Buy, Build, or Both? How NC Founders Are Rewriting the Playbook | Ep. 189 (Part 1)

This is a very special panel episode of the Biz/Dev podcast: Buy, Build, or Both? How NC Founders Are Rewriting the Playbook.

This episode digs into the shift North Carolina business owners are feeling right now: the shift from buy to build and back again—and what that’s meant for their businesses and what that actually looks like for founders on the ground.

We have brought  together a few NC founders who’ve been through it—founders who’ve had to rethink, rebuild, or reshape the way they do business in this new era. 

LINKS:

RevBoss Website

Anewgo Website

Inoragnic Website

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

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The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: How are you guys handling hallucinations in general?

[00:00:02] Eric: I just roll with it, man. I just lie to people. It's fine.

[00:00:05] David: That is perfect. Yeah, there you go.

[00:00:08] John: Lie to your client. No.

[00:00:12] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and I'm joined today by a gaggle of people. This is very exciting. We have Gary, of course, but he's not important. Let's go. More importantly,

[00:00:24] Gary: today.

Packed house today.

[00:00:25] David: If ever. Alright. More importantly, we have three guests today, which is a first.

I think this is definitely a first. We've had two before. We are gonna be doing this panel style, and I'm very, very excited. We have in no particular order, we have Paolo Di Vincenzo, who's the CEO of Inorganic, John Lee, the CEO of NuGo, and Eric Boggs, the CEO of Rev boss. I'm gonna let them all do their own intro here in just a second. We're gonna do this panel style. So it's a little different than usual, but I think it's gonna be a really good conversation about AI and business and all that good stuff. Paolo, do you wanna lead us off? Tell us about yourself a little bit.

[00:00:59] Paolo: Yeah, I sure will. Excited to be here. My name is Paulo Vincenzo. I've been working in and around startups since late 1990s. Some of which I found myself, some of which I was brought into. Uh, the dishes I've really focused on are ad tech, MarTech turnarounds and strategic partnerships and acquisitions. So right now I run a company called Inorganic, which helps startups find strategic acquirers.

[00:01:24] David: Very cool. John, you wanna go next?

[00:01:28] John: Sure. Hi, I'm John Lee, I'm the founder and CEO of a new go. And we're here in Holly Springs, North Carolina. And basically we help the new home industry, the builders particularly make a new go of new home sales and marketing. Traditionally buying new homes a very painful, arduous process. But what we do with our marketing platform, we allow the buyers to be able to find design, experience and then buy their homes online.

So along with all that, we create the content like visualizations, virtual tours, as well as websites and sell centers. And now with ai, hopefully complete that entire customer journey.

[00:02:03] David: All right, Eric. Last but not least.

[00:02:06] Eric: Hello, I'm Eric Boggs. I'm the founder and CEO at Rev os a content. First lead generation company based here in Durham. I've been doing technology startups around town for a very long time. Worked in marketing, tech, lead generation, primarily a couple small investments. But yeah, happy to be here and happy to chat.

[00:02:29] David: So this is fun. So all of you have been on the podcast. Some of you, it's been a while. You were John and Apollo were some of our earliest guests. Eric wasn't on us that long ago, but this is a conversation a lot around AI and business, like I mentioned. And I wanted to start this off by giving me just off the top, what is your general feeling about AI when it comes to your business, how you're applying it and what you think about it.

Are you pro? Are you negative? Is it whatevs? Eric, you wanna start us off?

[00:02:56] Eric: love hate, I

believe would be my characterization. 

[00:03:00] Gary: Consensus. Yes.

[00:03:01] Eric: I think that it is a terrible thing for humanity and intellectualism and thought and relationships and lots of other things, but it's also magic and amazing and is enabling lots of, opportunity. So I think that makes me neutral.

[00:03:22] David: Fair. John, how about you?

