Dave Sobel Appears on Slow Smoked Business with Jarrod Morgan

[00:00:00] A special episode today, I'm sharing my appearance on slow smoked business where Jared Morgan and I share a conversation about AI, technology and the value of managed services and I even smoke some bacon. Enjoy this feed drop of slow smoked business with Jared Morgan.

[00:00:21] It's okay to fling spaghetti at the wall. Like I'm fine with testing, right? But we have to do it in a way that we're testing for utility rather than just sort of get quick, get rich quick schemes.

[00:00:36] Hey everybody and welcome to slow smoked business. I'm your host Jared Morgan. Guys, we're breaking new ground today. I've got Dave Sobel on the show. Welcome Dave.

[00:00:53] I am so excited to be here today. It's gonna be such fun. Dave is in his backyard because he is going to join me being the second podcaster to bot to podcast a tech business grilling thing all at the same time.

[00:01:10] Does that make you like what is it Buzz Aldrin, right?

[00:01:12] I guess. Yeah, but you know when I heard your content goes like this sounds fantastic. Yes, let's smoke something. Let's smoke something.

[00:01:23] For the first time ever both myself and my esteemed guest here will be cooking in our backyard. We've already had copious amounts of interruptions just in the run up to the show here so it's just going to be an interesting one.

[00:01:36] It's a joy of sitting out in your backyard doing this stuff. Of course it is. So like listen, because you are so gracious to be cooking on the show I'm going to allow you to introduce your food first. So what are you cooking today?

[00:01:49] Well thank you. So I am cooking up my bacon. So I do a home cured bacon that I learned to do a couple of years ago where you cure it for a week beforehand. So I pulled them this morning.

[00:02:01] Did the curing last week. It's a maple rub that you do with with the salts and maple syrup and cure it for a week and then throw it on and I'm doing a slow cook all the way up to try to get the meat to 150 or so.

[00:02:15] And then I can pull them they'll go back I'll wrap them and then I'll chill them back out and I can start slicing tomorrow if I need one of those blocks.

[00:02:22] So you okay so you haven't sliced it yet you have a or yeah you've got you've got like basically almost like pork belly. It's pork belly. Yeah it's pork belly.

[00:02:32] So I took it and I went up to Costco got a big old big old 10 pounder slicing into three chunks and then those could each got cured in a ziplock bag and then those three are smoking right now and you can appreciate that there's a tech angle to mine too.

[00:02:45] Yeah I use and a Wi-Fi enabled controller on the big green egg to make sure that I control both the temperature and keeping an eye on the meat temperature itself.

[00:02:55] Well the guys that are avid followers of my show know I'm a very wreck you know I cook on a wreck tech right so text in the name.

[00:03:04] I don't have time to be like Aaron Franklin down in Austin Texas like he's he's my hero and that guy's great but I need something to sort of dial it up and streamline it for me.

[00:03:14] And so you've put a lot of effort into this I too went to Costco but definitely did not do I did not do all the things you did so I'll get over here we're actually doing what I will say is the laziest thing you can grill which is frozen chicken wings.

[00:03:30] And I know that sounds silly but I'm telling you it's one of my favorite things to do everybody that listens to the show knows I like easy quick things and this is the easiest thing you can possibly do on a grill but there is nothing better than a properly smoked chicken wing which is what we're going to get into.

[00:03:48] Overhead grill cam is part of the reason why we had some delays today so we're going with a gimbal style which is this almost this is like the Blair witch grilling project right now.

[00:03:59] And I'm going to dump these guys on the grill and we're going to see Dave's been smoking his.

[00:04:05] Here in chicken wing here Dave's been so this was meant to be because I have the same bin that you just used to dump those wings out so so I will not rest until they are a sponsor of the show that I absolutely so I'm going to do that.

[00:04:18] I swear by that it's the what is the brand of this thing called oh I know it's the collapse but it's the collapse of the been it's a great.

[00:04:27] It's a drip easy barbecue bin because we have a bunch of like you know salmonella chicken wings or whatever like what do you do with the thing after you've thrown them on the grill.

[00:04:37] It's super easy to wash it breaks down into a cutting board.

[00:04:41] It's awesome so drip easy fam.

[00:04:44] Get at me on the show so we can have you on slow smoke business Dave you are the host of business of tech right.

[00:04:53] That's my show yeah great show that sort of details everything that's going on in the tech world and kind of a run down of the headlines and the way for for people to sort of think about what's going on in the news.

[00:05:05] And one of the things you've been talking a lot about shutting the grill up there.

[00:05:09] One of the things you've been talking a lot about is AI right you talk a lot about AI on the show we talk about it here too.

[00:05:15] And I'd love to get your perspective on where AI is today relative to the average person the average person that is out trying to build their business or whatever I think when you live in the tech world.

[00:05:31] You get in this bubble and you think AI has already touched everything and it's it's changing and that's not that's not even remotely true right there's so much.

[00:05:40] It's not even close there's so much of a world that hasn't even really wrapped their head around it yet so where do you think AI is today for the average person.

[00:05:47] Yeah and it's always good to get my perspective on this because my I come from the IT services world so I ran a business delivering technology services to small businesses for a decade and then I spent another eight years delivering software to the company.

[00:06:01] And I'm a big fan of the companies that serve that space so you're exactly right like the those of us that live and breathe tech like will immediately think that something is massive and then you step out into you know the regular business world and realize that adoption always takes so much longer.

[00:06:17] So the two metrics that we're sort of comparing against first when we look at chat GPT itself right had the most explosive consumer product launch of any technology so far right just just went to 100 million users in record time.

[00:06:31] And then we're going to compare against adoption we're only actually seeing you know sort of 10% adoption maybe in the business world and mostly these are all early pilots and people figuring out like what this might be.

[00:06:46] But interestingly particularly the larger the company the more we're seeing that I just reported this past week that the government the US government is running 1200 different projects right now to pilot and test the generative AI and its derivative uses.

[00:07:01] So it's happening. It's happening early but it's much more in that early test period that a lot of people might think based on the buzz.

[00:07:10] Yeah I think you know the the average person maybe has heard about AI right now and maybe has done what I did in my first couple of ways which was ask chat GPT to write notorious bg lyrics about nice companies that I've had started and

[00:07:26] I don't think everybody really plugs into it until they fully understand what it means to them right and so until people start to fully understand what's going on you know and how it can affect their lives and how it can change their lives then it doesn't really become real it doesn't

[00:07:45] really become a part of their life for me the big moment was we had a family situation so my mother is actually battling cancer right now.

