Jeremy (00:00)
Why don't skeptics trust Atoms? Because they make up everything.

Jim (00:02)
I don't know why.

There's nothing funny about that at all. I refuse to believe it.

Jeremy (00:06)
Well, atoms make up everything. You are made of atoms

Jim (00:16)
All right, so there's a lot as always going on this week, but there's a few pieces that we wanted to kind of pull out today. And that is the skeptical intelligence of them that kind of coined, you know, Forbes magazine had an article about skeptical intelligence. And so like when we think about what a lot of people are focusing on with a it's kind of like like the dumbed down version, right? It's like.

and then digesting it, taking it, and just assuming it's correct, right, basically. Don't we feel like we find that a lot, or no? You don't, because you're naturally skeptical, I think, aren't you? Right, I'm not a skeptic.

Jeremy (00:51)
I'm, yes. A

fair characterization of me is that I'm naturally skeptical, but I also have realistic expectations.

Jim (00:58)
Right, but a lot of people don't. So they just take whatever AI generated garbage comes out and just paste it into an email or a document or an essay. AI slop is a real thing. Somebody just sent me something today and they're like. And they were like, no, it was it was through a nonprofit that I'm involved with and they were like, look, someone else generated this. What do you think? And I said, I think it looks like AI slop and I don't think it's genuine at all. And I think if you post that on social media, people.

Jeremy (01:06)
AI slop is a real thing.

a one, friends.

I thought I just made up that word that that series AI slop right now. So others are saying. Well, so that's interesting, too. There's critical mass. If I'm saying it, you're saying it, probably others are saying it, then it's a real thing.

Jim (01:31)
my texts.

double dash.

you ⁓ mean the dash. exactly. Well, and that basically this article kind of went on to say, like, don't worship AI. Just use it as a tool and know that you still have to use your own you know, you have to use some critical thinking and be aware of how

Jeremy (01:55)
We welcome our AI overlords.

Jim (01:57)
Exactly.

Yeah, we don't want them angry with us. ⁓ And that, you know, you can't really replace critical thinking with automation. You have to still use your own brain and use these things to augment kind of like you would a spreadsheet or a different technology that you've already had, but just use them to augment and you can augment your own capabilities faster and better, especially in areas that you don't have a lot of familiarity with.

Jeremy (02:22)
skeptical.

I'm sure next week we're going to talk a bit about the news that came out this week about the millions that big business enterprises losing. And it's exactly because of this. They're putting agent AI agents in place. They're throwing all this money, but they're forgetting about human oversight, human intervention, real think critical thinking. But how many how many times this is a good use of AI. Analyze all of our podcasts. Tell me how many times we have said critical thinking.

employee critical thinking in your everyday life, especially with AI.

Jim (02:55)
And

there's no question about that. And obviously bigger businesses are seeing where they're rushed to invest and keep up with their competition or get ahead of their competition without a plan or a strategy or thought put into it. Just like, let's just dump in whatever we hear because we're going to see our ROI is going to be incredible, astronomically great. And the real ROI for a lot of these bigger companies and corporations that have done it early on was not there. And so that's why I think a lot of smaller and younger businesses

are not jumping on his vest.

Jeremy (03:26)
Well, maybe

it's my, this might be my bias. I have a particular affinity for small business and medium sized businesses, but I feel like part of the sort of natural tendency of small business owners is to be a little bit more critical. Absolutely, We don't just throw money at a problem hoping that they don't.

Jim (03:44)
They

don't have as much money or resources or capacity.

Jeremy (03:48)
Enterprise does

that a lot. Like, well, there's a problem, let's just throw some money at it.

Jim (03:52)
look at

meta growing billions and billions of dollars at VR and then virtual reality and then pivoting quickly to like, okay, none of this works without let's throw hundreds of billions of dollars into AI.

Jeremy (04:06)
Though in full

disclosure, I sank about 420 hours into VR Skyrim. It was worth it.

