We're Stopping Until January and Moving to LinkedIn
Talked about we're gonna take a break. We're gonna take a little holiday break. Are are we cool with this, Dex? This was all in texts, and I I couldn't tell if you, like, if you cried a little.
Speaker 2:No. I'm pissed. I was just looking at LinkedIn because you're starting to post there.
Speaker 1:Is that why you said that? Is that why you tweeted that?
Speaker 2:I'm a 100% serious. I really want all of tech Twitter just to switch to posting on LinkedIn for a week. I think it would, like, permanently change the vibe of LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:I just saw I just saw you replied.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I'm I'm for it. Let's do it. I you know, I realized, like, there's more people on LinkedIn that care about AWS than Twitter. Probably by a lot. Like, I don't know why I don't post anything there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like this annoying thing that's in the back of my head where I should really be building some attention there. Yeah. But it would be a lot more fun if at least a bunch of us were there and it was kinda the same vibe Hey, as
Speaker 1:we're there. We're doing it.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be on I gotta go clean it all up. I just went through and, like, declined, like, a 100 something requests Their to
Speaker 1:notifications are so meaningless.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:The notifications tab is just full of, like, some person posted a thing. That's not a notification. You shouldn't send a notification for that. I didn't ask to get notifications for random people posting things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's that. And then, like, they have, like, the connection concept and the follower concept. So I switched it to be follower by default, which I think makes sense. I gotta go through and remove all my connections because I don't have someone to start over.
Speaker 2:What did you do? Did you, clean it up or did No. You just pick it
Speaker 1:some point, I switched over to the creative or whatever creator profile thing where you can have followers, but I've never touched the connections. Honestly, I've never even looked at them. I don't even know. Like, I just go through randomly, and I look at people that ask to connect, and I'm like, yeah. Nah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like Yeah. If they're obviously a recruiter, no. If they're not, sure. Why not?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that that's that's my thing. Like, I had I've had different phases over the I haven't used LinkedIn in years, but before when I had it, I just had different logic with who I would accept who I would decline. That would change over time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But now I just have I have like no idea what a connection means for myself. I'm just gonna delete everyone and I start think if there's anyone meaningful that I remove, like, they'll find a way to reach out again, like, you know, it's not Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anything lost. I respect that but it's so hard for me to do that. It just feels like I'm slapping people in the face if I unfollow them on Twitter or on On
Speaker 2:LinkedIn, though? Come on.
Speaker 1:I guess on LinkedIn, who cares? Yeah. I don't know. It's hard. With the my problem with LinkedIn is, like, why why do you have to wear, a polo shirt to be on LinkedIn?
Speaker 1:Like, what is the deal with the lack of authenticity and the, like like, people aren't this way. The way they are on LinkedIn, that's not how people are.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Or are they that way in person?
Speaker 2:Like I think to some degree
Speaker 1:Are some people just
Speaker 2:There's like this professional persona that we learn to be and they just become that
Speaker 1:way. But it's so fake. I mean, not like people are trying to be fake. I'm not trying to slam individuals. But like, if you really sit and think about how you act when you put on a, quote, unquote, professional whatever, what are you doing right now?
Speaker 2:Just closing my door.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It sounded like you're beating something. Like, poor Zuko, what did you do? Like, if you really if someone genuinely just stopped and thought about how, like, their professional persona in their workplace or on LinkedIn is not a reflection of them as a person, like, are a different person at home than they are on LinkedIn, then I think they'd realize I'm not slamming them. I'm not saying they're a fake person.
Speaker 1:It's just like you're being fake on LinkedIn, and you're being fake in your workplace. On Twitter, I feel like everybody's just themselves. Like, you're literally just yourself the way you are in your home. You're not, like, putting on a mask to get on Twitter. I kinda love that about Twitter, but I don't understand what it is about LinkedIn that can't have that.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly why I want Twitter to crash LinkedIn because I think that's why I don't wanna be there. It's just this weird vibe. And I think if a bunch of people showed up and like, you know, acted differently Yeah. I think it would be more effective. I think that stuff would get a lot more eyeballs and attention and eventually that'll change the vibe of at least our corner of LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:So that's what you're hoping is to change LinkedIn, not just get some experience that we all go back to Twitter better people.
Speaker 2:No. The opposite. I want Okay. Yeah. Wanna I want us to not change at all and then just show up on LinkedIn and then change LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:And just change LinkedIn. Yeah. That would be amazing, actually. I didn't even honestly know you had a LinkedIn just seeing that you're I don't even know how to find the thing. I just you just did this.
Speaker 2:Everyone I'm sure everyone has a LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Just not everybody advertises it.
Speaker 2:Let let me clean it up, and then we'll we'll connect
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm already looking at it. Too late. Oh, no. This is awesome. Okay.
Speaker 1:Am I even connected to you? Okay. We are connected. Cool. I just don't think about LinkedIn at
Speaker 2:all. I'm gonna figure out how to remove everyone and it's it's gonna be some stupid thing where it's going.
Speaker 1:Could you leave me at least?
Speaker 2:Well, I have to understand, like, should we follow each other or should we connect? Like, what's the difference?
Speaker 1:Both probably. I don't know.
Speaker 2:That's very confusing. I feel like I should have added like, a second adding going from one thing to two things means there's like, what, four combinations of, like, can follow me and be connected, you can be connected Right. And not following each other, you know. Very complicated.
Speaker 1:It started though I think LinkedIn started without the idea following people. It was just connections.
Speaker 2:Connections. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember. I actually remember, like, over a decade ago whenever we first got on LinkedIn. I remember, like, people bragging about having 500 connections on LinkedIn. Like, that was the thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you remember this? Are you old enough to remember this?
Speaker 2:But it's a stupid system because a connection is mutual. So it just means that it erodes any meaning for you on LinkedIn to have a high number of connections.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess so. Back then, it was like a sign of your importance. You're connected. You're a connected individual.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that also means you're like if if you have 10,000 people connected to you, that also means you're like following 10,000 people, which just means your feed is just complete noise at that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess so. Yeah. I've never thought about how LinkedIn has a feed. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:So that's why I follow people is to to see them on my feed.
Speaker 2:I I guess I I just wanna go in there and treat it exactly like Twitter and then not change anything because of
Speaker 1:the No. We don't have to learn LinkedIn. We're just gonna yes. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. It might be good.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm trying to think if I should, like, change my whatever, like, because the big thing about the z for your work history on there, I wanna, like, like, maybe I should make it funny.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Make it make it funny. I I I don't know if I've looked at my, at my profile.
Speaker 2:There's so many like like when I go to my profile, there's like a million of those progress bars being like, which university did you attend?
Speaker 1:Add it
Speaker 2:in and you'll be at step six of seven, you know. It's just it's just so, like, so deep in the instantification process. Yeah. There's like a million things you can dismiss.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. I have used LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm I'm open to work apparently.
Speaker 1:I have a I have a recommendation someone gave me from 02/2009. That's like
Speaker 2:Oh, man. That's a long
Speaker 1:time my career. That's
Speaker 2:a before my
Speaker 1:career too.
Speaker 2:Taken me way back. Wow. Oh, I've got one. Oh, wait. No.
Speaker 2:I I get I I've given I've given one recommendation to these two recruiters that I worked with.
Speaker 1:Oh, I've given a couple.
Speaker 2:In house recruiters at my last company. Oh, look at my skills, software architecture, Elixir, Golang, JavaScript, Erlang, Cassandra, graph databases This is awesome. UIUX, c sharp. This is so outdated. React database design.
Speaker 1:All 15 skills. Well, you have 15 skills, Dax. I don't if you knew this.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:No more. No less. You have 15 of them. Okay. I have a story.
