Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I swing between wild optimism and wild pessimism on a daily basis. Sometimes more than daily.
Yesterday I had a couple of amazing conversations where I was like, oh, that's going to be fine. Everything's going to be pretty much normal today.
And then like, by the end of the day, I had one conversation with someone where I was like, you know,
[00:00:26] Speaker B: do
[00:00:27] Speaker A: they, do they want to work with me or do they not?
And I was like, rocked.
And that's every day right now. And I think, like, it doesn't matter whether you're a consultant, whether you're a builder, whether you're in house.
Just, it's chaos, frankly.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: What, what triggers those, those highs and lows? I mean, I have them too. I know. Like, I've talked with our mutual friend Laura Roeder, and really everyone that listens to this podcast is like, oh, some days are great, some hours are great, some are shit.
We're recording this on the day of the massive PHP vulnerability that's going to go out in an hour and a half. That every Laravel and WordPress site and a whole bunch of others like,
[00:01:07] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:01:07] Speaker B: stuff like this will only continue to come. Like, yeah, I was having a great day Yesterday till about 9:30 when I saw this on Twitter. And then I'm like, fuck, there is tomorrow.
What triggers both, like the, this is amazing. There's so much opportunity and the, you know, I need to buy 20 acres out in the country,
[00:01:29] Speaker A: I think. All right, look, you sort of mentioned some of it there, which is the fact is you are hit with such a fire hose of updates.
People aren't meant to deal with this level of information, this frequency. Like, having a drink is nice, but having a high pressure crowd control fire hose turned on into your face is unpleasant. It's always going to cause you stress. You want the water, you don't want it like that.
And it's the same thing with like tech software as a service in particular right now. Like, you go on Twitter, which it feels like you have to be, and, oh, look, algorithmically, here's all the ways that you're falling behind or getting crushed.
You look in your curated feed and it's like, okay, there's fewer ways that I'm getting crushed here, but they're still notable.
But also the people who are tweeting this stuff or, you know, whatever, what do we call it on Twitter on X these days?
They should have called it
[00:02:35] Speaker B: tweeting. It's still Twitter. Like, I'm just, I'm too old. Like, it's still Twitter.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: They should have called it tweeting just to be different.
They're still suffering from this kind of like, oh well, I'm tweeting about how this is going to crush other people, but also kind of because I'm also receiving this information and it's like, it's like everybody's just getting sandwiched between huge amounts of optimism and pessimism at the same time.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I think like objectively when I look at it, the kind of situation is like as an established company, I think we have a different path than someone getting started right now. And you tweeted about this like we're already, you know, a seven figure business. To operate our business takes a certain amount of effort to get started from scratch today.
I mean we're even launching like a new product line. Like we have this like AI video editing service which you like sent us.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: I've used
[00:03:34] Speaker B: it. Some stuff.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Very good.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: I'll be able to see. Yeah. So if you want to check it out, it's called ultraclip AI, like totally done for you. Video, audio editing, shorts, all that kind of stuff.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Before you move on, let me tell you something I really liked about that, which I think is going to become more a growth thing for people, by the way.
I liked the outcome, pricing.
I don't know whether you're going to continue to do that and I don't know how you're going to police that other than goodwill. Um, but the concept of pay X amount when you are satisfied with the output is a pretty good acquisition lever if you ask me.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's, that's a whole, that's a whole discussion. I mean, so, so yeah, let's talk about that because I, I, I see intercom. Right. Well, acquired by Salesforce, I think. Right?
[00:04:30] Speaker A: Salesforce just acquired them. Yeah,
[00:04:33] Speaker B: yeah.
Did this. Right. Like they, they're charging on closed tickets,
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Finn. Yeah, yeah.
I think that we will also see an, a good number of people doing that. I'll give you another example. This is not necessarily the same thing.
Recently I had a list for a client that I was working on. I was building them a total addressable market list of named accounts.
There were several thousand on there.
I wanted to make sure that I had LinkedIn company URLs for all of companies.
So I was like, what do I do? I go to Clay. Clay is the market leader in finding this stuff because they can do the waterfall search and all that kind of stuff.
I quickly max out the free tier or I can't even remember if I paid for it. Or whatever. But there was a free allocation of credits and I was like, oh, to complete this task I need to pay them like several hundred dollars.
