Tortoises, Voice Strain, And Podcast Lore

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome back to Corporate Strategy Podcast that could have been an email. Michael. Oh, what's up, Michael?

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Oh, hey, it's good to see you. Please uh take a moment. For everybody that's listening, you're gonna miss this moment. I wanna see your shirt. I want to see this shirt because I am so confused. But it looks amazing. Alright, I'm gonna read it out for everybody that's listening and not watching. You can always watch on our YouTube. His shirt, Anthony's shirt, says Florida Ninja Gopher Tortoise.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Which does it look like sound ninja turtles. It doesn't sound interesting, but when you see it, it look interesting. It's a good shirt.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

It's supposed to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But as as the Ninja Turtles.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yes. Yes. Because I'm unlike you. I love Florida. And I think Florida's the best. And we have these cute little gopher tortoises. And I saw the shirt and I was like, I gotta get it. It's great. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Yeah. I need that shirt. In my neighborhood, we actually have a bunch of gopher tortoise signs. Like anytime there's a new gopher tortoise nest that happens and you can see it. Our neighborhood, our HOA, goes out and they put a sign. Basically saying, like, be careful, can't disturb the gopher tortoise. And we also have signs that say look out for gopher tortoises.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

That's really nice. That's really sweet. I love that. They're such cool little creatures. Save so many of these things. Uh-huh. When they wander out the streets. It's like, oh, go in. And then take them and they're they're fast. You know, that's the they're tortoises. People think tortoises are slow, but they can like they can like rattle their little claws and book it. Gopher tortoises, red-eared sliders. You know, Florida's got all kinds of wildlife that we gotta take care of because they can't take care of themselves no more.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

It's true. I'll give everyone uh if you do see a gopher tortoise or any turtle for that matter crossing the road, you need to make sure, do not turn them around and put them on the other side.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

No.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

If you put them where they came from, they will literally just go back to where they wanted to go and they'll go back in the road again. So you gotta, wherever they're heading, whatever direction they're heading, pick them up, take them that direction because they're going somewhere. They got a mission.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

They have a mission and they're out to complete it. So the best thing you can do, help them get to the other side. That's a really good tip, Michael. Are we gonna end the podcast right now? That's the show. That's the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

That's the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

That's it. Value delivered, mission accomplished. Good job. Great job.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

You know what's also so good about your shirt? And I know you know this, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. My full name, Michelangelo. What color am I?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

No.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

What color tortoise am I?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

No, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Give give me which color one. Yeah, that's the one.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

This little guy right here.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

The orange guy.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

That's me. That's you. Michelangelo. You know which turtle I am? Uh Rafael, Donatello, Leonardo. Probably Leonardo.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

That's probably right.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

That's probably right. I think that that checks that checks out. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm not the smart one. That's for dang sure. Not the leader. That's for dang sure. I'm the one with violence issues. That's uh that's my fit. That's definitely my fit, turtle. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Yeah, that fits right. I agree.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

I think so. Hey, uh, speaking of violence, VibeCheck, how you doing?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Doing well. What a week. What a time to be live. My voice is kind of, I don't know if you can hear it. I've been talking like non-stop for the last four hours.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Yeah, who you've been doing.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

And what when I was a corporate, when I was a corporate shill like you and everyone else who listens to this podcast, my voice was trained. And my voice could do this for nine hours a day. And now I can't do it. I can't do it. My voice just starts to go at hour three.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

I I can't, even I can't do it anymore. When I when I have days, like especially when I go to conferences and I have to talk all day, I'm dead. I'm gone. I used to be able to do it. I think just I think as we get older, um, our vocal cores just can't handle the nonstop talk. It is a muscle though. I will say that. Like you can kind of get back into the all day talk. Like when I was a sales engineer, you know, I had demos from nine to five with an hour lunch break, and you talked all day. I don't think I could get back to that. I need to train, I need to train my voice to get there. So you've been doing that today, huh?

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, yeah. Today's been like non-stop client meeting after client meeting, which is it's it's a good thing. It's a good problem to have, but my voice is definitely not ready. And I looked at my counter like, it's fine. It's only like four hours of back-to-back meetings, not thinking about I'm gonna be talking non-stop during these meetings. So now we're podcasting.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

You made the right decision doing this activity, which will not impact your voice at all. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Exactly. That's the way I looked at it. Like, this is gonna be so easy. You're gonna be doing all the talking. I mean, today you have our topic, right? So there's really not much I need to do.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

I have the topic today. I do. Uh, but because recently, every time you've had a topic, I've stolen it from you and claimed it as my own. I'm gonna let you introduce the topic today because I think you need to finally take a little bit of credit for your work.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

I mean, you're just so gracious. I every time you come to this podcast, you just you just roll out the red carpet for me and you just let me be in the lead. And that's what a true partner does, a true podcast co-host is they let their partner, you know, have the limelight when it's the right time. So I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

I, you know, I appreciate you too, and I'm happy that you recognize that in me. We actually, uh, before we get into it, we had a little bit of a get together last week at my abode. And uh when when Michael showed up to the house late, uh, he was like, Oh, hey, I'm introducing myself. I'm Michael, I run the corporate strategy podcast. It could have been an email. All my guests looked at me and they're like, You're on a podcast? And I'm like, no, this he's just making this up. This is not real. This is not true. It was crazy. I mean, you just you just entered the house like that. Like, that's a wild move. That's a play. That's that's really a way to start the party.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

