Welcome back to Data Driven. This is episode 400, and
no matter what Andy's weather station tells you, it's always sunny in
farmville. Today we're talking AI vibe,
coding, building real systems with small teams, and how the last
few years have completely changed how we ship software and podcasts.
Let's do this with some different music this time.
Hello, and welcome back to Data Driven, the podcast podcast where we explore the emerging
field of data, AI, and, of course, data engineering.
With me today on a special most auspicious day. I
think I use that word auspicious, right? I'm not sure. Is my
favorite data engineer in the world. How's it going, Eddie?
It's going well, Frank. How are you doing? I'm doing
fantastic. We're recording this on January
7, 2026. Can you
believe it? My goodness. 26. This
is the future, man. I'm waiting for my flying car, but
until then, any day. Any day now.
There actually is something at CES that they were showing was, like a personal, like,
drone that you can, like, stand in and, like, fly around.
No way. Way. I saw it and I was like. But now we're at the
point. Now I'm like, could that have been an AI video?
Never really can't tell anymore. Yeah, that's true.
They are getting better, aren't they? They really are.
You've seen some of the experiments I've been doing on Frank's world
on YouTube. Oh, yeah. See, like, you know,
a lot of that. You know, I'm not going to tell you which ones, but
you. You know, some of them are AI, so it's. It's.
It's pretty amazing. Plus, I can generate
videos longer than 8 seconds on my Spark.
Nice. My DGX Spark. So. Which I don't think we've
talked much about on the show is kind of like the. This 2025 was the
year for me of the home lab. Right. Where. Yeah.
And you, too, as well. Right? Like, it was an interesting. It was an interesting
year. So I, in October, convinced my wife
to let me get the DGX Spark. And if you're
watching this on video, there's the box right there. I
leave the box out because I know more than anything, the DTX
Spark is as much of a status symbol as
anything else. And
seeing you cough is making me cough. I know I choked you up there.
I know. Scrambling for the mute. I think the mouse was over
on the third, like, three screens over. That's funny.
Trying to get to the mute button. So,
yeah, so I got DGX Spark. And it
basically, it's. You know, Nvidia sells it as a personal
AI supercomputer. It basically has
shared. A shared memory model, so it has 128 gigs of
RAM, which means that, you know, I have about.
Depending on how much the system is using, when you're using it, I have about
120 gigs of video RAM,
which, if you were to replicate that with a traditional kind of desktop
PC, would be very pricey. I mean, you'd have to get
three or four of the 5070s, like, working in unison to get that much
VRAM. Right. So that is. And it also
has a Grace Blackwell chip in it, which is one of their, you know, one
of their more professional ones. I know we're recording this while CES
is going on, so there's. They've announced the new Vera Rubin stuff and
all that. So there's definitely a lot more hardware innovation
happening that I can't keep
up with it, man. Like, it's just, you know, you can either pick
the hardware side or the software side and, you know,
but. And then also this year, I picked up
a. I think I did talk about this on the show where I picked up
the an i9 with a 4070 in it.
That's a gaming PC, but it's a mini PC, so it's, you know,
probably about the size of a cable. Cable box. Nice.
Which. This will make listeners. I know it made me feel old, but
I. I told my. My teenager, he's like, you know,
what's it look like? And I'm like, well, it's about the size of a cable
box. You know what he said? What's a
cable box? So I'm not
surprised. Yeah. So
that. That is the world we live in today, I suppose.
Frank, you mentioned we were the OGs. We really. We really are.
So you were just on another podcast. So tell them. Tell. Tell our good
listeners why this one's special. Although I think Bailey may have
ruined it by now. Well, probably. But that's okay.
Bailey's doing her job. And. And thank you, by the way,
for helping Bailey do her job. You are the man, the
creator of Bailey. This is our
400th episode of the Data
Driven Podcast. Can you believe that? 400?
No, I can't, man. It's. It's wild.
And it was about, what, nine years ago, we started,
you know, figuring out the logistics of the recording and things like that
and working through it, and it. It's been.
It's been an interesting ride. That's for sure. Definitely.