I, I'm just doing this speculatively for the client at this point just to see whether it's possible.
I'm not doing that. And then I remembered freckle exists now. Freckles model is effectively put the spreadsheet in and you pay if we find you the result that you're hoping for.
Every cell you buy credits.
And I was like, okay, cool, you've allocated me a free number of credits.
I'll try it. I burnt through it instantly.
And then I saw that the information was good and I was like, you know what the principle of reciprocity here, you've given me something, I'm going to give you something. I ended up paying like $249 within the first hour to, to like buy enough credits effectively to do this list. Yeah.
And like you look at the the same strategy for other businesses, I think this is going to become more prevalent.
I don't know. It feels like it.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: I think it talks to one thing we talk about a lot like within the tiny seed group is like trust is at an all time low.
There's so much stuff out there. Anyone can vibe code a thing that on the surface looks like HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever. You don't know until you get in there and use it. And like switching costs not for in your case like that but if for a company adopting a solution like that's a huge deal, man. Like
[00:07:01] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:07:02] Speaker B: doing some, doing some consulting with a very big company right now and for them to change software vendors is like a six month process and it puts whoever like the champion, it puts their neck on the line. Like
[00:07:15] Speaker A: if it goes wrong, they're getting
[00:07:16] Speaker B: fired.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: In my experience it's, it's actually the reputational risk that, that stalls big enterprise deals more than anything else.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: If you've got someone
[00:07:26] Speaker B: right, like founders,
[00:07:28] Speaker A: no one cares about price.
It's like a secondary thing. If you don't have a champion within the organization who's willing to find all the shortcuts around procurement or whatever.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:07:39] Speaker A: it's not happening. Doesn't matter.
And you have to be good to those people and make it, make them feel amazing and make it so that nothing goes wrong for that person's career.
Otherwise you've lost the deal in the next enterprise Org that you go to.
And another thing, sorry, while we're on this point, I speak from experience here. Champions who are Enthusiastic and willing to go out on a limb for you. Move organizations because they're career focused. So if you get one of those people, give them all the massage you can.
Because it means that in six months when they go, hang on, I've hit my limit in this company, I think I might move to this other competitor company.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: They're going to do the exact same thing. Yeah,
[00:08:24] Speaker B: yeah.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Two for the one.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah. No, super interesting. Yeah, yeah.
Kind of going back to like getting started versus, like continuing that. You know, I think a lot of folks listening to this will have something going already, but I think all of us are kind of looking at our current businesses and like, gosh, on the.
I think of it like a spectrum, you know, like we're. We're a scale. Like we're on a scale or a spectrum of AI implementation and realization. We're 3 out of 10 right now. I think something like that. 2 out of 10. 3 out of 10.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: What, you personally or as a society?
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Well, kind of both. Maybe I'm like one step further, but I think there's things that we can't even think about that will happen with AI.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: And so what I think about is it is whatever it is now, so call it a 3 out of 10.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: When it's a 8 out of 10, what will be true and what needs to be true for our businesses?
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Do you want. Yeah, I guess. You want my answer here?
[00:09:26] Speaker B: I want. Yeah. I think it's an interesting thing to talk about. I don't know the answer, but. But that's kind of how I think about it, is like,
[00:09:32] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:09:33] Speaker B: we have a current reality and we're doing whatever we're doing in that reality, that's going to change.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: And with that, what do we need to do different?
[00:09:41] Speaker A: I think. Yeah. Okay, cool. I think like, even at 3 out of 10, let's just assume that's where we're at now. It doesn't really matter ultimately. But like, even right now, we're not at the end of this adoption.
What, what is everyone worried about? Everybody's worried about somebody vibe coding their own product.
They're worried about, therefore, the market drying up. If everybody can just vibe code their own thing, they're worried about.
Even if they get customers, are they going to be able to retain them? Are they going to be able to sell them more stuff? If they can just vibe code, add ons, or work with an API or whatever. They're also worried about, okay, let's say all of that stuff is great. How the heck am I going to find more people because search has declined. Paid media might become more expensive.
Influencer marketing is clearly going a little bit westward as people start absolutely hammering TikTok with fake people.
All that kind of stuff exists right now. And those are four problems right away that we, we're at. Even though we're at 3 out of 10 adoption on AI now, if you think about how AI actually makes those worse as it gets better, it just, it's not like, okay, we're at level four now, therefore the problems are at level four. It's like, no, we're at level four now. So the problems are at level 40.
