Techstrong Gang – September 20, 2024

Hey, happy Friday. What a week it's been. We've got so much to go over here.

We're gonna talk a little bit about the actions the Fed took on the interest rates yesterday. Is it a great thing for us? Uh, gen AI is transforming so much, but especially marketing and technical marketing at that.

And you ever hear that song, AI Saves the Radio Star? Well, probably not, but we're gonna talk more about that you're watching Textron Gang. Good morning everyone.

Happy Friday to you. It's Alan Shimmel for Techstrong. It has been quite a week, craziness in the Middle East.

We've got actions by the Fed that may or may not impact you. And of course, AI is ever present in working its way through things. We're gonna discuss all this some more with our gang today.

We've got, uh, oh, we got, you know, a lot of the usuals on our gang. Let me introduce them to you. Um, you know, sitting out, and I guess he's back from Dreamforce now, uh, but our Silicon Valley beak reporter, editor extraordinaire, John Schwartz.

Hey, John. Welcome. I hope it was a great Dreamforce.

Hey, Alan, it was good. It was action packed. Um, hey, yesterday you mentioned you referred to me as the czar of Silicon Valley.

Yes, I actually like that because it reminds me Mike Ello was the czar of the Telestrator, according to the great Marv Alberts. So I will take that any day. So thank you for doing that yesterday.

Abso So that's a little Nick, a little nick history right there, right? Wow. Marv breed Mike Al, and he, I do remember him calling the czar of the Tell Strader.

I was gonna call you Czar Oh, it all the time. But, you know, you, you had all those Bolshevik kind of, uh, inferences and now, you know, I'm more Of a popper. So Yeah, it's an election season after all.

You know, we gotta be careful. There's already one candidate being called Conrad. Um, yes.

But let's not go there anyway, I did. But next, joining us also at Silicon Valley, she is the gal or woman with the knowhow for marketing. She has her own marketing podcast that y'all should follow, but she's also a regular gang member and a member of the FU team.

It's our own Lisa Martin. Hey Lisa, welcome Alan. Great to see you in the gang today.

I'm excited to dig into these topics. Absolutely. But in case I forget later, how can people, what your podcast, how can they follow you?

The name, what? Give 'em quick info. It's called Marketing.

Yeah, marketing, art and Science. You can find it on Spotify. You can find it on the feature on Groups Media page and YouTube.

Very cool. Excellent. Alright.

Also, joining us from Colorado. He's our CTO and Futu Group, CTA and regular here, my friend Mitchell Ashley. Hey, Mitch.

How's it going with you? Hey, happy 50 point rate cut week to everybody. Good to see you all.

Yeah. 55. 5.

Anyway, Mitch, I feel like I've seen you in the same place for three days already. I don't know. You getting, have you lost your wanderlust?

I, I, I haven't moved this, Basically. Yeah, it's, and sleep in this chair. Chair.

I don't know what you Slap on Little Lap. It Could be like that Wally kind of movie. Something where you just have that chair that moves you around.

I don't know. This is my avatar. It's not really, Or it's an AI person.

Right. And then joining us in between his golf games and Yankee tickets and everything else. I've enjoying his life in New York.

Our cheap content offers some. Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you?

I'm good. I cannot say there's absolute correlation and causation here, but I returned to New York and the Yankees are in the playoffs, so I gotta Say, okay. You know, when you're a Yankee fan, it's only World Series wins that count.

Sure. They've been in the playoffs for three, four years in a row. Now we need it's time.

It's time. I think the last one was what, since 2 9 9, correct? Yes.

Yeah, 2009. 2009. We're ready.

But anyway, hope Springs eternal here in the fall as we head into a baseball playoff season. Um, but let's, let's turn, I mean, it's, as I mentioned, there's been no lack of news and topics this week for us to dive into on, on this Friday show. Um, I wanted to kick it off though with, I, I, you know, econ it's all about the economy stupid.

Right? Someone got elected saying that once and, um, it is still, and the, the Fed took, so a bold move yesterday though, from Wall Street's reaction, I maybe they had figured it in already. I don't know.

But John, I, you know, you, you're, you're good at these things. Yeah. I mean, we had to, yeah, we had some factors.

I mean, I, what we want to talk about is with the lower interest rates might mean for it. So just kind of to step back, as we all know, inflation is down and the labor market is softening. So we got this half point reduction, and here are some of the factors that also contributed to it.