One I totally, and I don't think my wife knows this, so don't tell her that uh we were late because I totally read the timer on when you texted me, and we just showed up at the time I thought I knew it was at and the time I put in my calendar, which was a couple minutes late. So I'm happy you didn't shame me in front of the whole party. So thank you. You're such a great host.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

You did bring these bacon rack figs. So that made up for it a little bit. Uh yeah, just a little bit though. This didn't fully absolve you from the not the whole thing, no.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Yeah, we showed up fashionably late with a great, I guess, dessert-ish type. It wasn't supposed to be, but just because of the series of timing, everyone already ate everything else.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yes. Well, everyone went back to the kitchen afterwards because they wanted some of these bacon wrapped. Is it was it dates or figs? Are they the same thing? Okay, dates.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

No, I I actually I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

I don't either.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

But these were dates.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

They were dates they were dates, they were delicious, but it didn't make up for the fact that you came in, you're like, yo, I'm Michael from corporate strategy, I'm his co-host. I'm like, dude, no one knows here. Like, no one knows, they don't supposed to know. And then everyone's like, Did you hear the podcast? I'm like, no.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Did you actually did you want to keep that on the down low? No, or you didn't care. No, I don't care.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Okay, I don't care. It's always funny because like I don't really talk about it. I don't talk about the podcast. You know, like I'm I'm past that point, right? Like if you found Corpus I to the podcast, you're one of the select few that I care about. But if you haven't found it yet, then I don't care about you. So, you know, I keep it a secret. It's it's our it's our little secret. Like they don't deserve to know the common man. So, you know, I'm just uh I when you did that, I was like, dude, you're just giving up the secrets to everybody. Now everyone's gonna listen, and the tips aren't gonna be as good because everyone's gonna have them.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Yeah, we actually don't want people to listen to this podcast. So if you're listening, I want you to stop now, turn it off, never come back.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

No, go away. Go away. You're ruining that for everyone else. We only give away like if everyone followed our tips, then corporate would disappear because it'd be like problem solved.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Yeah, you can only have so many people you know get promoted to VPs, and that's what everybody who listens to us gets promoted to a VP.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

We have a hundred percent VP conversion rate for our listeners, and I have data to prove this, so don't don't at me. Don't at me. I love that, it's just factual, you know.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

It's always so funny, like people's reactions when I say, Oh yeah, like you know, we we host a little podcast. They're like, Oh, that's cute. You've probably done like three episodes, and I'm like, Yeah, we're on episode, like I don't even know, 250 or whatever it is. And they're like, wait, hold on a second. 250? They're like, How many years have you been doing this? Like, oh, a couple. Yeah, and like I feel like people are so blown away because they're like, I've known you for this long and I had no idea that you run a podcast. Like, yeah, it's a fun little surprise.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

It is a it is a fun little surprise. And you know, I think most of it, the reason I the the honest reason why I don't really share the podcast publicly is because most of the people I hang out with don't work in corporate, thank God, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, that is absolutely one of the reasons. It's like if it's people that don't work in corporate, like it just has no relevancy to them whatsoever.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

They're gonna be like, oh, I want to listen. I'm like, do you want to listen though? Like, do you want to hear about the struggles and tribulations of what we deal with day in, day out, working inside of corporations or outside in your case of corporations? It's not fun, it's not a glamorous fun thing to do. Uh, there are tips, which is why we do this, but yeah, that's why I don't share. Because yeah, God bless them, they don't work in corporate and they're lucky for it.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Right. Yeah, it's always funny because they're like, are these two idiots just talking to each other with no one listening? I'm like, no, no, no. Like, we've actually like the only reason we keep doing this is because people we we've helped people, like we've legit brought on people who are like, hey, you don't know me, and I've been completely anonymous, but like I want to tell you thank you for helping me find a new job and feeling comfortable, like stepping out of my comfort zone. And we've had legit people come on the episode, there's some really good guest episodes. They're like, hey, this has meaningfully changed my life because you guys helped. And that's the only reason we do this. We do this because we keep getting that feedback. So we must be doing something right.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

And if you need help, if you stumbled across this and you're like, I do need help, the best way to get in contact with us is join our Discord. Uh, go to the link tree in the show notes. You'll see a Patreon where you can give us money. You'll also see a Discord where you can join the conversation and talk to us and our amazing, wonderful community there. So if if you do want those tips outside of the pod itself, that's where you go. That's where you get it.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

And guess what? What? It's free. Free to join. You can also join our Instagram. I've been told that is also a great way that people can jump in and ask us questions, participate in the conversations, even post anonymously, which is cool. So we're still figuring that out. But if Instagram is more comfortable for you instead of Discord, join us there. It's been great.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

We should put Instagram on our Link Tree. Oh, I think it already is. It's already on Link Tree, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 11:52

I think so. I hope.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Cool. It's in the it's in the show notes, it's in the YouTube links. Hit that Linktree. Get us in all the places.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

It's down there somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

You can leave a comment on this video. If you're a YouTuber, do it. Do it. So, what are we gonna help you? Do it. Why not?

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Do it, Michael.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

What are we helping?