Right? That's
[00:11:07] Speaker B: the,
[00:11:07] Speaker A: the curves are diverging from each other. The problems are harder and harder to solve as the technology gets marginally better.
Well, let me ask you this.
How do you feel about that for your own business?
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Is
[00:11:24] Speaker A: that how you're seeing it affected?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: I think we'll edit this real time. I'm just sitting here thinking.
I totally agree with what you're saying. I think today is a perfect example of this. I don't know who found and disclosed this PHP vulnerability. I assume because the PHP foundation is releasing a patch that it was like unethical hacker or like a big cybersecurity organization.
But if that wasn't the case and just in general, we'll see an exponential number of vulnerabilities that aren't responsibly disclosed and issues. So it's like, yeah, it's not linear. As the tech gets a little bit better, it's going to be like, oh, the tech got a little bit better. Now there's an exponential kind of impact of that. And that's just one, that's one vector, right? That there's, there's marketing is harder tech, you know, shit's more expensive because we're all using a ton of tokens. People are, oh, I don't know, like I can't even think about that. Like the supply and demand of labor is just different. Right? There's a whole bunch of folks that aren't as needed anymore. There's some folks that are super in demand. So like that's, that's not even consistent. And the kind of barbell will continue to stretch, I think.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think that's definitely true. I mean I just cheered last week about a company that I thought was pretty great.
They let 30% of their staff go.
Those people who got let go, by the way, are not C players.
Having worked with them personally, I know that they're a players and that's hard to look at.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:13:00] Speaker A: I find that really, really emotionally challenging. That rocked me all weekend, if I'm honest. I'm not like I don't have skin in the game anymore there, but like, it was horrible to watch.
So, yeah. You
[00:13:14] Speaker B: feel more, do you feel more secure on your own or would you feel better inside a company
[00:13:22] Speaker A: right now?
I think, I think it's probably on my own.
I mean, most.
Well, like, I'll be pretty open about this. Like, I have one ongoing client who I'm not worried about at all. They're not gonna suffer from this in any way, in my opinion.
I have one long term client who I really liked working with, who I just finished working with. They changed their needs more than like not needing me, I think. Yeah.
And they sort of reassigned their stuff.
But I'm looking at the market and I'm like, huh?
The issue of acquisition is so heavy on people's minds right now that a person saying, hey, you might not need more acquisition.
I think like sometimes that message gets drowned out.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: But
[00:14:17] Speaker A: that being said, I just think maybe the opposite is true. Right. Like you don't need more acquisition.
You should be thinking about how the heck are you going to juice this business model for all the revenue potential right now?
Because if you've got more cash in the bank, you can make better choices. You can resist bumps that other people won't be able to.
And that's, I mean, that's part of the reason why I focus so much on life cycle these days is because like, like, if you're a search marketer right now, good luck.
Whereas like, for me, I'm just like, oh, you've got 50,000 people on your list who aren't paying you enough.
Let's get them to pay you more. How do you do that? Well, there's all sorts of ways, you know, but ultimately, like, for me, that's, that's the sort of way I think about this.
Yeah.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: So funny story related to that. So, you know, I serve as advisor in residence with Tiny Seed and we sent out an email to the whole list last week asking what people's biggest problems were. Like, what's your single super. You know, the email, hey, what's the biggest problem you're struggling with right now? And we said, I'll record a loom and reply to you for every reply. So
[00:15:34] Speaker A: I've
[00:15:35] Speaker B: done about 250 looms in the last week.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Awesome. Super fun. Super interesting. Really tiring, but really fun.
The number one problem, not surprisingly, is demand generation and I do think it could be just where some people are in their business. Like they're, you know, it's that classic, like, cold start problem. Like, I built the thing and there's, like, there's no moment. I mean, Kastos has thousands of customers. We have some momentum, right? And like all the companies you work with have some momentum. I think when you're just starting out, you need both, which is why it's so hard, right? You need some demand gen and you have to convert, nurture, and expand those folks.
But I think the challenge that you're facing in terms of messaging and positioning is you're right that the most effective use of your marketing time is to get more out of what you already have, right? Your
[00:16:30] Speaker A: list,
[00:16:30] Speaker B: your customers, expansion, revenue. And that's just not what people want to focus on. I think, I think you're right, but it's not what people want to hear.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Look, you know, a prophet's never accepted in his hometown.