It definitely has. And yeah, show has evolved.
You and I have grown and we've,
we're 10 years older and. Yep. You know, and
hopefully 10 years wiser. Hopefully, hopefully
our families have grown. Yep, your family
has grown. I. And, and you've added to your
family in the last 10 years. I, I have not.
But I did reach a milestone last August.
My old, my youngest son turned,
turned 18. And I realized
in, in thinking about that, I realized that
for 43 consecutive years
I was the father of a minor, at least one
minor child. Now in order to, to kind of
span a gap there in the middle,
I have to count time that Stephen was in the
womb, but I knew he was there. When my younger daughter
from my first marriage turned 18,
we, we knew, we knew Christy was pregnant with Stephen. But
43 consecutive years, Frank, that's a.
Solid lifetime that is of being a dad.
So it's different. It's, you know, it's, I don't like
regret or, you know, have regrets or anything about. Well, I do
have regrets, obviously, but I don't. It's not like a big loss.
It's like I changed, I shifted gears. I'm now in this
new phase of it. But, you know, it's not just me shifting
gears, Frank. You've done a lot of gear shifting. The market has done
a lot of. You mentioned keeping up. And I'll say this and then I'll shut
up. The way that I've found to keep up with both,
at least the kind of hitting the high spots, both software technology
and even physics when it comes to quantum, is
when GROK enabled the ability to create
something called Grok tasks. And I want to say it was in
2025, early in 2025, I set one up
for technology news,
really. And I haven't really played with Grok that much.
So at 5:40am every every
weekday, actually it's every day at 5:40
an announcement shows up. That's when I scheduled it. It pops
up and, you know, I get a little thing on my phone and I'll hit
it. Or if I happen to be on Grock, and I am, sometimes
I'll see the task gets populated there. Just click on it and
it gives me six or eight, sometimes 12
paragraphs on how things are going. I don't
know if it's limited to Super Grock
or not. I got in on Super Grok when it was
basically an add on. If you went from
paying x 8 bucks a month
to 16 bucks a month, you could, you Got
a subscription to Super Crock. So I think now if you buy it
out of the box, it's like 30 bucks a month, but I'm still
paying 16 and I get to use it. It is 30 bucks a month. Yeah.
Yeah. Apparently I'm on the free plan. I didn't know that.
I thought I was, I thought I was paying for this, but
now I don't feel so bad about not using it as much.
Will they let you do a task on a free plan? I don't
know what's available. It says. It does. It says the task.
Yeah. I have to take a look at that because that looks interesting.
So to find it in the ui,
but interesting. I've got the client on my phone. That's one of the few.
I've got one of the few AI clients I've got on the phone. I know
you use some too. Yeah, I have. So one of the things I did was
I don't know if this deal is still available. If you sign up for
perplexity using PayPal, you get a year of Perplexity for free.
Oh, neat. Yeah, I don't know if that's still the deal, but that's. I
have Perplexity, so I propel. I have Perplexity,
I have Gemini And I have ChatGPT and,
and the free version of Grok. I also have
Claude because I love Claude code and I thank
you for turning me on to that because it is, it has been
transformative. Right. Like so, you know, you did mention I have a
three year old and I have a teenager and I have a tween,
so I don't get a lot of focus time.
So I
have to be very judicious with what I choose to focus on.
And the big
advancement is cloud code. Right.
Because there's a lot of things I want to code up. I just don't have
time for. Right. I don't have time to do that. So this one project I'm
working on, I'll kind of give a preview of it. It's called podz
and Podsy is Ponzi, is, is. Is meant
to solve a problem that we're having with the creation of the podcast.
Because we have this show and we have the Impact Quantum show
which is doing gangbusters. If you're not already subscribed,
check it out. Impact quantum.com. but you know, we
won, it's won awards being the top quantum, you know, computing
podcast by Feed Spot. It's, it's, it's on a
really solid growth trajectory. Because again, we really,
we've been podcasting now for nine years, right?
And that makes us kind of OGs in this game, right? This
is, you know, absolutely. And you know, I was talking to somebody and I was
like, you know, like, I'm good at this and I don't say that at arrogance
because I've done it about four or five hundred times, right?