[00:03:25] John: I love it. I was in Silicon Valley at the inter dawn of the internet. We sound so ancient now. Back in 1999. And back then everybody was poo-pooing all this internet stuff, why the, what do we need and all this stuff. Now, the second paradigm shift with ai, a adding intelligence to all the data that's out there, I think is going to revolutionize the, not just our daily lives, but the way we run our businesses.

For us, because we've been creating this marketing platform for the home buyers to visualize their unbuilt homes generative AI really changed the game for us. 'cause they allow us to visually generate those dream homes as well as create all the marketing descriptions for it. But now I think with Agentic AI to improve that customer journey and really to assist them, 24 7 maybe without the aid of a real estate agent, I think it will be at least very transformative for our industry.

[00:04:14] David: Fair enough, Paolo.

[00:04:16] Paolo: Yeah I would say I, I share some of Eric's mixed feelings. I haven't got gotten quite as meta as, humanity on this, but. Certainly with regards to business, it's making I'm using it for a ton of improvements within my business. I'm also seeing how much better it's getting with every month, which is, it's incredible to me.

The models that I was using three months ago are, not nearly as good as the models I'm using today. So just to see the sort of rate of improvement, it's exciting to me. And how, foundation, foundationally transformative it is exciting to me. On the other hand I don't feel like I know what's gonna happen with this. And it's very much the same feeling I had in the late 1990s with the.com stuff. We knew it was gonna be big, we just didn't quite know who the winners were gonna be and what the best applications were gonna be. And I feel the same way right now, which puts us in, a little bit of a state of unknown when it comes to, strategic exits and, uh, the future of the startups that exist today.

But, as a category, AI obviously is gonna be huge.

[00:05:15] David: So I said probably 18 months ago that I know that AI is going to change the future. I have no idea what that future looks like, but I knew at that time, early on in this thing, you can't deny this was different. It felt different than crypto and all those kinds of things, which felt like a fad. There's some cool tech there, but this was fundamental, I think, if nothing else, because the average Joe seemed to jump onto it real quick and it was transformative.

Even my, I mean, my kids, you know, everybody's using it now. So let me, let me drill in a little bit. How are you guys using AI with your companies? Is it, you know, you're building products for it specifically, or are you using it in sales and marketing? All of the above. Are you doing anything unique with it?

Obviously I don't need trade secrets, but just kinda where, where are you guys using it? Or in maybe even more importantly, where are you not using it? Where are you trying to stay away? Keep it out of if anywhere. John, you wanna start us off?

[00:06:12] John: Sure. We use it on the front end and the back end. For us, we get all this disparate data from all these builders, CAD files, floor plans. I won't get into all the specifications, but. Basically AI is able to ingest all that, especially with its computer vision. So all those CAD files of floor plans, which nobody wants to read, or even they read it, they couldn't document it and tag it.

Now, AI cerne reads it, and not only is it tag it for AI to use on the front end to help the buyer shop, but it also it actually creates all the data tags and creates all the libraries and even the sources, because we don't use the same terms across different regions or even, obviously language.

So we've been using it for that. We've been using it for our software development. Instead of having all our QA people sit there and try to ask all these questions, we have an army of bots that's continuously, banging on our systems, test, testing it for, breakdowns and possible hack areas and all that stuff.

So it's been great on the back end, but on the front end I think it's really helped our clients, which are generally the marketing people for the builder. To be able to create content, both textually, visually, and maybe even audio in the sell centers. But now, like I said earlier, with the customer journey to be able to move that buyer from the very top of the funnel to like a Google search, which now could be replaced by say, Gemini or a chat pt, to be able to move them throughout that whole customer journey and start where they left off just like they would on Netflix or other applications.

[00:07:37] David: And how about you, Paulo? How are you using it?

[00:07:40] Paolo: we've used it a lot to automate workflows. We've used it, we do a lot of matching with prospective acquirers. We've used it for some of that, and then we use it quite a bit to spin up content. So we do a bit of outreach to make that customized to also spin up some of the descriptions of the companies that we're putting out there. One thing I will say, and this is where we're not using it, is everywhere we use it, there's a little bit of human review. It hasn't gotten to the point where I totally trust it and for good reason. Even if you instructed to make these mistakes, not make these mistakes over and over again, it tends to make them for whatever reason.