Yeah, they crucified Jesus.
I, I, no, look, I think, I think if you're, if you're below a million dollars of annual revenue right now, a hundred percent focus on acquisition because frankly, like, beyond that, unless you've got insanely high list and insanely low conversion rate, like, what are you, you're going to optimize 1 or 2% here and there, and you'll end up with a tiny bump.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Sorry, can you, can you expand on that? Because I think that's one of the core principles of like, marketing prioritization. Like, you're talking about, like, what's the absolute opportunity versus, like the, the kind of relative one. Right?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's it. So, like, let's say, let's say I'm a, I don't know, like, I'm a CRM tool for window cleaners and I can serve Everybody in the U.S.
probably a lot of window cleaners. I don't know how many that is, but I imagine it's, you know, probably over 100,000.
Now, let's say, let's say I'm below a million dollars right now, but I've been going for, I don't know, two, three years. I've got a list of 100,000 people who might have tried the product at one point and decided it wasn't for them in that situation, trying to convert that 100,000 people with even the smallest price.
Great, move forward with that because ultimately you have a low revenue.
I'm not nagging anyone here, but that, like, relatively, that's a low revenue, but you have a high opportunity within your list. And so the biggest gap is that because the conversion rate between your opportunities and your customers is so large, so small. Sorry.
On the other hand, let's say you've been going for like six months and you've got, you know, you've got 10,000 window cleaners on your database and your revenue is still below a million.
You have much less opportunity in that 10,000 to convert them into paying customers than that hundred thousand.
Right. So. So in that scenario, yeah, focus on the. Focus on expanding. Focus on kind of converting more people.
On the other hand, that 10,000 list, those people should find ways to convert more people at the top of the funnel, which is go out, find a channel, go to, you know, chamber of commerce for every single city.
You know, scratch some backs and get people to run marketing campaigns with you for their chamber of commerce, for window cleaners. And you cut them a fee and you say, we'll say, we'll give you a hundred dollars for every window cleaner in your, in your chamber of commerce that signs up to our CRM. Yeah.
It doesn't matter whether you send them or not, frankly, we'll just dumb attribute them to you.
That's a way to grow.
And I think if it was me and I was trying to build this, the CRM business that were just completely plucked out of the air, I think I'd be doing that versus doing search engine marketing. I don't think I'd be out there going, best window cleaner CRM.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
I mean, I can speak from like, personal recent experience. That has been the hammer we've tried to swing many times in the business, you know, SEO and content. And it's just.
And I think we're quite good at it. And it just doesn't.
It just doesn't work. Like, it just doesn't. It was. Which I think is like a very understated change in the kind of bootstrapping SaaS world is that was a fantastic way to acquire customers.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: You write some content, you rank on Google, you have some CRO stuff in place, you nurture them on email.
Like, that's marketing. That was marketing. But like,
[00:21:28] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:21:30] Speaker B: taking that away is a big deal for our ecosystem.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: And I think it's. I think that's true for most people up until that kind of million.
After that, it. I still think that there is a valuable exercise in building that channel.
I don't know if it's going to be the same value. I suspect not.
But there are going to be companies out there that continue to absolutely dominate based on search, like they always have.
And there will be a large majority of people who spend a huge amount of money to not dominate.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: So my, My experience, and I think most people will probably see this is if you're an established. Back to the established versus new. If you're an established brand.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:22:18] Speaker B: it's. And I'm talking about, like, I call it AI SEO.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: It's reasonable to perform well there if you're a new brand.
I think it's very hard.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: I. I don't know what the kind of knowledge graph or whatever is, but frankly, we don't. We don't perform that well because we're not the number one or two or three player in our industry. We're the fifth, maybe.
And like, that's the cutoff line. Right. Somebody's like, hey, I want to start a podcast. The AI is like, oh, you should go to Buzzsprout or whatever and do this. Just because they are.
They're a more top player than us. And like, we've been doing this a while. If we started this today, that would be very hard to break into.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: What would you do if you did start Kastos today?
Let's a thought experiment.
Like, assume that you're going to build that product.
What would you do differently?
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I would do.
This is really sad. I would do organic social.
