The FridAI Update - AI for the Rest of Us

Business Brain, episode 621 for Casual Friday, February 7, National Working Naked Day. It's more difficult than you think. 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we analyze them, we dissect them, we use them to ensure that we are getting every ounce we can out of every experience any of us has and using it to make sure we keep on living those charmed lives. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Gene. I'm happy to be here. Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Yeah, man.

Yes. Yes. Hey, I want to talk about. Since we spend so much of our time online, it kind of gives us a warp perspective. And I mentioned it to you before we started recording this week's episodes, and you were like, yeah, exactly. And the example I use was like, if I posted something online and for my business or whatever, and maybe I had 15 likes and not very many views, you know, whatever, 50, 100 views, I would. I kind of would consider that a failure. Right.

But if I gave people would.

A lot of people would. Rightly so. Right. And I get it if you're trying to grow and get exposure, but if I gave a talk in person and 15 people came up to me to tell me how much they liked my talk, and there was a hundred people at the talk, dude, I would be a rock star. I would just think, that's amazing. So just, it's important to understand this perspective, that and to even put a little more nuance on it, is that if 15 people liked it, probably a hundred people liked it, but didn't do anything. Right? Or just a big number.

Oh, of course, yes.

If. If, you know, it's just we're so focused or not focused, but maybe. Maybe it's just me. So I only speak to myself. But being focused on these numbers and thinking and, you know, and I remember we had. Who do we have on the show? Years ago, Paul, he was the. He had a company that made conference tables, and he wrote a book called Boss Life or something. Remember that? And. And he asked us. He asked us about the show and he said, well, how many. You know, how many downloads you get? And just at that time, it was like, I don't know, four or five years ago. You're like, well, we, you know, we only get about 3,000. We get about 3,000 downloads a week. And he was like, hey, don't downplay that. He's like, that's amazing. Why Is that not good?

Why is that not good? I know.

And so we just kind of get this perspective of vast numbers because the Internet's, you know, ginormous. And so give yourself some credit that you're. If you have an impact on one person, you know, and they. You connect with them, those are the things that are really crucial and those are the things that stand out. Like, I had a. I wrote a post one time about always being an outsider and I had one person come back and say, dude, that's my life. You nailed it.

There you go.

I was like, wow, it really meant something to me that he called me out and said, hey, I've connected. This is everything you described. I've been through this kind of thing. So I was like, well, that's good. I hope that's helpful that I share this concept of being an outsider. So anyway, just don't get stuck in this warp perspective of what's happening online.

No, it's interesting. That 3,000 number resonated in my head when you said it. There's the Beacon Theater is a theater, well known, famous theater in New York City where lots of people played. It's now owned by the Madison Square Garden group.

Hmm.

But it's, it's always been there. It's been there forever. It's actually the place I saw my first concert and. Yep. And it holds 2,894 people. The place is huge. If you walk there, there's a lot of freaking people. Like you're going to wait in a long ass bathroom line if you go to the Beacon Theater. You know what I mean?

Yes, yes.

So like that perspective and to your point about speaking at a conference, I was at a, at that NAMM conference recently. I went to see a person speak his. He was talking about the new book that he has out. And his name is Narada Michael Walden. And you might not know that name, but he's a drummer and a producer. He started his career in drumming playing in fusion bands like Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra. And then he also played with Journey for a while. He was mentored by Quincy Jones. There's gonna start to be names that you hear. And then he produced Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. Right. So fairly, you know, he's got a pedigree there, like really does. There were. And this is a conference of musicians where I would presume 40% of the people there, if you said that name to them, they go, oh yeah, narrative. Like, obviously that guy, you know, he's held in In. In his name is mentioned in hushed tones, right?

Okay. Yeah.

There were maybe 100 to 150 of us in the room to see this. That's. That's quote unquote it. Yep. And then afterwards, there were maybe, like you said, 15 or 20 people that I saw get in a line to go up and say hello to him. And that guy I happened to be with, a friend of mine who is a professional photographer, and they asked him to come and take a picture of Narida with the gentleman that moderated the session and all that.

Okay, sure.