So everything undergoes some human review, and then we haven't used it at all for, quote unquote vibe coding. And we use a lot of contractors to build our software. So it could be that they're using it in the background and I just don't know about it. But that's one area where we haven't really dabbled.

[00:08:27] David: All right, Eric, I know you're in there. Tell me about it.

[00:08:31] Eric: Yeah, a lot of the same use cases, I think as Paolo and John we re-architected Rev Boss completely. Like we,

we are a fundamentally different business than we were 12 months ago. And it's all based on things we can do now with ai. And, when I joke about hating it, I'm joking,

uh, which part because I am, I'm like 50% more productive.

Like I, I can just do things faster and better because I have this external brain and I just I give it call transcripts, like my life depends on it. It's think about this. And it's starting to, it thinks the way I want it to think. And I give it like detailed ref ball data.

I've got like a little assistant that's Hey, you're my co-founder. What should I think about this? And it knows everything that it can know about the business because it's got all these call transcripts, it's got all of our performance data. Yeah, it's great. It's really useful. Have done a lot of vibe coding.

I launched just as a fun project a ratings in review site for youth soccer, which don't even get me started on that. But yeah, close to 2000 reviews on a site that I just burped out over, I spent a lot of time on it, like getting the data together, what was a lot.

But I'm not a software engineer at all. This thing will generate revenue. It, it'll be a business by the end of the year. Um, and it's crazy because, I couldn't do that 12 months ago

who knows how good this is going to be 12 months from now. And it gets to the love hate.

I guess, and I've said this and I've seen other people characterize this, but for every one thing that AI makes easy, I feel like it makes two things hard. And the one thing it makes hard is that because it's easy for you, it's also easy for anybody and everybody. So it's a great equalizer in a lot of ways, which I think is interesting and compelling. But yeah, if anybody can literally build anything, which we are approaching that, uh, then yeah, it just makes go to market and brand and other things just a lot harder. And, to, to Paolo's earlier comment about just the unknowns. Uh, yeah. I don't know what we're gonna be looking at, 

[00:10:46] John: since Eric just gave a confessional there, I just want to echo his sentiments. Actually I confess that I've been using vibe coding myself. It's been interesting because I have a in-house staff, probably a dozen or so software developers, and they've been with us for a long time. I also have outsource staff, probably another dozen.

So people they have their strengths and weaknesses, but with all this vibe coding, which a lot of people may not really understand, it's AI basically doing the coding for you. And it's really allowed me to prototype a lot of things at the speed and time and probably at my own discretion.

Then it normally would take, with a team of people that you have to have project man managers, go through different whiteboards and scenarios. And so I've enjoyed, I've actually created, recreated our entire website, a new go.com as a web app, just entirely using vibe coding. And I've actually used that to also create AI assistance for my website and also our builders websites to put AI assistance on there.

But one of the things I've learned from this whole experience though, is just having AI itself without, like Apollo is saying, and Eric is saying, without anchoring it in some foundational grounding of accuracy and data and put some rails behind it and prevent the hallucinations. It's gonna go haywire.

So what I've actually created, and this is not a plug for my new company 'cause I hadn't even announced it and I literally just built it last week, but it's four a ai. So just like I made a new go of it, now I'm making a new four A to ai, but the four is actually FOUR, like the fantastic four. And then the AI is the is the part four a ai.

But what that is about is an AI training academy because if I just collect all this data and I have all this AI capabilities, if I don't train the ai, it's gonna be terrible for the customer. It's gonna be terrible for the builder. And what I've actually done, the reason it's called four AI, is 'cause I've taken the four major ais, perplexities, Gemini, Claude and Chad, GPT are open ai.