As much like me being Peter Lovells or Mark Liu or Mark Thomas, like, just out there talking about the shit I'm doing every day.
This is the key. Those guys and you are effective because you're marketing to your audience about the thing that you do on the channel where your ICP hangs out.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Well, I'm really glad to hear that.
I'm dubious company Peter Levels and Mark Lou, though. But.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Well, okay, it could be whatever. Rob Walling. Right. Like,
[00:23:57] Speaker A: that's
[00:23:58] Speaker B: better.
Yeah. So.
But I think that's.
I think that's. That's.
It's a bit of a disconnect I've had is like, I talk a lot about, you know, business and SaaS and all that kind of stuff, but I don't run a product or a business that caters to SaaS, companies and founders. I run a podcasting company. And so, like, my organic social presence, which isn't very big, doesn't really help that at all, but I do. But I do think it can be very effective.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Yeah, man. That's so interesting how we perceive each other.
By the way, I see you as, like, being in the right place at the right time with the Right. Message.
I'm surprised that's not working out for you, actually. But, um. But the.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: For cast. For Castos, it's not for. For, like, you know, AI stuff. It absolutely is. Yeah.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So, yeah, fine. Yeah. And so for Kastos, then, if you were going to do this, you'd be like, okay, let's find maybe like, let's create a new account for myself where my audience is 100% people who could start a podcast.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Yep. It would be Instagram and TikTok. It would be doing reels every day, showing the product, talking about how to do this successfully. Yeah.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I suppose in some ways, actually, that's kind of what Beehive did themselves. Right. Like, if thinking about those guys over there, well, this is it. And I'm thinking about Mark Liu now, and I'm not thinking about Beehive anymore. But
[00:25:35] Speaker B: I don't like. I saw some drama. I didn't, like, read all of it, because that's just so toxic.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: But, like,
[00:25:40] Speaker B: he vibe coded a competitor to them or something. What happened?
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, he vibe coded a version of Beehive.
I don't think it's a competitor, but now Tyler Dank has waded in and just gone, well, here's all the reasons it's not a competitor. And now, like, nice one, Tyler. A chunk of your audience are now thinking, oh, I could just use Mark Lewis thing for much cheaper. Clearly, Tyler is worried enough to think that this is a
[00:26:09] Speaker B: validated. Yeah.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Anyway, from my perspective, I don't know if this term translates globally, but that's just willy waggling, you know, Who's. Who's got the biggest.
Who's got the biggest reach.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Yeah, reach. Yeah.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: But look, I think, like, the. The thing that they did, you know, Beehive, they did really well, was that I think they got in front of influencers who are creators.
They got in front of people who wanted a bigger audience and said, look, Kit doesn't give you the audience building tools, like referral tools and stuff like that, which, by the way, is not true. Like, they do. It's just not the same.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:26:57] Speaker A: but the message was so pervasive to the right people at the right time that it was like, oh, yeah, cool, I'm going to try that. And then once you're locked in with a newsletter, unless you're going to stop the newsletter, it's just a pain to move it all.
And so, yeah, I think that concept of what you just described with podcasting is really interesting.
You know, I. I agree. You got to go to where people are who and just behave like them is the reality.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: You know, it'd be interesting. I'm just sitting here thinking I should, I, I'm going to do this. I, I, I thought about this yesterday. I was driving because I saw a guy that I follow in the SaaS space. You know, this guy, Simon Hoiberg, he's a Swiss guy, talks a lot about SaaS and AI and stuff.
He put out a totally AI generated video the other day and he was transparent about it. Like, hey, this is, I'm on vacation. This is my, you know, doppelganger, whatever. There's this gal, Julia.
Oh, man, she used to work, like with Justin McGill. Anyways, her entire kind of online presence is a virtual avatar. Now this is a whole nother topic. And I'm sure, like, knowing you, like, you would not agree with this, I think it would be an interesting thing for my own personal AI Persona to build an AI channel or account on Instagram and TikTok,
[00:28:21] Speaker A: because
[00:28:21] Speaker B: I'm
[00:28:21] Speaker A: not.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Well, this is just, knowing me, I'm not going to sit there and talk about podcasting for two hours every day. I would love to build an AI machine to do that for me.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: I don't think, Let me tell you, I've kind of tried this.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: I am, I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about this.
I had a client who I did this for at one point.
