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Business Brain, episode 629 for Casual Friday, March 7, National Employee Appreciation Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas and we analyze them, we dissect them, we use them to help tune our business brains so we each can lead those charmed lives with a little skill, a little more knowledge than we could the day before. Our sponsor for this episode is Rogue amoeba. We're@macaudio.com brain and codebrain gets you 20% off the best audio software for the Mac, hands down. They've got so many great things, and I'm using some of it right now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man? Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. Here we are again. I like it.

Again on Friday.

In fact. Yeah, we got an email from Jonah Falculin. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, Jonah. Sometimes I talk to AI when I'm bored. I ask silly questions, and AI is fun and entertaining and even informative. What I really love is that AI can provide interesting and informative conversations on a wide range of topics, from science and history to entertainment and culture. However, as a mom with a grade school daughter, I limit her use of AI to encourage active learning. I want her to view challenges as opportunities for growth and learning rather than relying solely on AI for answers. I have things to say about this.

Me too. That's a good one.

You want to start or you want me to start?

Well, I guess I'll start. Is this the. You can't use calculators on the. On the test type of thing, where that's what it was like when I was in school. You're like, wait, why shouldn't I be able to use a calculator?

Because I think there's that happening. But I don't think this is what Jonah's talking about. I think Jonah's pretty AI positive.

Yeah, seems like it. So she's trying to ensure her daughter is thinking through the process, not just relying on something to give her the answer.

Yes, that's. That's how I'm interpreting this. And I think. I don't think that that's something we should limit to just children. Yeah, I like. This is for me too. And in fact, if you're looking at, with today's iterations of the LLMs, the, you know, various ChatGPT and. And Gemini and, you know, all the others.

Yep.

They're not the best at simply delivering Answers. Now, some of the deep research stuff that each of them are doing that has increased accuracy quite a bit on just being sort of hands off research gatherers and synthesizers of data. But they often get things wrong still.

With almost every time I use it.

Correct. Yeah. So teaching your, your daughter, Jonah, and really teaching all the rest of us not to rely on it for the answer, but to, to use it as an assistant whose work needs to be checked is a great thing. I think that, like, that's how I use AI most of the time. I am guilty at times of just saying, yeah, go find me the thing. I'll just believe this. But that's not always right.

We do a Google too.

Right. We do it with everything correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a, that's a great tip. And I think it's. I, I do like the concept. I, I think that, yeah, I, There's a follow a guy that I follow. I can't, gosh, Aaron somebody or other. I can't remember his, his, his username right now, but he talks. He's a teacher, he's a professor, and his whole concept is share is bringing AI into the classroom instead of trying to fight against it. Yes. Right. And I.

Different conversation from what Jonah brought up. But, but yes, I'm ready to have this one too. Let's go.

Yeah, it's a good, it's a good topic to try to bring at some point and to discuss because it's. I think it's the same with your business. It's trying to. How do you max. Maximize the benefits without, you know, relying on it too much and not making you think and your brain turned to mush.

I had an interesting issue with effectively this, but it was decades ago, so it wasn't AI. I wrote a term paper. It was 10th grade. It was the first time I was writing a term paper. And our teacher explained the process. And the process was going to be you research, you write your rough draft, you submit your rough draft. I will review it and then review it with you, show you all the things you did wrong. And it's the edit process and it's teaching you how to research and write. So I love it. Right, Great.

Yeah.

I mean, it sucked at the time, don't get me wrong. But of course, great, great value in this. Right. So I did the, I did the assignment and I submitted my rough draft. Now we had an Apple IIC at home and so I, you know, did my research and I typed my rough draft into the word processing app. Whatever it was at the time on my Apple iic, I printed out the rough draft and I submitted it. And my teacher said, so this is not the rough draft that you were supposed to submit. Your rough draft, not the final. I'm like, well. I said, some version of you haven't read it yet. I think. I think we'll all agree this is a rough draft. And she's like, well, but you typed it. I'm like, well, I typed it into my computer so that when we do edits, I can just go and edit the stuff on the computer and then I'll print the final once, you know, once we're done. She's like, well, that's not fair. The rest of the class hand wrote theirs and then is going to have to go and type it again. I said, yeah, I got that. I, as I understood the assignment, it was not about the mechanics of the grunt work of typing and writing. In fact, I would argue I'm getting more out of this because edits for me are a non issue. I want to learn how to do this. And there's no friction from going and doing an edit. In fact, we could do three rounds of rough drafts. It doesn't matter. It's not like I have to type it and figure out does it fit in the page, like, all that stuff's gone. And she was like, well, if you are unwilling to write your handwrite, your rough draft, I will fail you on this project. And I marched her down to my guidance counselor's office and I explained exactly what I just did here. And when I finished, my teacher went to plead her case. And I'll never forget this because it was one of the first times the administration was on my side, perhaps one of the last. My guidance counselor's hand went up and said, nope, stop. He is 100% right. Oh, I finished my diatribe with. And by the way, within five years, I might be the first person that did this, but everyone's going to be here. And obviously I was right, and I knew I was going to be right. And my guidance counselor's hand went up and said, he is 100% correct. This is how we will be teaching this class very soon, and we might as well start today. He's going to get more out of this than every other student in that classroom because they're hung up on how they're going to get their thing typed right now. And that is no longer a concern of his.