[00:07:55] And thank you and one of the things that you do if you want to really fight is you want to find a doctor that has treated.

[00:08:06] She has MDS right which is a blood cancer and kind of a rare cancer you don't see it a lot and you really want to find a doctor that has treated that more times than not right you don't have somebody go I do that about 10 times a year you want somebody that oh I did that about 10 times a day right

[00:08:23] and so old school it would have taken months of research to find doctors but with chat GPT I literally went on explained my mother's situation I explained her age for diagnosis and I said hey I need the five doctors who have treated more cases of this type of cancer than anybody else boom got five names

[00:08:48] and then I said okay I need the five most cited academics on research about this cancer boom got five names two of the names were on both lists and so it was like bingo in less than really 60 seconds frankly I had narrowed down two months worth of work and we zeroed in we found a great doctor for her at MD Anderson she's getting awesome care but

[00:09:17] it who knows how long that would have taken who knows if I would have stumbled on the right answer it just would have been a tremendous amount of Google searches and reading through things and so I think for the average person that's a very personal story for me to share but I wanted to get it out there because that kind of thing that sort of speed and efficiency for an average person dealing with a real life issue is how you can think about hey how I can change the way we navigate the world.

[00:09:45] And Jared let me translate what you just said in a personal story into what we're seeing in the business world so I reported on the show that they're running tests in emergency rooms where they're giving the ER docs chat GPT and allowing them to use as patients come in to provide all the symptoms and

[00:10:04] get answers back and what they're finding is in 90% of cases their chat GPT is correctly diagnosing the problem in the top five things that come in. So now imagine a technology where the patient rolls into the ER the doc describes the symptoms and then from there gets the answer in the list of five.

[00:10:26] Speaking of heading to the ER by the way I know like if anybody if anybody doubts that we're doing a backyard podcast it's usually me that has to apologize for the background noise but Dave we're just barreling through it.

[00:10:40] But you're right and so and so did they did they come to a conclusion really about that.

[00:10:47] Yeah and it's what they're finding is it's incredibly effective that the ER doc is getting the correct answer in the five answers provided 90% of the time.

[00:10:57] Wow. And so what you want to think about this is the ability to augment human decision making to your you had to make decisions about health care for your mom ER doctors have to make decisions about healthcare for their patients.

[00:11:09] It's giving you that access to that information faster and in a way that you can test we've got examples all over in terms of what they're doing in terms of chemical testing where they'll actually do met it met pharmaceutical testing and they'll give all of the potential proteins out to one of the models and say what are the potentials for the for you a particular drug and it'll come back and

[00:11:30] here's a here is a subset of the list you can test and then that's accelerating drug drug development like it's those kinds of uses and you can find it in all kinds of businesses.

[00:11:41] Yeah I'm going to check my chicken wings really quick but I want to I want to that sounds like it sounds like a weird thing.

[00:11:48] Okay, so I have not seasoned them yet by the way what I wanted to do is kind of sweat them out a little bit get them wet so that they will have that the seasoning will actually stick to it so I'm going to see if I can get it.

[00:12:00] I'm going to season half of these up with some bourbon maple rub and the other half with lemon pepper which are which is one of my favorites while I'm saying that your house.

[00:12:10] Yeah really come on over so while I'm while I'm doing this you said a key word there that I think just spoke volumes and the word was augment right so before I really thought about this as a as a like an AI question so for those that are new to the show

[00:12:30] I'm going to go proctor use an online proctoring company and we watch people take tests over the internet to allow them to not have to go to campuses and test centers and really be able to test anywhere.

[00:12:39] One of the things that we struggled with and battled with throughout the history of our company was the appropriate and acceptable spots where you add tech to the stack and add it to the process what we found about test taking was people were profoundly

[00:12:57] nervous about an algorithm making a decision about a student and whether they were cheating on a test or what was going on. However the magic happened when we would take our you know I don't know if you see what I'm doing here by the way I'm not sure if you're watching online

[00:13:16] if it's like this is like terrible terrible camera where the magic happens when you take when you take a human and you make them better and you allow the human to do what the human does best and the tech to do what the tech does best and it makes the human faster.

[00:13:34] It reduces errors that to me was where the magic was I think we're a long long long long long way away. Maybe we're not maybe not that many longs but we're a long ways away from Skynet deciding our fate you know and just there being no human input for critical human experiences.

[00:13:54] I think we're a long way away from that but I do think we're close and we're going to be better off when we as a human have a tool that that makes us more efficient and less error prone.

[00:14:07] I mean I agree completely and for me the advice that I'm giving to business owners and in particular the IT companies that advise them is exactly that you're looking for areas where you can use AI to augment your team.

[00:14:21] People are not going to get replaced by machines. They're going to get replaced by people that understand the AI. Yeah, that's the big that's the big thing to look for.

[00:14:30] And in fact there's actually a couple of bits even if you're not ready to dive in fully. There's two things that you want to do regardless.

[00:14:38] The first issue should definitely be looking at your organization and making sure your data is clean data.

[00:14:42] The AI only works really well when the data is well organized when it's when it's at least you know not necessarily perfect but at least consumable by the machines.

[00:14:52] And then the second thing is is you want to work on a framework of the way you're going to approach it. What are your ethics around that?

[00:14:59] What are the limits of what you're willing to do which aren't one of your privacy policies will kind of information you're collecting and just consider the framework.

[00:15:06] And by the way, there's a ton of these out there. You know the the Biden administration put out an executive order that gives a whole bunch of framework stuff.

[00:15:14] NIST is providing a whole bunch of stuff private companies are providing all bunch of stuff. This isn't a start from nothing situation.

[00:15:20] This is a there's tons of resources to think about that so that when you when you're ready to implement at whatever speed you've got the frameworks in place.

[00:15:29] Yeah, I just think we're living in an exciting time in the old saying that I said on an episode before was you know there is no such thing as AI is just better and better algorithms right and so when you sort of think about it that way.

[00:15:42] It frames it in a different place I think we're I think we're just a long way away from the sky net people people too many people watch Terminator right and they and they go they go straight to the extreme when they think about artificial intelligence and pass all of the great.

