The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Justin Fortier, Founder, CEO/CTO of FYC Labs Discusses Scaling Services Businesses and the Future of AI

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

Justin Fortier, Founder, CEO/CTO of FYC Labs Discusses Scaling Services Businesses and the Future of AI FYC Labs: fyclabs.com Fractal Group: fractalgroup.io Accru: Accru.co About the Guest(s): Justin is the founder and CEO/CTO of FYC Labs, a boutique dev and design agency specializing in web development and software solutions. With a background in tech entrepreneurship, Justin has built a successful career as a tech entrepreneur, advisor, and influencer. He has worked with notable clients such as National University, Budweiser, and Pepsi, and has been recognized for his expertise in web design and development. Justin holds top-level technical and business advisory positions at various companies, including 11.2 Ventures, Blush Design Incorporated, Ed ORF Finance, and Inter Ratio Corporation. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss interviews Justin, the founder and CEO/CTO of FYC Labs. They discuss Justin's journey as a tech entrepreneur, his insights on building a successful company, and the unique approach FYC Labs takes in providing web development and design services. Justin shares his experiences in scaling a services business and introduces the concept of the Fractal Group, a consortium of businesses that collaborate and support each other. They also touch on the future of AI and its impact on creativity and human existence. Key topics discussed in this episode include: Justin's background and journey as a tech entrepreneur The challenges of scaling a services business The concept of the Fractal Group and its benefits for small businesses The future of AI and its implications for creativity and human existence Key Takeaways: Scaling a services business can be challenging due to the limitations of reselling time and the need for highly skilled talent. The Fractal Group model, which involves collaborating with other businesses and sharing resources, can help overcome the scalability issues of a services business. AI has the potential to enhance creativity and enable new possibilities in various industries. The future of AI raises ethical concerns, such as deep fakes and the spread of misinformation, which need to be addressed. The younger generation, particularly Gen Z, shows promise in terms of emotional intelligence and adapting to technological advancements. Notable Quotes: "I just knew at that point this was gonna happen. I cannot see myself working anywhere else. I can't see myself not having a piece at the top." - Justin "We're keeping the agency small enough. We're at 50 people, which isn't tiny by any means, but it's also not a big roster that you're gonna pick from. So that's what's kind of unique." - Justin "The more extremely is watching my kids grow up with this because I'll probably be curmudgeonly and old by the time it all hits you." - Justin "AI enabled you as someone who basically didn't have the design skill or whatever it may be. It unlocked that particular blocker for you." - Justin

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to to the show We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in As always for 16 years and 20

What is it? 2,000 episodes? I was going to say 20,000 episodes Because it kind of feels that way We've had so many amazing people on the show And it's just like a library We call the Netflix podcasting You can go through and binge

Whatever you want to binge You can politics, entrepreneurism all the greatest minds all the greatest romance novels or we have gone to great romance novels people on the book anything you find is on the chris voss show because we do about three to four shows every weekday and the information you're going to learn will change your life and if it doesn't you better go back and listen to them because otherwise i'm going to come out there and visit you and make sure that you get the point of every podcast i'm just kidding we're not going to do that i don't have that kind of time so guys we had an amazing entrepreneur on the show we're talking to him about his insights how he built a very successful company and he's

going to tell you he's going to tell you all the secrets where you can build one too boy that i just put a lot of pressure on him but no we're not going to make him do all that. There's a lot of work that goes into that sort of thing. But he's going to give us some tips and tricks maybe and some advice on how to do what he does. So we'll be talking to him. In the meantime, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. We're begging. We're pleading. Don't make me get on my knees.

Tell them to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmaschristmas1 on the TikTokity. And I think that was all of it. You know, it's on the internet. Just go find it. That's what Google's for. It's on the front page. We have Justin Fortier on the show with us today.

He's the founder and CEO and CTO of FYC Labs. He's a tech entrepreneur, advisor, and influencer leader in the San Diego and Sacramento area. He evidently avoids LA. What's with that? He just skips from one end of the island of California to the other. His boutique agency grew internationally, capturing clients such as Remix, National University, Budweiser, and Pepsi. He's been recognized on several top lists for web design and development.

