FridAI and Over-Automating

Business Brain, episode 627 for Casual Friday, February 28, National Chocolate Souffle Day 2025. Music right away. It's amazing.

We've done it before.

Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where you send in ideas, we come up with ideas, we then dissect them, we discuss them, we use them to tune our brains so that we can each keep on living those charmed lives that we love so much here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton and I'm still out.

Here in Northern California. I'm Shannon Jean. Yeah, Happy Friday.

Happy Friday, man. Yep.

Yeah.

Another week, another month.

Yes, it's gonna. That's right. The start of another month. February's been.

Yeah, I'm happy to say goodbye to February. I don't know why, it's just. It's not been great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's been highs and lows, but it's, you know, getting stuff done.

I've had more lows than highs, but that's okay. It's fine. It's not a complaint. It's an acknowledgment. We're all human. It's totally fine. I'm okay. Just didn't want to make it. I don't usually complain or even do anything that's other than being overly positive on this show, so I just want to make sure.

The highs and lows of entrepreneurship. It's a roller coaster. It's like one day you're just killing it and everything is going great, and the next day you're just like, how can I continue?

Will I still be in business tomorrow?

I. I've been there so many times and it's. I still. After all these years of. Of feeling that way and doing, I still. When I'm at the bottom of the roller coaster, I'm still just like, man, how am I, you know, I gotta. I gotta. How am I gonna get back up? It's gonna be this way. How's it gonna. Am I gonna feel this way for. This is it now?

Yeah.

How am I going to continue? And then sure enough, something will happen and I'll just be like, woohoo. Woo.

That's it. I know, I know. I. I heard myself utter last week or something like, God, I. I can't keep doing this. Like, you know.

Oh, yeah, I know. It's like, here we go, here we go.

And it's like, wait, I. I've said that a few times before. Yes, I resemble that remark.

Yes. Yeah, that's great. Hey, I want to talk about automation, but I also want to talk about our Friday AI topic or Friday I. Yeah, sure. What do you want to do first? You want to do the.

No, I want to hear about this over automating thing. Oh yeah.

Okay. So I have a thesis here to sound fancy. I always try to, to I. Before I automate something, I want to do it manually. So I understand it completely.

Same.

Yeah, because I, I think that you put your own fingerprint or your own special sauce and stuff on it. That's why the subtitle for the show, this topic was Losing the Daveness because we talked about last night. You could say your name in there, replace. But looning, losing the you part of it. And if you don't understand how to do it manually at first, I don't know how long you have to do it. But if you, if you don't do it enough times, put in the reps so you understand the process and you put your fingerprint on it, so to speak, before you automate it. I feel like it's often soulless and it's. If it certainly doesn't have your soul in it. And maybe I'm just old school and I have more gray hair than, you know, these AI kids that are up and coming and just, you know, doing amazing things. That's. That could be. But I don't think it's a get off my lawn comment. I think it's. Yeah, it's valuable to me because I, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how else I would do it if I didn't kind of jump in, you know, to, to figure it out first. And then once I figured out, then I'm like, okay, how do I streamline this? How do I automate it? How could. Can I use, you know, what service can I use? Can I use ChatGPT? Do I have to use. What's the zap.

Zapier.

Zap, yeah, Zapier. To connect these things together. But if I don't have that, that manual time with it, if I don't massage it, if I'm not frustrated with it, if I don't learn it inside and out, maybe I don't even know how to automate it until I dive into that.

That's it. I'm the same way. I will start with, you know, I'm thinking of our, the system that we here at Backbeat Media called podman, which is short for Podcast Management system, which is the whole thing that tracks what episodes are going to go live for every single one of our shows, what ads are in those episodes, how much the shows are going to make, then once the ad goes live, did it go and what are the timestamps on it? And then now the system will like automatically pull the audio of the ads so that we can send that along to the sponsor and all the things. Right. When we started representing podcasts here, we did not have that system. There was no third party system to just buy. And so we started with a series of Google sheets.