Hiring and wage growth has slowed the number of job openings per worker has dropped job search times or lengthening the number of workers settling for part-time work when they prefer full-time. Employment has risen. We talked about it yesterday.

There've been a rash recent degree of layoffs. It's Cisco, Intel, Google, you name it. We just talked about some friends of ours who had lost their jobs.

Unfortunately, it's Cisco. So the, the concept here is lower interest rates are ramped at easing those trends by making it less expensive for businesses and households to borrow and therefore spend more freely. And now is our current and resident economics are Alan, what does this mean, do you think?

Not just for it, but in writ large? Well, I, I think there's a couple of things here, right? I, I think number one, you gotta dispel the myth that this was done for political reasons.

And this is why it's so important that we have a fed that is over and above p politics over and above political appointments. It needs to be independent because we needed this half point decrease more than anything. Right?

A quarter a point would, I think, would've been a huge disappointment. I think the other thing you didn't mention, John, is in addition to the half point decrease, uh, the Fed signaled that they expect to do two more decreases this calendar year. So you're talking about bringing it down a full point, probably their quarter point.

Unless, unless stuff really hits the Fed. Now, can I, Can I interject something really quick? Can I interject something really quickly?

Sure. You mentioned this is not done for political reasons, and I think this, this, these decisions is usually done by a 12 person panel. Yes.

The Federal Reserve Board. So it's, there are a lot of, right, right. So I just want to you point that out too.

Exactly. Sorry to interrupt, But you know, though, the chairman is a political appointment. It was purposely set up to be outside of government.

It, it, it, it needs to be, but, but that being said, we're talking about a full point between now and December or the end of the year decrease. And that's, that's substantial, right? It's gonna affect people's credit card rates.

And, and a lot of people, you know, it's funny, we were all afloat, meaning consumers we're afloat in cash during covid because of all the, uh, tax incentives and programs they put in place. And, and many of us increased our credit, uh, because of that cash on here. We were able to get more credit.

But the nature of the beast is you get more credit, you use more credit. And so a lot of people are carrying balances where maybe they weren't before and they were paying, you know, pretty high rates, 25, 20 9% rates on credit cards. So when you see interest rates starts to come down, it affects our credit card rates.

It affects your car loan rates. Hey, I, I've got a lease a new car in November. I'm, I'm actually tickled that maybe the rates will come down.

Um, and, and the biggest thing, housing mortgages, that's for the world at large. But John, as it affects our world, this is all about, I mean, our world, meaning the tech sector. I mean, we had a, we had a, a crash, right?

The, the VC market damn near dried up if you weren't have, if you didn't have an AI in your neck, right? And so many of these companies that had done major, major rounds in 20 19, 20 20, even 2021, they couldn't afford. You know, the average startup raises enough money for 12 to 18 months because the thought is in 12 to 18 months, the game changes for them.

They've doubled in size, tripled in size, they've got scale, they've got more customers, and they raise more money at a higher valuation. Well, they couldn't do that over the last two half year, two and a half years. They were being told by their board, Hey, if you're gonna raise money right now, it's gonna be a haircut round.

You are gonna lose valuation. So don't raise money, keep, you know, hoard your cash and they tightened up, cut your expenses. They laid people off.

And we, and so we, we saw this tightening that we didn't see in the wider market, right? In the wider market. It was inflation, but people still had cash.

And the job market was struck. Our market got got cut. 5% that they did yesterday, that it's a, it's a, it's a game changer in terms of the vibe, in turn, in terms of the attitude, in terms of the atmosphere.

People are optimistic, positiv, you know, optimistic, whatever, rhymes with that. And we want to do things and move forward and start investing in our tech again, because there's so much great stuff. I'm sorry, go ahead.

There was kind of a dark, dark cloud over silicon dollar. There has been one for at least a year, maybe 18 months, there's this anxiety over a recession continuing layoffs. And we saw with the case of Intel in particular, and now also Cisco Yeah.

Where they would announce a around the layoffs and then proceed to have another major around. So there were a lot of people having a hard time finding work as well, those who got laid off. I just wanna kind of, kind of kick it maybe to Lisa about this.

And I mean, I think you see or share the kinda same feeling of, of people who have jobs feel, especially out here, very fortunate to be employed. Definitely. I, like you had friends that were let affected by the Cisco layoffs this week.