He's been named as the finalist for CEO of the Year twice by the San Diego Business Journal and was recognized as one of the top 50 most influential business leaders in San Diego by San Diego Daily Transcript. Boy, next time I go to San Diego, I'm calling him to show me around town. In addition, he holds top-level technical business advisory positions at 11.2 Ventures, Blush Design Incorporated, Edvo, Aura Finance, and, boy, what is that, Intraratio? Intraratio Corporation. There you go.

I learn new words. That's why we do the show. He has held technical executive roles for blockchain innovators, XYO Network, e-commerce game changer for days, and manufacturing technology SaaS, Intraratio Corp again. Welcome to the show, Justin. How are you? Great.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah, check us out at fyclabs.com. That's the best place to find my day-to-day work. We're doing a really cool project called dealsend.io if you want to go there.

accrue.co A-C-C-R-U dot C-O. We're doing a really cool fintech product there. You're going to hear a lot about these businesses when you hear my background and my story. So you'll know which one you need to go to when you hear the bell. There you go. Damn, it's Chicago. Chicago.

Chicago. Let's go Cubbies. I'm out here visiting my business partners. Good day. Out here. There you go. If we get those Bears to maybe get a good team together, that would be good too. Hey, they got that QB.

I miss the days when the when the Bears were great I'm a Raiders fan, but you know when the Bears the dick I think whether those are dicky years. Yeah. Yeah, the Bears Give us a thousand overview of what you do there at FYC labs So FYC labs is a boutique dev and design agency building software. We do all sorts of things from mobile development to custom portals for your back-in, back-to-house accounting services. We do pretty much anything when it comes to web development and mobile development. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. All right. Thanks for coming by. You do a lot of stuff for web development and everything else. Give us a give us a deeper cut if you will like what are some of the different venues or or avenues or things you provide so our our agency is unique in that we we're not just going to staff you up right i don't have a bench of of developers and a catalog somewhere and i'm going to pick a name

at random and put them on your team. I've been doing this long enough to be an important partner, a thought partner, and kind of fractional CTO for whatever project we're working on. We're keeping the agency small enough. We're at 50 people,

which isn't tiny by any means, but it's also not a big, you know, just roster that you're going to pick from. So that's what's kind of unique. So you can throw a lot of stuff our way, and you're going to pick from. So that's what's kind of unique. So you can throw a lot of stuff our way, and you're going to get really experienced, effective people on your team. There you go.

So give us a rundown. How did you grow up? What influenced you? How did you get into technology? And then how did you first start your own company? Yeah. So I grew up in South Lake Tahoe, California, where everybody was an extreme athlete, and I was a nerd who sat in front of the computer.

So I had that going for me. I'm sure I had lots of girlfriends in high school. Revenge of the nerds. Right. So yeah, I was more kind of into, I played ice hockey. That was my thing. Good at computers, good at school. So I didn't go become a professional skier like a lot of my friends did. I ended up going out to college, the traditional route. So I graduated in 08 with my master's degree and if anybody knows when they graduated 08 it was not the best time to be leaving yeah it was a rough time i bounced around actually just doing restaurant and bar jobs with a master's degree and we actually three four

friends of mine started a bar in san diego where four of the bartenders had master's degrees two of the bouncers had a master's degree communication and we were the most overly qualified oh my gosh people in the scene you guys made really smart drinks then i guess we did we kind of pioneered some of the classic craft cocktail scene we were doing fractions man we were doing fractions you're doing fractional fractional fractional martinis maybe right so i learned i learned a lot from that though that was an experience in a small business and that taught me that i'm the type of person who's going to do my own thing so actually working with that group i met this guy pablo stanley who's this incredible

artist you should definitely go check him out. His project, Blush, is incredible. Musho's incredible. Buono's incredible. Pablo, in general, is just one of the most interesting, talented people you'll ever meet. The guy comes in asking me for a busboy job. Dude, are you kidding? No! The world needs you to have this other thing. I was like,

let's go start a business together. That's how I started my business. This is a theme that I talk about a lot. Any podcast I go on, any groups I talk to, and it's like your entrepreneurial flame has to be lit high and tight. You got to be ready to go. And you got to feel like you can't do anything else.

