¶ Business Brain – The Entrepreneurs’ Podcast #639 for Casual Friday, April 11th, 2025
Business Brain, episode 639 for Casual Friday, April 11th, National Pet Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, We crunch them. We use them to analyze and tune and improve our business brains collectively, all of us together, so that we can each keep on living those charmed lives. Our sponsor, MacAudio.com slash brain, a.k.a. The folks at Rogue Amoeba, where coupon code brain saves you 20% on anything they make.
If you are successfully hearing this episode, it means their software worked. But I'm pretty sure you'll hear it because literally every episode of this show all the way back to the beginning has been using their software. So we'll talk more about that in a little bit here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And I'm here in Northern California. I'm Shannon Jean. Happy Friday, man.
Happy Friday. I, I, I was, I was having a retrospective moment while I was traveling
¶ The value of "I wish I knew that before" vs. "I'm glad I know that now."
Shannon and I, I learned something cause I always learn things. Right. And it was something that would have been valuable in the past. Past i think we all like knowledge a perspective a skill anything right sure oh my gosh and my first thought was damn i wish i knew that before and immediately i was like wait a minute that's not gonna help me that's not good talk that's not good talk and i so i immediately followed that up by saying, I'm glad I know that now.
And- I love that. Like, if there's one thing that maybe epitomizes what we do here to tune our business brains, it's that. Recognizing that that, like, this skill was valuable. I certainly recognize the skill was valuable so much so that I wish I had that value in the past. The reality is the second best time to have it is today.
And so it was because we talk about this stuff and tune our business brains and do the things that we do every week, twice a week, that I instantly was able to catch myself and be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to get stuck in that negative thinking. This is a positive thing. And by golly, I'm going to make it positive by saying I am stoked to know that now. I've just added to my talent stack.
Yeah, that, you know, we do talk about this a lot on the show. And I think it's because we've learned over the years, the importance of, you know, the language you use in your head and programming yourself. And, you know, this stuff is hard. This, this entrepreneurship stuff is difficult and, you know, it's ups and downs and things you don't know and things you look, you know, and so looking at it that way, I think is, is really powerful.
You just don't want to beat yourself up on things that you don't have to. Because even though maybe it doesn't sound like it's important, it's important, the way you talk to yourself and the way your brain talks inside,
Right? It's the mind hack that comes from it, the inner judge, exactly.
Yeah, it is. So I love this idea of flipping it. And you had one that I use all the time now. It was not like this, but a similar switch of the framework when instead of apologizing, like for a late reply to an email, using this, hey,
¶ “Thank you for your patience” instead of “I’m sorry” from Business Brain 555
thanks for your patience. It instantly changes the way you even write the email, right?
Because- Everything.
You don't want to start the email with an apology. That's terrible. So being able to understand language, and I had a client that used this phrase and said, oh, you know, how did he say it? He said, I have a, my mind is uncontrollable or it's chaotic. And it was just read these negative terms about my mind. And I just said, hey, you know what? Before we continue, let's just change the way we talk about that. And really, you just have a curious mind. That's all it is.
And that's great. I like to have a curious mind. I want somebody to describe me that way. Yeah.
And so, you know, setting yourself up, you're just programming yourself for success. And all those small little things add up. It just stacks up the way you look at everything. And I also, I think it impacts the way you interact with other people, right? Because you feel more confident. And people pick up on that. People are drawn to confidence and positivity. It's like gravity. You want to be a planet,
Right? Yeah, people are drawn to confidence, but what pushes them away is negativity. Yes, absolutely. And that's more important than them being drawn to confidence, right? Yeah. But the nice part is both of those things are true. So if you get rid of the negativity in your mind, you will be more confident and people will, instead of being repelled from you, they are drawn to you.
You got it. And that works with your employees. It works with your suppliers. We recently did an episode where I said, everyone's a customer, even your suppliers, vendors, your banker, your accountant, because you want
¶ Everyone’s a Customer
them to take your call. You want them. To be motivated to talk to you because you bring a certain level of cheerfulness, positivity, whatever. And it all starts with the way you talk inside your head. So I think this is a great tip. I love it. I think it's powerful. So instead of I wish I had known, it's I'm glad I know that now.
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. If you've got a moment like this in your life where you notice you shifting that negative inner speak that self-speak to positive self-speak let us know feedback at businessbrain.show all right so i want to take a minute and talk about our sponsor here because this show is powered
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charmed life. And our thanks to Rogue Amoeba for doing what they do and for sponsoring this episode.
¶ BB Review-Ian in KY
All right. In addition to sponsors, you are a huge part of what makes this show work and your reviews. Let us know how we impact you. And we have a review from Ian in Kentucky. Five stars. Entertaining, insightful and energizing approach to work and technology. I have been a huge fan of business brain, says Ian, as someone who falls somewhere between pioneer and settler in the Simon Wardley. Oh, that's something I got to research. He says, I am always drawn to Dave and Shannon's pioneer mindset.