Intel Google, as you mentioned, it's a challenging time for tech workers. Um, there's a lot of fear going on because those that I know that have been laid off in the last, over the summer are having a hard time finding jobs. Um, so it's a challenging time.

I hope that the Fed injects a little shot in the arm to tech from a hiring perspective. Um, I'm cautiously optimistic about that, but it's, it's definitely been tough times in the Valley for the last year or so. As you mentioned, John, uh, I see it, I feel it.

My, my network feels it as well. So I think the news that came out this week from the Fed is I, I, I, I wanna believe that it's a shot in the arm from a hiring perspective. Um, and organizations will leverage some of the hires they've made in data science and ai, for example, data analytics to really become much more efficient and streamlined in their operations.

Hey Lisa, can you guys connect some dots for me a little bit? Because one of the things you always hear is like, the Fed sneezed, the market got pneumonia and then marketing budgets dropped through the floor. So what exactly is the connection between these things?

Why is marketing budget so dependent upon what happens on Wall Street and what's going on with the Fed? Because I hear this conversation all the time. Yeah, that's a great point.

Something that I, I don't have a lot of background on why they're so directly tied, what they are. It's been, I'd say the last 23 and 24 have been challenging from a marketing perspective. A lot of the CMOs that I talked to don't have incremental budget to spend on cool projects that are gonna help differentiate themselves.

Um, I haven't talked to anybody yet since the fed cut the rate this week. So I'm curious to understand what that relation is, Mike, to your point. But we've been feeling that for years now, and it's, um, something that we, we at future wanna understand, given the budget constraints, how can we be a best help to organizations from a marketing perspective, whether it's helping them with brand voice, whether content creation, um, things like that, that will help them just be more efficient or understanding how emerging technologies like Gen AI can help them be far more efficient because the efficiency stories in marketing with gen AI are prolific.

I think this, this kind of feeds the Anxiety, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I have this pet theory that a lot of it is not related and it's just a knee jerk reaction. And the first thing that companies cut is marketing and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because then sales decline and then they had fewer leads and then they wind up, you know, essentially fulfilling the prophecy that they could have avoided if they just didn't randomly always cut marketing first.

But that's just me. Yeah, Well, there's agree extreme behavior because they also change what we want from marketing. We want middle of funnel leads.

We don't want top of funnel leads. You know, there's all these cha behavior changes and Yes. You, you just don't, just don't flip a switch to, to start doing that.

Right? You have to get those leads different ways. I, I think one of the things to look about this, the market didn't react heavily about this 'cause it was, they say it's baked in also in the mortgage rates.

Um, but the consumer price index went down quite a bit from the 6% range into the 2% range. And, and looking at it kind of, if you look at it farther, I think what will have the biggest impact is a continuing downgrade of the, of the interest rate. Um, because that starts to free up cash.

I mean, really, we've been writing this kind of weird interest rate thing since 2008, right? Into, you know, recovering from that. And then we went in into covid and now we're hit, we hit this inflationary period.

Unfortunately, then that's gone down too. So one of the behaviors by not just marketing, but really all spend that, that we've seen is it's on a quarter by quarter basis. You don't get your budget for the year, whether it's it or what marketing or whatever it is.

And just so that you can correct directionally, which well, It's volatility is what you were referring to, Mitch. Exactly. Exactly.

And you know, in some ways that's not a bad behavior to have anyway. Right. Just, you know.

Well, no, I, I, I disagree. Oh, okay. I I think one of the problems we have, especially in public companies and having helped, you know, a company go public and sat in on those exec meetings is you can't manage your company quarter to quarter and, and achieve your long-term goals there.

Estimates definitely that take longer than a quarter. I sometimes you've gotta just, Hey, I know this isn't gonna help me this quarter, but this is gonna pay off. This is strategic.

And, and otherwise you drive your ship like you're sailing in the Americas Cup, tacking left to right, right to left back and forth. Um, I think less volatility, more certainty. And you know what, our economy is a consumer confidence based economy.

The consumer drives our economy, even in the tech sector. And when they feel good, like things are getting better and the price of eggs are down, if they're not contaminated or something, they feel good. They spend money.

And it, and, you know, I don't wanna use the word trickle down, but it, it, it goes all it gets spread all over the economy and we're gonna see it. But I wanna bring this back to it for a second. My feeling, and this is purely subjective, is that a lot of these cuts have impacted the, let's call it softer, skilled folks, the marketing people, you know, the product marketing much more than the truly, truly technical engineering staff.