You literally can't. And I just knew at that point, this was going to happen. I cannot see myself working anywhere else. I can't see myself not having a piece at the top but probably when i kicked this thing off i knew i need to work with the best talent him him and i did some really cool stuff early on and that's that's how we kicked started our business man it was it was all bootstrapped we've got a crappy office in downtown san diego this place sucked man let me tell you let me quickly tell you about that office. Yeah. There was a roller derby. Roller derby.

A women's roller derby. We shared a wall with that. So all the time, we'd be trying to be on call, act professional like we know we're doing, and there's... Dude, you ever smell the roller derby team? Oh, no. I didn't ever think about that,

but it's sweat and dried blood, I imagine. Absolutely no air conditioning, no. I didn't even think about that. But it's sweat and dried blood, I imagine. Absolutely no air conditioning, no ventilation. We come from a modest start. Yeah. I remember our first office. It was 10 by 10. It was in an old Class C, what probably should have qualified as a Class D building.

And, yeah, it was about as big as most people's bedroom in their home when we did it. I think we got it for $100. But, you know, we did the same thing. We did the startup thing. And this was FYC Labs, right? This was FYC Labs, yeah. There you go. We started out just doing menus and graphics for events, and then we kind of graduated up.

There you go. And you built the company. How did that go? We didn't build the company how did how did that go or what were some of the so we didn't build the company very well just um we built we built up some momentum right and then both of us bailed we both found other opportunities and started other businesses so pablo went off to silicon valley and he worked for udemy and he was co-founder of carbon health and he's done incredible things up there. I went out and started working with Interatio and kind of started a buddy of mine I played hockey with said, come on over, let's do this thing together.

And, you know, we worked and built that company up. Meanwhile, the business, FYC Labs, is just kind of chilling, doing its thing. It's status quo. I've got some employees over there. They run the day to day. It's kind of just me. Right. So It's status quo. I've got some employees over there. They run the day-to-day. It's kind of just meh. It's still running.

It's just you're not your guys' main focus. It's kicking off a little bit of money here and there, but it's not my main focus for about five, six years. I went out and did other stuff. Same with Pablo. I did some cool blockchain. The tough part here is

my wife was running it. So watch out. Watch out for raising it now. I don't mean to throw you under the bus there. My wife was running the project management on a day-to-day for a lot of that time. So the, but in the meantime, when I did some cool stuff in blockchain,

got pulled over to the XYO, which is a really fun project, got really deep in the tech at that point. That's when I kind of blossomed more as a CTO and engineer, was getting to really dive into the tech at that point. That's when I kind of blossomed more as a CTO and engineer, was getting to really dive into the tech with them. I had an amazing mentor over there, Ari Trowell. Great, great, great CTO over at XYO. Brilliant guy.

Some awesome mentor. There you go. And so at what point do you come back? Yeah, so I get brought back. So that's why I'm in Chicago right now. As a business partner, this gentleman out of Chicago. Hits me up. Random connection through a friend.

Says, I'm buying up small dev shops. I'm like, guess what I have? A small dev shop. So we meet. I come out to Chicago, meet him. Great guy. Really enjoy talking to him. He says, hey, you know what?

Go back to your agency for a year with for me. I'll buy this thing off from you. If you hit all your marks, I'll double my offer. I'll take the agency from you. I go, great, that sounds awesome. So I come back. I'm doing the thing. We tripled our, we blew past all the metrics

that we were supposed to hit. This is also 2020, 2021, by the way. So it's a little easier than it was the other time. So I got lucky in 08, lucky in 2021 time when there's a lot of ec funding going on a lot of easy projects to pick up like startups looking for software development he we kill it and then i look at my i look at him i go well now that i've built this i kind of don't want to leave you want to be partners oh he took he bought out my other partners um pablo still has a little bit

of founding equity, but basically him and I run the business now day to day. Love working with the guy. We've now started several in-house products. We've basically built ourselves a little venture studio. We won a really sweet championship belt for our coding. I decided to put that on the show for you today. There you go.

Look at that. Yeah, we've done a lot of really cool stuff together since. That's how I came back, and the company's grown from four people to 50 people in just a few years. Nice. And so you built it back up. You find that you kind of abandoned it there a bit. Well, to be frank, it's hard to grow a services business. So now we can help out your viewers here and kind of teach them a little about what are the things I've learned along the way.

There you go. Scaling. Let's give some people something that you want, right? I love services businesses. They're great. They kick off cash. They help jumpstart other businesses. They give you a sense of purpose.