Is AI Really Taking Jobs

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Oh, have I got a topic for you? Oh, I don't like when we start that way. You've seen the headlines. I've seen the headlines.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

There's so many headlines.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

AI. AI is coming for our jobs. You love talking about AI. I do. And I thought this would be the best time to talk about AI job loss. If it's real, if it's fake, if it's a sham, if it's job displacement, if it's truly upskilling. We're gonna talk about all the things. Is AI here to take our jobs? Cool. What do you think? Yeah, let's do it.

unknown 12:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Let's do it. I I I have some data for you. Okay. I got some I got some points for you. Give them to me. So obviously, you know, that all the AI doomers, and this is so weird because the big AI labs have been like the biggest AI doomers. The head dude of anthropic is like the biggest. Scare everybody away. Yeah. The new model that we have is literally going to like cause catastrophic cybersecurity holes and gaps that you know could expose 30-year-old software. And it's so interesting with this wave of technology because everybody is talking about it. I think I mentioned this on a previous episode. My pest care guy, like my pest control dude, I was who was asking me, he's like, Hey, what do you do? I'm like, we run a technology company, we help businesses figure out AI. And he's like, Is AI gonna take my job? And like, that's just crazy. That like random people, yeah, random people are like thinking about this and they know about this because that's what's been put inside of the news cycles. Yeah, and so like you've seen the headlines, it's like there's been massive layoffs in tech and companies and whatever, and a lot of it's been attributed to this AI is making us more efficient, therefore, we don't need this part of our company, this organization, this group of people anymore. We're just using AI for that now. So, what do you think, Anthony? Is it true? Is it fake? Last week, is it actually last week?

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Microsoft Xbox laid off all of the id developers who programmed the engine that id has been making for the last 30 years so they can go to Unreal Engine 7, which is now AI powered. So yeah, it's happening. It's happening every day, sadly. Um it might not be so when you look at the job numbers, and I have no data to back this up, but like you know, I do so it's not coming for everybody, right? But it's it's coming for the knowledge workers who have the experience, the expertise, and the ability to execute independently on their own. And and sadly, it's starting in entertainment industries, really. So like Hollywood, game dev, music, graphic design, audio visual, anything like that, because it's a theft-based architecture, right? AI, the concept as we know it, is it's theft. It's data theft. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, none of them have paid the copyright licenses for any of the data that they've stolen. And they are not compensating anyone whenever that data gets used. So, like, this theft-based infrastructure is causing people to lose their jobs. But it's it's mostly in the creative space right now.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

My opinion, I'm I'm gonna try to stay unbiased, is job displacement is happening.

SPEAKER_04 15:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Certainly. Like there are and this is just like any technology wave. This is, you know, any sort of giant revolution in technology, mechanics, assembly line. Like, sure, there will be jobs that are lost, but with that, there will be new jobs that are created. And I think that's where I try to remind people, you know, is if we get a better tool, we don't just stop working. Like companies, therefore, produce more, therefore, generally make more money, and therefore need to hire more people. And that's like my opinion on it is sure, certain jobs are like more susceptible to be impacted by changes in AI, like the entertainment industry, right? And especially because it's been done in a way that wouldn't be like morally the right thing to do, scraping the internet, not referencing any of it, not watermarking anything, like just literally stealing it and using it to train engines that are now putting people, freelancers, out of work. Like that's really messed up. But I think in general, we're going to be creating more jobs, is my opinion, than the amount of jobs that are lost.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

So, follow-up question, and this is going to lead to something that was shared in the Discord. What jobs are being created?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Yeah. So let's

Job Data And Roles At Risk

SPEAKER_01 17:00

talk about some data points. I've got it up because I did some research. We don't do a lot of research for this show. I did some research here. I'm I'm excited. Give me the data. So in June, in June, we shown that there is a net increase in jobs that are added to the market. So it's like 57,000 jobs were added. And the unemployment rate, this is US, by the way. This is not global, so I can't speak to global. There is a 4.2% unemployment rate. Right. Which is pretty stable with what it's been. People aren't losing more jobs, and there's being more jobs putting out there. The biggest impacts for job losses have been in leisure and hospitality, interesting enough. So that's what got me thinking about, okay, well, like, what's is that like truly, does that truly make sense to use as like a data point and a statistic that we can trust? I think what as I was thinking about the data, I was like, okay, well, we've seen and we've talked about this, these ghost job postings that have been out there of like you're applying to hundreds of jobs, you never get a response, right? And is the job actually even real? Like companies have been sued over this where they don't truly even have a position, but they're putting it out there to build a roster of potential people, and like that's messed up from like a company culture perspective if they are doing that. And that's why I think the aggregate like job growth number of 57,000 new jobs is kind of hiding where there are disruptions and like different age groups, industries, like you said, entertainment. And so that's where I think it gets interesting of like where are the biggest impacts to jobs, what industries, and then where are there new jobs being created, as you're kind of asking.

SPEAKER_04 18:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

And so what I found of like looking at that data, where are where are the biggest disruptions happening? And this is where like if you're in these roles, I think you need to be thinking about how do I upskill myself? How do I find a different skill set? And one really obvious clerical and administrative work. If you're simply taking notes, if you're a translator, if you're doing things that AI can do really, really well, you're you're scheduling for people, you're doing bookkeeping, like you're doing basic document processing. Hey, they did you sign this right? Hey, you got to go, you know, sign this form. I'm gonna email the person, get them to sign this form. All that, you're gonna be you're gonna be out of a jump pretty quick if that's what you do. Because you've already seen it. Every single one of us has joined a meeting. I just got off a meeting where AI transcription was there. It gave us all the summary and action points after. It even recommended to me, hey, do you want to schedule a follow-up call for next week? Like, I don't need an AI, I don't need an assistant, a virtual assistant, a real assistant to do that anymore because AI can't just do that. You agree with that one?