Speaker 1:The being on LinkedIn here, I just saw something because there is a feed on LinkedIn, which I I totally did not realize. Right. If I realized that I've never looked at it. Scrolling down my feed, I see Wesley Faulkner. Do you know Wesley?
Speaker 2:No idea. By any chance,
Speaker 1:worse at AWS? Okay. Story time about Wesley Faulkner. I remember now drunk on a hotel rooftop in Atlanta at Render. I'm wearing the Render shirt today, and look at this.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:I remember seeing Wesley and saying, we have to connect on Twitter or somewhere, and he didn't have a Twitter. He's on LinkedIn. So we're connected on LinkedIn, and I had forgot about Wesley, but here's the story. The first conference I ever go to was that, Render, in Atlanta. I was I was too too far gone.
Speaker 1:I drank too many alcoholic beverages, and I was very, like, disoriented. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:That was not the first conference. The first conference I was to was with you at Reinvent.
Speaker 2:Reinvent. Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. So flashback six months or whatever it was. At Reinvent, I came out of we went to something. The wax museum thing, we went to that. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't even know if I had drank that night, but I was just so exhausted. It was like day whatever, too many of seven. And just like walking around Vegas for that whole week, like, we're just I was just beat. And it was like a late night again, And I'm walking out of that thing. I left that thing early because I was just so tired.
Speaker 1:I just had to go back to my room and just, like, sleep. And walking out of the the the thing I'm telling a very long winded story. Walking out of the what's the place? The wax museum.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:He is standing outside the door, and I'd never met Wesley. Didn't know him, but I recognized his face. I think he used to be on Twitter, but I he worked at AWS. Still works at AWS. Sorry.
Speaker 1:I recognized him. I was like, I know you from somewhere. And he was like, I don't know you from anywhere. So we struck up a conversation. I just told him, like, this is my first re:Invent.
Speaker 1:I'm exhausted. I think I'm just gonna go back to my room. And he had been to, like, a lot of reinvents. He's like, yeah. It's a lot.
Speaker 1:You need to just pace yourselves at these tech conferences. He's like, oh, it's my first tech conference. It was nice meeting you, and I went to my room, and I went to bed. Next tech conference I go to is Render in Atlanta, like, six months later. And as I said, had too much to drink.
Speaker 1:I'm on the rooftop bar. There's, a party thing after one of the nights at Render. And I go to the bathroom, and I come out, and guess who I run into? Wesley Faulkner. Two conferences, two appearances.
Speaker 1:I decide at that point, he's my guardian angel. He's not a real he's just showing up whenever I need to be, like, put to bed and, like, telling me to slow down and go go home, Adam. No. So I have conversation with him. This I'm pretty drunk, so it was a little like I was probably way too much.
Speaker 1:I was just like, oh my god, Wesley. I remember you from tech the re:Invent thing, and I had never like, whatever. I had never met you, and now I've seen you at both tech conferences I've been to. So flash forward to last month when I went to TwitchCon in Vegas. Guess who was at TwitchCon?
Speaker 2:Are you serious?
Speaker 1:Wesley Faulkner. For his
Speaker 2:first time, he'd never
Speaker 1:gone to TwitchCon. He went just because he wanted to, like, see what it was all about. He works at Amazon. You know? Like, check out this Twitch thing.
Speaker 1:I bump into him the first day at well, it was at Prime's panel. It was just like, I'm really convinced he's not a real person.
Speaker 2:He's not real.
Speaker 1:He's following me somehow around. He's not real. He's an angel or something.
Speaker 2:And the fact that he's on LinkedIn doesn't really help either. Because I don't think anyone on LinkedIn is a real person.
Speaker 1:None of the people on LinkedIn are real. Yeah. Sorry. That was a really long story to kick off. You you just started the stream on Twitter and I just went on to this giant storytelling adventure.
Speaker 1:Sorry about
Speaker 2:that. But you said he didn't have Twitter, so you followed him on LinkedIn. Are you connected on LinkedIn?
Speaker 1:Yes. That's how we yeah. So we're connected on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is good, everybody. But all that to say LinkedIn is a place to find angels and heroes
Speaker 2:and everything else. Angels and heroes. That that, weird VC event I went to a few weeks ago, I saw someone, like two people met or like we were in a group and someone was like, oh, let me get your contact info. And they pulled out their LinkedIn app and they had like a LinkedIn QR code and they like scanned it and I was like
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Wow. What is this world? I was like, I was like, I hope nobody asked me to do that because I have to be like, I don't have LinkedIn. They probably give me a really weird look like, what do you mean you don't have LinkedIn? Like, how do you get anything done in this world?
Speaker 2:But yeah, like in that world, it's just all done through LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. They went from business cards printed in their pocket Yeah. To LinkedIn QR codes.
Speaker 2:Did you
Speaker 1:ever have a business card?
Speaker 2:Someone gave me a business card at that meeting and I was like, wow, don't people still care around
Speaker 1:business I mean, you ever had one with with Vax on it, like
Speaker 2:I think I yeah, I think I did. Yeah? Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1:I'm not judging.
Speaker 2:I don't think I ever used it. No no no. I'm not like hesitant. I'm just like trying to remember. Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I did so it like the a company that acquired my first company, I remember they printed out business cards and I had a bunch and I don't remember ever carrying them around or ever giving out a single one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. So we we had them at statues, like, when we were, like, five people Yeah. Which is funny now looking back.
Speaker 1:And I don't know if I ever gave them to anybody. I know I had some. I had, like, a little box of them. Yeah. It's just a fun relic from the past.
Speaker 1:It's like, now we all kinda know, like, what I don't know. Or may I guess it's maybe it's not a relic. Maybe people still pass them around.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Like I
Speaker 2:said, I just I got one the other day. But the thing I don't get is, like, I don't know why he gave it to me. He should've just let me take a picture of it cause now he's got it, like, restocked Yeah. The the one I took. And also, I don't remember where I put it.
Speaker 2:I think it's, like, in my pocket somewhere and it might have went through the laundry. So it's just it's just not effective.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Any physical piece of paper is is just toast. There's no way I'm keeping that thing. It's gonna end up in the trash.
Speaker 2:The iPhones have like that NFC thing now where you can like put them together and then you can get contact info. Oh. But I I don't necessarily want like Like share
Speaker 1:it that way.
Speaker 2:I don't want every random person I meet to be in my contact book, I Oh,
Speaker 1:oh, that's another topic. Have you looked at your contact list lately?
Speaker 2:I've cleaned mine up. Cleaned mine up and it's in a great spot.
Speaker 1:Okay. I've had that to do for, like, ten years.
Speaker 2:It's since my first iPhone, I've had
Speaker 1:a contact yeah. It's I've never cleaned it up. And sometimes I end up in it, like, when I'm trying to I don't know. I'm just trying to call somebody and you don't go to the resents. You just, like, start scrolling.
Speaker 1:And you see some names in there that are like, oh, wow. That's a that's a childhood
Speaker 2:some random person from high school. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like, what
Speaker 1:are they doing in here? Like, what would happen if you
Speaker 2:hit that number? Your whole life could change.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's true. They probably don't have the same number at this point. Right?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Don't know. Phone numbers aren't exactly like permalinks. I feel like
Speaker 2:I've had like A
Speaker 1:lot five
Speaker 2:my friends have had the same phone number forever. I've had a ton. I know if you're in tech, you just like rotate phone numbers because you'd like don't fear that switch. You like do it more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I like that for stupid reasons a bunch of times. But, my friends have had the same phone number since they were since they got the first one.