That's funny.

That were shared. Yeah, We. We could all see them internally, and then each sheet would be shared with the podcasters of the hosts of any given show. And it was fine. It was super tedious, obviously, but it allowed us to learn what we needed to do to make this work. And it was tedious, but it was informative. And I didn't even know.

Phrase.

Yeah. I didn't even know where it was going to go from there. And you said, I don't know how long you have to do it before you automate it. I would posit that you will know. You'll get to a point where you're no longer iterating every week on the system. Right. Like, we started the spreadsheets, it was like, oh, we need another column for this.

Becomes routine over and over.

We're just doing it. And now it's actually tedious. It's not like we're building the widget, we're just using the widget. And it turns out this is a crappy way to use this particular widget. Right. Like, you get to that point and then you build the thing. Now, with Podman, I hadn't even gotten to the point consciously where I was like, oh, we need to do this. I remember when the idea for Podman came to me, I had just gone and spent an hour in the flotation tank where my mind is free of all thought if I do it successfully. And I did that day. But it was about an hour away, this particular tank. And so I was driving home and I had learned by that point to not have any music or anything on for the ride home, because as my brain sort of comes back online, there's some really good ideas that occasionally percolate out. And that was one of them. It was like, wait, we need to build a database and do this this way. And I saw the whole thing and I took a voice memo and sent it to Adam, who coded it all up. And now that's the thing we run our whole business on.

Yeah, that's awesome.

One nice part about doing it the hard way first, I mean, there's many of them. One is that you learn what you really want out of something. Is that even still today I appreciate Podman because I remember what it was like before, even though it's been 10 years.

Exactly, exactly. You know, same. Yeah. And I think you can take that analogy to any. About anything. Yeah. Because, like, I know when I'm talking to people and they're interested in doing some business or whatever, and I'm trying to give them some advice, if their focus is on, I don't want to get my hands dirty. I want to hire somebody to do all this. I want to automate all these things. I'm. I always say, hey, you know, you're just not going to know it unless you kind of get your feet, your hands dirty a little bit. Yeah. And you could. I think it's great that you're ready to go and you want to hire people and you want to do all this, you know, automation and systems. That's great. That's how you scale it. Yes, but if you just like, bypass all that stuff, I would, I would, to use your fancy word, posit. Posit, Posit. I would posit that you're not. Your chances of success are lower because you don't understand all the, like, back office stuff that requires it. Like, you know. Yeah, I, I just, I think that's such. It was such a, such a powerful way for me to learn so much about business. Was just like, okay, well, let me just be a craftsman here for a little while. Yeah, just touch it and let me move it and let me sell it and let me get feedback from the people I'm selling it to. And then once I had it in my brain, okay, well, first off, can we buy this product and make money? Right. First and how hard is it to manage? Because if you walk out in your warehouse, that's just my, My. Yeah, Your experience. If you walk out in the warehouse and yell at these guys, hey, why aren't you getting this stuff done faster? Da, da, da. Well, if you don't know what it takes to manage that inventory, or if you don't know what it takes to work in your shipping department, you're just blind. You don't know that. What's. What are you. What are the resources required to ship a hundred orders a day versus, oh, now we're shipping 200 orders a day and wait, why can't they get them out? Well, you have to. You have to get in there.

You gotta you gotta, yeah, you gotta do it. And sometimes you don't need to build it yourself. Sometimes.

True, you will. You will do it.

You will do it the hard way and then realize someone else has built a solution that solves. If it solves 80% of what you want and you can customize the remaining 10% but not the final 10%, that's close enough. You know, you don't have to build it yourself. And I'm saying this mostly to me, but if anybody else is listening, that's fine.

Same problem. I have the same problem. Let's build some custom software.