Their weekly AI conversations are a great way to get my mind thinking outside the box and explore new ways to use technology to boost productivity. If you own your own business, work in customer support, customer success, sales, or any other role that involves interacting with customers, you are sure to find some valuable insights that can help you take your game to the next level. Thank you for that, Ian. And Ian is now entered into our drawing to win a MacBook Air this year.
And you can be entered too by going to businessbrain.show slash review and leaving us a review. We say it all the time. We just love hearing from you no matter what you say. But what I find interesting is this week, the two reviews have mentioned how much people appreciate our AI segment. So, like, that's informative to us. We will keep doing it. In fact, it's Friday, Shannon. Shall we Friday-I?
Friday-I. I think that's a great idea. And what are we talking about this week?
¶ ChatGPT 4o adds a new image engine
Of course, everybody's talking about the new ChatGPT 4.0 imaging feature, right?
It's insane. You know, what I realized after going nuts and using it for many days was that one of my favorite things to use, but also to show people about GPT is the T part, the transformer part, the part where you can take what it has sent you. You know, you ask it, you prompt it, however you're going to prompt it. It comes back and gives you a result. And then you say, all right, well, I want to tweak that. I want to use it. We've talked about Canvas on the show before to really interactively
work with text. But even just... Prompting back and forth you can tweak text and have it work well dolly the the previous image engine if you gave it a prompt and the image that it gave you was not exactly what you wanted getting it to tweak that for you you are out of luck there was no transformer on the image now dude it's there it is it is truly chat gpt for images yeah.
It's crazy i i started playing around with it everybody posted like studio ghibli uh
Obviously you.
Know images all that kind of stuff and i'm like i'm gonna do that and the fact that you can upload an image or even now like i can
Sketch uh.
Out of just a rough idea of what i want take a photo of that upload the sketch and say look, I want this circle. I want it to say this. The colors are royal blue and yellow. Here's the Pantone numbers that I want to use. And man, it's amazing.
I never thought to do that. This is why I like doing this segment. Wow. Yeah.
So you just kind of give a rut because you know, you have it in your head. Like I could tell, oh, I wanted to do this. And here's these people standing next to it. And this in the house in the background, whatever. And you put it up there. Then using the transform feature like no okay close but i want you to change this and make these people look like this or do i mean and you could just walk it through step by step by step and it it's it's dramatic man it's amazing
I'm glad you explained what you did because i still and i understand it i you know in addition to being like entrepreneur dave and podcaster dave i'm also drummer dave and i deal with a lot of artists and especially in the artist community but also in the tech community there's people who uh it's fair to say approach ai with some apprehension they don't like it they don't like it right and i get it but here's
i i truly do get it i'm not going to get into it but i i i understand it as a creator i get it. You're not using ChatGPT as the creator. You are using it as your collaborator. Correct. And that, to me, if I try to get ChatGPT to create anything, if I just tell it, write me a sales pitch for this, it's terrible.
If I write it three paragraphs about how I want it to form the sales pitch and then let it sort of go out to the world of data that it has and come up with best practices to apply what I've given it to that so much better. And the same is true exactly for what you're talking about with your image. You're using it as a collaborator. You have the idea. You're not an artist. But candidly, no artist out there is going to be able to get me the image that's in my head fast enough.
I'm not even worried about the amount of money. But, well, I guess I suppose I am. I cannot afford to have an artist on staff 24-7, 365 to do little podcast ad images. No. It's just not going to happen. And it didn't happen beforehand.
Right. No, it did not. And the big problem is iteration, is that when you have to work with an artist or an engineer, a web designer, anything.
Copywriter.
I'm sending you this. Okay, now I'm waiting for you to come back. And it says, no, that's not really what I want. I'm sending you this, and you're waiting for it to come back. That's not what I want. You've spent all this time. And, you know, I always say, because people say, well, AI is going to take your job. No, it's not. AI is not going to take your job. What's going to happen is if you don't learn AI, someone who uses AI is going to have far more opportunities than you do. That's it.
And it doesn't matter.
It's a tool. You know, helping it.
The carpenter that chooses not to use a hammer is going to get less work.
You got it. And it's just evolution. I mean, I go back to, I used to hire technicians that worked on computers, right? Big, full-size computers. Then it was laptops and you had guys, okay, great. I'm laptop tech and this kind of thing. But when we transitioned from laptops to phones and iPads, I had technicians that were like, I can't, I can't, it's too small. I can't work on it. And I was like, well, okay, we'll give you the computer business.
You know, you can do that stuff. But eventually I had to say, hey, man, you need to learn this stuff. And he's like, well, my fingers are too big. I'm like, okay, well, you need to figure this out. Because there, as you can tell, there's less and less of this, and more and more of that. And I want you to be involved in that side of things.