You know, if you something four or five hundred times, you're not, you don't get
improved at it. You know, you really have to be trying not to improve.
So, you know, and you know, we have enormous, we
have fantastic numbers on this show. But like, you know, if you look at the
growth trajectory, I mean, the potential is enormous. But one
of the big challenges is, is that how do you track
all of the assets that are related to a particular episode?
And that's the problem that PODSI is meant to, to address, right? So
every podcast is going to have a transcript, an audio
file or video file, maybe both. And it's also going to have
a, you know, a thumbnail image, right? So every show
has at least four assets, right?
How do you deal with that? Right? Because then at this point we're looking at,
you know, 1600 assets for all our shows, right? That's
not a trivial data problem to master or
to manage. So that's what podzi is meant to do. So
the reason why I say this the way, the reason why I think this is
an interesting use case for Claude Code is because
on December 5, I had a car accident and, you know, we're all okay.
Car was totaled. The airbag did, though, leave
a Honda shaped imprint in my hand
because it was a Honda and the logo went smack into my hand.
But aside from the hand injury, you know, we're all okay. And,
but that night I just was like, I had
this idea because I was getting frustrated because if I want to add a third
show and that's, you know, we've talked about adding a third show, maybe, you
know, more shows. Beyond that, the logistics of managing
all of that, you know, content becomes
an issue, right? And that's, you
know, that's what POSI was and how that ties is the accident is
that I, I was feeling frustrated with the lack of progress of
Ponzi. I, I, I had thought I had this grand vision that we don't in
a week, right. Even with,
you know, vibe coding it or whatever,
you know, when it got to like Christmas, I was like, all right, what the
heck has taken so long here? Right? And yep,
I basically looked at it,
and it turns out that by that point I'd written about 30,000 lines
of code, or it had written 30,000 lines of code.
Right. And it does about 90% of what I wanted to
do. Now think about that.
Two of my boys have birthdays in December. I had a car accident.
I had to close out a lot of things for my day job. And you
know, you have the general, you know, run up to Christmas. There's
no way in hell I would have been able to do that
normally. 30,000 lines code, right? Yeah, yeah. Even if I
was doing it full time, no job, no children, no responsibilities. That's
a stretch, you know, in 20ish days to hit
30,000 lines of code. Absolutely. That is,
I'd have to, you know, I mean, that's a full time, maybe two full time
coders. Right. Again, I'm not going to
shell out the money to do that. Right. So in a sense,
I'm not so much taking a job away.
I'm adding to my productivity as an
individual. Does that make sense? Yep. And
that's exactly, you know, that's all of it. And I mentioned
to you that I was listening, I am listening still to an audio book called
Vibe Coding. And it occurred to me, and I, I think I posted this
on social media yesterday or the day before. It occurs to me
in this that there's more than one way
to change the ratio for return on
investment. And the role AI plays in that
is exactly what you just described. And what it
does is it takes one person, you or me,
and it makes us ten times more productive.
Right. And it turns out that, you know, we don't need to jack up
the price, which would be one way to do it. Kind of a, you know,
maybe not in a very effective way to do it. Increasing the value
would certainly support jacking up the price. But to do,
to increase value, you need to add features or functionality
or some, some kind of way improve the code. Well, because,
you know, ostensibly using an AI like Claude code
to do that, you, you nailed it. You don't have the
inclination to spend the money to hire a couple of Vibe coders, or, sorry, a
couple of coders to, you know, knock out 30,000 lines of
code. And it costs you the cost of a
cloud subscription to do that in the
middle of all the rest of your life. And what's happening is
all across the board, all of these projects that have been on our
list of when I get some time, I'll do that. Right. Or
it's, you know, it's I joke about if it's not in the top
three on my to do list, it doesn't get done. That's
changed. It's now probably the top 20. Because
a couple of things that were hanging out there that A couple of weeks ago
I spent some. I spent a day and a half revamping
all of my Andy weather stuff surfacing. The data that's
collected from my weather station sitting out here on the deck and it took a
day and a half. I had two applications that I rewrote.