And so we waited, and they finally said to my friend, okay, it's gonna be time, because they're gonna throw us out of the room. So we're gonna steal Nerida away from this line of. Of attendees that are trying to talk to him so we can get this picture. And his publicist went over and was like, naruto, we need to. Then he said, yeah. He turned to him, he said, no. He said, I am nothing without my fans. And he ignored his publicist and kept going and did not come and take those pro pictures until all of his fans. Yeah. But what was great was it meant that I got my picture with him taken by a pro.

Nice. Yeah, that's cool.

So that worked out for me, and I got to have a conversation with him. We have a. A mutual friend that. That he's played a bunch of music with. And so we talked for a little bit. But. But. But that was the thing. Like, every single interaction he had, he made sure was meaningful. And it was quote, unquote, only 15 or 20 of us.

Yeah. So, yeah, it. It's put it in perspective and think how you can have big impact and can feel like a grind if you are just putting good content or valuable posts or even blog posts, like blog post on your own company website, or.

A podcast, for example.

Or a podcast. Oh, man. We both.

My third episode of the day, Shannon.

Yeah, yeah, I know. And it's a tough one because I feel great now doing the livestream because I see the numbers. I'm super, super number driven. I can't help it. Yeah. And so I'm like, oh, there's 490, 439 people on the live stream. Maybe there's not, but for me, there is.

There's definitely not. We know there's not, but it doesn't matter.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. It motivates me, keeps me going. I'm. I'm hoping to impact one of you. Right. That would be a Huge, huge success. If one of you sent us an email and I get this now, now that I'm, I'm on Exmoor, I get comments like, man, I listened to that last episode. It was so great. And you know that I want that, like all of us, I want to be purposeful, I want to be valued. And so getting to hear that and, you know, getting that perspective. So I encourage you not to get lost in the daily grind and I also encourage you to reach out to people that are creating content that is having a positive impact on your life and tell them guys like us, businessprint show review, go leave us a review, please. That would help us tremendous. We're giveaway something awesome. Last time we gave away a MacBook and we're going to enter everybody that leaves us a review up there. It's going to be amazing. I can't wait.

Shannon. I don't know why it took this long for me to, for either one of us to have this idea, but we talk about how we do this segment about AI on, on, on the second show of the week.

Yeah.

And why isn't it Friday? F R I D A I.

I like that it's Friday.

It's Friday. Yeah, Friday.

I love it. I don't know. Genius. Yes. Yes. All right. I have, I have a, a discussion about this that I think you'll find fascinating. I, I have a great con friend of mine that, you know, I follow on X as a lot of people follow him as well. His name's Chris Corner. His, his account is MHP Underscore Guy. All right. Because he also invests in mobile home parks and things like that. But he's super crazy business, not lots of great ideas. So he always talked about this idea is like, hey, you know this on Craigslist, there's tons of pianos for free. People are just trying to get rid of them because they're big and they're heavy. And you could do this with any big item you think people want to get rid of. But he's like, you know those pianos? And he talked about this about a year ago, said, you know what if you went to every one of those person that's trying to give away a piano? Which I don't think very many people go pick them up. Right, Right. What if you went to each of those person? People reached out and said, hey, for two, I'm going to be in your neighborhood for $200, I'll come pick up your piano for you and I'll, and I'll, I'll recycle it or I'll donate it or whatever. So his concept was you could probably make two grand in a weekend driving around picking up pianos. Oh, yeah. Flipping the script on it because you're solving a problem. Of course they want to give it away, but they need to really get rid of it.

It's more about getting rid of it than giving away.

Getting rid of it. So we had.

And the person who wants to take it is. Is happy to take it. Also needs someone to deliver it because most people can't move pianos around.

Yeah, yeah. So his concept is like, hey, this could be an interesting side hustle. He's talked about it before. So last week, as you know, you may not know, but open AI ChatGPT, they announced, maybe it was a week before a new higher end. Well, they have a higher end service is 200 bucks a month instead of their 20amonth. And with the $200 a month type of account, you get access to this new thing called the operator.

Okay.