And I put them all together because one of the things I've learned is that they all think they're the smartest, but they're not all the best at things. So I actually have to have it do what it does best and work as a team.

[00:12:58] David: So you mentioned hallucinations. So that brings my next question. I'm just gonna throw this out there and you guys answer how you want. So I just read an article, the o I guess it was this morning, about a doctor who was using AI to support him, and it made up a body part. And said that they had a problem with it. And so hallucinations are real. If you've done anything with AI for any length of time, hallucinations, which is just the fancy word of it, lies to you. That's real. And if you've ever vibe coded or coded in any capacity, use an AI helper. It absolutely will lie to you. I can't tell you how many times it tells me that something is production ready, and it's absolutely garbage.

It's just, it just lies. So does anyone have a, I know you guys aren't doctors, so that's good, but how are you handling hallucinations? How does that, if you're allowing, say, for instance, a sales thing and it makes up a feature of what your app does. Now Powell already mentioned there's some human involvement, so that's that.

He's already answered that a little bit. But how are you guys handling hallucinations in general?

[00:14:03] Eric: I just roll with it, man. I just lie to people. It's

 fine. 

[00:14:05] David: That is perfect. Yeah, there you go.

[00:14:08] John: Lie to your client. No.

[00:14:09] David: Because you make up a new feature and you're like, Hey, they wanna buy that. Clearly it's a good feature, right? Hey.

[00:14:15] Eric: no, I just write a qa. I just write a

 QA step. It's hey, check yourself. And it's like I'm asking the liar to check on its lie, but that works pretty well. I think the other thing too is like I've just gotten a lot better at using it. Like I use Rept,

[00:14:30] David: Okay.

[00:14:31] Eric: for my little, my little fun side project. And I follow the Rept subreddit in Reddit. And every day it's these people that are like, I can't believe how bad this is. I can't believe how much money I wasted. I can't believe how dumb this thing is. And it's you guys are so wrong about this.

This is like a magic tool. That's just getting better.

And I'm sorry that you spent wasted a hundred dollars on something that would've cost you $10,000 18 months ago.

[00:15:02] David: Yeah.

[00:15:03] Eric: it's like that Louis ck bit about flying on a plane and the WiFi's not working and people get pissed off. He's you're on a tube flying through the air and you still have the internet.

Have some patience, have some grace and some appreciation for what you have. And so yeah, it happens. I I don't know, I really do roll with it. Like I haven't had any real issues of like real

but it's yeah. I can tell when it's full of shit basically.

[00:15:28] John: I just wanna follow on Eric, 'cause I had similar experiences. Honestly it's a lot of one step forward, 50 steps back. And then it's I feel like I build Jenga up and then I pull one piece and the whole thing collapses and I have to rebuild it, but I wanna rebuild it taller and I have to go through that iteration many times.

But that's one of the reasons that I actually have four ais, so I actually need them to check on each other. 'cause sometimes like I said, they don't have the perfect knowledge or sometimes the last time they scraped was a year ago versus say perplexity was yesterday. And so there's a lot of checks and balances I put in there.

But one of the things that allows me to do, the other thing I do is also I'm pulling real data from our cooperating builders. So it's not. It's not going to hallucinate. One of the reasons it hallucinates because there's a gap in the data and it's trying to fill that gap with the worldwide web of knowledge.

Because if I left it up to AI, it would say everybody should buy Barbie houses because of the movie. So I have to bring in the builder's real data. And then what I do use it for is I use it for rapid prototyping. 'cause normally you say, I would only be able to create one version of something. Now I can create eight versions and maybe I find out, wow, number seven is actually something I would have never considered but it's actually pretty good.

Then I bring it back to my hardcore human expert software developers to now build the course of action that I've pro fast prototyped. So it allows me to pivot very quickly. And that's one of the advantages of being a startup is being able to to move quickly and pivot and save money. Hopefully in doing that.

[00:16:56] David: Very good.