Jim (04:12)
There's another article that we saw in Yahoo! Tech that's about AMD, so the chipmaker that basically says that the CEO saying how even tech industry leaders get confused and almost...

dizzyed and bewildered by the speed of AI and technology and how fast things are pushing forward. And I thought that was really good and insightful because I think it really for small businesses too, if these huge corporations and chip makers and so on are having the same like almost panic attacks and anxiety around this and the speed of how fast everything is, then obviously as a small business owner, it's completely overwhelming. I had a conversation with a couple of folks who aren't business owners, but they're just like women and they're like high

60s, lower 70s, and they're fascinated about all of it, scared, but also fascinated and said, like how like wanted to know how do I keep up with everything? And I said, I don't. You can't. I part of the reason we do a podcast is really mainly for us to stay current about what's going on so we don't lose sight of what's going on in the context.

Jeremy (05:16)
It is

hard to keep up, even if you love this stuff, and I totally geek out on all this stuff, but it is, I mean, it's hard for anybody to know all the things about all of this, but as a quick aside, I know you've told me, and I'm not going to deviate from this, that you've told me to keep it to one joke per episode. When I originally prompted it, I prompted it for a joke on this article on AMD, and it was just nasty, know, comparing AMD to the loser against Nvidia.

Jim (05:43)
I mean true though and really ⁓ there were a lot of there were a lot of parallels to that that were people drew you know regarding you know kind of what they went into here but but to get deeper into into what she said it was the idea is that ⁓ which again is a female tech leader which is which is not the norm sadly really and she's really taking a pretty firm stand but yeah this particular company is not exactly as best in class well

Jeremy (06:08)
I

disagree. think in the gaming world, think AMD actually is a fantastic chipset.

Jim (06:15)
They're

definitely not the ones who are the biggest beneficiaries of a lot of this AI technology. That's beyond. Okay. You don't agree with that? You think that they're killing it? Their stock. don't think their stock and their investors. not. Video pretty well kicked their asses.

Jeremy (06:26)
I'm not saying that either. just saying that. This video

versus processor, first of all. Second of all, I think what's really good about this is we have somebody who is a business leader who is straight shooting. And I love that. So for me, maybe I'm just feeling a little protective, not that any business leader needs protection by me, but.

Jim (06:49)
It's kind of

like when Claude comes out, when Anthropic and Claude, their teams come out with certain things and you're just like, God, you're really just trying to take the, to drive, maybe it's their core value, but they're also just trying to take a little bit of the shine off of. Well you love them, but let's be honest. All right, and then.

Jeremy (07:04)
No, they're fantastic.

I am totally

an anthropic fanboy.

Jim (07:10)
One

of the last big takeaways though was just that she said was that AI won't replace everyone, but it will absolutely reshape every job. And I actually thought that was brilliant. It will replace a lot of jobs. I don't agree with her on that, but it won't replace everyone, but it will absolutely reshape every job and position and they will not look like what they look like now.

Jeremy (07:32)
don't think it will replace anyone. I think it will replace jobs. And I think that that's really, there's an important distinction there.

Jim (07:40)
⁓ We

aren't our occupation. No, it's true. So the big one that we're going to focus in on for this episode is how Anthropic, which is the company that runs Claude, Claude AI is basically a JAT GPT competitor and they take it. It's fine in their minds, but it's the smaller one, the less well known one, but one we've been for years and better in a lot of ways.

Jeremy (07:59)
Both of the chat CPT was a clogged competitor.

I just

all joking aside we are technology agnostic and that's important because I will be the first to criticize technology that really is falling short but with Anthropic I really do appreciate some of these new tools that you're about to talk about.

Jim (08:22)
And

so this is from VentureBeat, and it kind of gets into how they're taking on OpenAI, TattooBeat, and Google with their new Cloud AI features.

The interesting part, the part that I, the biggest takeaway I took and look, we're, we're, we're going to translate it to business and small businesses. It's more educationally focused, but as business owners and business leaders, there's this need and want to, to kind of learn things and grow and, still use critical thinking. But basically it's just like, kind of comes back to that skeptical, you know, thinking or, ⁓ or, or intelligence to a degree. And that's why we kind of picked up on both, but this one really got more deep.

into

Focus with the ability to focus and and learn complex things versus just getting a quick answer. Problem is our need for instant gratification in society, especially as small business owners. It's like, hey, we don't have any time. I just want to know the answer. When I when I showed one of my daughters early on how how chat GPT could kind of help her because I didn't understand the homework question. We use that like the homework question she was getting asked. I'm like, I don't understand how to do that. I'm not familiar. I'm like, do you want the answer?

and to know how to do it. She says, yeah, I do I said, I can't do that.