They teach you a lot about systems, but they are extremely difficult to scale. It is really hard to go out and scale up a services business. And really you're going to just, you're going to be exhausted. Your employees are going to be exhausted. Yeah. Why, why is it hard to scale it?

You're literally just reselling time for the most part in a service business. And that's a pretty tough resource to, to gather. just turned 40 times i was the most bleeding asset i had right so that's true and you you kind of are the company and your employees of the company you know when you're selling a product you know they're easily replaceable i suppose you can you know you can just put ai and fire everybody these days but But with service business, you've got to keep good talent. You've got to keep good talent, and you have human variability, right? People get sick. People have losses in their life.

People move on. So it's not as easy to scale that sort of variability. Now, people who have done it, I'm super proud of them. It's great. There's cash flow kicking off these things immediately. You don't have as much of a ramp up time so that's why i liked it early on was it was a good foray into entrepreneurship because i could live off of it right i didn't have to i have to wait two years and go raise a bunch of money just to survive and see when my revenue is coming and i immediately knew how to control pnl um and figure out how to

bootstrap things so it's lessons, but it doesn't scale. So that's why I went to XYO. So I went with Intra Ratio because I wanted to build up a scalable business that we could see those sort of SaaS margins on. Did you kind of feel like maybe it would help, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're constantly learning, you're constantly growing,

you're constantly kind of, I wouldn't call it thickening your resume, but there's challenges that you get from owning different companies. When I started my first multimillionaire company, within a year and a half, I was starting a second one on top of it. I was insane with ADHD and OCD. That was probably part of it. Plus, I got bored. You've got to boost of confidence too right

you think oh i can do this i can take on anything and then i think within a year or two we started something else we had we ended up having about three core companies that were our main and then i was always starting stuff i mean i just i don't know i just get bored and i'm like let's see if we can make this thing fly and it was kind of the adventure of of learning new stuff and trying new stuff and sometimes you learn stuff that you can take back to what your main core companies are and make them go and so it's kind of a it's kind of a thing where if you pick up some knowledge base you might be able to use it in your toolbox so check this out here's how we approach that and this is where the guys who i worked for that bar i I told you it was amazing group of small business owners.

They created something called consortium holdings down in San Diego. It's a, it's a loose group of LLCs, all different businesses of bars and restaurants and hospitality down in San Diego. And they didn't create an umbrella company, which all had like this, this kind of dictated downward systems,

but they had this community of businesses all dedicated to sharing resources, joint PR requests, systems but they had this community of businesses all dedicated to sharing resources joint pr requests getting bulk orders on certain things going so basically what happened was they were able to create economies of scale relatively right and allow for employee transfer from one place to another really seamlessly and create this restaurant group without having to create a restaurant group they didn't have to create this big umbrella thing, but they did have a consortium of smaller LLCs that they could find other small investors in.

And I thought, man, what if you did that for services and tech companies? So what we've done, my partner and I have different angel investments that we've done, different startups that we've created ourselves and different services businesses that we own. And we've created a consortium that allows us to, like you said, if you're getting bored,

you can always pop over to one or the other, but you're always contributing toward a rising tide, right? All these boats are rising up with this tide because you're contributing better systems from one that you've learned over here. You bring that system over to there, you bring the systems over. And then what you do is you can also get employees

who are bored. Hey, they're getting tired of working agency work. They're getting tired of demands, deadlines. Let's move them over to this product company for a few months. Let them chill out. Let them explore, experiment, and do some cool things. And prop them back over to the agency because we need a cash flow. It's been incredible.

It's a really cool model. We call it Fractal Group. The Fractal Group. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of fractional CTOs and things that we see. We've interviewed a lot of fractional CTOs and things that we see, you know, we've interviewed a lot of fractional CTOs in the show. And it's kind of an interesting thing. When I first heard of it, I'm like, what, you're like a part-time CTO? I love it because there's a diminishing return on a CTO when I've been that guy. At a certain point, I'm just another engineer. So that first six hours of my day may be super valuable. The last two, you might as well just hire a kid out of college.