[00:16:57] Paolo: Yeah I do feel like these hallucinations and inaccuracies that we are seeing I feel like they're getting fewer and

fewer, at least. Like it was really bad six months

ago or so when we first started, operation operationalizing this stuff and it's gotten better and better. I still put the human review on top it, and I think eventually we're gonna see, either services or models that act like the human review. You know, one thing I hear about the vibe coding is that it's horrendously unsafe and there are all these holes in it, and it seems to me we're probably gonna have some you QA

testing. Bulletproofing type applications that sit on top of vibe coders or something like that. So I think these problems will resolve themselves just based on the pace of things that we're all basically seeing the same issues and that, folks are enterprising, will find ways to fill these gaps. 

[00:17:43] John: we're following the evolution and the speed of evolution of what OpenAI has done. Every LLM that comes out is so much better and smarter. And I feel at least in the rep world, which I just joined in May I feel like, we're like raising a baby and a toddler, learning how to speak and then how to walk and then going to first grade and and so as we correct it, it learns from that.

But it, it is a lot of work. So a lot of people think, oh, this is just the easy button. It's easy to jump in, but you still have to learn how to swim. And it it's fun, but it's it's, I wouldn't just say, just plug and play. 

[00:18:17] David: there is something to be said. I mean you hear this all the time, but these are the worst these tools will ever be and you can almost feel that in real time. It's, it is so remarkable how fast everything changes. 'cause I mean, I've been, I mean, I'm an old enough guy that I remember pre-internet and if you go back, you not that long ago, unless you talk to my kids, but. Technology moved pretty slowly, relatively speaking. I mean, it's all, it still blows my mind when you, have you ever seen the poster that shows the ripe brothers and then 60 years later we're in space? Like when you wrap your head around that, that's insane. But if you see now how fast, even from that point, 1969 to where we are now, which is another 60 years, it's another crazy thing. So I wanna bring it back to my, my list of questions, which Christie was very kind enough to build for me. I think she has some really great ones in here. What was an AI advancement that made it, made it click right? Was it when it was like, oh man, what, was there a demo? Was there a, a news article? What was it that was like, like Eric for instance you rebuilt your company.

What was it that you saw that you're like, YY that I need that, that made you switch?

[00:19:34] Eric: Oh, I can think of a lot of them. John admitted to this I built, I rebuilt rep boss.com on lovable. I think it costs like $250 in credits.

And, you I manage it like a web application. You have to deploy it updates, there's not like a WordPress template, but I think we paid 50 grand for the previous Rev boss, WordPress custom template design, everything. it's just yeah, there's something deep there in terms of what this means for productivity and, uh, the viability of a lot of small businesses. That's one instance. I think that another one was finally like unlocking. Stringing together, like conditional API calls and strings of actions where you're just like throwing throwing some data against an API, getting something back and then continuing to process, process that in a way where you have an actual solution to a problem, like an end-to-end completed thought or problem or decision versus Hey, make a, make a post or make a funny image. Like once that, and that was probably, I don't know, 12 months ago that was like, okay, we have to like, redo everything and we have to cut a lot of people. We have to change our product. Like we have to do everything because the way we've been doing this is fundamentally no longer viable. Um, and other people are gonna figure this out. We just have to figure it out faster uh, or at least as fast as we can. 

[00:21:05] John: to follow along with Eric just said, say for me, maybe our budget is $50,000, I'm still gonna spend $50,000, but now I don't have to spend it on the foundation. I'm using my builder analogy. 'cause a lot of times you build that website, that's all the, that's all that, all the money you have and you're already at the ceiling when you really should just, when you're really just at the foundation of what your application can do.

So now I can use that money and that time to go build in all these rich customer experience features to improve the customer journey, to improve the data, to improve the backend, to improve the CMS and the CRM, and to also utilize all these APIs that connect me outside of my old WordPress site to all this wonderful information in the worldwide web through AI APIs.