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Let's continue.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Okay. Customer support. This one is interesting because I've gotten conflicting reports on this one. Of oh, what was the company? Was it like Klarna or something? There was some company who laid off their whole customer, customer support workflow. They made headlines because they laid off all of them for AI agents. That's what they claimed. They're like, hey, we're eliminating our whole support team. AI will do all of it. Like three months later, they they reneged on that completely, and they said, hey, part of our culture in our company is to have a human touch point for whoever needs it if they're struggling to use our platform. So you can probably attribute that not to a human touch point and like that's nice. You can attribute it to no, just the AI implementation did not work for the support flows that they needed, and it caused them more pain as a company.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

I did not choose to go to a, well, I couldn't actually go to a medical healthcare facility because I could not get past their stupid AI age.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Yep. I think you already mentioned that next one freelance creative work. I think if you're doing like basic copywriting, brand matching, you're finding imagery for presentations, you're putting together PowerPoints, like you're gonna be out of work pretty quick because that is becoming really, really AI plausible. I don't even know the right word. AI does a really good job putting together things like that. As we know with our Is It AI challenge that we do in our Discord soon coming to our Instagram. This month was the first month we trumped our community and they chose, they thought the AI image was not the AI image. It trumped everybody, except for you. Except for you and I. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah. It's a sad day.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Uh more data. It's getting really good. I got a few more. I I'm just touching on I'm touching on these areas that if you're in these areas, you need to start thinking about how are you gonna upscale, find a different career, whatever. Routine, legal, insurance, financial processing stuff. If you're doing data analysis and data entry, Look for another job. If you're a junior software engineer, and this is a part that really speaks to me, and probably you two, entry-level software engineer work is like it's gone. I think about what we did in Big Corp. What took us probably a year to do automation-wise, like you can do in like a couple of days now, yes, with AI, which is just wild to think about. However, I think some areas that are gonna be okay, and if anything, just require more manual work. Healthcare.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

I think you're never gonna be able to replace that with AI effectively. Yes, no, you agree? Continue.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Relationship-driven sales, B2B, enterprise. I think there are certain business is still done on handshakes and dinners for a lot of business-related sales. You with me? Anything that requires a physical presence, pest care, pest control, uh, any sort of construction around buildings like robotics has a long way to go. I think those are going to be okay. And I don't think it's as simple as saying like, I don't know if you what you think. I want to hear all your points in a second here. I don't know if it's like as simple to say white-collar jobs are at risk and blue-collar jobs are not at risk. I don't think it's that simple because I think if you're a domain expert with AI, like you're gonna be just fine. Like AI doesn't have domain expertise unless we all give it to Claude and ChatGPT, and then they steal it from us and then create departments that uh completely put our companies out of business. I don't think you're ever gonna lose the subject matter expertise for quite a while. You're probably in a pretty resilient industry.

unknown 23:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

All right, let me with your points. I'm ready.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

So all of this is under the assumption that AI is being offered as it exists today, correct?

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Fair. Yes. How does it have a disability? As AI not predicted the unknown.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

How does AI exist next year?

SPEAKER_02 24:12

Yep. Like, do you think we've hit the ceiling with AI?

SPEAKER_00 24:16

We have gone well past the ceiling. Uh and I I don't I don't think any of your data is wrong. I think it reflects the current moment. But here's the thing.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

I think it reflects where jobs are being lost today. Today.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yes. So I've got a few points uh that are not data-based, that are observation-based, which are the best kind of points

The AI Bubble And Service Model Trap

SPEAKER_00 24:38

to make. So uh a few weeks ago I talked about how on this podcast uh Google is opening up a lot of shares uh because they want to basically short cycle the AI bubble. They think it's gonna collapse. They're trying to capture all that VC money this year before ChatGPT and Anthropic have an ability to do their IPO. Now, if if that plays out the way we think it's going to, ChatGPT or OpenAI and Anthropic are not profitable companies by any measure. Uh and they're also very disliked companies by most of the common people, right? Like if you know they're building an AI data center near you, you're probably showing up to your local town hall meetings and saying, I'm not going to subsidize their electrical or water fees. And many communities are now getting up, showing up, and saying, like, I will vote you out of office if you allow that data center to be built here and it doesn't subsidize our living fees. So you're starting to see people who have absolutely no knowledge or understanding of AI buck up against government contracts working alongside specifically Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and uh Meta. So it's an interesting position because none of those companies, none of their AI departments are profitable. They're wildly disliked by people that don't use them. And the people that do use them will all openly admit, I think you would say this too, that you cannot use these tools by themselves. Which means all these tools need a person to babysit them. Uh I see this every day because I I do use these tools, and I'm like, wow, you're just objectively wrong. And somehow you missed the most obvious thing in the paper that you could have pulled data from and you didn't. So they're not good at what they do. They are not liked by those that don't use them, and they're not profitable. Google sees this, and they're gonna cause the bubble to collapse. When the bubble collapses, and this is where we get into opinion territory. Everything I've said thus far is observational opinion.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