Speaker 1:I kinda like the reset, to be honest, sometimes. It's like doing backups from your phone, like, when you get a new phone. Sometimes I just don't. I'm like, no.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. Over. Start over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. My my bank, you use Mercury. Right?
Speaker 2:I use Mercury. Yeah. And I use Brex for my other one.
Speaker 1:Oh, right. Right. Because you actually have a start up. When I was on Brex, they like
Speaker 2:They booted me.
Speaker 1:Cycled all our cards. Yeah. I got booted from Brex. That was a whole thing. But then Mercury, I think this is the second time they've cycled my debit cards
Speaker 2:for security reasons. The debit card. But I I don't use a debit card at all.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:What do I use their credit card. I use their, no, because Mercury has their credit card. Do have
Speaker 1:a credit card? How do I not know this?
Speaker 2:Okay. The only reason I use it is because I don't have to have like a separate credit card. It's nice to have it all integrated in one Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. I'd rather just have it all in one place. Yeah. I totally hear you.
Speaker 2:But the annoying thing is you have to keep 50 k in that bank account and like, I only wanna keep like 25 k in there. So it's it's like a little bit little annoying.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a big buffer for what I do. Interesting. I didn't know they had them
Speaker 2:though. It's not like an amazing one. It's 2% cash back but whatever. That's like pretty much roughly the same as
Speaker 1:what it a you merchant card?
Speaker 2:Their standard card? It's called io. It's like Mercury io. Like, Oh, input that's thing.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm gonna look into this.
Speaker 2:Maybe you weren't invited. Maybe
Speaker 1:not. What I was gonna say, the reason we got on this track, they just cycled my debit card. Everything was set up with that debit card, and it's kinda nice. It's like a resetting of all your SaaS subscriptions and stuff.
Speaker 2:No. This doesn't happen anymore. What? Have you not seen what's been happening lately?
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:So I am a prolific loser of credit cards. Like, will lose my credit card several times a year. And before, when I would get a new number, because of my personal credit card, so Amex, not the Mercury one. Yeah. I would have to go and update everything.
Speaker 2:It was a little annoying but it was fine because of the reset, right? Now, I don't have to update anything because it just updates automatically. Every single Yep.
Speaker 1:Are you serious?
Speaker 2:They just go get my new card, which is so annoying because it's
Speaker 1:How do they do
Speaker 2:that?
Speaker 1:I think it's
Speaker 2:because they've all integrated with something like Stripe and then Stripe does that because there is some, like, protocol for, like, credit card carriers to push
Speaker 1:credit numbers. Okay. So maybe just not with debit card.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's why. You can't escape you can't escape yeah. It might be it might be like because
Speaker 1:mine were all, like, I was just noticing all my payments were failing. I'm like, what's going on? Oh, they changed my debit card for
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you have like any of those like fancier credit cards, like Amex or or Chase or even like the Apple card. Yeah. It's it just updates everywhere. It's
Speaker 1:very annoying. So I do have an Apple card. I don't think I don't think I have any other credit cards anymore. I used to have, like, the travel cards and do all the, like, nerd wallet stuff where, like, we put everything on it and we got the points. It's Starwood Preferred and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:I used to do all that. And then eventually, we were just like, you know, it sucks not knowing how much we've spent this month until, like, we pay the credit card. Maybe we should just use our debit card. And then we did. It sucks having to put a PIN in, but it's kinda nice, like Wait.
Speaker 2:Hang on. I don't understand why you have that problem. What do mean you don't know how much you spent till
Speaker 1:the end
Speaker 2:of the month?
Speaker 1:Well, because there's no good personal finance tools, Dax. You need to build No. No. I mean, was just like you you have, like, two different things. You have your balance, like, in your checking account, but then you have, like, a credit card balance.
Speaker 1:So it's like, if you're not looking at both, you don't really know I don't know. It was just like this delay among
Speaker 2:I think we went to the other extreme. We only use our credit card. So
Speaker 1:That's what we did. So just to get maximize the points or whatever, we paid the balance every month, but we only used a credit card for everything. And then eventually we did, like, the Amex Platinum and all that. I mean, we were just, like, doing the whole thing. And then eventually, we just got tired of, like, the like, we weren't spending money.
Speaker 1:We were, like, building a number up and then paying and then spending money on that number. It just felt weird. There was, a delay.
Speaker 2:So here's my setup. The thing with the other thing I like with the Mercury so my business account is a Mercury bank account that effectively is is, like, my whole bank account. That's, like, the only one that I really have. That has that credit card, but that credit card gets paid every day.
Speaker 1:Oh, it pays it every day.
Speaker 2:So like, it's it's just like moving between two internal numbers in Mercury. So it's not like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It you decided to pay out every day. So Yeah. Just all the all the business charges go there. Then we we still have our Amex. Me and Liz each have a have one.
Speaker 2:Like everything else goes on there. And that does get paid out once, once a month. We actually do use some of a good amount of the benefits of, of the Amex Platinum. But I don't like optimizing the points or anything. I feel like it's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And just like a general cashback thing is, like, almost the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I'd prefer just the cashback thing. I think we are starting to travel again, and it looks like we're only gonna travel more and more because Casey, like, travels revival stuff. I'm traveling for jiu jitsu stuff.
Speaker 1:That sounds so dumb.
Speaker 2:It's not dumb. Embrace it.
Speaker 1:Saying it out loud. I'm embracing it. I'm a traveling white belt. Okay? Listen.
Speaker 1:I wanna get the competition experience now so that at blue belt
Speaker 2:Every time you say that, think you're gonna say, I'm a traveling white man. Okay. I forget that it's white belt.
Speaker 1:Am that too, I guess. Both things can be true. Yeah. No. We're we're, like, booking travel a lot, and it just feels like, we're probably leaving a lot of travel, whatever, miles on the table or whatever.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. I don't lose sleep over it. It's just hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think it's that much more compared to I mean, yeah, a debit card, you're not getting anything back. So but I think the difference between a cashback card and, like, doing the travel points optimization, I don't know if there's enough of a difference for me to care. That said, we do spend all of our points from Amex on travel. That's, like, the only thing we spend it on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I do remember getting some free flights like spinning points or miles or whatever. And I was like, this is nice. We did it. Yeah. We saved up enough.
Speaker 2:This is like a very LinkedIn topic I feel like talking about credit card maxing.
Speaker 1:It is. Yeah. Travel points, credit card yeah. Oh, I forgot I was looking at your LinkedIn. Let's see.
Speaker 2:I ever tell you the scheme we had going with the massive amount of Amex points we were accruing at one of my previous companies?
Speaker 1:I've heard of this kind of thing, not from you, I don't think. Or maybe I did, but go ahead.
Speaker 2:Okay. So here here's a here's a really funny setup. So I worked at a company that facilitated transportation for much bigger companies. So, they would spend, like, a $100,000 a month through Uber, through us. Ah.
Speaker 2:But it was a funny setup where we actually would pay Uber first and the company would pay the balance plus markup, like once a month. There was like some kind of Yep. Working capital window. But Uber accepted this payment through Amex and I don't understand So why they did we were a tiny like four or five person company and we were spending in Amex as much as, like, a thousand person company. And literally, we had, like, Amex assigned an account manager to manager to us to, like, schmooze us and stuff and give us, like, free mix tickets and and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And he was, like, so happy with us because our spend was just growing up without him having to do any of the usual stuff. And, we were literally baking so much that we could fly like one person could fly round trip to like Japan every single day. Like that's how much money points we were we were getting. We just turned that into, like, an employee Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No kidding.
Speaker 2:So it was really Uber that was fronting that because Uber was paying the Amex fee to accept it.