[00:15:58] Updates that it can do for humanity. There was a study back in believe it was 2018 2018 2019 timeframe from Gartner that said that AI is going to be a net job creator not it's not going to take jobs.

[00:16:13] It's not going to remove jobs from the economy it's going to create jobs but in that creation it's going to eliminate millions of jobs and replace them with millions more of new jobs.

[00:16:24] And so just like in history when you saw, you know blacksmiths went away as we had introduced the car, but now you have mechanics right and all these other things that happen.

[00:16:34] Jobs just move and change in the economy, move to another spot.

[00:16:40] But it's not that the jobs are going away and that's a lot of that's a lot of turmoil in the modern economy though the global economy like there's going to be a whole lot of people that have to be re skilled so that they know how to operate in this new kind of world.

[00:16:54] 100% I mean I I laugh I've been in technology over 25 years now. Everything has always gotten more complicated and created more right it's we create more productivity we've become more efficiency but by the way, things are more expensive net with technology and you invest more in technology over time.

[00:17:14] Now I would make an argument that you're getting more back. It's a better spend we've gotten better at it we've gotten much smarter we can enhance productivity, but by the way, these companies don't get smaller, even the smallest technology company is continually growing because the need is continually there.

[00:17:32] Yeah, it's just a wild time and if you know if you've been around.

[00:17:37] I'm a I'm a I'm an elder millennial right someone that I'm on the cusp right of not being a millennial but so I've seen I mean I mean I watched it go cassette tapes all the way to where we are now.

[00:17:47] Every time you have a major shift like this, the personal computer revolution, you have the internet revolution kind of like had a semi sort of high speed internet revolution in there.

[00:17:59] You had the web 2.0 revolution where everything got social.

[00:18:03] It feels like this is one of the first times that everyone sees the sea change coming.

[00:18:11] Seems like every other time people were a little slower to react but I think now as a society we've gone through these like sea changes before with technology and I feel like everybody sees it coming this time would you agree.

[00:18:23] Yeah, I think so. I mean I tend to be a little bit critical of these waves you know and so I'm a Gen Xer right so I bet so yeah so but little a few more grays and what I mean by that is I've also learned to watch it but just stuff not turn into something.

[00:18:37] Oh yeah.

[00:18:38] And so I think that for me there's kind of been three critical points. The first I think was the internet itself exploding into the mainstream right the cloud the internet you know becoming a thing that's that late 90s 2000 conversion.

[00:18:53] The second one was very clearly the introduction to the iPhone.

[00:18:57] You know the mobile revolution.

[00:18:59] Oh man you can't miss that one though that was a huge right and I actually am willing to think that what we're seeing now is the third.

[00:19:05] And it is because it's hitting so many things and this just doesn't feel like a fad particularly when I put aside the fad type stuff.

[00:19:15] You know there's lots of crazy discussions going online.

[00:19:19] I mean I love the story of the lawyer who went into court with a brief that was entirely written by chat GPT and got you know and everything and it was wrong like it's a funny story.

[00:19:27] Yeah.

[00:19:29] But I'm much more interested in stories like what I'm seeing in terms of actually efficiency in terms of what law firms are able to do in terms of parsing all of those laws and the speed that they're able to do in getting their

[00:19:40] Paralegals to be more productive or getting lawyers to do case management faster like that's the way the rubber is really hitting the road and we're seeing me again in a year we've seen pretty crazy advancements and what's capable I know you're probably doing it in some of your business.

[00:19:55] I'm already got it implemented in most aspects of what I do and it's been able to create incredibly large surges in my productivity and I'm seeing it with a lot of the MSPs and IT service providers that I talked to are saying the same thing.

[00:20:12] Yeah, it's you know it's important and you know it's an important wave of technology and an important change when you don't have to try that hard to explain to somebody why it's important.

[00:20:21] So conversely let's make fun of something together.

[00:20:25] Okay, this happened two times.

[00:20:30] Every tech, Illuminati, whatever person tried to tell me how important Second Life was going to be.

[00:20:38] Do you remember Second Life?

[00:20:40] I do.

[00:20:42] Is it still around?

[00:20:44] It is actually still around that company is still plugging away.

[00:20:46] Well good for shout out to Second Life.

[00:20:50] They live right next door to my space.

[00:20:54] Everyone told me how important this was going to be and people are spending gobs of money on fake digital real estate because it was a gold rush.

[00:21:04] And to the average person you could not get them to verbalize why this was important.

[00:21:12] Right?

[00:21:14] You just couldn't.

[00:21:16] Whereas, and it by the way it happened again with Meta which I don't think Meta has given up on it yet, which is this and for those that don't know just big virtual reality world where we disconnect from this world.

[00:21:27] We're in the new world.

[00:21:29] We put the goggles on.

[00:21:31] Oh, we're walking around.

[00:21:33] It's like the Sims but we're trying to make it real.

[00:21:36] It just has more clout.

[00:21:37] It was just too early.

[00:21:39] And if you can't tell me why it's a value add to humanity and people and the average person just goes, yeah, I'm in then it's not going to catch on.

[00:21:48] Conversely, your reference of the smartphone revolution.

[00:21:51] I did not have to explain to literally anyone why it was significant that you had a you had an internet mobile device, a telecommunications device and a smart camera in your pocket.

[00:22:05] Right?

[00:22:07] I didn't have to explain everyone immediately knew why that was significant.

[00:22:10] And that's what I feel like is happening with artificial intelligence.

[00:22:13] I don't think the average person needs much convincing that this is warrants paying attention.

[00:22:18] I think you're right.

[00:22:20] And what's interesting is you actually can measure it based on kind of utility and interference.

[00:22:24] And let me let me tell you what I mean by that.

[00:22:26] Like, so you're exactly right.

[00:22:28] Like people like the smartphone because it has an amazing utility.

[00:22:29] It removes a bunch of devices from, you know, from my pile of things.

[00:22:34] You remember when you had to carry a camera and a phone and all this separate.

[00:22:38] But I actually want to highlight interference a little bit.

[00:22:41] One of the reasons why I don't think virtual worlds or the future is people don't like things that make them look goofy.

[00:22:48] You look funny.

[00:22:50] Look, it's kind of simple, but you don't like putting on a pair of goggles.

[00:22:53] It interferes with your interaction with people and the world.

[00:22:56] And you look kind of weird, right?