Yeah. Oh, my whole life has been building custom software and then not being smart enough to sell that. Talk about being in the picks and shovels business. That's right. Like I literally. It's a different skill set from scratch. I built what might have been the first content management system ever. And I was. Content management system is a fancy set of words to describe what WordPress is. I built one long before WordPress was even a twinkle in Matt Mullenweg's eye. But Matt was smarter than me because he took his and made it a viable product for other people to use, as opposed to just use dog food in your own business. And now he gets his own private island. And I don't get that because at.

Least not, you know, it's fine, it's coming.

It's fine. Yeah, it's coming. Exactly. Yeah, I'll, I'll earn it eventually.

But yeah, I, you know, let us know if you think I'm wrong, if I'm right, or if you have other examples that we could talk about. You know, is it, you know, how do you. Do you do it that way? Do you get your hands on it or do you just like. No, Shannon, you're thinking old school. I just go in and do this and do that. I'd love to hear.

Yeah, yeah. Feedbackusbrain show and the word posit was introduced. I mean, I probably heard it before I heard Walter Bishop on Fringe say it, but Walter Bishop on Fringe said it years ago and it stuck in my head. He always reminded me of my grandfather. And if you know about Walter Bishop on Fringe, now you understand my grandfather and it's going to make you go, oh, I see. But yeah, he said that word and it was like, oh, I like that word.

Posit. Yeah.

Friday, Friday I time, Shannon.

Friday.

You want to go first? Do you want me to?

I'll go first.

Okay, sure.

Anytime any gives offers out, I'm taking it. Yep.

Smart man.

Yeah. So I use this tool this week. It's called Napkin AI. Spelled just like the napkin that you have.

Sure.

And it does a few things very, very well, which I really like. And the main thing I use it for is I write a lot, but I always look at other people's stuff, like their content. And they have these awesome graphs and illustrations in there and I'm like, how do they make that? That's totally cool. And I don't know how to make that stuff. I'm not. Good stuff that looks like somebody drew it with a pen or. That's really cool. Well, now I can take my content cut and paste it into Napkin AI. And it grabs data out of whatever I wrote about. Doesn't have to even have numbers in it. And it creates these amazing graphs that. And images that you can put with your content. I love it. And if you're watching the live stream, which probably aren't. But there's.

But you can go watch this on YouTube. We push this out to YouTube so you can watch it after the fact too.

Perfect. Go, go look on YouTube and you can see it. I wrote this article called the Focus on average sale price about increasing. Increasing the price of every single thing you sell so you can make more and sell less. And this, you know, this is what nap. I just cut and pasted in a bunch of text and this is what napkin AI, you know, spit back out in about 10 seconds. And it's. It just looks. Makes me look way smarter than I am.

Yeah. This turns it into like a PDF, white paper, pitch paper, whatever you want.

Exactly, exactly. And I just think it's great. It's. When you're working with it, you can hover over the graphic and it'll offer you 20 other choices of different kinds of graphics that you could change it to. I think if you click that, it might.

It's not letting me click it. It might let you click it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool, man.

Since I'm the author. Yeah. So it's just got in it, you know, it just does it really well. And I'm. I don't pay anything for it. I'm sure they have an upper level tier, but I'm able to download this or share it, collaborate like I did with you, Dave, or save it as a PDF. So check it. Napkin AI.

Amazing. Amazing. I love that.

How about you, Dave?

What are you doing with AI Was on a phone call with someone who's essentially a competitor. It was actually somebody who used to work for me and went off and started his own agency and is doing great. And we will. We're still friends. We still talk all the time. And we share data with each, like, specific pieces of data with each other about, like, hey, this person's buying a lot. You should talk to them. Or this person moves. You should talk to them. Like, it's. It's fine. We're, you know, it. We compete with each other, but that's not really where we compete. Like, there's plenty of money to go around, like, all those things. So I was on the phone with him today, in fact, and we were talking about one thing and that he needed my help with. And then he just started like, oh, you should talk to this person. You know, doing the thing that we do.

Sure.

And I started taking notes. I didn't think I was going to need to take notes. So the only phone call. This was an actual phone call. Yep.

Got it. Got it. Okay.