Yeah.

And she said, I like it. You will not penalize him. One point for this.

My teacher also like. I also like. It's. You're telling the 10th grade story, but it's Adult Dave's version. Telling, retelling, telling it. Yeah, I marched her down to the.

I did march her down.

I got it. I got it. Yeah, I can just see it. Come on, let's go.

Let's go, let's. I said let's go to my guidance counselor right now.

Yeah.

And she's like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, I'm gonna go down there and tell this to her. You're welcome to come with. And she decided to join.

Yeah.

Because she wanted the opportunity to plead her case, which she, she, as it turns out, did not get. All right, folks. You know I love talking about the tools that make running a business easier. Well, when it comes to recording this very podcast and literally every other podcast I do, I couldn't do it without the software from our sponsor, Rogue Amoeba. Seriously, if my Mac lost Loopback, Audio Hijack, or Farrago, I'd probably have to record this show on a tin can and some string. It probably wouldn't sound all that good to you. Rogue Amoeba makes the best Mac audio tools, period. Want to route audio between apps? Loopback does it effortlessly. Need to capture any sound on your Mac? Audio Hijack is a total game changer. And their new Whisper AI powered transcription. Yep, you heard that right. It turns everything I say into text right on my Mac. No cloud, no nonsense, just fast, accurate transcriptions. If you're running a podcast, a business, or just want the ultimate control over audio, you need Rogue Amoeba. Check out their apps@macaudio audio.com brain that's macaudio.com brain plus through the end of May. Because you're a business brain listener, you can save 20% with code. Yep. Brain. So MacAudio.com brain code brain. 20%. This is a no brainer. See what I did there? Live your charmed life with better audio. Go grab Rogue Amoeba's stuff today. And our thanks to our friends at Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this episode. How are you using AI Shannon this week?

Let me tell you a story. So I did this last week, but it's relevant. Doesn't matter Previous show. Yeah, it doesn't matter when I did it. So I got hired by a person that works for a business, needed some help kind of formulating their sales plan. They didn't feel like they were connecting with their audience very well. And their. Their company. What they the service that they Offer, which I'm. I won't talk about, but sure. It's pretty complicated. And I said, okay, yeah, no problem. Glad to help you. They booked a call, everything. So in the meantime, I said, okay, I need to figure this out. I know nothing about this service that they. That the company offers. So the. So I went up. I saw that, oh, they have a. They have social media accounts, of course. And I went up to X just to see if they had one up there. And I said, great. So I went over to Grok, which is the X AI, and I said, hey, give me the lowdown on what this company does. Does and the services they offer, but tell it to me. I'm an entrepreneur. I don't know anything about this kind of stuff, this, what they're doing. So give me the. Break it down.

Yeah, keep the jargon out of it.

Keep the jargon. And so, you know, that was the first part. It's just great. Very obvious. Kind of broke it down. I said, okay, cool. And so I got a handle on it. And then I went back to the individual's account and I went to Grok and I said, compare these two accounts and tell me what this person is. Is. Is this person selling this product correctly? Ah. And Grok said, no. And it was very interesting. And Grok said, I'll give you a breakdown of what. What worked, because they base their no on the success of this person's engagement.

Okay. All right.

Of trying. Trying to sell this product and trying to do work for this business. And Grok, you know, said, okay, here's. Here's how they. They could be doing a better job. And so I was able to break down just a complete, detailed, deep dive into every. Into thousands of posts that the company had made.

Yeah.