Right? And I, you know, I'm watching on LinkedIn, my friend's writing and, and people who've just been through this saying, Hey man, you better buckle in. It may be eight or nine months before you find a job.

That's how long it took me. And that's a long time to be without a steady paycheck for a lot of people. So Lisa, I'm so I have Two Yeah, I have two John.

Go Ahead. Friends who are Oh yeah, I have two friends, uh, both highly skilled. They're older.

So Aism does play a big part out here. Oh, absolutely. But they've been, they've been looking for eight to nine months.

One expects it will take a year. Um, and I think feeding into the fear, and we alluded to it, is the operational efficiencies that our companies are looking for. And, and, and in a certain sense, like what a meta or even an Apple, they were moving people out because they want to make this pivot or shift to ai.

So not only are they doing that, but then the current workforce is concerned about AI and the impact on their job and being displaced. And I had to say, there was a talk, we, we talked about this yesterday, but during their sit down, there's kind of this kinda sinister undertone to Benioff and Jensen Wine talking about how AI agents would be doing the work of people and making their jobs easier, the people's jobs easier. But it, it kind of creeps into your mind that as that AI gets smarter, those agents might become the more permanent employees.

You know, it's a little bit of a, of a skepticism on my part, but it's something that I conceivably can see happening in the next several years. Sure. Lisa, I thought you were gonna say something.

When, when John had started to know about, uh, marketing impact heavier on the marketing teams. Yeah. Well, what we see is depending on the age in the maturation of the organization, um, marketing's priority differs.

Um, you know, in, in younger less mature organizations, it's all about sales and engineering. Um, in more mature organizations, I talk with a lot of CMOs who have done a lot to strengthen the sales relationships. They're to really give them visibility into their customer behavior like they've never had before.

So we're seeing a lot of synergies there. Um, and so, but I also think from an AI perspective, we're seeing a lot of efficiencies gained. And agentic AI is gonna be an interesting one to watch to see.

To John's point, from, from an editorial perspective, it's gonna be able to come in and replace some of those humans. Um, that's something that I've got my eye on and I'm talking with marketers about that right now to understand what they project the impact might be. Absolutely.

Yeah. Another thing, just one more thing, Alan, that that's changed, having gone through this inflationary tightening up of, of cash for startups and things like that, a lot of companies have gotten acquired because of that cash situation. There's been a roll up that I know, I know that, um, I don't think it was announced this way publicly, but kind of some inside information that I've gotten about a, a layoffs at IBM, some of, some of the companies are going through this, okay, we we're kind of fat drunk and happy and bought all these companies.

Now what do we, what do we really need? What do we really keep? And calling out the companies that they, the acquisitions that they acquired over time.

So I think that that's Part they hard onto the ip. Yeah, hang on the ip, you know, that what happens anyway sometimes, but when, when you're at that period of, okay, we're making a shift now, um, do we really carry that cost anymore? And so that's, I think dipping more into the technical, uh, staff, the higher skilled staff, as well as, uh, you know, softer skills.

Absolutely. Hey, we gotta move on. But, you know, I'll just tie the bow on this.

It's a good thing the Fed did this. I hope they carry through on the rest of the year. I think it'll take time to percolate through the economy.

Um, but it's a good thing. And, and, and, and, you know, maybe happy days are on the way. We'll, we'll see.

We're gonna take a break on Textron gang. We're gonna come back and talk about, you know, we touched on it already. Gen ai transforming marketing is specifically technical marketing.

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We're back. And yeah, we're gonna talk about gen AI and technical marketing specifically. There's a startup out there called Cortex Click, and they have a, a way of taking large language models that have been specifically trained to look at, um, documentation and the, the, the original writings and the code produced by developers and turning that into more sophisticated technical marketing documents, including blogs and all kinds of things that folks that I've talked to about this are excited.

'cause basically, most of the folks who write this code, um, hate writing in general, and, but the current level of AI tools aren't very good for technical marketing. And on the one hand, those guys are thrilled. So that's the left side, the brain, the right side of the brain.

The marketing people who have historically, uh, written that content for those folks are a little, uh, shall we say, plus and minus on this. They kind of don't really like the trying to figure out what all this stuff is saying. So the tool is, uh, gonna help them.