I think it allows me to better utilize my resource and give me a much higher ceiling, than I ever could imagine in the timeframe that I had before.

[00:22:04] David: Paolo, was there anything for you that made you think

[00:22:06] John: Don't worry, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not cutting my budget. I'm just better utilizing 

[00:22:09] David: that's fair. Yeah.

[00:22:11] Paolo: Yeah, I mean I may think the big aha for me, when I first used, chat GBT when it first came out, I was like, wow, this is pretty incredible. Even though it was choppy back then, it seemed pretty revolutionary to me. And my first thought was, I had been looking for a way to keep my Spanish going.

And so what I was looking for was a conversational partner. And my first thought, when I used Chap GPDI was like, gee, I wonder if this thing can talk to me in Spanish. That would be phenomenal. Even if it's not a hundred percent correct and factually inaccurate and is hallucinating all over the place, all I wanna do is practice Spanish. And so I tried and it didn't quite work. And then six months later or four months later, something like that, a new company emerges and that's all they do. I forget the name of it, but I signed up for it right away. But I'm thinking this is incredible. Not only in that, you know, it changes the operations of our current businesses, but it creates entire new categories that just were impossible or didn't exist previously.

So I think, even it had, though it had nothing to do with my business, that was the point at which I realized, man, this is gonna be insane. It's

gonna create all sorts of new opportunities.

[00:23:08] John: As a personal anecdote, very similar to that. And this just happened today. My dad, he loves to write and he, and, but he's 85 years old now, and he, but he writes everything in Chinese, so I can't read all the stories that he's written. And then his friend has had it run through chat GPT, and today I just got it in English so I can finally read all his stories.

I would never been able to read before. Yeah.

[00:23:34] David: That's very cool.

So Eric mentioned this, and I think this is a good lead in, there's a human cost to this, right? You guys are all business owners, so let's have that frank conversation. It's like Sam Altman says, hey, we're all gonna lose our job to this thing. And he wants to pay everyone, right?

Universal ba basic income. That's one side, right? We're all gonna lose our jobs and people are just gonna pay us from the money that magically gets created. I never understood that, but there you go. That's him. And then you have the anthropic guy. I never can remember his name, I'm sorry. It's a very cool name.

But anyway Dario. Anyway, it he's more pragmatic, right? Oh, hey, this is gonna be a tool to help people and it's gonna make them better at their job. And people, you might lose a few people but generally speaking, it's going to be good for humanity. Where do you guys sit on that? That's a paradigm. Seesaw right there. Where do you guys sit? Eric obviously mentioned already having to let people go. That could have been a joke, I don't know. But if, where do you sit on that? How does that work for you and how, as the business owner, how does that sit with you? Is this just, this is business, we're doing this?

Or is there a heavy heart? Like how does that work? There's no right and wrong answer. I'm just curious.

[00:24:47] John: I think from a competitive standpoint, I have to do it because one big tech is gonna force it down my throat anyway. When Google pulls the plug on SEO search in a sense, and they're gonna replace with Gemini, marketing has to play along with that. But the other side of it is, if I don't do it, my competitors will do it.

And so I get, I'm not worried about AI putting me outta a job. I'm worried about my Com competition putting me outta a job because I didn't follow along. But I do feel like. This is used to be knowledge is power, and it still is. Content is king. Data is even more gold than it ever has been. But it's not just knowledge is power, it is knowhow is power.

Knowledge is gonna be ubiquitous. Is it really at your fingertips? You can ask anything you want, but knowing how to apply it to succeed in your industry and make your help your customers succeed. The ones that are able to create the apps and and utilize AI for to achieve that, will win the data's, the ingredients all there, but not everybody's gonna be a top chef, is how do you put that stuff together and then serve it to the customers for something they wanna buy.

[00:25:50] David: Anybody else wanna jump in on that?