And then hundreds, maybe a thousand posts that the salesperson had made. And I was able to find a disconnect between what each account was doing. And Grok offered up and said, here's how to connect those. These two messages. Here's how to bring it together. Here's how to portray it in a way that's not overly complicated. And so when I had the call, which was this morning, I was just so much more prepared because I had learned the basic stuff that the AI would do. Tell me about this company, yada, yada, yada. But it also did this, and I didn't really ask it to do it, but it showed me here, this is, this disconnect between the message here and the message here. And I, When I portrayed that to my client, it Was. It was shocking. And when they brought, they were like, oh, yeah, it, you know, you're right. I'm not explaining that part of it. I'm not. They weren't leaning into the true value proposition. And I don't want to be specific. No, no, no argument. But I can't be specific.

Well, made the argument, at least to me here that, you know, we've been talking this whole episode about what AI is good at and what it's not good at. And one of the things it's great at is looking at a massive set of data and synthesizing, summarizing, even what it does. And then you took two summaries, essentially. Right. A summary of one account with a, With a certain focus and another. And the same focus on this other account and related the two and compared the two. And these are the things that AI currently is. A, it's, it's great at it, and B, even if it wasn't great at it, it's fast at it. And so you're able to look at the results. Then you, using your human, your, you know, your wet mind, your wet computer there, able to say, yes, I, this is correct. Or, or you might look at it and say, please take a look at this again and let me nudge you in a different direction here. You know, like, that didn't seem like it was the case with yours, but in, in a general sense, that might be what you would have had to do if.

Yeah.

If it had gotten off track or something.

That's right. And when I did it and I got those results that were really powerful and, and then I presented them in a way that I thought was easier to. Kind of.

To digest to.

Yeah. To Grok, if you will.

And.

But then when. Yeah.

Have to use this.

Yes, there you go. Yeah. When I thought about it, I said, well, why couldn't I go to two different accounts in the same industry.

Yes.

One that is far more successful than another and have Grok tell me why this account has, you know, 100,000 followers and it's very successful.

Yes.

And this other account that's in basically the same industry, why that one is. And it proceeded to tell me.

Of course it did. This is what I mean. You're using so Grok. For those of you who don't know, Grok is Twitter X's AI engine. So it is. It's a regular large language model with a specific tuning on X. Right. So.

Right.

These kinds of questions are exactly the right thing to use Grok for. What do you need Does. What kind of account on X do you need in order to use Grok?

There's a free version, but there's to get access to the one called Deep Search and the other one's called Deep Think. Yeah, I'm a Premium Plus. I think I'm a Premium plus member.

But what is Premium Plus? What do you pay for Premium Plus?

I think I pay $30 a month.

Okay, got it. So it's more than the eight bucks a month of the regular premium number verified or something.

And you get a bunch of other stuff because I, of course on X, so you get analytics and different things and all this kind of stuff. But you can also just subscribe to Grok. You can download the app in the Apple Store or on the Android Store. I don't know what that costs, but you can, you can just subscribe by itself, I think. Got it. I'm pretty sure. Okay. And so yeah, it, it was impressive, you know, because just like made those connections that were just not obvious to me. And I think you should not ignore it because if you're. And you could use a different. Maybe you could go to ChatGPT and have it go analyze two of these social accounts too. Like if you have a. Oh yeah, that's true.

Why not?

Right? I'm not sure it's just Grok, but you could go and say, look, I want to grow my company's exposure and engagement on Instagram. Ok, well, in this, if you were in, I don't know the. Let's say you're in the. I don't just pick landscape business.

Sure.

And you say, okay, let's say you're.

In the podcast business.

Podcast. Who is in the top? Yeah. What is the best account on Instagram that's getting the most engagement? And it'll tell you. Boom, it'll come up. And then you say, why. How is.

Compare it to mine and, and give me.

Yes.

The next five steps to do.

Correct. How do I get my account to. To that. How. What best practices can I implement? Create a plan for me or for my employees. So if you have. Sure. It doesn't matter if you've got a social media group, people say, what. What are the steps to get us to that account? What are we not getting that they are. And that's, that's pretty wild, man.

Now we have to, we have to end the episode here because I need to go do this right away anyway.

Yeah. If you've used Grok, I'd like to hear how you've used it and what you like about it. Feedbackusinessbrain show. Let us know.

Yeah, absolutely. Feedbackusbrain show. And also go to businessbrain show review. Leave us a review and we'll enter you into a drawing for a MacBook this year. Keep living that charmed life. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.

See ya.