[00:22:59] Like it's kind of goofy to put these things on your face.

[00:23:01] The smart glasses on those they've tried two or three times.

[00:23:04] By the way, not here for Proctor U by the way, when they were doing the smart glasses, we're like, oh my God, like,

[00:23:09] but by the way, we're very comfortable with digital assets, which is an interesting portion.

[00:23:14] Like we'll buy skins in Fortnite or we'll buy, you know, things that we only all have as a digital asset.

[00:23:21] You know, we've been experimenting with it and some of what we're seeing crypto is kind of is that an asset?

[00:23:26] That's a whole other topic.

[00:23:28] But I'm using it as an example of like we do buy digital assets and that component about what those virtual worlds are talking about is a thing.

[00:23:36] I'm far more intrigued again by when we think about it back to that augment capability.

[00:23:41] I'm far more interested in what we're doing with augmented reality versus like that virtual reality.

[00:23:46] Like I think the idea of putting data into the world and making it more accessible to you is going to be a thing.

[00:23:52] I think it's going to be, you know, can we like one day we'll get to hologram communication.

[00:23:57] Why? Because it's convenient, right? It is nice. We're doing something together right now.

[00:24:02] It's not perfectly convenient for us to see one another.

[00:24:05] You can envision a world where we're doing that.

[00:24:07] And if people say like, Dave, you're like way ahead.

[00:24:09] It's like, well, am I really crazy that far ahead on holograms?

[00:24:13] Google's already working on it in the in meeting environments.

[00:24:15] And by the way, kiss just launched a new version of virtual avatars to do their concerts.

[00:24:22] And I'm slightly skeptical, but then I'm reminded that Abba's been doing it for two years and I was made over a billion dollars in concert sales selling virtually.

[00:24:31] So no digital transcend or the kiss army, right?

[00:24:36] Exactly. But so you look at this and you're like, oh, I can't wait a second.

[00:24:40] I can see the areas where it augments versus interferes.

[00:24:43] So I want your esteemed opinion on NFTs because you've got you just you touched on it.

[00:24:51] It's like, oh, that's a whole other thing. And before you even I was like, oh, I gotta ask you about this because you talk about hysteria like a couple of years ago, it would not have been.

[00:25:02] It would not have been crazy to see someone spend a quarter million dollars on a JPEG of a digital ape, you know, that had a gold tooth or something.

[00:25:17] And maybe they weren't JPEGs. I'm sorry. I didn't get it in a craze.

[00:25:20] But yeah, but I get the idea.

[00:25:21] It was an image and like and now those obviously the market has cratered on those things.

[00:25:27] What is your thoughts around cryptocurrency digital assets like NFTs, non-fungible tokens?

[00:25:34] I never saw the utility, right? So let's start with cryptocurrency.

[00:25:39] I didn't understand what was broken with money that needed this fix.

[00:25:43] And ultimately, like that's kind of where it comes down to everyone that was telling us how money was broken.

[00:25:50] I didn't think money was broken.

[00:25:52] And then, you know, funny all of the things about decentralization, we became really interested in centralization when the scammer showed up and what people were asking for their money back.

[00:26:02] So again, you have to focus on that.

[00:26:03] I do believe in the idea of digital assets. I think that's going to be a thing.

[00:26:09] But at the same time, I don't think digital assets for their own sake is necessarily a really large thing.

[00:26:17] And let me point to the art world, right?

[00:26:20] Like art is artificially valuable because we have simply deemed it based on scarcity, right?

[00:26:26] It's interesting to me like I'm not a big art collector, but I like the space and I'm interested in.

[00:26:30] I like to try and appreciate art and stuff. And I understand that, you know, when they want to paint or paint something, that's one time, right?

[00:26:37] That's an exclusive thing. There's scarcity to it.

[00:26:39] It's not quite scarce when it's artificial, right?

[00:26:44] Like in the idea of the board eight, board eight, club and stuff.

[00:26:48] It's like, well, it isn't really scarce. You kind of just created that stuff.

[00:26:52] And so again, I don't understand the problem you're solving.

[00:26:55] And that's where we have to ask the critical questions.

[00:26:57] It's okay to fling spaghetti at the wall. Like I'm fine with testing, right?

[00:27:03] But we have to do it in a way that we're testing for utility rather than just sort of get quick, get rich quick schemes.

[00:27:11] I think the value in the whole crypto movement to me was the idea of non centralized databases and making it far more difficult to hack databases because you've got to do like the 51 percent.

[00:27:23] For those that don't understand, like it's too much to explain here.

[00:27:27] But instead of having one central database, you've got like a little piece of the database on millions of people's computers making it a lot harder for someone to hack and change data.

[00:27:39] I think there's a tremendous amount of utility there.

[00:27:42] I agree with you when it became a surfing ape image, it's sort of like beanie babies, right?

[00:27:47] We sort of built it and tried to tell the world that it was scarce and valuable.

[00:27:53] And sort of like when you're telling the world that something is scarce and valuable, it just it may believe it for a little while.

[00:27:59] But after a while, it's like it's only it's not really right.

[00:28:03] It's just it's just not in the it's kind of like baseball cards.

[00:28:06] Like I still have my baseball cards from when I was a kid.

[00:28:09] I got my comic books from when I was a kid.

[00:28:10] They're going to be valuable.

[00:28:13] And there's just literally a million dudes like me that still has your 1991, you know, Martin McGuire card that you are this one's going to and it's not like it's it's it's appreciated.

[00:28:23] Modestly, it was 10 cents when I got it now.

[00:28:26] It's 40 cents, you know, or two dollars or whatever.

[00:28:30] And so I think there is some precedent though when you say digital assets, like there is some precedence for there being value to a non physical thing.

[00:28:40] For instance, intellectual property in and of itself is a valuable thing that we can't touch.

[00:28:48] I can't go call my company Google because Google owns the intellectual property to that name.

[00:28:55] I can't reach out and touch the actual thing that intellectual property, but we've all agreed that it has value.

[00:29:01] Yep, exactly.

[00:29:03] And that's where there is opportunity.

[00:29:05] Let's not throw out whole technologies without understanding them.

[00:29:07] I think blockchain is an interesting technology.

[00:29:10] There's there's some real use for a continuous logging mechanism like some of these pieces are there's there's things that we're going to do something with.