I think it's everything you said is objectively true from what we've seen. Like, even my wife and I were talking, and she was like what we know. Hey, if yeah, she's like, hey, if these data centers are built, like, are they like killing bees because I guess they put out some sort of toxin or something? And I'm like, I've not even heard this, but like people that are in tech, right? Exactly, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Like people who are not in tech now hate a data center, which I love personally. I think this is great. Like, let's go. Um, but so when the bubble collapses, you now have a bunch of sort of powerhouse companies that are tied into every major business and corporation's sort of ecosystem. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna look at the books and say, well, we don't have the stock to back us up anymore. Uh the venture capitalists aren't gonna continue to throw money into a pit for no reason. So we need to up our software license utilization and probably start selling into companies that have pre-existing data centers. So, hey, I'm gonna sell my Chat GPT functionality to Microsoft that they can run in their data center. I'm going to license it based on a software utilization license, but I'm not gonna manage this data center anymore. That's Microsoft's problem to solve. And what you've created is the enterprise software loop, which is going to remove AI from like the common man's accessibility, right? Like you're not gonna be able to go to ChatGPT anymore and ask it a question. You're gonna have like an hour-long wait time because they're literally burning money to answer your questions right now, right? Like they're just they're burning money and they're burning the earth to answer your questions, and that's not sustainable. So they will start to sell very expensive enterprise licenses to companies like Microsoft. And when Microsoft sees, wait a second, I'm basically paying an additional headcount for a robot that still needs a babysitter. It's an additional headcount to make the robot successful. Why am I doing this? There will be the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. We actually saw this happen with cloud computing technology, where when the cloud came out, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, there was just this, it was like the rush for gold, right? Everyone, I can go spin up a virtual machine in the cloud. It takes five minutes. I don't have to use VMware anymore. And like this is this is probably very technical for most of our audience, but like there was this huge boom, right? And these companies made not a lot of money in the early days, but they were just looking for adoption. And once their licenses started to match with the prices of doing business on premises, the swing came right back. And it was it was like originally 60-40, like 60% of people had cloud deployments, 40% kept their on-prem infrastructure. It literally went the opposite direction. So now it's like 60% on-prem, 40% cloud. And like cloud is more mostly used as a small startup test dev, but most people realize like, hey, it's actually cheaper and more cost effective to do my computing on premises the way that we like always have done it. And I think uh the bigger question isn't actually AI. And this is what I've kind of come to realize recently. It's the service models that don't work. Period. It's a it's a big boom at the beginning. When you start a new service model, look at Adobe, look at Amazon, look at Netflix, everyone jumps on your platform, everyone buys your subscription, it's a huge success. But maintaining that in a late-stage capitalist environment where profit dictates your actual success, not revenue, you can't sustain it. The only thing you have the choice to do is to raise prices for those paying for your services, which in turn turns those people away. So now you look at Netflix and you're like, well, Netflix is producing more garbage, but they produce more garbage to get more people to watch their programs. But people don't watch Netflix's programs because they're garbage, and Netflix is getting more expensive. So why would I pay more money to watch more garbage? I lose my subscription, Netflix loses their money. It doesn't sustain. This is the problem. This is the core problem of like our corporate capitalist society as a whole. It's not AI, it's not cloud, it's services. We never should have become dependent on services that don't actually we shouldn't give money to something that doesn't give us anything in return. One last example.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

In the last two weeks, we're getting fired up. I have watched I knew this would get fired up. I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

I don't know if you're not you're not the biggest gamer, but basically, like as a marketer, this fascinates me. Sony, who owns PlayStation, Spider-Man, Crunchyroll, has recently been on a PR, just destroy destroy their PR campaign, uh, by firstly announcing that all of the digital licenses uh people paid for for movies like Terminator 2 and Predator and many others, uh, they wouldn't have access to anymore. So you as a Sony customer who paid for these movie licenses just don't have them. You just lost your licenses for that, which caused this weird backlash of like, wait, what do I actually own digitally? Well, the next week, Sony announced that they were going to end disc production. And I'm sure you saw that because it is literally made global news. Uh, the backlash is insane. Like non-gamers are now like, what the heck is going on? Looking at contracts, being like, wait a second, we don't own anything. And that's because all these corporations have tricked us into thinking that digital licenses to play a thing means that you own a thing and you don't. And I see all of this coming to a head. Like, literally, I think the AI bubble crashing, I think this service infrastructure failing us is all going to actually lead to new regulations about what we own digitally. And when we pay for something, what we get out of it, whether it's some kind of proof of receipt token, some kind of license that we can take and resell and trade. Like, think about it like this. If I bought a digital game, I could sell you that digital game, right? Like that seems logical, but we've given that up. We never had it in the beginning with. So, like, when you look at the bigger picture, the problem is we've just let corporations take advantage of us. And AI is this big visible boil on the blistering face of corporate as a whole that we're looking at and we're like, well, this isn't going to last. And I don't think it will. I think ultimately all of the data you shared is 100% accurate. In fact, the reason why I withheld my opinions on some of them is because like I actually think the opposite's gonna happen. Where hospitals, medical organizations, they are going to buy the enterprise AI license because it's actually really useful to feed a tool that's specifically good at looking at patterns with thousands of x-ray images and be able to look at that and find anomalies, find sort of unique or similar scenarios that will help the healthcare industry. Like I do think AI is a really great tool for that. But when it comes to, you know, writing a book, building graphics for a video game or a movie, basically theft-based uh architecture, especially when it's sold as a service, it will collapse. And I'm so excited for it. I feel really good that this is all gonna fall apart in like the next year, and I can't wait for it.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

I love that I told you nothing about this topic because I knew, I knew where this was gonna go. And I'm just so excited because it's so poignant for like everything that you're saying. It's are you saying, I guess, let me let me get to this the bigger picture. Is Bitcoin and NFT that sort of technology and capability? Is that our future? Well, is that the only way to save us?