I'm struggling here and I've never used TikTok.
I don't like the concept of tick tock, but our guess was that there are a lot of customers for this company on TikTok.
And so I created an AI avatar who conceivably worked at the company and created content based on what I saw to be trending on TikTok with this AI Persona.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:29:28] Speaker A: it was one of the most confusing projects I've ever worked on.
There's technical challenges, there are quality challenges, and there are frankly, like, like moral challenges to doing this.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah,
[00:29:45] Speaker A: it was interesting.
I found it, like, intellectually stimulating and it caused me a great amount of kind of like energy.
What, what it didn't do ironically was it didn't drive any business.
And if I'm honest, I think part of that was that.
Oh, my gosh. I think part of this was that maybe the person was too sexy. Um.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: And it effectively became a thirst trap. It was not, it was not like I was creating some sort of like,
[00:30:25] Speaker B: you know,
[00:30:27] Speaker A: model from the 80s or anything. Like, that's not what that was.
But I think that honestly, like 20 something men were just too turned on by this AI person that I created to think about anything other than like, well, you know, I don't know if that's true or not. And Craig, I'm not sure you'd have the same effect. I'm sorry, but I was
[00:30:51] Speaker B: gonna say I don't think that, like, I don't worry about that.
I worry about a lot of stuff. I don't worry about that.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: But it was an interesting thing because what, what I sort of realized was that if I think if you have a big corpus of existing content and then you're feeding that to an AI avatar and saying like, okay, reshoot this as me.
I think you'd probably go a lot further than I did because it would be, firstly, you rather than a totally made up person.
Secondly, you'd have valuable content that you wouldn't have to think about recreating or writing from zero.
I'd love to see what happen if you recreate Craig as an AI and just run it and see.
I think you might get further though by taking your.
All of the clips of podcasts you've done about podcasting, all of the things you've recorded, clipping it up and just creating hundreds of bot accounts, which is just real clips of you and just going, whatever. It's a race to the bottom in that way. But I might get some money on the way down, you know.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: That's crazy. Yeah.
You have kids?
[00:32:11] Speaker A: Yeah, two.
Two daughters,
[00:32:14] Speaker B: so I have two also. So 14 and almost 16.
I think, I think this is the biggest stressor in my life is, you know, I'm like, I'm a dad. I want to provide. Like, I have, I have a lot of personal value. I prescribe to being.
This is being the man. Like not being a man,
[00:32:38] Speaker A: but like
[00:32:38] Speaker B: being the dude
[00:32:39] Speaker A: providing for family for people you care about.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And
[00:32:42] Speaker A: your wife probably does the same thing, right?
[00:32:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, my wife. Yeah, my wife totally does. Like, she works, she loves working, she loves providing, all this kind of stuff.
I don't worry as much about, like my lifetime and my working lifetime and longevity.
I have a lot more questions about their working life.
I don't know that there's a lot we can do about it. Right. Like, they're both technically kind of leaning
[00:33:16] Speaker A: like
[00:33:17] Speaker B: it's a trip. So my degree is in biomedical engineering and that's exactly what my daughter wants to do as of today.
My son thinks that cybersecurity is like the only business that's Going to be around in a few years.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: He might not be wrong
[00:33:30] Speaker B: and I don't think he's wrong, but like he, he kind of leans that direction too.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:33:35] Speaker B: but I don't know what to do, man. Like it used to be like, oh, go to school, you know, do sports and activities, go to a good college, get a degree, go be whatever kind of profession.
If you assume again on the AI spectrum, a lot of conventional jobs are just going to not exist or exist at a much lower frequency.
That advice is not good advice anymore.
I don't know. Anyways, what do you, what are you thinking and what do you talk to your kids about?
[00:34:09] Speaker A: Well, we don't talk about this stuff mostly at this point. They're still, I think, a little bit too young. They're both under 10, so.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:34:21] Speaker A: well, I worry about it greatly, obviously.
You know, I think so much of our identity probably as people who've built stuff is tied to being able to build stuff, you know, and being good at that. Right. Like you and I, you and I have both been around a long time, frankly and like, we didn't stay that course. Like I've been doing this 10 years, you've probably been doing it a bit longer, I guess.