[00:29:17] And again, my eye particularly when I work with business owners is to make sure that we're having a conversation about what's the utility of this thing to make sure that it makes sense.

[00:29:27] And you know, call me old school or classic.

[00:29:29] I prefer classic on this stuff.

[00:29:30] I tend to think that things need to generate revenue, right?

[00:29:35] Like I think the basics of business or basics for a reason.

[00:29:38] You got to drive revenue.

[00:29:40] It has to be done efficiently and manage the cost of good sold.

[00:29:42] And in the end we have to make some profit.

[00:29:44] Right.

[00:29:46] And anytime somebody just says like do something in magic profit.

[00:29:48] I'm pretty skeptical.

[00:29:50] Yeah.

[00:29:52] Yeah, yeah, yeah, no totally agree.

[00:29:54] I think we should do a simultaneous grill check by the way.

[00:29:56] I think we should.

[00:29:58] I was just thinking the bacon might need to be checked here.

[00:30:00] All right, let's take a look.

[00:30:02] You're going green egg.

[00:30:04] I see green egg.

[00:30:06] That's coming out.

[00:30:08] That's looking pretty good.

[00:30:10] The bacon.

[00:30:12] By the way, so my camera work there someone zoom in for us.

[00:30:14] Thank you.

[00:30:16] I've got an actual producer on the side here to make sure things look good.

[00:30:18] So, you know, I've been these have been smoking since for about two hours now.

[00:30:20] Oh man.

[00:30:22] So that's so the target is my grill is saying about 149 degrees targets 150.

[00:30:26] So they're just about right.

[00:30:27] But I don't mind going slightly over right because I don't want to do too much because you don't want to cook it.

[00:30:33] You just want to get it smoked and nice.

[00:30:35] And then these will get like now let them cool naturally and wrap them and put them back in the fridge.

[00:30:39] So did you season them with anything?

[00:30:41] So that's the that's the rub itself.

[00:30:43] So that's where I'm actually doing it where it was cured with the maple syrup and the brown sugar and with the two kinds of salt.

[00:30:49] And that set, you know, those sat in the fridge for a week.

[00:30:51] And I ended up, you know, flipping them every other day to make sure that the bride was all doing nicely in those ziplock bags.

[00:30:57] It looks so good, man.

[00:30:59] So I'm going to retrieve the the wings off.

[00:31:02] Let me get a little camera shot of how our wings are doing here.

[00:31:04] So we've got lemon pepper over here and we've got the babe bourbon maple or maple as they say.

[00:31:09] Nice.

[00:31:11] Over here.

[00:31:13] So we've got some lemon pepper over here and we've got the bourbon maple or maple as they say.

[00:31:16] Nice.

[00:31:17] Over here.

[00:31:19] I think we're done.

[00:31:21] I'm going to check the temple needs, but you can you can eyeball.

[00:31:24] You can pretty much eyeball wings and these bad boys shrunk a lot afterwards.

[00:31:28] Oh, we're ready.

[00:31:30] So we might get to watch me eat on the show today, which is always fun.

[00:31:34] So and I'm it's if you're watching online to the green egg that Dave has is certainly the best way to do it.

[00:31:41] If you're watching online to the green egg that Dave has is certainly five steps up in and grilling street cred from where I am, which is screwing around with a digital, you know, a digital grill here appellate grill.

[00:31:56] I love to not sell yourself short man work like so doing on a proper cooker like that is actually like significant work.

[00:32:04] I when I my friend my sort of interest in smoking and grilling started when I would do a we call it the pink rose.

[00:32:11] So we would rent a towable cooker put it in the parking lot outside my townhouse and I'd go get a full hundred pound pig and smoke.

[00:32:20] And but the trick to that is, I mean you're getting up every hour and a half and stoking the fire.

[00:32:27] That's a lot of work, especially when you're doing, you know, like, you know, I'll start to smoke the night before you don't sleep very well.

[00:32:35] And then I'm trying to have my friends over to have a good time and I'm tired of barely slept.

[00:32:40] So, you know, but there is real art to doing it properly the way you're doing it on a grill that way.

[00:32:47] Well, and it gives you a lot of new options.

[00:32:50] It does it does reduce it does reduce the number of disasters.

[00:32:55] I mean, I've had pellet. I mean, excuse me. I've had ceramic cookers.

[00:32:59] I've had, you know, it's just literal like old school smokers and most of the time you're good.

[00:33:06] But man, every so often you have a full on disaster, right?

[00:33:10] Where where it just did not go as planned.

[00:33:13] And like, for instance, like, you know, using a traditional smoker in the in the winter, you know, and you're just battling frigid temps outside.

[00:33:23] You're not able to keep your grill at the temperature that you want it.

[00:33:25] And anyway, well, let me let's let these bad boys cool off a little bit.

[00:33:30] And we can probably do a whole episode on grilling technology for sure.

[00:33:34] That was certainly good.

[00:33:35] You know, where do you think?

[00:33:38] I mean, where do you think the tech industry is going to go?

[00:33:43] We've talked about AI.

[00:33:45] I think it's I think that when I when I when I'm what I meant by that question was, you know, the social media revolution was literally changed the world.

[00:33:58] Right.

[00:33:59] It it has arguably arguably been used to overthrow governments.

[00:34:05] It ruined marriages.

[00:34:07] It connected people with long lost loved ones.

[00:34:11] I mean, it's done good and bad and everything in between.

[00:34:14] It feels like we've sort of reached an apex though.

[00:34:17] Right.

[00:34:19] I feel like Elon with I don't want to call it X.

[00:34:23] Okay.

[00:34:25] Twitter but you know, Twitter X.

[00:34:26] I think I think we're sort of at the apex of social media.

[00:34:32] I know with what Elon's trying to do is is trying to re think the way it's done.

[00:34:39] It's not going well.

[00:34:41] I think you've seen you've seen a nice bird.

[00:34:43] Yeah, saying it nicely.

[00:34:45] You've also seen Zuckerberg.

[00:34:47] I mean, he renamed his company from Facebook to Metta trying to distance himself distance himself a little bit from the controversies and find a new reason for being that has a lot of growth.

[00:34:59] I mean, I also don't see it.

[00:35:02] Where do you see the future of the tech world as going as it pertains to social media?

[00:35:07] So I think we're seeing the end of sort of the centralized social media world where big companies own that experience.