Speaker 1:Oh, right. It's the Amex fee. So that that fee, that 3% they have to pay or whatever It's high. What is
Speaker 2:high. Amex is like high plus. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you mean, do you remember when, like, people didn't accept Amex? Like Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Because it
Speaker 1:was fifteen years ago, it was, like, really common that I was just so used to people when I'd pull out my Amex Platinum. It's like, oh, I'm used to it. You don't accept it. That's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But now it seems like everybody just eats it, which is great, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, don't know if the cost went down or whatever, but yeah, Uber was eating whatever Uber was paying back to Amex, Amex was basically giving us a cut of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it
Speaker 2:was like this funny little scheme. And to be honest, I think if we like really focus on not growing the team, we might have been able to fund like our whole business. Like our whole business could have just been like this Could you
Speaker 1:turn that into cash? Is there a way that could be
Speaker 2:it as cash and that's like the least efficient. But
Speaker 1:But that's a lot of cash.
Speaker 2:Like, at certain scale, it's yeah. It's it's enough.
Speaker 1:I'm just thinking of all the business opportunities now. How can I weave OpenAI's announcements into this?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Create an amazing startup with travel points arbitrage and GPT. I don't know. It's gotta be something. Do you just feel, like, stress with all these announcements in OpenAI? I have this, like, existential dread.
Speaker 1:Not like we're gonna lose our jobs. Just like, I should be using it. I am a developer.
Speaker 2:I definitely I get what you're talking about for sure. It's like, I kinda feel that, but then I another part of me is like, I think I'm just in a different phase of my career where like that's not the type of opportunity that makes sense for me. I think it's for someone that's earlier on and they can like really get ahead if they catch something early and it's just like yeah. I don't know. It's it's a it's a weird feeling.
Speaker 1:I wanna see more yeah. I think, like, I have decided at this point, I do not wanna build another software company. Like, still in the middle of the first one, no desire to, like, be an indie hacker and build, like, a b to b thing or something. I don't know. I'm not doing that.
Speaker 1:Like, there's a lot of avenues our careers could go, and that's just one I've kinda blocked off. I think, like, my problem with all of the people that are jumping in and building things is there's way too many people building a thing they can build in two days because OpenAI made this new API. I was like, yeah. A million people can build that in two days. But where are the, like, existing apps just getting amazing functionality now because this stuff's available?
Speaker 1:I feel like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, established companies that have really cool products and not like the big, big ones. Obviously, we've seen a lot of stuff get AI integrated. But, like, the like middle sized companies and applications, their thing can just get so much better now if they found the right way, the creative ways to leverage this stuff. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it just takes time. Yeah. I think that's kind of what I was talking about too. Like, don't think jumping if the if a new announcement from OpenAI like, enables some like one week or one month project, That's like not interesting to me because I'm like, I don't even know if that's gonna make sense.
Speaker 2:And like, should have made the idea should have made sense even before this new open AI feature came out. And that's yeah, agree. That's like where I see most of this stuff. I yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's it's hard to think about good way to integrate this stuff. I'm sure it'll happen but yeah. I've been like, as a user, I'm not really using AI outside of ChatGPT in any product at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Same. I had just I think I told you I had just gotten excited about Bedrock as like a way to cost effectively within my own AWS account, do some things with LLMs if I so chose. And then, I don't know, the OpenAI stuff does make it feel like they've got such a lead.
Speaker 1:Just like being able to do the image to and from, like, can send images through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know. It's like, the AWS stuff doesn't need to get like way way way better. Like, I tried to do a better compilation. Was like, this is a lot worse, like, meaningfully worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, Claude two, that's on is that on Bedrock? Claude two, did you tell me that was good?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's good and that's on Bedrock. Yeah. No. That's definitely the best option, I think.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:because I heard I heard somebody say, like, GPT four and Claude two are the only LLMs that really matter right now.
Speaker 2:Yes. I agree. All the others are so far apart.
Speaker 1:All the
Speaker 2:other ones are just like noise. Yeah. But even then, I don't know. It's it is I I think at the end the day, I just don't have many good ideas that are, like well, that's a critical part. That said, this new OpenAI, the context window increasing, like, can shove our whole podcast transcript in there.
Speaker 1:I saw Rocks tweet that. Yeah. What would we do? He he said that and he's like, I'm gonna build so many things and I couldn't think of a single thing. Is my brain just so slow?
Speaker 1:You just said a line, and it was like how I feel. At the end of the day, I just don't have many ideas. Out of the out of context completely, that is how I feel. I just don't have a lot of ideas. Don't have many ideas.
Speaker 2:I just don't have many ideas.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's cool things. What yeah. What would you do? So you stick the whole podcast transcript in there.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't do anything, but I think some like Riverside could probably do something. Probably. Like or, you know, the thing we wanted to do where we like automatically generate clips, like that's another way to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So clip generation. I feel like that should get better because if you have the whole episode in context, then you can really determine what are the best parts. I wonder how they're doing it today if the context is not large enough to fit the whole episode. Like, how do you really know what the best parts of the podcast were if you can't see the whole podcast at once?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and you could have fit it in Claude this whole time. So I don't know maybe if they were Oh, really? Using something different. But yeah. So yeah, that's like the only place where I'm like, okay, there I have a problem and I can see this kind of helping with that problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But in general, yeah, not a ton of ideas. I mean, some of this personal finance stuff I definitely want to integrate in because, I guess that I think the problem is you have to like be you have to be disciplined enough not to force it. And I think a lot of the places, especially even in the big companies, it feels a little forced because it feels like they need to make sure they have they can say they have it in there to like Yeah. Deter people from thinking, oh, they're not doing anything in this space.
Speaker 2:Like the Shopify one is a great example, like they they put AI in there and it looks cool, there's some cool demos but I'm like, this just feels like they only did it so they can say they did it and I'm sure they'll continue to improve it but it's like, is it making a difference for anyone?
Speaker 1:Like, it on the consumer side? Like, if you're on a store that's powered by Shopify, you'll see this or
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. It's more for your like operation stuff but
Speaker 1:Like writing your product descriptions and stuff maybe?
Speaker 2:I think it was more around like business questions like, I don't know. Like I said, the demos are interesting but the question I always have is, with all these demos, there's always a user that has a question that needs to be answered and the demo is them typing in the question and getting the answer from AI. And I always wonder, like, that's very cool, but is that the best way for that user to have asked and answered that Right. Kind of answer that question. And and I think for some things, yeah, but I don't think we have a good handle on on that on that really, like, I mean even for this personal finance thing, like, I You can imagine someone being like, oh, I want to know how much I spent on Uber last month.
Speaker 2:And that could be like a natural language query. But is that the best way or is just like a UI grouping like common services that you can just scroll through? Is that like a better experience?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like,
Speaker 2:you know, there's something more discovery in that one versus you having to come up with exactly what you want.
Speaker 1:This is a question we asked for a long time at Satmuse.
Speaker 2:Like Mhmm. I mean,
Speaker 1:we've been doing NLP stuff for ten years now, and it was it was always like, we could build this feature and there's like, wait a minute. I think that's a feature where, like, a drop down is just better than like, it's not actually a thing you're gaining by being able to ask a question for that. So there are definitely things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, sometimes you need to guide the person in building the query where you need some kind of a structured UI, like a drop down so you know what the options are that you can pick from versus just a blank text box. So yeah, it's like how many things is a blank text box the best input? And I don't know, like, we're I'm still waiting to see someone do it so well where I'm like, oh, that's how we should all be doing it or like Yeah. They figured it out.
Speaker 2:We're all we're still in the fart app era as Jay likes to say.
Speaker 1:I've already seen a lot more of the just since yesterday with this all these
Speaker 2:announcements, a lot more of
Speaker 1:the utopia is coming takes.