Maybe that's the future. We just work things that way with the transition. It's interesting how you guys do that. It sounds like there's a group of people that are like yourself who like that mobility, being able to move around to different projects, play with different things, you know, expand your mindset on different things. Yeah, and you're creating some diversification to when there's down times in one industry, come back and the other one helps out. So we've given cross-company loans. We've given cross-corporate guarantees to help one smaller business get a line of credit when the other one you know wasn't quite big enough yet fyc would create a cross-corporate guarantee for one of our other

fractal groups one of our fractal businesses and that helped jumpstart that business because otherwise without that they would have gone back to the sharks and the vcs and the angels which love you guys but no i don't want want to feed my little babies to you yet. So do you see this maybe as a potential future model for business and other, you know, a model that other people could adopt in that? I think it's been going on for years and just sort of these like loosely grouped together consortiums and syndicates and just friends, you know, creating community among businesses has been going on for a long time. Formalizing the model.

Yes, probably. I could probably go kind of work with some of those, some other folks, but a lot of entrepreneurs are sort of great phrase that I heard. Want to go fast, go alone. Want to go far, go together. Right. So that's what we're sort of approaching. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of have that one track mindset.

I got to do my thing and I got to grow. But there's, I think there's a bunch of us out here who really, they would rather build medium sized businesses with their friends than one big business alone. Yeah. You know, that's kind of interesting. After my partner left,

I didn't have a board or a partner anymore. And it was just me running our companies after 13 years. And it was kind of like the vacuum. Cause I, I at least had a sounding board. You know, I was always the visionary. And so I created what I call my virtual board of directors. And I called up a bunch of entrepreneurs that I knew and friends of mine.

And I said, hey, I need somebody I can bounce off ideas. You know, if I'm thinking about innovating something or trying something new or working on some new widget, I need somebody I can talk to and bounce off ideas. Business lawyers are expensive. This is back in brick and mortar days, so you didn't really have the internet. It was just barely beginning. You had CompuServe, I think. Can I put up a bulletin board for business?

There probably was one. There wasn't a lot of those resources that people have now. God, I would have killed to have all the stuff people have now. You know what? I also still have the analog version of that. I go grab beers with a couple of guys from the Norwich Hall business owners.

That analog version is awesome too. There's something special to that. So yeah, we would all give each other advice and we create our own little board directors. I call them up and I said, hey, you know, if I can call you maybe and bug you sometime about some ideas I have, you got an open line to bug me. And it worked really well. Kind of like the beer thing. Yeah.

But I like how you guys have taken it next level where you have, you know, funding and, you know're you're kind of all working on each other's projects and stuff yeah i found a lot of you know i see a lot of my friends who start small businesses and they kind of hit these these ceilings so quickly and if they just had a group of friends who would take a little bit of risk for them with them or kind of give them a little leg up they would make it past that next hurdle a lot of them just don't make it past the next hurdle because they just they're trying to do it alone no come here let me just help you out we'll we'll give you this extra little system we'll kick off we'll give you a ten thousand dollar loan to get past this so you don't have to go raise money like but we can make this work together and if there are more businesses kind of helping each other like that i mean don't get wrong businesses cut throat is competitive but

i'll take all the friends I can get against that. Hey, rising tide lifts all boats, man. I mean, that's why you have to look at it. But I love this concept as a business model because, you know, maybe there's a future to it where everybody could do it or become more scaled and get his own business license or something. Yeah. But I love the concept because, you know, you're right.

Sometimes you're stuck because there's some tool that you need, or there's some, there's some combination of the state if you haven't figured out yet. And you, and if you just get that one tool, it turns the lights on to a whole different area. And, you know, you can hire expensive business attorneys, you can hire expensive business attorneys you can hire expensive business consultants you know but not everyone can afford you know what kenzie and company come and fix your shit yeah and you know having having people that are that are kind of at your more around your level and understand your thing and and probably aren't going to charge you, you know, do you have $5 trillion for, yeah. Yeah. It's been cool. So that's, that's our, that's my, that's kind of the story. And there's a lot of cool little things that I've learned along the way.

Again, now the count, the downside of this model is I work my ass off. I'm working all the time. We've got a context switching. It's gotta be something you got to get real good at real fast. I just got off a call talking about edc las vegas which i it's an electronic daisy carnival 400 000 person electronic i do not know how to dance and i don't know how to do enough bowling and you'll learn to dance that's how it works at edc i know i i've lived in vegas for 20 years i know how edc there you go. We're going to go out there. We want a media contract out there.

