's like AI+, right? It's gonna, it's gonna help us do our jobs better, and it's like surface level and knows a lot of things, but it's only surface level deep. So I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity to take it into niches and really know the subject matter expertise and teach the AI along the way to like get deep into those niches. It's just like where I see massive business opportunity, right? Because a lot of those things, but it can't do some of the human things still. So there's probably some going deep on some of those things, probably really good, I would think, really good business opportunities.

Yeah, cool. Micah, final thoughts?

I'm I continue to be super excited about it. I think there are going to be the necessary amounts of regulation that, you know, they're going to have to work in there. You know, that is way over my head, but there's enough to be scared about with the things that it can do. As much as it can do, it's just crazy how how easily and quickly people can use great things to do bad. It never ceases to amaze me. I think you're totally right about this upcoming— I'm not a very political person. I especially don't want to— I don't certainly enjoy talking about politics necessarily in a large scale. But In terms of how I think it'll impact this presidential election, I think 100%. There was a lot of disinformation in the last one. We started to get a taste of that, of just fake accounts, fake news, right? I mean, that was a big thing. I think this is going to be a whole new level, right? I mean, it's like auto-generated fake news that's just pumping out all the time. And, you know, it's gonna— it'll put some pressure, I think, on our kind of established— or, you know, maybe we'll find some new ways— but like our established mediums for like finding truth, or like where we find, you know, reputable, you know, information and articles, things that we trust. Um, it's amazing the things that are out there that just kind of random new publications, you know, of things where, you know, it looks familiar, but like, because I know I've seen somewhere I'm like, it looks like a normal regular article, but then I look at the name of the thing, I'm like, I've never heard of this, you know, this, this, you know, newspaper or whatever it is. And, uh, you know, it's really shocking. Um, and, you know, I, I just think it's definitely going to be something that we see this year, and I think it— or next year, and it's going to be something that it— I don't know, it'll push us, it'll challenge us. I think as a— I mean, this is certainly global, but push us as a country to probably look towards where do we find the actual truth, right? Where are the sources we go to? Right. What are those? I guess call it news outlets that we go to. you know, are they gonna be able to push forward to allow, you know, a lot of the country to say, yes, I trust them, or man, I need to go, you know, are they gonna become more powerful because people are starting to realize how much like misinformation is out there? Who knows? But, yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

Bradley, there's probably a whole business idea for you right there is, uh, creating the trust source with how do you know which is the, you know, like, uh, you're, you're, you get a spam call from your spouse using AI voice. Uh, you know, how do you verify, right? Yeah, for sure.

Actually, what about that right there? Like, you know, there's tons of plugins like in your browser. What if— I think, I think I saw Facebook have something similar to this because they're really trying to combat, um, fake news, right? And they were saying like there would be some things that were like— they would like— I forget how they did it. It'd be like a question mark on there when you would see like this might not be real. I think they started doing that on Facebook. But like, what if you had a plugin on, say, Chrome that was like a scam, you know, AI plugin where the AI was trying to help tell you whether what you were reading was real or not?

We're getting deep now, right? Good AI, bad AI fighting against each other. What if that—

what if the good AI that you— turns on you and starts telling you that the fake news you're reading is real. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a movie about this, I'm sure, right?

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

All right guys, I think that's the— I think that's the podcast.

That was a good— that's a wrap today. Yep, there we go. All right, I think we covered a lot. Um, this all started with, uh, with, I think, a question about like, uh, how many team members do you have, Dave? Yeah.