Speaker 2:Like Oh my god. Again?
Speaker 1:People worried about money when we're all about to have everything for free. Like, what? I guess, just go we're gonna snap our fingers and AI is gonna change the world. We're all gonna just sit around and watch it do our bidding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't I know that just keeps coming up and there's like so much fear around that, but I I I have no idea. It's I it's just like like we've about before, just so far removed from anything that I'm seeing in front of me. And it'll be funny if we're wrong and that does happen. We're like, wow.
Speaker 1:I know right.
Speaker 2:It turns out that was it.
Speaker 1:I mean, it'd be great. We'll have all the time in the world to talk about it because we don't have to do anything. We'll all just have income from the AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone's like debating what the right like the moral use of your free time is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like we're a little ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 2:No. Getting into arguments around, like, that's not a good way to spend your free time.
Speaker 1:I don't think we're cynical. Like, I think it's just different time horizons. Like, sure. Maybe, like, on some time horizon, humanity figures it all out, and we live in an era of abundance and there's not so much scarcity. Maybe.
Speaker 1:I hope so. That'd be great. But also, like, I don't remember has there ever been a technology that came along, like a transformative technology, and then, like, suddenly people worked less? Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. It can't happen until you're until the last one. Until the last one, there's always work to build the last one.
Speaker 1:Do you think there is a last one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hypothetically, like
Speaker 1:tongue and cheek?
Speaker 2:No. I don't think I think hypothetically, like, I don't even know what the last one could I guess the last one will be the one that can discover the rest on its own, which I guess is AI. But, yeah, until that's fixed, like, there's there's always gonna be some amount of work.
Speaker 1:Do you ever think about how there is so much diversity of life on our stupid little planet? Like Australia, koalas, kangaroos. Like, how different just across our little planet life has evolved into these very weird shapes and sizes and different things. And you think about the size of the universe and you think, like, what could be out there? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Like, I don't on Earth, it's like it's crazy that life just finds in like every single crevice of Earth, there's like some form of life. It's like something has crawled in there and like figured out how to live in every little crack. It's like it is like a it really feels like an infestation, you know.
Speaker 1:I just I I don't know. The AI thing, just think about like, is that the natural path that life takes? It gets so smart that it creates like artificial things that get so smart that they create I don't know. And then I started thinking like
Speaker 2:Well, we've talked about this before where like, it could just be unique to Earth that evolving means getting smarter. It's not necessarily the case on all planets.
Speaker 1:Oh, right. Right. Evolving could mean I mean, one point on Earth, evolving meant getting bigger and with bigger teeth and Yeah. Like scalier and scarier.
Speaker 2:And if that's just a direction permanently, like, yeah, you you would never invent AI. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. This went this went into some weird places. I should note, we talked about we're gonna take a break.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That was out of nowhere. Sorry. I don't know why I dropped that in the middle of the podcast, but we're gonna take a little holiday break. Yes. Are are we cool with this, Dex?
Speaker 1:This was all in text and I I couldn't tell if you like if you
Speaker 2:cried a little. I'm pissed.
Speaker 1:Okay. No.
Speaker 2:No. I'm down for it. Yeah. Break till next year. So this is gonna be our last recording.
Speaker 2:I just wanna make sure we don't lose it, you know?
Speaker 1:Oh, because you're afraid I'll just stop doing a thing. You're afraid I'll stop doing something because, like, I'll just do something really really hard and then not do it again. Why would I do that? No. I I have the same thought.
Speaker 2:I've You done I've done it as well. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's easy once something's kinda, like, shelved to, like, never take it off the shelf. We won't.
Speaker 1:We have to get to a 100. There's just there's no way. If we had already gotten to a 100, there would be a real flight risk here. But you and your arbitrary
Speaker 2:you and your arbitrary goals, again, like, it's just like it's it's it's never like a small goal. It's always like a big goal, but then somehow you just stop. It just makes no sense. It's like, you know what it's like? Imagine someone working their whole life to get into the NBA, and they finally get into the NBA, and then they just they're like, oh, this is good enough for me.
Speaker 2:I'm done. You know?
Speaker 1:I'm done.
Speaker 2:And they just retire immediately.
Speaker 1:That would be yeah. That would be extreme. But I guess I've done things that are similarly extreme.
Speaker 2:That's like that's like your your concept.
Speaker 1:It's my thing. Yeah. I'm a sprinter. The the I didn't explain the break. So we've got holiday travel.
Speaker 1:I've got holiday travel. I don't know if you don't travel anymore. I forgot. But, like, would have been out next week anyway. And then it's like December is just, like, one big Christmas tree.
Speaker 2:Mess. And, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:One big Christmas tree. It's just like it's like a a whole holiday month. And honestly, for me, it's like I've felt so much anxiety over not recording the podcast, not publishing not putting it out there. Like, we've got Chris who helps so much. It's just the like, I'm not doing any of the thing, like, the little clips anymore.
Speaker 1:I did that for,
Speaker 2:like, a couple weeks. We need to do to grow it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that, like, grows it obviously, when you start doing that, like, you're just you're getting yourself out there in front of more people that can resonate. But, you know, more people also that are like, those guys are idiots, and I don't wanna listen to them. But you get more people that are like, I would like to listen to them. And you just kinda have to do that.
Speaker 1:You just have to, like it's just the the content hamster wheel of, like, get your little selves out there. And not doing it gives me a lot of anxiety, but also just don't really have the energy to do it. I don't know why. Like, I have the energy to do a lot of things. I don't know why that just sucked my soul enough that I haven't done it.
Speaker 1:So it's like I need a little pause. I think the holidays are a nice little reset. And then Yeah. New Year, get back on that and find a sustainable rate of doing it. I did way too many.
Speaker 1:I was doing, like, 10 clips for every episode. It was just intense. That's the thing I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:yeah. Full microcosm.
Speaker 2:Just do a little.
Speaker 1:Just a little. Just like a couple for each episode, you know?
Speaker 2:And we can start posting them on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:We can post them on LinkedIn. I'm gonna spend this holiday break on LinkedIn if you'd like to hang out with me. I've already connected with AJ's on LinkedIn. I just forget all these same people we hang out with Twitter on Twitter are they're on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Not all of them. Just there's like three of them on LinkedIn. But I mean, just because they have a LinkedIn account, this would be I'm
Speaker 1:pretty sure they're all on LinkedIn. I just they just don't tweet about it.
Speaker 2:You know what I really hate? I hate that that's the stupid little art style that LinkedIn has, like, with all their illustrations.
Speaker 1:What? Where?
Speaker 2:Just like those, color just whenever I mean, I don't know if you can see any but whenever there's like there's like an illustration style on LinkedIn for whenever they do an illustration of something. Oh, like LinkedIn Yeah
Speaker 1:yeah yeah. Or people oh, I see. Oh, yeah yeah. I see one right
Speaker 2:It just reminds me of like just generic like, 2015 Yeah. Landing page Yeah. It's bad. Enterprise. It's
Speaker 1:also just like, what if if we all get on there, it it'll be fun. If we don't, the few of us that do, like, you're just throwing yourselves to the wolves. It's just constant, like, spam from these recruiters. It's like the whole purpose of LinkedIn is just to get you in front of recruiters, I feel like. Or is that just the software dev Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because the messaging the like, my message tab has like a million messages from people. Oh, look, a message from KDC. You're part of an exclusive group of new experts. Wow. I am.
Speaker 2:How exciting. Look at you. We're bringing together top experts to share their knowledge. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just hard to know what's real on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Nothing. What's None of these none of these people. Okay. Yeah. Messaging tab is just all ads.
Speaker 2:It's all ads from random It really is. Someone's looking for an Elixir engineer.