[00:35:18] We're actually moving into a world where people are moving back into smaller groups.

[00:35:22] We kind of all figured out as a society that everyone talking at the same time is a bad idea.

[00:35:28] It's not necessarily great for good for good conversations and good information exchange.

[00:35:33] And on top of that, it's such a short bit that we don't have the opportunity for these more intricate long form discussions.

[00:35:42] It's not a great forum for that.

[00:35:44] And so you've probably seen it in your own world.

[00:35:47] I know I've seen it in mine and I've seen it with people that I talked to that it's going into more smaller groups.

[00:35:52] Have you probably noticed that you maybe have Slack channels that are like with clusters of people you like talking to those tech text threads that are communicative.

[00:36:01] We're seeing it in in where we're moving at a larger perspective.

[00:36:05] You mentioned Meta what they're doing with threads.

[00:36:08] They're embracing that technology called activity pub, which is the idea of allowing federation of these networks.

[00:36:15] So you kind of different versions of it.

[00:36:17] There can be a social media network that has one different set of rules versus another that's focused on one specific community where then another group wants to run theirs in one way and they've set up a communication structure that allows for that interchange.

[00:36:31] And that has embraced it. Threads is supporting activity pub.

[00:36:34] They're actually trialing it right now.

[00:36:36] This is going to be really interested for this kind of decentralized communication.

[00:36:41] I'm hopeful but watching for making sure that that continues to be a actual healthy way that we communicate.

[00:36:50] But I think that's the where it's going.

[00:36:52] Do you think you think threads has a chance?

[00:36:55] I mean, it sounds like you see some real utility there.

[00:36:57] I just saw it as a Twitter cover band.

[00:36:59] So I mean, I've been more active on threads.

[00:37:02] I wouldn't say I'm necessarily like it.

[00:37:04] We fully embraced of it, but the conversations have actually been pretty high quality of light.

[00:37:08] Now I live in tech world and tech threads tends to be a little bit more robust than some of the others.

[00:37:15] But the interesting thing about threads is it doesn't have to be the only solution because that's built on this open standard.

[00:37:22] There can be other related networks that plug into it.

[00:37:25] And so from a social media perspective, it's like, well, it's not just threads, right?

[00:37:31] Threads links to mastodon which links to some of the audio to blue sky.

[00:37:36] Like they're all interchangeable in this new world and you can take your audience from one platform to the other.

[00:37:44] That's the actual power of this decentralized version.

[00:37:47] I don't think I fully understood that or appreciated that.

[00:37:50] That is really interesting and that is a novel thing.

[00:37:52] I think what's interesting about for me, for Twitter again, I can't bring myself to call it X.

[00:38:00] But I'm with you.

[00:38:02] Just a side note because I love branding and stuff.

[00:38:06] What are you doing?

[00:38:08] Like you have literally a globally recognized brand that you have paid billions of dollars for.

[00:38:12] And then you because you, I don't know, because you want to send a message to everybody that things are changing,

[00:38:19] you torch that name.

[00:38:22] Now you branded it X and then by the way, this is just some UI annoyances.

[00:38:28] You also put the X logo, which is a friggin X in the right hand side of every time somebody embeds a tweet.

[00:38:37] So when you embed a tweet on a website, the X logo is at the top right of that embed.

[00:38:43] What does an X at the top right of anything universally mean to every technology user since the 80s?

[00:38:51] It means to close it, right?

[00:38:53] And so I've clicked on that X so many times.

[00:38:56] Just it's just such a bad, it's ill advised and poorly executed.

[00:39:01] So I'll offer a very simple theory.

[00:39:04] Okay.

[00:39:06] I think Elon has Twitter brain.

[00:39:07] I think like, you know, you spend too much time on Twitter.

[00:39:10] Your worldview to sports a little bit.

[00:39:12] Well, he's kind of the ultimate user and his brain just got a little bit broken.

[00:39:16] And he really started thinking that Twitter was more important than it actually was.

[00:39:21] If you look at usage, it's one of the smaller sites besides politicians and media people and tech people.

[00:39:28] It's actually not that part of most people's world.

[00:39:31] So he kind of over rotated on thinking how important it was.

[00:39:34] It was so important to him the same way that like cigarettes are important to some people.

[00:39:40] But you can stop smoking.

[00:39:43] You can stop and most of us have realized, you know what?

[00:39:46] I don't really like that.

[00:39:48] I don't want to do it anymore.

[00:39:50] I'm going to stop but he's got a little too much Twitter brain.

[00:39:53] That's a great perspective.

[00:39:55] And I think I just think to my perspective and I again, this is my opinion.

[00:39:59] Twitter's value to the world was the global public forum.

[00:40:05] Right?

[00:40:07] So Facebook was where you sort of went to talk with communities of people.

[00:40:12] Twitter was sort of the place you went to speak into the big void, right?

[00:40:17] Because you just didn't, they didn't really segment conversation.

[00:40:22] It tried to but it never really caught on where you would segment certain threads and conversations into other sections like really your Twitter feed.

[00:40:29] Was this giant indiscriminate, you know, thing of I am following baseball Twitter and I've got no barbecue Twitter and here's some politics and here's some stuff.

[00:40:40] And it's all just mishmashed.

[00:40:42] And so when you tweet, you weren't talking to a subset of the world.

[00:40:47] You're talking to the whole world and that was what was novel about that.

[00:40:51] And you could watch Twitter was where I went when earthquakes happened and governments were overthrown and everything because that's where you went to get people that were trying to tell the world something.

[00:40:59] Right?

[00:41:01] So I mean, it's you're right.

[00:41:03] And but what I want to it's a great place for people to come to communicate.

[00:41:06] But I want to actually focus on two thoughts that I think are we're learning from this experience.

[00:41:11] The first is it wasn't public was always a private company.

[00:41:16] And we have to remember that the rules of the road or private company rules that's healthy.

[00:41:21] We're both in business, right?

[00:41:23] Big believer in that kind of stuff.

[00:41:24] But the rules of the road are different in a utility and a public service versus a business.

[00:41:30] And it's just a thing.

[00:41:32] You just have to acknowledge it.

[00:41:34] It isn't a public thing.

[00:41:36] It's useful for the business owners to say it's a public thing, but we have to remember it's not.

[00:41:41] But I think the actual important lesson is what we talked about in there.