And the operator is basically like an agent that goes out and does stuff for you. Okay. So Chris. And if you go to his account on X, you can watch him do this. He. He recorded his screen as he was doing it and he said, okay, I'm going to create this. I'm going to tell the operator to go to my Facebook Marketplace account. And people are listing this stuff on Facebook Marketplace all the time as well as Craigslist. But he did it with Facebook Marketplace. Go find everybody who's giving away a piano within a 50 mile radius of where I live. Take this message that I'm writing and send it to every single person there and offer to pick up their piano for $200. And when they respond, this is the response I want you to say, and he created this whole thing. You got to watch it. It's crazy. It didn't. It wasn't 100%. Obviously, it was a little slow. It's brand new, It's a little slow, but it did it. It did it. It went and did. And he's like, wait, I just got a response as he's recording it and somebody is responding and, and the AI is responding and he's like, my operator is responding to that. This guy has no idea that he's talking to my AI right now. You know, and so what I love about this concept and what I love about Chris's content is it's very simplified, right? It's not some crazy complex like, yeah, well, if you're going to build a SaaS and you're going to do this with your, your business development. No, no, no. Let's just use going up and getting people to pay us to pick up their pianos. It couldn't be easier.

No.

Or, you know, more simplistic, more simple.

Yeah. Picking up pianos is not easy.

Not easy. No. Yeah. You gotta have a couple guys, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But his concept is like, I can have this, do this every day, right? I don't have to be there. It will just go out every time someone does it. And you could say, hey, let's wait and do a posting that's been reposted. So they. Oh, wow. They've had it for a couple weeks and nobody's picked it up the piano. So maybe they're a little more interested in paying you $200 to come pick it up. And as I watched this and I, and I, I responded to him and I was like, wait a minute, you're, you're, you know, you're blowing my mind here. And he's like, oh, I totally thought of you as I was doing this. Because I love all those crazy side hustles too. The opportunities for this, these agents and operators is it, it will be life changing for us. There is. You will no longer like, I need an appointment for this, right? I need a reservation for this your agent or your operator, you'll just tell your phone, hey, I want to go. I want to, I need to schedule, find a great place, romantic restaurant that I, I want to go Valentine's Day or I want to, I want to do a trip to Napa. I want to go to these three wineries. I need some appointments. Da, da, da, da. All this kinds of stuff and this ways to make money with it is to taking information and using it to create a new revenue stack for yourself.

Now, I know this isn't the only feature of ChatGPT Pro, but it's one of the newer ones.

Fine, great.

But imagine if you would 5 years ago I said to you, Shannon, hey, look, I, I know we're talking about virtual assistance, which is a term I still don't like. Remote assistance, offshore, whatever you want to call it. And the cost is of course less. And so you can get somebody for $20 an hour instead of $60 an hour to do some of this work or maybe less, I don't know. And in that frame of mind where we were thinking about this five, seven years ago, if I said to you, or if I could just, if you could just pay $200 a month to have somebody on the clock for you 24 hours a day. And. And no one was going to be mad that you were overworking some poor human. Would you. Would you try that for a month?

Are you kidding me? Of course.

Of course. But here's the problem. Everybody sees chat GPT is like, oh, well, it's $20 a month. Why would I pay.

Or free.

Why would I pay $200?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I could tell you right now, the first thing I thought of is, so I buy lots of stuff at auctions, right? That's my thing. So the great thing about this is you're not, like, you don't have to program this operator. You're literally just telling it.

Oh, just tell it.

Yeah, I want to. Okay. I want to buy. I need a new gazebo for a vacation rental that we have. So I go to the operator and say, listen, here's my login credentials to get on this auction site that I belong to, and I want to buy, let's say, a store return or overstock of a gazebo from Costco. Okay, here's my login information. Great. It goes, okay, I can log in. I can access it. I want you to be on the lookout for this product. They update these auctions every day. When you find one in this condition, that's this size, here's the amount, I want you to bid on it.

Okay.

And then I walk away.

Hang on, hang on. No, this is great. But what you just gave me, the idea was, well, we have all these services like Zapier and all the things that, like, glue the Internet together that we pay little bits for. And they're frustrating because. Or ifttt. Right. I have TTT or Zapier.

And.

And you've got to go and essentially build the scripts in there. And they're fairly easy. They've made the.

Yeah, it's a great.

Fine. It's a great product. But what if I could just say, hey, you know, every time I post something to Facebook, I also want you to post it. If I use this hashtag or something.

Something co.

Trigger some trigger. Every time I do that on my Facebook account, if it's public and this and that, I want you to just copy it to others. And if it's longer, then would fit nicely. Like, if I want it to make sure that when it comes on X, it's not. You don't have to click to expand.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you summarize.