One of them was the one that posts on X. That's running again.
It had run since 2018,
rewriting the one that transfers the CSV blob
from the old Emachine sitting over here up to
Azure Blob storage container.
Finally, the website, you know, it looked like an engineer built it because an
engineer built it. And that's not a compliment
and I'm the engineer that built it. But I had, I had
Claude rewrite it. Now it's got a little bit of savvy to it and in
addition to that, Frank, it's got two APIs running behind it,
so. Interesting. Why do you need a weather station? Isn't it always sunny in
Farmville? It is always sunny in Farm,
except when it's not. You know, I. I noticed
you're wearing a jacket, but it's January and I know you're in a basement and
it's probably chilly down there. Yeah. It is actually
74 degrees as we record
on January 7th. It is 3:46pm
in Farmville, Virginia. 74 degrees is what my instruments are showing
me right now. Yeah, that's crazy hot.
It went from being like really cold. I mean, I am in the
basement and you can always tell if I'm running an AI workload or not based
on, you know, and I'm not running a workload
currently, but when I have the machines going, it does get toasty in here.
So. Nice. We're in an
abnormal heat wave for January in the mid Atlantic. And I know you
guys are warm up there too. We're like at 50 today.
Wow. And like a few days ago it was, you know,
1720 degrees Fahrenheit. Right. So it's
not. Yeah, it's kind of unusual, which is going to have. Yeah,
amazing impact on my sinuses. So
that'll be fun. That'll be fun to experience. So it is always funny in
Farmville. You're right. I got these glasses. I love those
glasses. These, these are blue blockers. And so if you're not
watching. I kind of look. I don't know what I look like. He says I
look cool. I look like a cool. So.
No, like, one of the things that some people think could be
triggering the migraines is. And headaches is kind of like too much blue
light. So I figured, I'll give this a shot. I'll give it a shot. Plus,
I. I feel like I look like AJ from the Y Files because. Like, you'll
see, like, he wears glasses like that. He wears glass like that. And then
I saw that and I. I looked up and I was like, what are those?
And I find out. And I think the exact pair he wears
is like $200. But we don't sell
merch, like hacklefish and things like that, so.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about. Well, the Y Files is an
interesting YouTube channel. It's also a podcast, but it's very, very well
done. I think when I first discovered it, I binge watched it. Then I shared
it to you, and I think you binge watched it. I did, too, yeah. Lot
of good stuff on that channel. Well, and he has a lot of
throwbacks to some other stuff. And for listeners that, that are
thinking to type the. And the letter Y and files. It's a
W, H, Y. The Y Files. Yeah.
But the throwbacks go back for me to
start. So I used to work third shift as a plant
electrician back in the old days and when the years began with A one.
And it wasn't uncommon for, you know, me being on
maintenance to have plenty of time to sit around after I'd done my,
you know, my scheduled maintenance stuff and fix whatever may have broken.
I was often idle. It was not always, but,
you know, probably greater. Only so much happened. Almost only so
Much happens at 3am. But I had the radio on and I would
listen to. To WRVA 11:40am in
Richmond, and the Art Bell show would play overnight
on that. And he's a. AJ Gentile, the
host of the show. Huge Art Bell fan.
Oh, yeah. If you don't know who we're talking about, it's this whole. So
welcome to conspiracy theory world here, right? Yeah. He was
Alex Jones. He was Alex Jones before there was Alex Jones.
Art. And he covered all of them. So Alex is, I think, a
little more political. Yeah. You know, cultural art was
more like sci fi, UFOs. Yeah. Really
X Files type stuff, right? Exactly. Mel's Hole.
And you'll see, you'll see stuff about Mel's
Hole, even on Y Files merch. They've got some much formula sold out
there so. But it's a fantastic podcast. Just
the art of it. And AJ has
is a career in. In entertainment and I didn't
realize this particularly definitely radio. But he was also one of the
producers or associate producers on Family Jewels. The
Gene Simmons. Oh, I didn't know that. I
didn't either. But there's somewhere I want to say in
social media and stuff. He posted some pictures a few years ago about
him and Gene, you know, collaborating on his head. Gene Simmons, if you don't know.