[00:41:46] You talked about sports Twitter and baseball Twitter and news Twitter and barbecue Twitter and all of the various bits of that.

[00:41:50] Humans are not really great at communicating about everything all the time.

[00:41:56] Everything all at once.

[00:41:59] We actually are better when we're processing information in useful ways.

[00:42:04] And I think that they were learning about this is that we are better.

[00:42:07] We are multifaceted as people.

[00:42:09] That's healthy.

[00:42:11] And if you're trying to consume everything all at once, things can get really ugly.

[00:42:15] But when you can focus on commonalities, when you can focus on areas that you can communicate together, you can work on something collaborative.

[00:42:23] For example, barbecue as a barbecue Twitter, if that becomes just the thing that you talk about like kind of a little bit old school Internet of like forums and private lists serves and that kind of stuff.

[00:42:33] Wonderful communities can grow there.

[00:42:35] And so the lesson for us is that in some ways specialization is really good and really healthy.

[00:42:41] And I think we're going to see more of that.

[00:42:43] I think there's real value in that.

[00:42:45] I think people got to a place where you're right.

[00:42:48] They didn't every everything being together all at once just became noise, right?

[00:42:54] It was it was hard to make sense of things.

[00:42:56] And I also think that, you know, the sort of the net effect to society of like a digital communication sort of democratize things a lot.

[00:43:03] And in the early stages, we thought that was such a great thing where, you know, the person washing dishes at your local Chipotle is can speak with the same volume as a CEO because they're all in the same sort of thread.

[00:43:18] The problem with that is, you know, no one got no one gets communication Mulligans anymore.

[00:43:23] Like, you know, 25, 30 years ago, you can mutter something under your breath and you can sort of say it without really thinking about the impact or how it could be misconstrued or whatever.

[00:43:34] Now if you if you type that under your breath, it has this.

[00:43:38] It carries the same weight as a public statement from a public figure and people get, you know, just crucified for these little things that they say or little things that they do.

[00:43:46] And all because they sort of wrote it out and it's given the same weight as what people are saying, you know, in press releases and things.

[00:43:56] I think that is a it's hard because it's hard to teach young people.

[00:44:01] I used to cringe when I was trying to hire people at Proctor U. We're trying to hire a lot of people.

[00:44:06] And one of the things you do is you check their public social media, right?

[00:44:09] I don't care what any HR person says if they put it out in public, it is fair game, right?

[00:44:15] Especially if they're in a social network that requires no login, right?

[00:44:19] So you would go check their social media to see what they how they portray themselves.

[00:44:26] And, you know, and you find people doing drugs and doing and you're thinking like this is a permanent record that you are creating of yourself.

[00:44:34] That is it's one thing to have taken a photo of yourself drinking a beer at 16 and that photo is in an envelope under your bed.

[00:44:43] It's another thing to have that photo as accessible as a press release from Microsoft, which is what it would be on Twitter.

[00:44:51] Yeah, and you're 100% right.

[00:44:54] And I think that we all cultivate that.

[00:44:56] But I think the other thing that we as business leaders and as humans need to sort of focus back on a little bit is that you also don't always have full insight.

[00:45:04] Into people as human beings and well wrapped just as we said that there are multiple facets to your personality and the things you're communicating with online.

[00:45:14] We don't actually know beyond the tip of the iceberg for most people what's going on.

[00:45:20] And I think you've hit on a really important thing that we as people business leaders in a society need to think about is, is how are we going to have a system for grace and for forgiveness?

[00:45:30] Because, you know, one of the things that I find is as oftentimes as a business leader or someone that communicates with somebody when I find something something's good like somebody makes some kind of big noise that's unusual for them.

[00:45:45] Usually the why behind it is not any of the things that I think or know about.

[00:45:51] I don't know about their own struggles. I don't know about what happened in their family life.

[00:45:56] I don't know about what may have happened with their parents that morning health wise or what happened with their kids or the fight they had with their partner, or you don't have insight into that.

[00:46:05] Most of the time you find that that's the core of why people have a particularly bad reaction to something that seems wrong.

[00:46:12] And then I also want to say we need to learn both as individuals in a society kind of you relearn the grace of forgiveness that we need a way of rehabilitating when somebody can make a mistake.

[00:46:26] And the act of rehabilitation is part of the forgiveness process.

[00:46:31] And I think that that piece the more we focus there, the stronger and better our outcomes are going to be both personally and by the way professionally.

[00:46:39] Oh man, you I mean we're veering into some some touchy feely stuff that I really love.

[00:46:44] I totally agree. I think I think grace is missing in the conversation all the time and an example would be the woman who was filmed on an airplane pointing and saying that man's not real or that guy's whatever that guy was to we all saw her name was Tiffany something

[00:47:01] rather than I've seen some interviews with her since then and she's like what that was one of my worst moments of my life.

[00:47:08] Like I lost control. I was showing myself. I should not have acted that way.

[00:47:13] And we have boiled her entire existence down to a five second clip of her worst moment and who among us has not had a terrible regrettable moment where we've said or done something or acted some way where if that was all you ever saw,

[00:47:29] you would not know who we truly are. And I think it's just a shame that people do that to other human beings to sort of score points right to say oh I'm on the good team because I'm pointing at that person and saying that's wrong.

[00:47:46] Instead of like, you know, there was a there was an instance at I'm a big University of Florida alum. I love my Gators years ago I forget I forget the kid's name.

[00:47:56] There was a there was a kid who was coming to play at the University of Florida had already committed there and a video comes out online of him.

[00:48:04] You know, white kid singing the lyrics out loud to a rap song just gets in the moment says the word he shouldn't say and this kid's life gets ruined over like a split second and to be clear like when you're when you're repeating somebody else's art out loud.

[00:48:23] Does that have the same weight as you flinging that thing. I don't know it's real probably not my question to answer, but the point is like there was no grace given to this kid this kids like 17 years old just figured out just figuring out what life is and you got a whole bunch of people that have never met that kid that labeling he doesn't get to go to the University of Florida by the way he gets his he gets his scholarship taken away and it's like holy cow.

[00:48:49] Where is the grace in this situation especially for a kid you know and I think we're becoming a little more aware of that we're just starting there's a lot of people that are starting to become a little more understanding digital media can make tribalism so natural and easy to do and then it's very easy to fling something harsh and hateful and judgmental at somebody that appears to be outside of your tribe.