I didn't think I needed to take notes. So I didn't, like, prepare a notepad ahead of time. And I was walking around my office as I do when I'm on the phone, so that I'm not distracted as we talked about, I think, in the pre show. And so the only thing that I had to easily take notes on was my quartet glass screen, you know, glass whiteboard that I have. It's. It's about the size of my keyboard. It's rectangular. It sits between my keyboard and the computer. And so I grabbed the dry erase marker and started writing. And, you know, dry erase markers are pretty thick tipped. And so I'm writing and trying to squeeze things into corners because there was lots of data being thrown around. And I finished the call and took some action items on the. A few of the things that were like, obviously instant things. And I looked at one thing in the corner and I was like, what the heck did I write here? I cannot. And I kept looking at it, and I'd look, I'm like, I know it's going to come to me. I know. Like, okay, I know what I wrote made sense in the moment. Like, but I just can't read my writing because it's, you know, fat marker trying to squeeze into a corner.

Yeah, yeah.

And finally I was like, oh, it was like 20 minutes before we were going to record here. I was like, I don't know. Like, I don't know that I'm going to remember this. Like, time is passing and it's not coming to me. It's going to drift away. And so I took a picture of not Just it, but it and the two things above it. And said to chat GPT, I can't read my own handwriting. Can you help? And the first pass at it was wrong. Okay, okay. And again, you know, I did not. To your point earlier on, I did not give up when it couldn't tell me what I wrote. And I said, all right, no, here's what I know. So we started. Essentially, I started collaborating with it. And I think that's an important lesson with AI. If you want to collaborate with the AI, it's on you to initiate that collaboration. Rarely does it give you an answer and say, do you have any feedback for me? Sometimes it depends on how you prompt it, but in this case, it was like, I think that's what you said. It's like, there's no freaking way that's what it said. And so I said, no, that's not it. Try again. And it did. And it was like, no. And I said, all right, let me help a little more. There was two words, and I'm like, the first four letters of the bottom word, I think, are these four letters. Like, I know my own handwriting. And so I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's what I wrote, but it just doesn't make any sense. And immediately it was like, oh, I think what you wrote was this. I was like, oh, my gosh. Yes, that was it. That's it.

And you remembered it and.

Oh, yes. Well, it got it. Like, I mean, it was. It wasn't even close. It was spot on by that point. And, you know, like, like we talked about on Wednesday, don't give up. Keep going. Push a little bit. And that's especially true with AI, that the T in that is the transformative part. You get to change the results by poking and prodding at the engine. And don't just make it chat GP use the T like you gotta use the tea.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah, you have to get it.

And it saved my butt. This is a client that will probably wind up spending a bunch of money with us in March, now that I know, to reach out to them.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it's great. So many great things. So many new little tips and all this I'm excited about. I was excited to hear Apple announced today when we were recording this, are spending like $500 billion building a new AI server location, or that's half a trillion dollars.

That's a lot of fricking money. I hope they get it right, because they haven't yet. And Apple rarely tells us where they're going to spend their money. They usually tell us, here's the thing, we spent well. They are so far behind the eight ball in the public eye on, on AI that they, they have to say that they're going to be there someday. And to be fair, Apple has a track record, a little bit of not being the first, but being the best.

Yeah, that's true. That's great.

So, you know, I think let us know trading on that track record, we'll see if they deliver.

Yeah. Yeah. If you have any AI tips for us that you'd like featured in our Friday I segment, let us know. Feedback BusinessBrain Show. And remember, if you leave us a review, you get entered in to win a new MacBook that we're giving away BusinessBrain show reviews. We'll get you there and then follow up with and tell us you left one so we can get your info.

Yes. And yeah, you can send other things to feedbackusinessbrain show and we'll read those on the show. We'll answer your questions. We'll do all the things because it's, it's what we do. We're gonna be here next week, it turns out.

Yes, we are. So 10, 10 more years.

That's right. 10 more years. We'll see you then. Have a great weekend. Keep living that charmed life.