Um, we didn't get to that maturity in the industry without being good. Um, you know, and I feel that I don't want to be like the people who got to the peak of their industry right at the end of the 80s and then failed to adapt when the Internet came along and found themselves at, you know, 55, basically being completely unemployable.
I don't want to be a dinosaur.
I'm happy to be like, you know, I'm happy to be continually trying to fight the dinosaurs. I don't want to be the dinosaur.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: And get crushed by a comet or whatever.
I.
So in that respect, my goal is to stay curious, to try to be open minded about my own skill set and where that's going, to try out new stuff and just to try and like stay generous in my sort of thinking about how things are, you know, rather than going like, oh, it's chaos, therefore I'm gonna suffer, go oh, it's chaos, but I might be a winner, you know. Yeah, yeah.
And then basically just stay with that level of kind of clarity of hope, I think for a long enough period of time where for me personally it becomes economically beneficial, I think for the kids.
I sort of think that our society is probably going to change quite significantly like that. We know that's true from the, you know, from, like. Well, I mean, think about how you were in the year 2000 and think about how you are today.
You would not recognize that you live in the future in the, you know, now, but you do. And you tell 2000, year 2000, Craig, like, oh, my gosh, here's what's going to be. It's going to be like even 2008, Craig, frankly, like, you would not believe yourself. Right. So you're living in the future, but that's going to carry on and it might speed up as well. So the rate. The pace of change might increase to such a vast rate that like, you know, again, we just sort of decouple from, from our perception of where this will go.
On the other hand, if you think about the legislation, the kind of.
I mean, obviously this is different all over the world, but the way that society now caters for technology adoption, I mean, we're probably behind, but it does catch up to a certain extent. And I think that even if it doesn't catch up to the extent that, say, policymaking has adapted to the Internet or to privacy changes or whatever, it might not catch up at the same pace that it did that it should with AI, but it will.
There will be changes that are significant that we can't predict right now in terms of both technological advancement, but also, frankly, political advancement.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: And so I assume that the playing field will not be the same in, you know, 15 years or whatever when my kids enter the job market in earnest. You know, I hope that they will as moved with the times by that point. Who knows, though? Yeah.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
So we have three years until my daughter graduates high school, my oldest
[00:38:38] Speaker A: and
[00:38:39] Speaker B: five for my son.
I think going to college, those next four years, going to college will be pretty important, like, buffer from reality,
[00:38:51] Speaker A: because I think
[00:38:51] Speaker B: that's.
That's about the time I think a lot of frankly, bad will start happening.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: I agree. I think it's useful.
College can be a really useful thing and maybe, frankly, ongoing study
[00:39:08] Speaker B: and it's super fun. Oh, my God. Right.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Just
[00:39:12] Speaker B: like
[00:39:12] Speaker A: have that period where somebody will probably be able to subsidize your life, um, and you'll get paid for being curious. Uh, you know, in the uk, we still have student loans, and they're not like us student loans. Like, they're still pretty hefty, but it's not the same thing.
Um, you know, in Germany, like, it used to be that you could be a professional student and it was just. You could just carry on. Basically. I feel like we. I feel like we should find ways to subsidize people to do that a bit more because it'll ease the job market for other people and it'll also probably create value that we can't yet understand from the connections that people will make. And non commercial applications of all of this amazing technology we're currently putting out into the world.
We're going to get to live in the future again many times in our life. That's amazing to me.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you touched on kind of what I think is the reality, what is kind of the path. So I think the path is like we're in this kind of weird space right now. I am shocked every day that the economy is not much worse than it is the economy.
I think there's a lot of political bolstering up of what the economy really is because I think what we're seeing is hiring is not happening and layoffs are. You mentioned the 30% reduction.
It's just constantly people are getting laid off and not getting replaced. And that will just continue, I think over the next few years that will affect the economy until we get to a time where I think something like universal basic employment or university income or whatever or something kind of like gets us to the point where you talked about, we're like, hey, we just don't need to work. We can be curious. And these people being curious create value in a not directly monetizable way.
I think that's like what we're going to get to, which is going to be weird, but I think appropriate because the direct line of capitalism and value is not going to need to exist.
And that's like really paradigm shifting. But like in that transition will be a lot of change.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: I agree. Have you. This is a curveball here. Craig, have you ever read the book before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich?
[00:41:55] Speaker B: No.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: I thought it'd be a curveball. I think it's quite a niche sort of interest in some ways.