But everybody's having that moment, as we just said in the last block, worrying about where their cheese is gonna move. Lisa, what's your take on all of this? Is technical marketing gonna become well, easier, more fun for fewer people?

What happens? I, I'm pro this Mike. I think it's a great thing.

I think you brought up a great point. Now, the developers and the DevOps teams they support don't like writing the documentation and spending time on that. So the ability to use generative AI to help them get content farther along, I think is a great thing from an efficiency perspective, gets them back to doing the core jobs that they want to be doing.

On the marketing side, I see it as an advantage for marketers that don't have a ton of technical expertise on the products that they're writing about. They can use tools like what, um, what is it Cortex Click is doing to help ensure that content's being written? You mentioned blog posts, uh, documentation, uh, of other types as well to en ensure it's aligned with brand voice, which is really critical when we're talking about using AI from a marketing perspective, is ensuring that the brand's voice is represented.

But I do think that it will be a, a, it could be a partnership between general marketers, content creators and technical marketing folks to be able to, to create documentation that is really ideal and advantageous for the end user customer, generate that content faster than the end user customer gets it, which goes a long way to, uh, customer satisfaction and things like that. So I see it as a good alignment between marketing and technical marketing and, and an opportunity. Agreed.

I, um, you know, look, I, I think we've gotta make clear to, and, and our audience, I probably understands this, right? Technical marketing software documentation specifically is a very specific skillset. Very specific.

Mitch, when we were at Still Secure, we had Carla Griffith, she was a great technical, you're you're on mute. She was a great technical documentation. She was Carla's fantastic.

Yeah. But for many organizations, that piece of it, the documenting the software or documenting, you know, process is sort of the truly behind the caboose on the trade. Whatever comes after the caboose, that, that's technical writing.

That would be the can. Yeah. And, um, and, and in today's world, look how many of us read software docu, how many bothered to even look at software documentation, right?

'cause if, if I have to read the manual, it's no effing good, right? That, that was kind of the model for a long time. And, and then today, in today's world, let me see if there's a YouTube or a TikTok on this that explains it.

I'm not gonna read no documents. And, and so I think it's almost been downgraded. And with that downgrade, you see less of the talents of the people, like a Carla doing it.

So to me, this cries out for an AI kind of solution. Um, maybe it'll make it better and more people will use it. I don't know.

Or maybe it's a thing that's time is calm and we should just do video software. Well, I was thinking about that too. 'cause the process for so long was have someone like Carla, a writer, technical writer, interview the developers and have them describe how it works or how whatever the information they need to complete their documentation.

And, and it wasn't always the developers writing the technical documentation If you had, you know, a, a documentation person. I, I agree. I don't think we need the, the big binders of, you know, thick binder of, of documentation anymore.

What I'm excited about is how this material can be turned into other uses. Like, can you create the tutorial? I'd like it to write the tutorial for the end user.

Um, write the, you know, the install instructions that go on the website, uh, write, here's a scenario now, now write the, uh, the documentation about how you would go down that path and lead people to it. That would be really good, because that's, that's the next step beyond just documenting what the software technically does, functionally does, is how do you put it in a form that now someone will learn from and consume it, not just read a big thick document that, that is what I think would make really turn the, the screws on this. But as someone who, who was always having to write the technical one or two pagers, thank God, I'm glad.

I don't wanna do any more of those. So Alan always stuck me with that job. That's still smart.

I stuck you with it was your job. You done. That's what you always said.

I would just point out it takes a well-written script to create a video. So, you know, this is not, these videos don't magically don't Happen on their own. Yeah.

Well, I think AI can help there too. Yeah. That'll, that'll, that'll take their things.

Yeah. You mentioned that consumption part, uh, Mitch, which is incredibly important because we know that the appetite for consumption of content is changing a lot. And one of the things that's cool with Gen AI is the ability to create video content from scripts like Mike, you were saying.

So it's gonna be interesting to see how organizations are shifting the types of content they're creating. What are the consumers want to consume? What's the fastest, easiest way to get this information understood so that they can start using the software and impacting their business.

But I like, I like the consumption feature. I think that's, uh, one that we're gonna have to be really focusing on to see how does that needle live with this change. I think the other side of the coin is, and this is the same way with, uh, AI generated software, if the volume of how much of that documentation or or content is being created increases, we're still in an age where you can't just put it out there.