Speaker 1:Hey. Hey. You know Elixir.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:Crap, right? Don't you?
Speaker 2:Oh, look. Now there is a recruiter selling me recruiting services.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like he will recruit for you on your behalf?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I see stuff from Bank of America for some reason. Why why would Seven Connections follow Bank of America. Why would you follow Bank
Speaker 1:of America? Why would yeah. Why would you follow Bank of America? I'm they have hashtags. People use hashtags on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:That's actually a thing. Hashtag AI. They really do.
Speaker 2:Top free hashtag AI courses.
Speaker 1:I actually see a piece of content that I like. I just scrolled along enough to to see something I like. It's a chart from from cost and usage in AWS, and I've been staring at those a lot lately. So it grabbed my attention, and the content is good. It's good content.
Speaker 1:There might be really good AWS
Speaker 2:stuff on Yes.
Speaker 1:I think it's like
Speaker 2:just like Twitter. You have to put in work to curate your feed and understand what type of bad stuff can happen. And once you get that, then you probably have a good situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just good. I'm excited. I'm gonna post on LinkedIn. Probably about as much as I do on Twitter.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna put capitals in my LinkedIn posts. I don't if you noticed this. I won't be all lowercase on LinkedIn. So I'm putting on my fake my fake self.
Speaker 2:Capitals. You're already not being true to you.
Speaker 1:Wearing my mask. I know. I'm just gonna ignore your reply. I hearted the other two. I'm just gonna ignore yours completely.
Speaker 2:Someone like I mine was thinking. Yeah. I'm just gonna troll every single one of your posts. I'm just telling you now. That's the only reason I got on
Speaker 1:That sounds fun. That sounds fun. I feel like AJ probably strikes the right balance on LinkedIn. It's like he's got a nice he might be the same person on both.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 1:We're gonna we're gonna see.
Speaker 2:I am gonna
Speaker 1:You got a follow nice like professional
Speaker 2:Oh my god.
Speaker 1:But not annoying professional vibe. What were you saying?
Speaker 2:I followed him and asked if I wanted to turn on post notifications. Oh, look at he has a link on his profile, ask me about your cold starts.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. He really is the cold start guy, isn't he? He just he does all the work that everyone's way too lazy to do. I feel like he's really good at doing the work, and everybody else is like, I wish somebody would do that work, and he does the work.
Speaker 2:He does the work? And I just take credit for it.
Speaker 1:This is mine. I love that post from Jay. Oh, man.
Speaker 2:So good. I do we have the most toxic work culture? I think we might.
Speaker 1:You probably do. You guys troll each other really hard on Twitter, but it's in good fun. So Is it? Can't really
Speaker 2:talk about toxic. I'm out there trying to, like, you know, talk about the thing that I worked on and, like, the exciting direction we're going in and Jay's just like, look at this idiot.
Speaker 1:You guys understand social media. So I don't think you're toxic. I think you wanna be perceived as toxic. I'm sorry. You're not.
Speaker 1:The Sunday were the the meeting's on Sunday. That's a little
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe a little toxic.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:You just perked up. You just got excited.
Speaker 2:I just love how everyone hates it. How dare you have meeting us so much.
Speaker 1:The deal with weekends? Can I be honest? I hate weekends. Not that I hate taking time off and being with my family. I love that part.
Speaker 1:I hate, like, that the world stops. It's like I get so excited on Monday that, like, okay. Finally, a business day. Things can start happening again. There's things that need to happen.
Speaker 2:But, like, what do you mean the world stops? What stops?
Speaker 1:Just like all the things that are in progress. If you got people working for you on stuff, you're excited for them to keep working on that stuff because you wanna see the progress. There's no better feeling than, like, there's a thing being done right now by someone else, and I'm excited for the outcome. I love that feeling. I just love hiring people to do stuff.
Speaker 1:And I love, like, when they finally surface something, it's like, oh, it's so good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're right. That is great. That is that is great. Great.
Speaker 1:But it stops on the weekends because everybody goes to their family barbecues and whatever. And then, like, I don't know, you got stuff shipping, you got stuff coming to eat, can't get it on the week. I guess that's changed. Stuff delivers on the weekends.
Speaker 2:That's changed a lot. Yeah. People yeah. I know. I guess different areas like, my friend just moved to Portland, Maine and everything shuts super early and like stuff just is not open on the weekends.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, damn, that is annoying. If I had to like
Speaker 1:That was nice for them.
Speaker 2:Think about that.
Speaker 1:The people who work, but not so nice for everybody that
Speaker 2:lives there. But like, it's it's just like a I think it's just a decision. Like, what he was describing is funny because it's not like everywhere else they're forcing everyone to work seven days a week. They're just staying open and having additional employees at overlap shifts on the weekend. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:And I'm assuming their day their day off is on different days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On like Tuesday He or
Speaker 2:was like he was like he was like it was Alan. He was like
Speaker 1:Oh, Alan. He lives in Portland, Maine? Sorry.
Speaker 2:He just moved from New York. Yeah. Like, at the beginning of the summer. Yeah. He's like, is there some kind of agreement between all, like, the stores being like, nobody violate this treaty and open on Saturday?
Speaker 2:Because the moment one one of you does it, we all have to do it. But like, there You know, is crazy incentive to be the first one to do that.
Speaker 1:But they haven't.
Speaker 2:But somehow no one's no one it's like Wow. There's like a social contract.
Speaker 1:It's interesting when like a town can do something like that, when they can kinda set themselves apart and be like, kinda it's progressive in a way. Like, we're gonna push back on the the pace of society and, like, the American de facto, like, go as hard as you can. It's nice. When you said Portland, Maine, my brain went, why did you say the state? I know where Portland is.
Speaker 1:And I was like, oh. Yeah. There's two Portlands. Yeah. That's why that's why you said it.
Speaker 2:Always gotta clarify. That's great for them but someone like me won't move there and that's fine. They don't want to Well, sign up
Speaker 1:yeah. I mean, I couldn't I couldn't do it. But what's what's Alan's? Does he know people in Maine? Is is he from there originally?
Speaker 2:So his family it's a weird coincidence. So his family used to spend a lot of summers in Maine, like they had a house there and he grew up in San Francisco. Maybe spent a bunch of summers there. And then his, fiance is from Maine, so her family's there.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:But they met in New York, like that was just like a random coincidence, the main thing. So they're gonna they're living there for they're getting married next summer and they're gonna live there, get married there and then figure out where they're gonna go.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:But yeah, seems nice. Like Portland, Maine seems very cool. Very nice. At least in the summons. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. I've heard good things. I've I've always wanted to visit, that area of the country. I mean, I've been to, like, Boston and we drove down the coast of Connecticut. But I've never been, like, further towards Maine.
Speaker 2:I've been to Maine before. I went whale watching when I was a kid in Maine. I remember getting really sick on the boat. I did see some whales, though.
Speaker 1:Is that, like, the winter thing only in Maine probably?
Speaker 2:I have no idea. Think it was kinda cold. Going by?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. I just I have more questions, but I'm not gonna ask them. What kind of whales? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Never mind.
Speaker 2:I think they were humpback whales.
Speaker 1:Probably humpback is what I was thinking. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. You know, we used to see whales in the Hudson too every once in a while.
Speaker 1:What? For real?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, next to Manhattan?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How about that? Learn something new every day.
Speaker 2:Whales, they get everywhere.
Speaker 1:So I'm really hungry. I'm really like, I want to eat so bad. And it's so hard to not be distracted. Every thought when you're hungry, every thought is just like, oh, whales in the Hudson? Man, I could use some food.
Speaker 2:Man, I could eat a whale.