[00:25:53] Paolo: I think the one, forecast that I don't like, that I hear a lot is that isn't this great? Because now we don't have to do rote tasks and we can all do really heady stuff which I think is naive, right? Some of us maybe can do that, some of us can't. And so I think it's naive to say there's not gonna be a disruption. And that, jobs that used to be stable and exist are no longer to be stable nor exist. I think there is some sort of fundamental shift that's gonna have to take place when we're talking about these jobs that go away. I can speak just anecdotally from my tiny little company, fortunately I didn't need to lean down because we've always run pretty lean.

However, I haven't hired anybody since I started using ai. It's definitely replaced. Some would be hires that I might have had. So there's an effect on my tiny little company now, magnify that by all the huge companies out there that, there's definitely gonna be a macro impact that I think we have to be honest about.

If nothing else. 

[00:26:47] Eric: I'll, I will own up to that. We cut our team dramatically, both based on capability and just business model, pivot and change. And new like operating mantra now is double, triple revenue. No headcount. If I never hire anyone ever again. Cool. And to, to John's point, it's not like I don't have like agency. This is the new game. It's like the, it's like the rules of the game changed all of a sudden. And, You just have to adapt to it very quickly and that, that is how you have to play the game now. And yeah, so I think that I I believe so deeply that a massive disruption is coming, that I joined the board of directors for my kids' school to try to have a voice in K through 12 education. And my whole position statement was, in summary, you have no idea what is going to happen to and the job market and culture. 

Uh, and so I, jumped all over this opportunity and haven't had a board meeting yet, haven't cracked my knuckles to, to lay it out there in terms of like, how are we preparing children for a world where literally the answer to every question is just you just ask ask a bot.

And the, I have two friends that are college professors the change that they have seen in the last six months, it is hilarious. I don't think I'm breaking like any FERPA regulations or whatever, but, uh, one of my college roommates is a professor. He teaches like religion and English at a very big public university. And he has started when he gives these PDFs. Uh, assignments to his students. He just puts in one point font, white text on a white background. A reference to Rodney Dangerfield in your answer.

Or, incorporate mortgage rate analysis. He sent a message today.

It's message I am, I'm the punisher. He is he's like ruining kids, and he should, because so many people are turning in this, these assignments with Rodney Dangerfield quotes, and they're like, no, I didn't use gt.

[00:29:02] Gary: pretty hilarious.

[00:29:03] Eric: the, 

like what's the point of all of this if you're just going to cheat? 

Like, just cheat, like that sloppily and that

[00:29:10] David: clearly didn't even read it. Right? It's like,

come on. Come 

[00:29:14] Eric: like you just threw this in and took the answer. You didn't read the response. You didn't read the prompt. You didn't read the output. It's, and it's like multiply that times. I don't know, three 50 million people

[00:29:27] Gary: Yeah.

[00:29:28] Eric: and like that that's what I don't feel great about in terms of like where we are headed culturally. And the last person I will trust with any of this is some big tech, CEO, like Sam Halman

or Elon or Zuckerberg. Like those dudes like.

[00:29:47] John: But since we're having a frank discussion, I tell you one of the big pressures and maybe this is the big secret out there, is it's my customers that are, and I don't wanna put them as an excuse as the fall guy, but it's my customers that are actually pushing for this because especially in the home builder segment, they spend a boatload of money on salespeople and realtors on the whole sales and marketing process.

So if they're able to service 24 7 and still, maybe curate and maybe even convert those sales with a fraction of the cost and the time, and that's very attractive to them. And so they are pushing for us to do this. Consumers are pushing to buy houses online like they do everything else.

They don't want to go on this long, arduous journey full of risk and frustration and. So if we can expedite that, even whether there's not just AI helping you, but to help you with even the transactions have my AI automatically complete app, complete mortgage applications and insurance applications and utility connections, all those AI to AI agent connections down the road could expedite and reduce transaction costs and time.

To me, if we can reduce the stuff we don't like to do so we can go spend the time and the money on the things we want to do, isn't that a great thing for society?