[00:49:19] Well remember I mean and I think the important fact to circle this into the business conversation. Remember it's about financial motivations. You know the the algorithms the big social media companies have learned that engagement equals enrichment.

[00:49:33] Yeah right and that the two work well together and they make more money the more angry their audiences. That's a financial motivation by way businesses are in the business of making money. I get it right like and so I'm not going to turn around what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to blame.

[00:49:49] Facebook or Meta or X I'm not going to blame those companies when we actually say is is us as society were responsible for putting in place the rules of the road the right the the guardrails.

[00:50:02] We don't like talking politics and get it I'm not going there but I'm just saying that argument that discussion is about the rules of the road for society that's healthy and we want to have those conversations.

[00:50:13] I always use a really simple example and I've used it a lot some of my posts and on my killing a podcast make fun of me for this. But the idea is is like look the cheapest way for say you and I get into the chemical plant business right we're going to do chemical processors.

[00:50:28] The quickest way for us to dispose of our waste is put our plant next to a river and dump it into the room.

[00:50:36] That is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to do that problem. But you know what society has decided that we don't want fish with three eyes and so we'd like to drink water that doesn't glow in the dark.

[00:50:46] And so we say that's not allowed now by the way we can have a healthy argument about what is the definition of clean water and maybe the ways that we're doing that.

[00:50:55] That's by the way called regulation in politics. It's kind of unpleasant sometimes but by the way it's a healthy debate that we should have and if we put a little grace around it to we can actually get down to solving some interesting problems.

[00:51:08] But that's where it is you don't blame the companies you actually have to turn the eyes back to ourselves and say like we want to live in a society that manages these things. It's kind of up to us to make those decisions.

[00:51:20] Yeah. So I have I could talk to you all day by the way you're great fun but I want to ask because we're heading into an election year and I don't want to veer into politics talk but I want to talk about sort of like I want Dave like the referee here right.

[00:51:36] The last I would say certainly the 2016 election. The tech industry's influence into that election is undeniable and will be talked about for generations. I think it was less so in 2020 because people were more aware but there were absolutely definitely

[00:51:56] incidents where different sides of the equation people interpret the Hunter Biden laptop thing people interpret that differently right of how that story was either pulled from the news and everything else.

[00:52:10] And people interpret all sorts of things. Where do you see the tech industry playing a role in this upcoming election next year. And do you think we're going to have another moment where everyone's going to point at some of the things that are going to be

[00:52:25] something that happened and have their own spin on why that you know why that was unfair and how that should change the outcome. Yeah. Yeah it's a complicated problem. I'll actually sort of smile and say to the last board is yeah I'm confident somebody is going to point to something

[00:52:41] because there's always looking for a reason but let's actually have a more nuanced conversation about this. What we've kind of learned is society kind of on both sides of the aisle here is that we don't necessarily like unregulated tech.

[00:52:54] We've kind of all decided we don't really like that necessarily and that we're not going to let what happened with social media happen again with things like a I'm pretty encouraged by the fact that there's some real bipartisan action going on in Congress right now in terms of reviewing

[00:53:08] AI. They pulled together a long series of workshops this past year to review the issue start having some real discussions they were learning about what the technologies are there's even a congressman getting his advanced degree in artificial intelligence right now.

[00:53:22] So it's real easy to sort of cast aspersions and say like oh they don't understand anything you know what they've actually learned it leaned into some real education around here they're having some open forums and discussion and the likelihood of this not being regulated at all

[00:53:38] is as close to zero as I can imagine the EU has already passed and they're their AI act that passed just in the past week or so. Wow. You know and you know law is its own thing that's going to take a little while to go but the Europeans have been pretty forward on on leaning into a lot of regulation

[00:53:56] and it weren't as much even on social media. I think we're going to learn a little bit from them as they roll it out to but I think our own the US government is not doing nothing. And so what I think we're going to land is this we're going to land in a world where at least it isn't just complete chaos to your point like is something going to happen.

[00:54:15] Yeah of course because there's people motivated by pointing out things as the reason but but there's a common thread of good you know I tend to be there's a lot of good people doing a lot of good work along the way. You can point to some of the stuff that happened from a cybersecurity perspective both in the

[00:54:32] 2016 and 2020 elections and I can point to what's going on in Congress right now around AI. I think there's going to actually be some real attention paid here. That's excellent. Well Dave I like I said I could talk to you all day.

[00:54:46] I've got a plate of wings in front of me so I probably have some some business to get down to is there anything else we need to know about that bacon behind you by the way. Well you know I'm about to pull that so when we finish up here I'm going to pull that I'm going to let it cool.

[00:54:58] Wrap it up I think that'll end up as part of the Christmas meals around here because that's exciting man. I'm inspired like when you when you told me you were going to make bacon before the show. I just I did not I did not think you were making big slabs of it to be cut later which is that's

[00:55:14] super cool and I think you know who which one of us looks like the real barbecue savant right now it's you know it's probably got making bacon so but but you're doing it on a regular basis. I just appreciated you having me in the studio to be able to have a little fun do some

[00:55:30] you know cooks and meats on both sides and have a fun conversation just an old schmuck in his backyard talking tech by the grill Dave the business attack podcast it's awesome guys if you if you love geeking out on stuff like this and really getting what I love about your show is it's quick like you get right to what's happening today.

[00:55:49] It's not the broad strokes you're really getting into reacting to the news which is really cool Dave where can they find that show and where can they find you.

[00:55:57] I'm easy to find you go to business of tech is the website there's a button there to follow on whatever platform on Apple Spotify YouTube whatever is favorite for you. I'm on all the socials but I freely admit I lean into LinkedIn.

[00:56:09] I'm easy to find there the easiest place to communicate with me is on LinkedIn again links to everything is at business of dot tech business of dot tech. This was awesome Dave enjoy your bacon I'm going to enjoy these wings.

[00:56:24] Guys be leaning into AI I said it on the show before it's the most significant change in the world in a long time and it's going to affect everything in the faster you learn how it can and will affect your corner of the world the better off you'll be.

[00:56:38] So we love it here we love talking tech here at the slow smoke business show. Thank you so much for being here Dave if you enjoyed this show if you found anything valuable please we send it to a friend of yours like us give us a five star rating thumbs up wherever we are you know what to do.

[00:56:53] We'll see you next time on slow smoke business.