You've gotta have someone review it for accuracy, make sure it's, you know, meets voice, all kinds of things. So if we double their triple that much content that we're creating, because we can may also, because the software's changing more quickly 'cause of things like DevOps, et cetera. It's more people to review that stuff.

And you've gotta have that talent there. So it's not like it's completely being displaced, um, because something else is writing it. You still have to validate it.

It's, it's useful and it's accurate, and it is what you want as an outcome. So Mitch, which is worth, uh, you know, putting together the technical documentation or maybe going to the dentist for a root canal, I rank those for me. Well, so I say I've had two root canals and they weren't so bad, but documentation, damn, I don't want to go back there.

Like Every thing. I don't see life. It depends on what drugs they give you.

Yes, That's right. You Know, That pain was over in a few days. Documentation never stopped.

Absolutely. Anyway, hey, we're, we need to, you know, this is AI's changing everything. And this is, this is this.

I take a low hanging fruit. We're gonna take a break coming back and we've got that famous song. If you could put it in your head, Jen AI Saves the Radio Star, uh, or something like that.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, and we're back. And you know, we report on all these conferences and there was one for Salesforce this past week, and it's always about what the company's announcing.

But every now and again, there's this kind of sidebar thing that shows up that just gets your attention. And John here has a report about how well AI might be applied to making radio more compelling. John, walk us through this.

Yes. So, uh, our friend will, I am, uh, got to meet him and talk to him for about 40 minutes. Really fascinating guy.

He's, uh, started something called Radio fyi. Basically it's this interactive conversational media platform that's trying to usher radio into the AI age and offer listeners kind of this two-way communication with an AI persona to dive deeper into music, sports talk, radio, politics, pop culture. You know, it's basically you get what you ask for.

And I think it's really interesting and, and vital because the radio industry, especially the, the terrestrial one as here in the Bay Area, we don't have really a talk radio anymore. There was a very popular station. It was a number one station for a long time called KGO, which I'm sure Lisa and I used to listen to a lot.

And it went by the wayside. It's a gambling sports site. So it's, it's, so I asked him about this and, and he was talking about how in a sense he kind of wants to revitalize the whole radio severe, and he's got a deal already with nine stations will sac access to this, uh, FYI, which stands our focus, your, your ideas.

And what Will wants to do is kind of delve into this, this area that has been kind of underserved. I mean, streaming in a sense has flattened a little bit. Um, satellite has had its run and he wants to just basically bring us news, breaking events on demand information that we would be available to us, not only through our car radio, and in fact they're working on a deal with a major automaker, which has, hasn't happened yet, but it is coming.

They wanna make this available through television, radio, media companies. They also wanna apply this whole business model to learning do it yourself tutorials, as we talked about earlier, advertising. And, um, I mean, we can go into deeper things of what he talked about, but he, he, he talked about this kind of influence of ai, not just on radio, but the workforce on the hyper creatives.

He's very optimistic about where things are going. He thinks we're gonna have this renaissance of spiritual AI use. We kinda got deep actually after a while we're talking about, uh, spiritual use versus just greed and operational efficiency.

And, and, and the irony is he actually believes that the white collar workforce is much more endangering that the creatives actually can use this and, and turn this into this flourishing industry of sorts. It was kind of utopian pie in the sky. But it was very interesting.

John, he, he's not naming the ai Max headroom, is he? I don't remember that blasts from the past. Oh my God.

Yeah. I think he might have been naming it Yogi or something, you know, might talk to my yo. I mean, hey, more power to 'em.

Look, we, we've had this Mike, you're up in New York now, but I don't know if you saw it, you know, uh, a D eight radio 88, I think with CBS on the a am dial. Uh, they went kaput last month or a couple weeks ago, and that was one of the biggest talk radios in New York. But I, I gotta tell you something.

I think Torque radio, torque radio's decline is a, a fate of their own making because it became so, so much torque radio was extreme politics right and left, frankly. And that's what people seem to, to log in for that listen to your favorite nutcase and or wing nut or whatever you wanna call 'em. And that's not the talk radio I grew up with in New York, right.

Where, where there were all kinds of great topics that were involved in talk radio. Um, so, you know, I may, maybe there's a place for a good, I don't know how you define good, but maybe there, there is a place for talk radio, I think in the world. Um, do I want it to be all ai?