We're going to be shooting and doing the live stream for that whole show. That should be awesome. That is a huge show. That thing takes over the town when it comes to show. I just turned 40, so it's going to be a trip. My wife and I are 40-year-olds hanging out

at EDC, trying to pretend we still got it. The Vegas locals that I know, they dress up, and all the hot chicks go to it, man. They dress up in some funky outfits or to the nines, and it's kind of like Halloween almost sometimes. Oh, let's go. It's a crazy party. I think the only time they've

canceled is is with is with storms I think I think we had to cancel because storm came in it was like crazy winds or something can't imagine the amount of money lost and I imagine now they have snipers for everything I just noticed something the other day I was I lived in vegas when that guy was sniping everybody in and out the mandalay bay and i had friends that were there and and so i was watching on tiktok i think a couple days ago and there was some event they were having a festival you know a concert festival somewhere i think somewhere in the mid or something, and they showed on the TikTok video how they had snipers

on all the buildings around them. So they're not going to let that thing happen again, so it's kind of cool that there's that kind of level of security. What a wild concept, right? Like we're all living in this world. Yeah, it's sad we've come here, but

you know, at least You kind of know that, you know, we're not We're not going to let shit like that happen again Yeah, and don't let us blow us down either We're going back out Yeah, we're having a Terrorist cannot win What more do we need to tease people out

On what you do Is there people you want to work with Out in our audience, because, you know, we put this on LinkedIn and stuff, services that you can provide to them, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there's something coming up right away. This event here, we're at Code Launch, and this one was from Dallas.

We're at something called Code Launch in Minneapolis. So you'll see us hanging out there. Hopefully we'll win, but that's a really cool project where we're going to be collaborating with a startup. We're giving them, I believe it 20 no ten thousand dollars worth of free services to get their product off the ground and we're working with a really great that's a cool plug if you want to keep an eye on what we're doing obviously our linkedin is the best place to keep up with us being a business right our linkedin or instagram i'd love for people to learn more about fractal

group it's fractalgroup.io and then accruerue.co. We didn't get much into that, but that's a collections and accounts receivable business that we've started out. DealSend handles smart deal flow for investors and founders. And then that company I was just talking about

heading out to Las Vegas, they're called FYM Agency. They're doing really cool media work. So there's too much to back into one single URL. So hopefully people will kind of catch up to what makes sense to them or just reach out to me directly and I'll point you to where to go. We're doing cool things.

There you go. Do companies have to be a certain size or revenue area? What kind of companies work good with you that they're out there listening? So we did a good job of kind of keeping our small businesses, a portion of our business dedicated to our small businesses and WordPresspress sites and websites i mean pretty small business is okay come to us we still have a wordpress and you know web design piece of our business and those are okay we're obviously looking for big projects interesting problems to solve a lot of fun stuff with ai putting wrappers around gpt i know that's the the cool thing to do these days so we're doing a lot of cool projects there if you are a cool startup who wants to potentially look for some investment,

we are angels. We have good ideas. There are good ways we can help you. We can bring you into this community, and we can put you on our platform to help you raise money. We're across the board. Now, probably too big would be, I don't know. Let's call it.

Nope, nope, there's too big. We'll take them all. All right, well, you're not greedy,'t know. Let's call it. Nope, nope, there's too big. We'll take them all. All right, well, you're not greedy, you know. What was the other question I had for you? What do you see the future in everything you're doing of AI? Where are you at with what AI is going on and maybe how it might change the landscape of what you guys are doing? So I think when we talk AI,

we're mostly talking about the impact of the LLMs in the last and the generative AI that's kind of exploded in the last couple years. And that's really what I mean, AI's been around for a long time. We've been doing cool stuff with machine learning for a while. And that's not going anywhere. And the predictive stuff is not going anywhere. For us

as developers, I'm not afraid of AI taking our jobs anytime soon. There's so much legacy stuff out there. There's so much legacy stuff out there. There's so much lint going on. That's a good point. I never thought of that. There's still people working on Windows 10 or something, or Windows 7 or something I think is really popular, isn't it?