Jeremy (09:35)
linear algebra

was that?

Jim (09:36)
It

was whatever it was. I'm sure I failed it when I was in school in middle school. So I or high school. I took a I took a picture of it. Didn't give any context. I I talked about this before. Yeah. And uploaded it and it got the answer and it gave a little bit of like, you know, it explained it said, do you want me to show you how to do this? And I said, this goes beyond that. Yeah. What Claude and Anthropics Claude is trying to do is to go beyond that with a deeper dive. So why you talk about a little bit like what what are they talking about with what their

learning modes are.

Jeremy (10:12)
Well, I think that there's a couple things that you said that I think are really important ⁓ to just tease out for the business owner. The first is what I appreciate is not just that they're giving you a learning mode, but that they are recognizing by providing you with modalities to interface with, that they're recognizing that you as a person have different modalities. There's a time to learn. There's a time just to give me the damn answer. want to move on with my life.

Jim (10:37)
Right, so different use cases, basically different things you need in your day. Like you might have a quick, simple thing you just want to get done. Like, hey, where do I file this? Or how do I go about doing this one annoying task? Versus, let me understand this so I can train somebody else on my staff how to do something more complex or even understand some new concept that I'm trying to learn in my industry or just in general.

Jeremy (11:01)
One of the things that, ⁓ so to give a practical example, which I think is also great for us as our transparency as a business, we're at a place now, we're about a year into doing these episodes for our podcast, and we're about to launch ⁓ what we believe to be our flagship product. And when we do that, we're also going to be putting a bit more attention to building our audience on this channel. So far it's been a great experiment, we've been having some fun, but we're now.

Jim (11:29)
have liked it and that

mainly we did it for ourselves and our clients.

Jeremy (11:32)
But now we're about to make a significant shift and try and go after more eyeballs. And so some of this is, okay, well how do we do that? Now, I'm an experienced marketer, you've got tons of marketing chops, but in this particular combination of elements, what we wanna understand is something very niche. So I asked Claude.

But I didn't just ask Claude, hey, what's the solution here? Because one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to learn a little bit more for myself as a marketer, but I also recognized that the answer is gonna be driven by the nuance of the conversation. Our specific tuning of this podcast, the content strategy for it, the audience that we're trying to reach. Through that conversation, Claude gave me a really good answer. And it's not done yet. It continues to ask questions in order to refine it.

It's both teaching and learning itself. That modality is different than when I asked Claude to vibe code with me.

Jim (12:26)
So two things

just because trying to keep it simple and easy for people and because there's a lot of clutter of modalities and all these yeah no offense but glassing glassy eyes right so the core of it

Jeremy (12:34)
Go for it.

Keep it

simple, Jeremy. Keep it simple.

Jim (12:40)
Claude is a ChatGPT competitor. they're offering something that ChatGPT hasn't offered yet, which is the learning modes. So A, download Claude. Look, I know we've been preaching it for a while, but download Claude because why wouldn't you? It's just another tool that you can test out and learn free as well.

Jeremy (12:58)
Also free. Worth it

to pay for though, by the way.

Jim (13:03)
Yeah, well

as with most of these tools, we say it all the time, like spend the few extra bucks because it's a great return on your investment. But also just try it for a month and see if you really do use it and which one you prefer better or which one you prefer better for what your needs are. Okay, so learning modes, do you have to activate it or how do you, yeah. Download Claude and then what? Or if you already have it,

Jeremy (13:19)
So in the chat, you download the cloud or use it in the browser.

And then there's

a little ⁓ settings toggle in the chat dialog. You hit that and it basically gives you the option to set use style. When you click use style, it brings up normal, which is everyday uses. Learning, which is what we've been talking about. There's concise, explanatory, and formal. And then you can also create and edit your own styles by mashing up different modes as you see it by giving it sort of a built-in prompt.

you to dial in exactly how you want Claude to respond to you. And that response, as I was just saying before, it's not just giving you the answer, it's also responding to you with other questions.