Speaker 1:It's like it's like a it's just at the end of everything I think. It's like, I wanna eat. I have to cut I have to lose six more five more pounds in less than two weeks. Do think I can do it?
Speaker 2:Otherwise, your wife will leave you. No.
Speaker 1:No. I'm committed to a weight class that I am not in, but I'm gonna get there. And I don't know if I can I don't know if I can actually lose that much? I'm gonna have to, like, do the the dehydrate thing.
Speaker 2:So you are you eating you're eating less and, like, doing a bunch of cardio? Is that what you're doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I wear a weight vest around the house, and I'm just doing pull ups and push ups and squats and running up my stairs constantly. Would you tell Siri to stop it? Trying to talk
Speaker 2:about You know what Siri just said? Siri just went virtual assistants don't eat. Like, I thought I was asking.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that color commentary.
Speaker 2:When is this gonna get replaced in LLM? When is Siri, Google Home, all of Siri is replacing?
Speaker 1:Siri is the worst. It's been and I think about that era, like the Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri. I mean, Siri was the first, right, of the major voice assistance? Think so.
Speaker 2:I don't remember.
Speaker 1:They're all so bad now compared to like, if you use the OpenAI, the ChatGPT voice thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so crazy. It feels so crazy talking to that thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I use my Google Home a lot, so I want it to be replaced in LLM ASAP.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Same. I I bet Google, they'll do that. Right? They'll get there.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure about Apple. The theory's always been
Speaker 1:the the one thing I'll say about OpenAI and about ChatGPT and just probably the current generation of LLMs more broadly, They're so verbose and they're so dorky. Like, can somebody fix the problem where they just like, everything they say is so dorky. Is that just the product of being average? Like, when you average out all of human history, it's just dorky.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really makes you think about the concepts of taste and what it means because fundamentally, this thing is showing us that the average can never be tasteful. But it makes you wonder, there people that
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Like the way ChatGPT sounds? Is there anyone out there that's like, yeah, that sounds good. I I bet people on LinkedIn do. I feel the type of people that would like that would show
Speaker 1:up LinkedIn on maybe. Can we stream on LinkedIn? We got the streaming to Twitter
Speaker 2:for Yeah. We can. AJ streams on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's really a thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. He streams on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:I was really just being stupid, but we can actually stream live to LinkedIn. Okay. Next podcast in the new year, we're streaming to LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:I can't wait. Let's build our LinkedIn audience over the next next two months, and then we'll
Speaker 1:Exactly. Drop the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, we will not we will not fit in, especially in a live setting, but we're gonna try. If there were if there's such a thing as good taste, that implies bad taste.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:People who have bad taste still prefer they still, like, appreciate good things. Right? They're just not capable of, like
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Making it themselves.
Speaker 2:Conceptualizing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I feel like someone
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean? Like, I feel like everyone, the masses, can understand when, like, a big paragraph just sounds dorky and dumb and, like, nobody talks like that. I feel like everyone can appreciate that, but only so many people can write Good.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, here's here's the thing with chat GBT though. Like, you can tell it to respond in the style of x. An x could be something that you feel like
Speaker 1:Have you ever gotten it to be like something you would wanna, like, post under your name or something?
Speaker 2:I haven't used it for this purpose, but so Liz is on this a bunch where she needed to do a bunch of copywriting, like brand copywriting. Mhmm. And Yeah. She identified a brand whose voice she likes a lot and then she really wrote like, write this in the style of, you know, the brand. And it's not like it nailed it but it did enough where she could like take it to the last 10% and ended up with a good result.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So Yeah, you still need people kind of creating that so you can like say like copy them. But it is funny because now anyone can have it. Like those people would have had to been hired Yeah. Before to do that but now that they put it out there, it's a you can emulate it pretty easily. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I it's kinda weird, like, can I just tell chat gbt to always talk like x person that I like no matter what it's answering? That that that might solve it.
Speaker 1:I I guess if they're a public enough figure and they've they've put out enough stuff on the Internet, then I'm gonna see if it can do the Primogen. Can I just respond to everything like the Primogen?
Speaker 2:Is that what you want? Is that what you're No. Is that what your ideal communication No.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm too dorky to be the Prime Engine.
Speaker 2:No. Not as yourself. I mean, to interact with. It's not like I wanna sound like this person. It's like when I get answers from ChatJPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess I'm not thinking about, like, how it responds to me and I have to endure reading the dorky text. It's more like I'm generally using it trying to create,
Speaker 2:like Generating stuff.
Speaker 1:Website copy or, I don't know, just like a response to somebody. Like, if you're ever trying to create stuff that you would send somebody or put into something, it just it sounds so like I would never use those words.
Speaker 2:But that's why this job of this taste job hasn't gone away. Like, you now need to go and curate. You have decent taste. You want you need to curate things that match what you think is good taste, and then give that to ChatGPT and have it.
Speaker 1:Feed that to ChatGPT. Okay. And now that the context window, has has the increased context window, the GPT four turbo stuff made into ChatGPT or no?
Speaker 2:I don't think so. I think it's only the API right now. So curating that stuff is still gonna be important.
Speaker 1:I guess the the style that it speaks to me doesn't bother me. The verbosity does. And it always, like, puts so much pressure on, like, coming up with something else to say. Like, I have to come up with another follow-up question. I want to just be more chill.
Speaker 1:I want you to, like, say half as much and then just be like, I'll be here if you need me. And then I can just think for a
Speaker 2:little bit. You
Speaker 1:know what I mean? It's always like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know you mean it. It's like all the time, but like, alright, what's next? Things you would
Speaker 1:like to dive into? Like, I don't have anything else. Cancel. I hate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I I feel like with the right system prompt, you can probably get it.
Speaker 1:Have you played with the system prompts? I I kind of know what they are. It's like ChadGBT
Speaker 2:has People do a lot with them. I I haven't done much with it. I've done a few things that annoy me. Like I I make sure it knows I'm like a technical person so that when it gives me answers, it doesn't need to like Okay. Explain what a computer is, you know.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:You can just tell me the end answer.
Speaker 1:For those who don't know, the system prompt is sort of like, you are a lab assistant at Stanford and you're going to like that stuff. Right? That's the system prompter now. Like, we are telling it what it is and what it should how it should
Speaker 2:But also, like, your preferences. Like, I prefer like, I am a software engineer. I prefer brief answers. Like, do like, show me code examples instead of explaining. Like, it's like any, like, annoyance you have, you can just throw in there.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, all it's doing is, like, copy pasting that back into the top of the Oh, okay. Every single one of your problem effectively, sort of.
Speaker 1:I only want YAML.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Like, the list of languages that you typically use. Like, oftentimes I ask it CDK questions and it gives me Python CDK. Like, nuh-uh. Nobody wants Python Go only, please.
Speaker 2:Go.
Speaker 1:Why is the CDK in multiple languages? I just I don't get it.
Speaker 2:I wish I wish we had stats on the distribution. Yeah. Like the languages that There's
Speaker 1:no way to get that, is there? We just went a lot of different places in a very short amount of time. I know. The chapters in our podcast are hilarious.
Speaker 2:Well, hey, there's something that the new contacts window could help with.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We can just throw the whole thing in there. And we can say, hey. Coach us. Tell us how we should stay on one topic.