Not everybody knows. Bass player and leader of the band
Kiss, huge rock band in the
70s and 80s and their.
Their lead guitarist passed away a few weeks ago. Ace Fraley
passed away and they actually did something for him at the White House.
I believe there was a. I think so. Yeah. Some sort of ceremony there.
So yeah. Yep. We're telling on ourselves
Frank, but we're. Going, we're going on our off road thing which I think
that's. And 400 shows we
managed to. To miss this. 399 shows in a
row. And here we are going off on a tangent. First time ever.
I don't know about the first time. First time in the four hundreds. But
the. No, I mean it was. It's. It's a cool. It's a. It's an interesting
podcast and I think what, what I like about it is
he's advancing the art of podcasting. Right. With Heckle Fish and like as a
character and things like that.
A lot of innovation. You know. I think one of the
things that you know, also is, you know, we've had Bailey. Bailey is
no longer in the Quantum show because some of our list. She
doesn't really apply there. I think so. But we
know we're doing. We're all going to do fun stuff like that.
I'm toying with the idea of like a Professor Cubitt
kind of like a thing that could work. Wasn't really ready in
time but you know, just conceptually. But again like I
think people focus on the jobs that AI will take away.
But I also would, would, would pull from our own experience. When we hired the
voice actor to do the first, you know,
couple of seasons of, you know, the, the intro,
we eventually replaced her with, you know, AI Once
synthetic voices got good enough and somebody's like, well,
you know, you really. You took away a job from a
voice actor. I was like, well no, because getting a custom
recording for every show would have cost. Would have been cost prohibitive would have been
somewhere between 75 and $100. Right. Yeah. And
you know, that's not really feasible
and I didn't think it was, that. That was going away no matter what.
But I wasn't going to do that anyway. Right. Like, so I think also with
this, with this idea of, you know, most of us, you know,
every developer I know, every data engineer I know always has like a back,
like a side project in the back of their mind they want to build. But
life, responsibility. Now that excuse is
really a lot lower. Right. Like,
I mean, now the question I have,
now the stuff, now the question I have is, you know, how many machines can
I have running code at the same time? Right. Because, like, I have
all these other ideas. Like, you know, I have Dingo, which is, you know, right
now is just a command line tool. I want to convert that
to a web application. Sure. Like podzi.
And you know, I don't know, like, podzi is amazing.
Cool. Dingo is amazing. Thank you.
It's good work, Frank. Frank does all the work. I've said this before, but
I never say it enough. Frank does all the hard work here on the show.
And it's as our schedules have just gotten crazy,
you show up here less and less. Well, I show up
and not even, I don't even show up that, that often anymore. That's so
sad. But it's, you know, I, all I have is
excuses, but it just, you know, it's a good
thing that work is as busy as it is. Yeah, yeah.
You know, the consulting and I, I, I'm in a,
I've been in an interesting situation for about the past six
months. I don't know if it's going to last. We, but there's been enough work
out there that the teams have been doing for,
for me to not, I can, I can pay the bills and
I don't have to do consulting billing and
that's unusual. It's the first time ever in my life
that's been true. So I had time and money
and I invested that money pretty heavily
in. Oh, sorry. I invested the time pretty heavily
and some stuff that's coming out of data integration, lifecycle management
suite stuff. But the big boost was
exactly what you were describing earlier.
Applying Claude code specifically to these
coding tasks has made it possible for me to
finish up stuff that I've been working on for 10 years.
Yeah, I know. You were showing me some stuff that you were building and some
cool code names that you have as well as you have some acronyms.
I Like to think that I inspired you to come up with the cooler code
names, but we don't know. Absolutely. Well,
I think the coolest code names actually Claude code
suggested. Oh, really? It's been cool. Yeah.
The one I think the one you reacted to most, the
new big project I shared with you, that's the biggest thing I've ever even conceived.