Jim (14:03)
So

one of the things that I really like about AI and how I've used it, whether it's Chat TV or Claude or things like it, is that it's helped me learn more about AI. So sure, I use TikTok and YouTube and just obviously pouring myself into different articles or videos, but also using the tools to teach me about how best to use the tools for my particular needs or task or whatever I'm trying to understand and learning it more. you know, I sent over an item today about

⁓ earlier in our this court about ⁓ it was about how to best target podcast advert you know getting more viewers and so on right but it was complex it's very heady

Jeremy (14:39)
He out.

It was really complex. First thing I

did was I dropped it right into Notebook LM.

Jim (14:49)
And

I didn't tell you to do that but my assumption was you were going to do that of course fascinating So Jeremy jump dumped it into a tool, you know Google's Google's AI tools, which is notebook LM which creates podcasts that are completely AI generated where people are chatting to fictional avatar voices are chatting about about this

Jeremy (15:09)
and

it's hot.

Jim (15:10)
PDF that we wanted to learn more about and now we could learn about it. I've told that story before about how even to clients and other people I tell, I'm like I learned stuff in a few minutes now that I would never be able to.

Jeremy (15:22)

minutes of a podcast, an artificial podcast. But it took some really heavy stuff around the data too and made it conversational, which made it more easily digested.

Jim (15:26)
No.

So the big thing here is that these learning modes exist. So and again, there's more to AI than just chat GPT. But it can help business owners prioritize also which tasks or whether they want to ⁓ learn how to use AI or.

or to let just let AI and some of these technologies just do the work for them. And it depends. Sometimes logically, just like what we use it for, you're just going to want to knock something out fast. like, just like, tell me what this is and how to do it or just do this for me if it's agentic AI. But then there's going to be other times that you actually want to learn something like we wanted to learn a little more about. what, how can we best target and come up with a plan for how to get more viewers and listeners and so on? And so I'd say,

Like what we let in with there's always a need for both, right? You have to prioritize as a business owner or a business leader What is best for you and your team your business for anyone yourself personally? Like do you want to learn a little bit? Probably a smart decision to learn a little bit too So you can understand the context and piece it together strategically But do you also then want to use it like just for task oriented like hey like a lot of people do right low-hanging fruit like yeah They help me write this email or help me automate this particular task. That's very

repetitive and annoying.

Jeremy (16:54)
I do want to sort of close on my end at least with paying Podbot a bit of a compliment. All three articles, I think this week, dovetail together really nicely. are not replaceable as a person, but even your role, like we've been saying all along, AI will give you certain superpowers. I am now able to do three times, I clocked myself so I know this, I'm able to do, I use a time sheet, I'm able to do three times.

And I'm already a hard and efficient worker. just that alone.

Jim (17:31)
Amazing.

Jeremy (17:32)
Unbelievable. But

when you add that to this idea that you can use learning modes to teach yourself more and that you have different tools at your disposal in order to work with you depending on the mode of what you're trying to achieve. All of these things, all three articles this week, I think paint a picture about not the sort of negative side of things, but the positive side of things, right? That there's a lot of upside potential, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses.

who want to start their own businesses, people who want to learn new things.

Jim (18:05)
even how to build

something. again, I'm not a coder or an engineer and I have no context like you do in that space. But now I know myself and I've encouraged other people who are like, who have at least a little tech savviness, like teach yourself through these tools to learn how to use these tools to write code and build out apps or sites or whatever you want. But it's not just learn and learn it, but then also use the tools to also do it.

Jeremy (18:31)
It's ⁓ fantastic for coding. It's fantastic for making things.

You're an amazing strategist. I the way that I have observed you consulting with our clients in a very short time span, you can come in, assess a problem, provide five different ways to think about the problem in a new way, and then make suggestions about how to improve something. Not everybody has access to gym at their fingertips, but I think that the learning mode here with Anthropic gives you the chance to have a gym-like thing that can go on a bit of a journey with you, that can teach

you but also offer you with new ideas new ways to go.

Jim (19:08)
Offer

a gym like thing soon very soon. Very soon. We'll be rolling up. That's it No, I think your point is well taken again Again, what we always say is just jump in and try so download Claude we get nothing from that So download Claude use the free version first week out week

Jeremy (19:25)
Get the joy

of knowing that you have learned something and tried.

Jim (19:28)
Helping others, that's what we're all about.