Speaker 1:What should our topic what should our topic have been this episode? What should we have spent more time? They it'll say LinkedIn. It'll be like, you should have dove more into the intricacies of professional manner behavior on LinkedIn. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Something nerdy like that. We still
Speaker 2:have to do a fully AI version of our fully AI
Speaker 1:episode. Right. I so I have access to a thing that looks pretty good in terms of creating AI videos. If you had it too, we could make, like we could just, like, type out a podcast or have ChatGPT create one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:They thought
Speaker 2:They thought it was
Speaker 1:a good
Speaker 2:podcast. In the new
Speaker 1:context, okay. We're doing this. We take all of our previous podcast, whatever fits in a 128,000 tokens, and we feed it in. And we say, this is gonna cost, like, $20, isn't it? We feed it in and we say, write up a whole new podcast episode.
Speaker 1:Sixty minutes, please. And then we take that and we dump it into the video thing and we make this is gonna be great.
Speaker 2:Have you seen the Hacker News automatically generated podcasts? No. Okay. So
Speaker 1:They generate like a not joking one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think it's a company the comp there's a company behind it. It's like a new company. Think it might be a YC company. They are like trying to build tools to build AI podcasts and to demo their stuff, they do like a daily hacker news podcast.
Speaker 2:It's very it's surprisingly good. Like, it has all like the podcast music and like the different transitions and everything. Yeah. And yeah, it's just it's just an AI voice describing like some of the top things, like summarizing what was in the article, talking about the debates that happened in the comments. And it sounds pretty good.
Speaker 2:Like I was waiting for something in my car the other day and I headed on and I was like Wow. It's it's a little slow. I think I would like tune it a little bit but it's way better than I expected. It's a great way to catch up on on everything.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Man, are we entering into a world where there's like just all the contents automatically made and people aren't doing anything?
Speaker 2:But that's content about other content, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what?
Speaker 2:Someone has to make the other content still.
Speaker 1:What other content?
Speaker 2:Like that AI podcast is content about articles people wrote and comments people wrote.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, I don't know. Could I feel like we could actually just pass in our dumb transcripts, and it could probably spit out something that looks like one of our podcast episodes.
Speaker 1:And we could just be on autopilot, and we'd never show up on the mic again. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe. Like, that's true. If we feed it all of our transcripts and then every week, we just give it a bunch of stuff to happen There's stuff going news and on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Like, I feel like I could actually do it. And then what are we even doing anymore? Like, us humans listening to fake humans talk about things. Like, what it just seems like, I don't know, the matrix or something. We're all hooked up with our brain tubes to the thing and
Speaker 2:I don't know. There's a milestone I'm waiting for to manage it at reach, and I'm very excited for it because I think it like, it's representative of a lot of things changing at that point which is I'm waiting for the first movie star to license their likeness.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's gonna happen, isn't it?
Speaker 2:And let a studio make a movie that they had no part in. And I think we're not that far from that. I feel like that's like within ten years of technology will be cost efficient Yeah. To like do
Speaker 1:I mean, if they can already create South Park episodes, how hard would it be to create
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like the voice now, like the voice generation that's like is very good. And you can also it doesn't have to be that crazy either. You can have another actor doing the acting and then just overlaying.
Speaker 1:Oh, and they just replace their face. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just a double? And and I mean, do that already.
Speaker 1:These are all, like, they're already, like, 80% fake. Right?
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So much of that's not real camera footage.
Speaker 2:And they've done it with actors that have died. Like when Prince who's the actress? Princess Leia. Forgot her name. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:They did that with her. They did that with a few people and Yeah. It's still definitely a little bit uncanny valley but I can see how next couple years It'll get it'll get there. Yeah. So it's a point like, yeah, like, what what is your job as an actor?
Speaker 2:It's to get famous enough that you have an audience. Yeah. And then from then on, you can produce a 100 movies a year if you want, you know.
Speaker 1:And that's what we need, more movies on Netflix with the same actors. Yeah. Like, it's not already impossible to sift through the amount of movies we could watch.
Speaker 2:A positive spin on this though is a good actor can play a role that they don't have the right look for. But they have maybe have everything else, you know.
Speaker 1:How? What do you mean?
Speaker 2:If I am the right person to play, I don't know, Elon Musk in some Elon Musk biopic. I'm like the best actor, I'm like so good at acting like Elon Musk. I can't do that because I look nothing like him. Like, I would never get that role.
Speaker 1:So it could look like Elon Musk, but it's you have, like, the mannerisms down or something?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like that or, like, I'm just, like, the right person to to take the role.
Speaker 1:You look nothing like the person, how could you be the best person to play that person?
Speaker 2:But it's it's possible. Right? Like you you can look like the person and not be a good actor at all. So
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah. Okay. And there's been probably plenty of those.
Speaker 2:The thing I brought I was actually talking to Liz about this exact topic yesterday. Andy Serkis played Gollum and Smeagol in Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that was fantastic acting. And he's done
Speaker 1:that a
Speaker 2:bunch of times. Like he played, like the chimp in the Planet of the Apes movie.
Speaker 1:Again, did
Speaker 2:an amazing job. But he had the mannerisms of, like, non human creature, so people can do
Speaker 1:it. Interesting.
Speaker 2:And he didn't have to look like those things at all. And we've we've kind of already done that but now doing it with like other real people. Yeah. There's actually a movie about this concept too. There's a movie where like it's about the future where, what actress Yeah.
Speaker 2:Licenses
Speaker 1:you serious? Is this oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Good movie.
Speaker 1:My brain hurts. I don't know where we're headed tomorrow.
Speaker 2:I wanna use your likeness and make content. That would
Speaker 1:be fun. Please do. I'd love to not make content for bit. That'd be great.
Speaker 2:It won't be content you like.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, can't be beggars can't be choosers. Right? Yeah. Well, this is it's like a goodbye.
Speaker 2:I know. Not gonna talk to you till next year.
Speaker 1:Stop it. No. That's the thing I told you. We have to still get on the phone. We're just not gonna record it, and I'm not gonna feel guilty for not promoting I
Speaker 2:don't I don't wanna talk to you unless it's being recorded.
Speaker 1:Because I don't
Speaker 2:know what you're gonna say to
Speaker 1:publish it.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna feel safe unless it's being streamed in real time. Oh, man. To several people.
Speaker 1:Streamed on LinkedIn, specifically, to several people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah, this is a goodbye.
Speaker 1:Well, I do have I do have to pee. And as far as everyone knows, I'll be peeing until the New Year. They don't know that I'll ever stop peeing because they're gonna hear I had to go pee. I'm gonna leave to pee. And then next thing you'll hear is sometime in January.
Speaker 2:You might not I mean, you might never come back.
Speaker 1:So coming back in January. Might not. They might just think I died.
Speaker 2:And I'm saying you might not come back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:There's no guarantees in life.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:We might just drop with an
Speaker 1:AI, Adam. I'm not dropping it forever. We'll be back. Wouldn't it be a crazy ending though?
Speaker 2:What? What would be the ending?
Speaker 1:It'd be a would it be a crazy ending to the whole series if the last thing we're saying is like, we're gonna come back and then we just never come back.
Speaker 2:But that's not that crazy. That seems very plausible to me.
Speaker 1:It does sound very
Speaker 2:The most likely outcome. If I do replace you, I'm gonna pick I have to pick someone that would, like, really enrage you. That would, like, really annoy you. I don't know who that person would be yet, but that would definitely be my angle.
Speaker 1:Try to think of somebody that that fits the bill but would be funny, and I won't feel like they're gonna hear it and be offended. I can't think of anybody. I got it. I'm not very good at
Speaker 2:spot guys. I think about it. There
Speaker 1:was the there was the line earlier in the podcast. What was it? I just don't have many ideas.
Speaker 2:Just don't have many ideas. Just don't have many ideas. At the end of the day, I just don't have many ideas. I do the
Speaker 1:end of the day. I just don't have any ideas. Let's sign off with that. Alright. We'll see you, Dex.
Speaker 2:Yep.