It picked the name and the name of the roles and so it's
first, it's very applicable what it, what it shows the analogy holds
and, and then the name names of the roles
that are going to be parts, kind of like sub parts of that
project. Those are also very apropos.
Oh, very cool. A Ponzi I got name. I got. I asked
ChatGPT to come up with a list of interesting names describing what
it's going to do and Ponzi was one of them. Nice. So, yeah,
great minds, Frank. Great minds. There you go. There you go. I'm actually, I'm
actually talking about Podsy because I think I'm building it from the get go
with the idea that it could be a SaaS for other, it could be a
service for other podcasters. Absolutely. Yeah. We're having
this problem. We can't be the only ones. Right.
And if nobody buys it, at least I solve the problem for myself. Right.
You know, and for you too. Like, I mean, one of the, you know, one
of the things this does leans pretty heavily into the AI side of
how do you generate content from a podcast that you already made?
Right. How do you track, how do you track the content that you've, you've
created as a result of, you know, other tools like Opus
or. And if you've seen, if you've seen us on LinkedIn,
like a lot of those short clips are generated by Opus where it'll, it'll
show, you know, kind of us talking. I know you use it
and, you know, it does the captioning, does the
slick editing. You could have it at B roll. I mean, it's just amazing what's
possible, right? Like. Yep. And I
mean, people are amazed to find out how small of a team we are
between this podcast and the other podcast. Right. Like, yeah,
I mean, it's a lot of content if you think about it. If you're doing
content per headcount, we're up there. Oh, yeah. And I
say we. And it's mostly you. Again, I would say you're
doing all of the, you're doing the, you're doing the lion's share of it. You
know, north of 90%. Not so toot my own horn.
But yeah, I mean, you started this with, with an eye
towards automation and you kept looking for
shortcuts and. And shortcuts for the shortcuts, and that's what's
grown these tools. And I mean, it was. Frank, we had only
been doing this a couple of years when you started coming up with, you know,
scripts and stuff like that, that would. That would, you know,
grab a transcript or, you know, parse
the URLs and, you know, post things for
us. It wasn't long at all, and it's just. It was what was available
at the time. And I think you should do a demo of Potsy
just to show people. How cool it is, like right
now. Yeah, I'm gonna need a
second to. And you got to keep in mind that Frank's been.
You've only been working on us, what, a couple months? A month. Maybe
a month today. Yeah, yeah.
And you started, you know, you started with the idea.
Yep. And. And, well, I was actually. I was
thinking about this for a while, like, how to do it. Yeah.
The real challenge was the real
thing that broke the cat, the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak,
was the Advent calendar that we did for Impact
Quantum. Okay. Which if you go. We'll make sure it's in the show
notes. Right. But if you go to impactquantum.com advent calendar,
filling in all of that content into one place.
Was. That was vive
coded, actually. Right. That whole HTML experience. But the issue
I had was the effort to collect all the
content. And the data that I had
was. I'm typing, I'm telling Claude to start the dev server.
I'm so lazy now. I don't have to type in.
But that's efficient. It's efficient operational
efficiency. It's not lazy. So
ultimately I realized, like, you know,
we have this, we have the transcripts, we have all this, but, like, collecting it
in the one place is just way harder than it needed to
be. And I kind of had this in
the back of my mind, like, what is this going to look like? And things
like that, and what am I going to do with it? And then really
kind of the accident, actually, like, I had a lot of free time to kind
of think, you know, later that day
and, you know, nothing will jar you out of
anything faster than like an accident,
you know. And so this, ladies and gents,
and AIs of varying levels of sentiency.
This is the current homepage for Pozzi. I actually do have A domain name that's
registered. Podzi Studio, I believe. Okay.
And you know there's going to be more marketing material
here. Right. But I'm going to sign in.
These are all test accounts, so you're not gonna.
I'll sign in. So right now we have two shows.
There's Data Driven and Impact Quantum. And so I can
see from my dashboard
what I. What I have. Right? This tells me I have
97 episodes in the system, which I think is about.
Right. Based on what the feed would be pulling because we don't share every
episode on one of the feeds because it would make the feed file super long.