I don't know. I, it makes me uncomfortable, but maybe just because I'm old. Um, maybe, you know, One of the things, Alan, to me talk radio to some degree, maybe large degrees of replaced by podcasts.

That's where we kind of go to hear Exactly. Yeah. Those conversations.

That's true too. And you know, we have our favorites that we either someone recommended or we found or whatever, you know, I don't follow 50 podcasts, but you know, I have maybe half a dozen that I listen to. If, if you applied AI to that, that might open up and expose you to more content.

Well, if you like listening to this, let me, uh, share with you segments on that topic from two or three podcasts, what people are saying. So maybe it's a way to open up what, without you having to do the, the work to find stuff to, uh, to get content. Well, you know, Mitch, you bring up a great point.

Yeah. 'cause I do have a pet peeve about radio in general, right. I'm, it's the same songs over and over again.

It's the same thing over and over because somebody ran an algorithm that decided that these were the 10 songs that we all needed to hear. If this thing could say, you know, if I could tell this thing that I like this particular song and it could actually surface other songs that were, you know, of interest or similar or had related stories or some sort of tie together, that would be interesting. Because right now I'm dependent upon, you know, a DJ who's got a program list from somebody else that's just, you know, going through the motions.

Well, but what, that's Funny difference. Oh, I, go ahead. I was gonna say this.

Oh, I was just say it's interesting. Go. It's ironic.

Oh, sorry about this. Well, no, you Go, I'm so sorry. So it, it's interest, it's about MTV, you, we made this reference like the bugles, you know, MTV in a sense kind of saved radio, revitalized it and brought us interested it.

But eventually, I know this because when I, when it was in 19 early eighties, I think 1981, August 1st, 1981, something like that, when it launched, I was one of the people they would call when I was living at home. I was in high school. And they would ask, they would ask me to rate the music.

And one of the things that, that killed MTV or heard it at least was they had the very short rotation list. Yeah. You know, Mike was alluding to certain radio stations.

You only hear like 200 songs. MTV was the same way, and it kind of got stuck in this rut. So you'd see the same song like every 90 minutes, right.

It was the top 40 stuff. So we didn't expand. And I think, yeah, it was, it was like that it's, and satellite, you know, radio people went to satellite and it was kind of restrictive and, and podcasts opened it up.

So it, it's kind of goes through this cycle and, and I think he's trying to break the cycle, you know, who knows how successful he'll be. But it sounds intriguing and interesting at least that he's trying this. So I would be nostalgic for a minute.

Um, what I remember about radio is growing up and we used to listen to KOMA from Oklahoma City, and this is living in Nebraska, they didn't transmit that far. We only could listen to it at night 'cause it would skip across the clouds and we'd get the signal and we would listen. 'cause it was all, you know, we call it classic rock now, but, um, we would sit there with our cassette recorder, uh, ready to hit record if that song Oh yeah.

So we don't have this one yet, you know? Yeah. Do it All the time.

It was fun. It was great. We An a lot of fun.

Yeah. 7 on your dial. Long Gone.

But, but Mitch and and gang visit difference between music and talk. And I'm gonna tell you, Mitch, your podcast example is part of what's wrong with America. Because when you listen to podcast or or radio, whenever you are making a choice of what you wanna listen to, you decide what song or what podcast you're listening to.

And what that has resulted in is reinforcement of tribal beliefs. Right. The nice thing about radio, yeah, they may only have 200 songs, but a hundred of them may be ones you haven't heard.

You know, there is some rotation in that 200 and you don't have control. You may wind up listening to a song that given your own, you may not have that record in your collection as if we, well, I have records still, but you know, you may not have that song in your collection on your playlist. And that's why I like listening to Radio Verse.

And I, I'm a serious XM person in my car, but that's why I like listening to radio versus playing my own playlist. I have Apple Music and all the rest, I can decide exactly what songs I want, but I don't like to do that. I want to hear different stuff.

And when we come, when it comes to talk radio and to podcasting and, and you know, we just reinforce our tribal beliefs and we never break out of our own echo chambers. And we really do believe that, you know, Haitians are eating cats or something like that. And you know, because we don't hear a wider audience.

And I think that if this can somehow, you know, move the needle on that, it's a damn good thing. I just wanna bring back an avatar of, uh, Wolfman Jack or Dr. Demento or some of those I still love.