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Interestingly, like interestingly, the idea of like a cryptocurrency or some kind of token that you own, I think is the missing piece in a lot of this. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Like that's the thing we haven't cracked, right? We don't have Do we own digital things? Right, we don't that that's the biggest thing. Like, AI has taken this stuff because there is no way to prove ownership. Yeah, and like Google, Google's trying to do this, like they they have been pioneering watermarking of AI images. And like if AI's created, anything you create with Gemini is watermarked and traceable back to like the sources, where it came from. Like, Google's trying to get ahead of this curve to the point of we are going to create the digital ownership layer of what AI is creating, which is so smart for them. Yeah, yeah, they they know where this is coming, or where this is going, sorry, and they know like where it's gonna end up, and I think that's why they're getting so so into that aspect of it. Yeah, but I love your points. I think the only thing I'd say um as one thing that I think maybe you meant it this way, and maybe I just interpreted a little bit different. I agree with you that we went through, and this is just a common technology playbook, right? Any company that's starting up it's you subsidize your product at an extremely, extremely low rate, even free to gain mass adoption, and then you flip the money engine on, and you're like, no, we now charge. And because you've gotten that foothold and that stickiness of the consumer base, people will pay. Like, this is how so many different platforms have become worth billions because they've played this model before. I think the difference is open source is the

Enterprise Licenses, Open Source, And ROI

SPEAKER_01 36:20

difference. Open source models are and open weight models are comparable to frontier-level intelligence right now. And companies should not, especially if you own a proprietary proprietary data set or a workflow, you should not be using enterprise frontier intelligence at all. That's my opinion, because those labs, those labs are gonna take all your data and they're gonna say, hey, great, because you trained us on your proprietary medical data, we are actually just gonna launch a subcompany that does exactly what you do, and they're going to take your market share.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Michael, I have great news for you. Great news. Tell me, no one is thinking about that at all. And everyone is giving them free data. Literally. I agree. Do you know how I know? Because all you need to do is just look at the outbound traffic at any company and see where it's going. Like there was, there's actually, I saw it was really funny. I'll see if I can find it, but like folks were actually looking at outbound traffic. Like all these companies are just sending like private data to Chat GPT and Clot. Like big, big companies that should be paying for licenses, that should be using internal localized AI models. They're just sending everything to Claude and ChatGPT. Yeah, but they the problem is no one understands how the technology works. And the technical people who do are losing their jobs and they're like, stop doing this. Uh, I do, I do think positively like I said before, you're you have to have a babysitter, right? Like that seems to be the realization that I've noticed recently is like, hey, if we're gonna use these things, you need a human at the end of every operation that's validating this. And that's kind of the part that I find dissatisfying because like I could have just made this myself and it like maybe it didn't get the nuance the AI came up with, but it's still like good. And I'd much rather build something myself by hand than have an AI create something and then spend the same amount of time reviewing it. Like it it almost feels like I'm demoting myself for a robot that might do a worse job than me. Like, sure, I might also do a terrible job. But like, why are we hiring two people? Like, if we just call an AI a person, why hire two people that can do the same thing if one person's just gonna have to check the other's homework for everything? Um, I do think to your point though, like data entry, clerical work, yeah. Right now, it feels real good to be like, oh, I've got my AI note taker on the call and look, it took all these notes. And they're gonna find like what what everyone else has found out. It's the, you know, the F-Around find out stage, that it's not perfect. So, like the whole reason you hired Janice to come in here and do her clerical work is Janice, don't stop making mistakes. She's been doing this for 30 years, she's gonna continue to do this until she's retired. And really good note-taker, right? Like, really good meeting maker on the calendar. Like, there are things that you cannot replace at robots. There are things that robots can absolutely help us with. The folly of the corporate structure is thinking, I can replace a human with this. No, it's I am giving a human a tool, and I'm gonna pay more for that tool, and I'm willing to expense more on that tool, but I should never ever replace the human. And I think the last the last data point I'll bring up is actually a very funny thing that's happened again in gaming. Steam, uh, which is owned by Valve, my favorite company, uh, they've recently added on their store a disclaimer. And if you want your game shown on Steam, which is the largest digital distribution platform for PC games, if you used AI in your game, you have to disclose it. And all of these developers are like, I don't want to do this. If that disclosure shows up on my game, less people buy it. Like, oh boo-hoo, like you stole. You literally stole other people's work and are trying to sell it as your own. And informed buyers are choosing not to engage with your work because it's disclosed publicly. That's that's the reality of the situation, right? Like, people will not allow this robot to take over our jobs. And I think it's a good thing. I think it's a great thing.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Yeah.

unknown 40:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:40

To build on, I think you're what you were getting to is this loop is about to hit a hard, hard wall.