But I had one tech that just wouldn't do it. And I said, okay, well, eventually, it got to the point where you know, every day, okay, call in and you can check the queue. And if there's work, you can come in because they would not adapt. And it sucked for all of us.
That sucks for everybody. Yeah.
It sucks for everybody. And it was, it was a great employee,
Great technician, but they essentially let themselves go.
Yeah. They obsoleted themselves.
They obsoleted themselves.
Yeah. Yeah. So now you just, you know, despite your, the, everything new hat, you can pick apart that, Well, I don't like this about it. Okay. You know, I don't like how streaming services are merging back to becoming cable TV and charging the same thing.
And I mean, if we could go back decades to the industrial revolution and say how jobs were taken by automation in factories.
Yeah. And when factories started, the safety was horrible. People get killed all the time. Little kids work in factories. Well, you change and you adapt and you iterate. Great. So getting involved in this and being able to master it and to make it your assistant and to really use it in your day-to-day work, it's powerful, man.
We got a note from Bill who is using AI in his day-to-day work. Bill is a programmer.
¶ Bill-Claude Code is the best LLM for Coding
And he says, I saw your comments. He says, I totally agree about it being a game changer. I've applied different AI stacks across various applications. Some were fruitful. The one I wanted to call out that was jaw-dropping for me was using ClaudeCode, Sonnet, as an assistant for app development. I began applying it to my main app, and the results are impressive. Unlike other solutions such as GitHub Copilot and Kodi, ClaudeCode can understand your complete code base and make broader changes.
The others seem better in smaller scope, changing a screen, adding member functions, whereas Claude code can take on broader prompts. Give it a whirl. It worked well in the Mac terminal, he's a Mac guy. He says, and I feel like I've just scratched the surface. And he says, my understanding is that MCPs open up Claude to external APIs so that you can embed other things. MCPs are sort of generic to AI connectors to allow you to use third-party external services with any AI.
So, yeah, thank you for that, Bill.
That's great. And I will say, one of the things that excites me the most about all these, and Claude is one of them that I'm having some experience with, is I've always wanted to create things for my clients that I didn't know how to create. I've always wanted to create an app that would shortcut five different things you had to do to get it.
And, you know, and when I say app, you know, a web app type thing with it, you know, to log in or whatever, I've always wanted to do that and not had the resources and didn't want to pay, you know, a ton of money to do it.
Just to mess around with it.
I've been through this iteration process so many times in my life. I'm just like, man, that's a big, big deal to build something like that.
You know what they call that now? There's a term for this. It's called vibe coding. Ah, okay. I've heard this term. Yes, but it's 100% dependent on AI. Like, it's exactly what you're talking about, where you go in and you just start telling it ideas and it starts spitting out code and you're vibe coding. You're just like surfing the wave, man. But I've done this. Like, I'm a programmer and I've done this and it's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.
And it's exciting for me because, like, I'm working on a project right now where... In a pretty short period of time with minimal investment, I'm going to have a tool for, remember, I have a mastermind, people that are learning to resell and buying at auction and all this kind of stuff.
And I'll have a tool for them to save them just a ton of time that I would have not been able, it would have cost me $10,000 to create or at a minimum and hundreds of hours of my time in the past to build something like this. And now I can vibe code and kind of walk it through. And I have somebody working with me to kind of clean things up.
I was going to say, anything you do with AI, but coding, of course, test it. Make sure it works because AI gets it wrong, in my experience. But also, if you do have a programmer around, once you get it to a point where you're like, oh, I've vibe coded my way into some version of this that works. Let somebody else take a look at it, or yourself, if you're a coder, and look at the code and put a critical eye on it.
And you can still vibe code your way through that. I've done that where it's like, okay, this is doing what we want, but what you're doing here is super messy. Can you clean that up? And it will. And then you test it again. You know, that whole thing.
Yeah, it's great. It's exciting, and it will be everywhere in our lives. Jeff Bezos said, hey, it's going to be like electricity. It will be all around you. It's already started.
You don't probably even know it.
You just don't know it. But you're reading things that were assisted by the AI. You're looking at things that were assisted by the AI.
Bell check, grammar check. All that stuff. All that stuff. If you've used Grammarly ever, that's AI. I mean, it's effectively the same thing as what we're now calling AI. It's these machine learning, large language models that are being used to do certain things. And Grammarly and its ilk are among them.
And, you know, like I said, it's not perfect. There's, you know, copyright issues you've got to deal with. That's the way it always starts. Uber, you know, every city in the country fought Uber while they were trying to, you know, grow. And then eventually it's like, okay, let's figure out how to make this work.
Yeah, now let's be nice about it. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and it changed the way transportation works. Yes. Embrace it. Learn about it.
¶ Business Brain 639 Outtro
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Help us make it better.
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