Yeah, I know. My God. That's awesome, Mitch.

We're showing our, Let's Have wonder. Alright, so, So, so John, what is the user experience gonna be like? So let's say I'm, you know, I log into this thing and I'm like, you know, hi, this is Mike.

Long time listener. First time AI caller. What?

Hey Mike, you Know, Say, Hey Mike, thanks for listening. Um, yeah, you just suggest the type of music you like, the type of era you like. I'm thinking about, to me, a shout out to Ksan and K Fog, where these were stations, very kind of progressive stations where I listened to it for the music, but I also listened to it for the, they did documentaries, they did music, they talked about culture, they talked about politics.

And it all was kind of like a lifestyle community. And I think that's kind of what they're trying to do. Maybe you wanna listen to rhythm and blues or, or some sort of, um, takes you into a, a sphere of, of a type of music or, or livelihood or state of mind or spirituality or what, what have you.

And in, and in a sense, maybe that opens your mind up to the, the boxes that we've all put ourselves in. You know, I'm gonna blame social media as much as anybody else, but I think podcasts have really fed into it. I think this whole idea is about experi experimentation about finding out things.

It's like finding, looking at search for first time on radio by, by using your voice and navigating. Um, and one thing he talked about a lot was the great music of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, which really spoke to me. He's 49 years old, but he, he really believes that, that we were at a cultural high point, especially during the seventies, whether it be movies, I think.

So Music, I agree. I feel strongly about, actually I agree with him. Yeah.

No, the only thing we need is to bring back the radio serials. Those were fun to listen to. Oh, Wow.

You know, Shadow, Shadow. He's a good influence, um, for the creative community because, you know, I was, when I was looking into this, John, after reading your article that you published, first of all, I was so jealous you got to talk to him. 'cause I'm a big fan.

That's awesome. But you know, we in tech here, well, the mass media is so focused on all the negative elements of AI replacing jobs, it's this and that. But we in tech, uh, have the opportunity to see and feel and hear so many great stories of how AI is transforming the financial industry and protecting us from fraud or helping in healthcare for faster, better diagnoses, things like that.

So I think for Williams's audience in the entertainment space, I think he's a, he's, he's a good voice for AI from a positive perspective for the most part. Um, and I think we need more awareness and more voices like that to help reach the broader audiences to understand some of the great applications that AI is already delivering. I think will I AM's been that for a long time?

Oh yeah. He's been an, He, he's been thinking about, He's not just for about years knows his music. He, he's socially conscious.

He, he's done great things. Yeah. He's an innovative, He didn't say What's up with Fergie though, did he?

No, he didn't. I should have asked him. Damn it.

Okay. Um, hey, you know, um, Al uh, Lisa, what you said basically was channeling him, you probably should have met him instead of me. Um, he was, you were talking about things we're talking about that he said that the twenties, meaning the 2020s we're gonna be this journey to generative AI in the thirties, things were gonna explode and we're gonna have this awakened generation that he said, we'll dial into the right coordinates.

I kept wondering, what does that mean? And he said, and he can't wait for it to happen, but he basically mentioned the movie Star Wars, and here's the takeaway. He goes, you know, flying cars and robots are science fiction, but what about science fact in Star Wars, what's the most interesting innovation there is the Jedi.

It's the spirituality at its highest human level. That's what we should be trying to reach. And that's what I took him from that movie, and I thought that was very, very perceptive of him.

And, um, you know, it's kind of part of his thought process of what he's trying to do with this and other things. Excellent. I love it.

What a, you know what, let's end on that high note for the week, right John? Thanks. I wish I would've been there too.

I I've been a will, I am fan of a long time. Um, great guy. Very, very engaging guy.

Absolutely. It sounds like a great time gang. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you out here for watching today's Textron Gang. We hope you found it at least entertaining, if not informative, uh, but hopefully both. We have a full Textron TV lineup following, so there's a lot of good stuff on here.

Check it out. And next week was looking up to be a crazy week of good stuff. I think we're gonna talk about some of the recent midea events of this week on Monday.

So stay tuned for that. And I'm sure there'll be a good smattering of AI and DevOps and cyber and all the usual stuff. But until then, this is a shimmer.

On behalf of Techron, you've just watched Techron Gang. I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor to the Techstrong Group. I'm excited to introduce you to a groundbreaking new initiative from Techstrong Research, the sustainability pulse meter.

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