A boutique agency our size is going to be agile enough to be able to pivot between any one of these things. And we do a lot of DevOps and infrastructure-type work, so there's that's not going anywhere so for us we're okay as for us as humans i think we should be cautious of the way we're headed with this it has a lot of power and it has a lot of ability to spread misinformation that we should all be really aware of deep fakes are not a joke that is going to be a difficult thing especially if we hit this election yeah it's going to be really weird there's people the you know there's a lot of we're all having fun making you know interesting art with with stuff but there it's amazing how many people think the deep fakes or just even ai generated art is real and you or i can tell but and and sometimes it's not even

good art like it's not even good art. It doesn't look fucking real, and people will buy it. They'll still see the five fingers and the weird eyes, and they'll be like, this is the greatest photo ever, and you're like, that's not a photo, dude. I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old,

and I'm just wondering what their, have you heard of the term uncanny valley? Uh- uh-huh yeah so i'm wondering what their uncanny valley is going to be because to me this ai stuff is dead center on cany valley i can't it weirds me out but these kids i mean my kids are going to grow up with this stuff all around them and they're going to be used to seeing this sort of wonky version of life and version of art that's that's going to be the norm to them so what i mean and how until they're just everything's just super real so it's going to be an interesting i think the more interesting way is watching my kids grow up with this because i'll probably be

curmudgeon-y and old by the time it all hits i'm that way now i'm 56 i just sit on the lawn and spray the kids and yeah exactly at that point i'll just i'll shut it down but i'm interested to see how my daughter yeah i mean you think about you think about everything get off on you think about the do you feel like a punk do you feel it's not even clinty's would give me a break do you feel do you feel like it just feels so weird especially for me i guess you're 16 years younger than me. You know, I grew up in the age where, you know, we had phone booths, right? You know, you didn't walk around with phones.

You know, I can remember when everybody started getting answering machines. That was like this thing. And we're like, hey, get answering machines. And like when people call you, they can leave a message. Like, innovation! You know, but we lived in an era where there was three TV stations. You know, Walter Conkright, you could trust pretty much what he was telling you. And, you know, now we live in this media age that's, you know, everyone's got an opinion and thinks it matters.

Bunch of idiots running podcasts and you know and it's just it's just crazy the world that you live in i mean i think i remember what there's a video out there where they handed a couple young kids a a rotary phone and they said figure out how to make a call and they were trying to figure out how to make a call or even how to take pictures with it and i remember there's another video where they handed a kid a record and she's they're like we used to listen to music on this and the kids just what the hell but yeah you the uncanny valley somebody gave i turn me on that term back in one of our episodes but these yeah these kids are going to grow up in a world that's i don't know it's just so far

removed from what seemed like a more simpler time but i guess they're going to look at our childhood or past and go whatever this is yeah right one of these weirdos going back then what are these devices yeah they're gonna hit 20 or 30 and be like when i was was growing up, we had AI. We only had LOM, GPT-4. Yeah, god damn, I remember that. Now we're on GPT-20, and we just think about what we want to generate, and it doesn't. I might just be an overly optimistic guy, but I've seen this. Actually, a lot of people complain about the Generation Gen Z

being a little bit lazy or maybe whatever. I think every time a generation hits that age, the previous generation calls them lazy that's just gonna be the case yeah but i actually i've come to enjoy talking to a lot of these folks their emotional intelligence is actually pretty solid watching some of the school curriculum as weird as it has been i'm impressed at least with my my children's school curriculum some of the healthy thoughts that they're teaching our children yeah pretty cool actually and i think there's there's a lot weird about it and uncomfortable as you get older but i think in general we're swinging toward the positive progress as much as the media wants you to think it's not at times i think in general humankind is gonna it's hard to say in the middle

of two wars but i think in general the the pendulum will swing toward progress eventually right it'll go back and forth, but the overall momentum, the overall climate of humans is going to be a better humanity. We'll drag ourselves there one way or another. It's how we move forward as a humanity. But what's interesting to me is I had somebody on who basically took Darwin's theory of evolution, and I forget the book that Darwin did that in. Maybe it was called Darwin's theory of evolution, and I forget the book that Darwin did that in.

Maybe it was called Darwin's theory of evolution. But basically, he overlaid it with AI and claimed that AI will become its own species. That was the species book that he overlaid it with. The origin of species. The origin of species. There you go. And he basically pitches that AI will become its own species.