SPEAKER_04 40:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Because there's AI noise everywhere. I I shameless plug. My company works with companies to help them figure out why AI isn't working for them. Right. Everybody's building stuff. Yeah, like everybody's building stuff, but like we can never get it to where it actually needs to be, and we're like stuck on the implementation. Or, you know, I'm giving everyone access, but now I'm just burning through money and I'm not seeing any ROI. A company much bigger than ours, but does something very similar. They were on a podcast recently and they were like, every every month internally, we are spending 50x more in token cost, and the measured ROI we get is like 2x.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

And like that, that doesn't scale. Like, there's no reason for me as a leader to keep on investing in frontier level enterprise cost and not try to go with open weight models or something like that because the ROI is not there. It's a shiny object. The first results are great, but then you realize that people are just using it for dumb and stupid things, like, hey, ChatGPT, frontier level intelligence, what's 30 by 46? And they just paid like two cents for that request. When it's like you have a free calculator in front of you, Janice. Use the free calculator in front of you. But that's the problem right now. It's this is what every company is getting to, and eventually there's gonna be a hard wall of saying, okay, you have not only stolen our data, but we are paying an incredible amount of money for you, and we're not getting any value from it. Janice was cheaper. We can't keep that. Janice was cheaper, exactly. We're gonna hire more people to clean up the AI slot that's coming from everything. And I don't know if you've seen it too. When I'm working with companies, it's really interesting because they're really like they're like, hey, AI meeting notes are great, like, I'm so happy we get meeting notes, but now it's just noise. And like, I don't even read the meeting notes because I can't even keep track of all the information that's just flying in and out of emails and recaps and so on. And they're like, it's informational, but it's not actionable, Anthony. Yeah, where's the actionable stuff that's right that comes out of meetings that people used to own?

SPEAKER_00 42:52

Yeah, yes. Well, I love that. Which I love it's informational, but it's not actional. It's like the thing that you'll never get until we get to AGI is nuance, right? Like you're never gonna get nuance with something that can only learn through text and copying, right? Like it it just doesn't understand what nuance is. So when you know you're in that meeting and Jefferson over there like really lights up when he starts talking about his project, but the AI just made it a bullet note in the meeting summary, and then it's sunken, you know, it's it's like buried in 18 other bullet notes, where Janice would have made that the entire meeting summary. It's like, hey, Jefferson's project, that's the future we all need to focus on. But like in AI, it's just it's just noise, right? Because all it knows how to do is to receive and regurgitate noise. So, you know, it's it's funny. Like you almost look at I almost look at AI as kind of like nuclear energy, right? Like in the early days, like back to Oppenheimer, when when nuclear first happened, it was dangerous, right? Like we use it as a weapon. We had mistakes with nuclear power plants, like lives were lost. But look at it now. It's the cleanest energy. It's the best way to power uh anything, basically cost-effective wise. It just requires a very specific type of expertise and infrastructure to make it successful. And I think we'll see AI go the exact same direction. Where yes, you will have businesses, healthcare organizations, et cetera, building their own little open source internal or like using open source code to build an internal AI engine, to parse through all their data and really come up with some great helpful innovations. But the thing that wasn't included in that sentence was Claude or Chat GPT, because we are coming up on a very like abrupt death to their service models, because no one's going to be willing to pay for it, like you said.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Yeah. Yeah. For the benefit, the ROI, it's just not there. It's not there for any company right now, unfortunately. Like I think most companies, unless like you're a small targeted research firm that like you do very specific things at a small scale. If you're a general corporation and you have many different functions, finance, dev, like maybe dev is the only one you see ROI in, right? Because coding is the only like enterprise level ROI factor you could look at. If you're doing like basic financial stuff, marketing stuff, etc. Like people are just using it to generate AI slop and you're not gonna get an ROI from that. Yeah, that's kind of the hot take.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

Yeah.

Upskill Fast And Win On People Skills

SPEAKER_01 45:30

However, I have good news for you.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

Great.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

There are some roles. There are some roles that I think will be okay. If you're in machine learning, if you're in cybersecurity, especially cybersecurity, holy cow, you're gonna be just fine because there's a whole new frontier of things that you're gonna have to tackle with this new stuff. Healthcare, if you're an education, a teacher, if you work in energy, if you work in infrastructure, construction, like you're gonna be just fine. I think if you're in those roles, you get a long way before you're gonna be disrupted.

SPEAKER_04 46:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Um, but I think maybe to end on, we should talk about if you're in a role that can be replaced from AI, what should you be doing?

SPEAKER_00 46:16

I think if you want to keep doing the job you're doing, be prepared to make the argument that you should be using AI as a tool, right? Uh present to your leadership, hey, we should be looking at, you know, building our own sort of internal AI engine that we can deploy and use so we're not spending all this money on tokens. Like become AI familiar, right? Like this is really hard to say to someone who's not a technical person, but like go out and learn economic AI deployment and utilization and be willing to pitch that because they they will be looking, the bean counters count them beans. That's what they do. And when they see Janice versus Claude, they're gonna be like, Well, Claude is so cheap. Why would we ever keep Jan? Claude doesn't need healthcare. Uh, but when when Janice comes to them with a pitch of like, hey, I think we can build this internal thing, and it would, you know, only cost us the power of the compute and the data center resources we need. But since we're only doing our own little internal uh calls, it it should be very affordable. But like Janice is stepping up, one, and two, Janice is owning this thing, right? Like own the AI before it owns you. That's that's literally what I'm trying to do at my job right now, is like get ahead of it, right? How does marketing use AI as a tool? And interestingly enough, the most success we found is basically just using it as a search engine for the things that marketing's already created because it's actually just really terrible at creating good copy and good marketing content. Like it's so bad at it. Like I can literally feed it good things and I'll say, hey, take this and make it better. And every time it makes it worse. So there's a lot of opportunity to use it. Bring those use cases now so you don't get replaced for not thinking about it. That'd be my tip.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