Yeah, yep.

It summarize it to this. Do this, take the image, go with it, yada, yada, yada. If it won't do that today, I guarantee you it'll do that in six months, but it'll probably do that today.

Yeah, I, I think you're absolutely right. And I think companies, we, we talked about SaneBox in the last show. These companies that are going to. Remember I said change is the only constant, right? Like, if I was zapier, I'd be like, oh wait, we need an agent.

We need to build an agent.

Yeah, we've enabled this. Communicate with Zapier has enabled the Internet and connectivity for a decade. Right? Yes, but, but if they don't adapt and bring in an AI that makes their service better, companies like this that have these operators or agents are going to eat their lunch all day because they're going to go, they're going to go, look, all we have to do is watch you do it one time, right? And you don't have to have a connector. It'll just do it, it'll just go, oh yeah, I'll log, I'll log in for you. I mean the, the, the method, the thing like, hey, monitor my email. And every time you see this phrase, do this, every time this person, you know, we're talking about follow up.

Yeah.

Every time you see me say I'm going to follow up with you in a couple weeks, remind me, remind me. I mean, right? This is life changing. And the perfect example is to start with something silly like a piano. You know what I mean? Because of course it breaks it down.

Or even just your social posts, like something that you can do, low stakes, like. But yes, the next time you find your. And I'm saying this to myself as much as I'm saying it to all of us, the next time you find yourself saying, oh shoot, I have to do all of that, stop and wonder, is it worth spending $200 to see if a chat GPT operator could do that for you forever?

And I guarantee it's going to get cheaper, right? I mean, of course it will. It's just going to be table stakes, right? You'll just, it'll be built in. Apple will go, oh, this is just part of the os.

I'm not, I'm not so sure Apple will ever get what. But someone will hate that. I love those.

I love that.

I love Apple. But they're their commitment and it truly is a commitment. Their commitment to privacy is, is, is has them hamstrung on this AI think it does. And I, I completely understand why.

Yeah, I completely understand the foundation on it. And, but it's being going to be used against them.

It already is.

I'm willing, I'm willing to give up some of that privacy to enhance my life and build things. I want to build. And you know, and before we go, I want to just point something out. You said. Okay. Because it's, it's very important. We talk about this all the time. This is not a topic. Maybe we'll turn it into a topic for a show. But you said, I'm telling, I'm saying this for myself.

Oh.

As much as for the listeners. Right. Well, one of the big reasons I do this show, it's really like an hour long affirmation for me every single week about what I should be doing, about how I should be acting, about how reality is flexible, how action is so important. And I talk about this all the time. How you have to build your inner judge. And there's no way I would be where I am today without having these conversations 52 times a year.

Yes.

520 hours. Let's just use that. Okay, whatever. Yeah. 520 hours a year. Sure. Let's just say that number over a decade. So 5200 hours of us talking to each other about our business. What's the best practices?

I say that this is the most valuable show that I do and I don't make the most money directly from it.

No, no.

By any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Sounds good.

But, but it's that and it, and there's, and there's, there's truth to that whole thing. If you want to really learn how to do something, teach someone else how to do it. Right.

Yeah.

And that's what also what we're. When I show up here, it's as much about me learning as it is helping everybody else learn. I know you're the same way. Yeah, yeah.

And absolutely.

And it's a craft. So. Yeah, yeah. You just, the more you do it.

I mean the stuff I talk about, you know, we, we. And I think we do a pretty good job. We try not to preach at all. We talk about, oh, this has worked for me, but I failed miserably at this. But there's so many, much of this stuff that I talk about that I'm not very good at, you know, of. Oh, you know, your list and keeping productive and this and that and the other. It's like, well, I'm doing the best I can, but I'm better because I'm here every single week. And I hope it has that impact on our listeners lives as well. Same and if it does, give us a review.

Leave us a review.

Business Brain show review. You'll be entered to win something awesome. Last time we gave away a MacBook. We're going to figure out what we're going to give away. Do it.

Do it. Do it. Thanks for hanging out with us everybody. Like he said, businessbrain show slash review and then shoot us a note. Feedbackusinessbrain show. We love hearing from you reply on socials. It doesn't matter where you find us, just find us.

We love it.

Thanks so much. Keep living that charmed life and we will see you next week.

Have a great weekend.