And at that point, it will look at us and decide i don't know and it's its parameters and and modus operandi is going to be different than humans because because you know humans we're we're mostly just breeding stock for the universe like our whole thing that we do all day long is figuring out how to propagate the species and survive and so if you're not thinking about mating you're thinking about raising your family and your kids and once you're done doing all that you know the universe kind of goes we know we're done with you we need the new stock of people that will breed and do stuff and that's kind of it's kind of how we operate you know and the and that's kind of the

limits of our operation because we you know we focus on that but he was like you know the ai isn't going to work worrying about i don't know how to pick up chicks and get laid it's going to be thinking about things that we probably have never even considered so and it's going to navigate through mediums we don't media we don't't understand. It doesn't think about reality the way that we would. And there's so many interesting things about thinking about a biological type being, because you define a species as being, you can think biological type being, living and navigating itself through wires and through radio waves. That's how it exists.

It exists there. It doesn't exist in the physical form. It manifests in physical forms. There may be mechanical robots or whatever it may be, but it's an interesting. Yeah. I want to increase it to 1,000. But, you know, the thing that a lot of people have talked about with AI

is the creativity. It's going to amp up our creativity levels and i gotta tell you it using the generative ai and especially when i'm working on images or or pictures that i want to have made you know whether it's with a blog or i had some meetup groups that i want to do some artwork for and normally you'd have to hire all that out and then you know you'd be, I don't like how that looks. I wish I could do it different. That just costs more.

I was able to go in and make my own media. And just playing around with it. And, you know, sometimes when I have a Facebook post where I want to talk about a topic, I can go make a picture that kind of encompasses what i'm thinking about or maybe it's a bit of comedy but the the creativity it's taking my creativity level to new heights and kind of my what do you want to say it my possibility frame has grown larger because then because you tweak with it and you're like hey okay we'll tweak it this way you know i'm okay do a little bit more of that. And it's just amazing.

I mean, it really gets your creative juices running. Yeah, technology at its core can create enablement, right? So it enabled you as someone who basically didn't have the design skill, the motor skill or whatever it may be to go do the design thing. But it unlocked that particular blocker for you, similar to what we talked about earlier with our fractal group and be able to unlock that blocker for that next call we call it a callback by the way so we unlock that opportunity for the other for the other group to increase your creativity and unlock that brain to go direct to so it's it's really cool that it

enables that part of our brains and i think they're you know you kind of as you're talking it made me think maybe there's a competitive landscape here maybe we do have a survival the fittest situation going on with ai maybe humans will suddenly become that much more enable or we'll get lazy with it and it's going to be an interesting interesting coexistence some people say that that's why ai will keep us around it's because the creative part because we'll be able to create better than it will. Yeah. We have a weird imagination as human beings. There's so many

fun sci-fi thoughts you can have with this thing. But it's so funny how inevitably we personify it so quickly. And think of it as a potential evil or bad. It just kind of is a thing. It's kind of how we work. Plus we saw too many Terminator movies. You kind of see that Boston Robot we saw too many Terminator movies Boston Robotics

Dog or whatever running around the music from Terminator starts playing we're all going to die so this has been fun to have you on the show give us your final thoughts and your dot coms as we go out Justin yeah again fyclabs.com best place to find me talk to me go to LinkedIn

look me up on LinkedIn. I do it pretty active on there. Appreciate the show. You do a great job. I love the broad spectrum of topics you hit along here, and it's just been fun talking to you. We'll keep checking out the Chris Voss Show. There you go.

Thanks for the plug. I certainly appreciate it, Justin. We're the Netflix of podcasting. You can binge on anything. What's funny is people consume 96% of the shows. So they're literally just pressing play and listening to everything. It's probably insane if they're listening to romance novels and then moving to this. But I learn so much from every show and everything.

Different ways of looking and paradigms and stuff. Great background sound to be going on when you're maybe doing some workout in the yard or something. Yeah. That's usually what they do. Usually, they do it when they're in the bedroom doing the whoopee thing with their significant other. I hear that's popular.

No. No better aphrodisiac than the Chris Voss show. You heard it. No one has ever told me that. And if you're doing that, knock it off. I don't think that's appropriate. I don't want to think about that. Anyway, thanks for being on the show, Justin.

Thanks for tuning into my audience. Be sure to be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time