I love that. Exactly where my head goes, too. Is it's inevitable. For everybody listening, it's inevitable. You've got to learn how to use the AI tools to make you better at what you do. If that's that means better can mean faster, right? It could mean that it used to take you a week to do this thing. Now, because you've incorporated AI, you can do it in a day and a half or something like that. Like that is valuable because at the end of the day, whatever you do, whatever your role is, you're bringing value in some way. And if you can find a way to either make that more efficient, do it better, have more resources available to you, use the AI tools to make you better at the value you provide. And I think it is worth being that advocate to say, hey, here's what I experimented with this week. You know, I tried this thing with this AI tool, I got bad results, here's my suggestion. And I think you need to remember too that, and I said this, you know, somewhere in one of my rambles, deals and promotions still get done with handshakes and people skills, relationships. That stuff is not going to be replaced by AI. So remember, at the end of the day, even though AI is coming, we're still all people working with each other. And those intangibles are not going away. So do not just sit in a corner. If you are one of these uh susceptible areas, go out and meet people, talk with people around you so you are seen, so you're heard, so you build those relationships. Because if you are liked by people, and this is a sad truth of corporate, you will not be easily replaced.

SPEAKER_00 49:40

Yeah. And one more additional thing, since we brought it up, I feel it bears repeating.

Data Centers, Local Pushback, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 49:47

Let's say you're not a corporate. I don't know why you listen to this podcast, but let's say you're not a corporate. And we love you. We love you. Thank you for making it this far. Uh it doesn't matter if you're not a corporate. Like we said earlier, a lot of these companies are building data centers and they are making the citizens of the cities and counties and towns they're in subsidize the costs. That is not right. That is not fair. Pay attention to what's happening around you, right? This goes for everybody. And this is not a political issue. This is actually just a late-stage capitalism issue. All sides, uh normal working average folks of all sides agree that you should not pay more on your energy or water bill because a company decided to build a data center near you. That's wrong. That's just more theft that we're letting them get away with. So go to your local town hall meetings if you know about it. Tell your neighbors, tell your friends, get involved, speak up. Local communities are stopping these things from happening and being built. And like, I'm not against progress. I'm not against building an appropriate data center where it it appropriately needs to be. But that's going through the right hoops, and that's not impacting the birds, the bees, the humans that are near the thing, right? Like, we have to be sensible. There's so many places you can build data centers. I mean, Elon wants to build them in space. So maybe that's the play. I don't know. But get involved, stay aware, stay active. Don't let them take anything from you that they have not earned by buying it from you. So, uh, to the larger point, services just we need to burn services to the ground. They they don't work. Digital ownership needs to become a thing. Get it.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Love it. Well, this was fun. This was fun. I knew you'd be passionate in some areas. I think it kind of lets people know like, really, we're getting a new tool. There are going to be more jobs created, in my opinion, than eliminated. But I agree. I think if you're in a susceptible industry and if you're in a susceptible position that AI can already do aspects of your job, you can get ahead of that. You don't have to sit there and just wait till it takes your job. Like, go shake some hands, go find out how you can bring value or do things faster or do things better in your role. And as long as you're seen and you're heard and you're liked and you provide valuable work using these tools, you're going to be just fine.

SPEAKER_00 52:09

I agree. I agree. Now, if only Google Jim and I could actually like capture my face and make a decent thumbnail on our episodes. I mean it's only only it is funny.

SPEAKER_01 52:21

It does me really well, but you it can't figure you out.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

It really can't.

SPEAKER_01 52:26

Maybe because you're an alien.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

I am a little bit of an alien. I think you're an alien. I think that's why.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

That's that's the issue.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

It is very funny. It knows you, it knows you so well. And me, it's like it, I don't know, it makes me look like a mixture of uh myself and oh, what's his face from the bear? You know that guy. You know that guy. I feel like it like it blends our faces together. And it, I don't know. We'll see what it does for this one. I'm not gonna stop using it because it's very helpful for me to do it. Let it run. Let it let it rip as they say. Uh we already talked about how you can get in touch with us, but please, if this episode was meaningful to you in some way, shape, or form, leave a comment uh in the video. Check out our Discord, check out our Instagram, check out our link tree. We also do uh private content on our Patreon, although we haven't recently, and that's because I accidentally deleted the private content that I built. So um, I'm sorry, and I will rebuild it. Uh, just need to get the time to do it. So check out our Patreon if you want to support the show. Check the link tree for all the things. Um, Michael, do you have anything else?

SPEAKER_02 53:32

No, we'll cover it all. Yeah, like, share, subscribe.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

See us in all see us in all channels. It'll be great. Please.

SPEAKER_03 53:39

We want to see you.

SPEAKER_01 53:40

Please like us. Please subscribe, please. Please, please clap.

SPEAKER_00 53:44

That'll do it for another episode of Corpus Strategy, the podcast that's kind of an email. As always, I'm Anthony.

SPEAKER_02 53:53

And I'm Michael.

SPEAKER_00 53:54

And you're on mute.