Before the Deluge, you can only get it in print now. I don't know why because it's immense.
It is a, a sort of cultural history of Berlin in the 1920s.
And there's some kind of parallels I feel with now. Ironically, if you don't want to read the book, you can watch the TV show Babylon Berlin, um, which is set in the same period.
Different.
It's not, it's, it's definitely not one for one. But there are, there are common themes and feelings.
Berlin in the 1920s was. Honestly, if I had to choose somewhere to go, it would be There in history.
I'm fascinated by it because Post World War I in Europe, everything was on the table. Like society had gone upside down. We were trying to rebuild Europe, or at least chunks of Europe. The population had been decimated.
We, you know, all over, all over Europe there was political change happening, technological change, cultural change.
Everything
[00:43:15] Speaker B: sounds familiar.
[00:43:16] Speaker A: It mixed.
There were so many, like, mixed influences before the deluge is a great sort of summary of that period, which is why I mention it. But what you got in that period was an inter. An interaction between like massively clashing political ideologies. You know, I mean, ultimately, we know how that turned out, but you also got people like, you know, Einstein basically just roaming around you. Just heaps and heaps of like, people who you now think, oh my gosh, I can't believe they were all in the same place at the same time.
[00:43:54] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:43:55] Speaker A: that's the Internet in 19, in 2020, you know, the 2000 and 20s. We are in this, this post war period. We came out of war on terror, economic crash, massive political upheaval. Doesn't, you know, however you feel about the current political leadership of the world, it's massive upheaval.
We came out of COVID you know, that is equivalent in some ways to this, to the experience of chaos, of war and the Spanish flu, you know.
And now we are faced with this possibility. We could go anywhere.
You know, technology, any technological idea could take hold. Any cultural idea, frankly, any spiritual idea, which also happened in Berlin in that time could take hold. You know, who knows what the dominating ideology will be for the next 25 years. I think we could guess, but I don't think we know.
Just like, they didn't know.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I, you know, like back, back to the very beginning. Like, you know, I'm up and down every day. I think one thing I will say is while I, I think it's easy to tend towards doom with this, I, I am at my, like, in my soul, very optimistic.
I, I think this will all turn out really good.
I think there will be major bumps in the road. But I told someone the other day, I said, I think we're all gonna live in Wakanda.
And they were like, what? What's Wakanda? I was like, okay, fine. But like,
[00:45:37] Speaker A: I just got the reference.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: I think it will be, you know, glass buildings and flying cars and, you know, weird hairdos and stuff. Like, I think, I think that'll be it because I think enough people want good and that's kind of what you need, I guess.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: And I think Also, you're not alone. You know, I think if you feel lonely in this, you know, AI psychosis, effectively. Right.
You feel like you're the only person who's worried about the future, but we're all experiencing these swings and we can all be alone together. Ultimately, your risk is no lesser or greater than anyone else's risk at this period.
And so I think to kind of double down on your point there, how do you want to approach it?
Do you want to approach it with a scarcity mindset, Feeling sad, feeling scared all the time, or do you want to be open about how you feel, keep curious, and, like, be willing to say, I might have to change some things to adapt to this kind of reality, and I might be wrong, but I'm hopeful that I'll be right, you know?
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a really good mindset. And really, mindset is so much of it. Right. It's not the, can I? Or how do I do this? It's. It's the mindset of being curious, exploring, looking for opportunities to provide value, general genuinely.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:47:12] Speaker B: that's like the mindset. So,
[00:47:14] Speaker A: yeah.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: Cool, man. This is fun.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: So good. Thank you.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: We both had curve balls. I felt like, that's great. Thank you for the book rec. I have it pulled up over here. I'm going to try to find it. I love the obscure book references. I feel like last time we talked, you had an obscure book reference for me, so that's cool.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: My book philosophy is you should always judge a book by its cover.
And that means that you pick up books based on purely what your eye falls on. Just read it. You'll enjoy it in some way. It might not be relevant to your life, but you'll enjoy it.
[00:47:45] Speaker B: Love it. Love it. Awesome, buddy. Folks want to follow you on Twitter. You're back on Twitter.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: I'm on Twitter again.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Mark Thomas. Yeah,
[00:47:53] Speaker A: I am Mark Thomas. Mark with a C.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Awesome, buddy. I appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Thank you.