Right. But anyway, so you'll see my
4 to 1 ratio is pretty spot on. Right. There's
401 assets here and 97
episodes, right. So it's about a 4 to 1 ratio. So let's
just go to. From Molecules to
Medicine. This was an episode
36 of
Impact Quantum. And you will see that
I have these tracked assets now where it
pulls. Most of these tracked assets are from.
Are from the RSS feed, right? So every RSS feed. Yeah. So,
like, and I think you and I were talking and was like, we use
Captivate, so there's other fields we could also capture too. But I want to start
with the vanilla. If you have a podcast, you have an RSS feed,
full stop. Yeah, right. Good call. Because I think
that's. I could always add on later.
And so basically you have media, which is audio or
this. You have video, you also have the audio and you have the
transcript. So what I have here is I
have the web page that's associated with it. So I can go here. I click
on this. This takes me to the webpage for it,
that episode. Right. Now, some of the stuff you do have to add manually,
but that's fine. You can just add an asset and tag it to this. I'm
also working on the ability to add a person,
right? So we would add the name of the person, the guest, what organization they
work for. My ultimate goal is to get a map of a graph
of how many people work in this industry. How many people work in this industry,
and kind of see that. And that could tell a story too,
right? Because at my heart, I am a data visualization nerd.
So that's kind of the thing. But as you can see, I have the thumbnail,
I have the transcript. So if I click on this, this is the.
The transcript from that episode. And then what I can do from
there is I've using the power, the magic of
AI Right. So if I want to create an
infographic or pull quotes, right? Let's
just say let's create a LinkedIn post. I know if you follow me on LinkedIn,
this may be like telling you about
the Easter Bunny, right? So I'm going to click on this
and I'm going to click generate. So what this is doing
here is this is saying, Please write a LinkedIn post about
this episode, right? And I will open,
I'll open a Grok because I just added this today based on a conversation you
and I had. Cool. So I click
on that. I want you to notice two things. One, that prompt
was automatically put into that text box.
Nice. And Grok is working on it right now.
I could do the same thing in Claude, Gemini, et cetera,
et cetera. But while that cooks, I will show you that prompts.
I have a template, little template language you could do for a prompt.
Right. So if I go here, I start
off the prompt. This is actually based on the. The
guest that we had on the
first show of the season, Jeff woods, was it? Yes.
Great show. That was a great show. And it was basically
how his book, the AI Driven
Leader and his prompt framework. This is really kind of based largely
on that conversation, right? So I have a thing here. This
is what I type. And I say based on the following data about this
podcast episode, provide a list. Oh, that's a typo.
Right? Can you give me a list of
comma separated tags for WordPress? Right? So podcast
name, I can just inject that as part of this script kind
of code here, right? So podcast name.com,
podcast name, episode title,
episode description, here's the URL. So transcript, etc, etc,
etc. I'll save changes. And so if I go back.
Let's go back to here.
Okay,
so if I go here now, I will see, I
will go tags,
generate and we'll do this one in Claude just for grins
and you'll see that it's there.
I click the button now it's going to generate the comma
separated tags. So this is useful for things like YouTube, where they want
this type of metadata for, to help us with SEO and things like that. Sure.
And then while that's cooking, we can see, look at, this is the finished product.
Nice here. Now there's obviously things I need to do to
clean it up, right? Because it says host Frank Lavinia. I wouldn't post this on
my LinkedIn, like talk about myself in the third person, but
just think about what's possible with this, right? And
all you have to do is load your RSS feed into the system
and all of this stuff becomes available. I can also add,
I can add more metadata. What's really cool about this is
that I picked this one because I'll put fun facts. So that way when we
do like a retrospective show or like someone out wants an
anecdote about a particular episode we can talk about,
I can say like, well, I was actually in a lot of pain recording this
and you can actually see it in my face. And I was attending
ignite and you can see the hotel room in the background.
And the reason why I was in pain was because we had a hot water
leak like literally 36 hours before I had
to fly cross country. So I had to clean up the basement,
put everything in a dumpster, and then get on a cross
country flight, which I don't recommend it at any age, but I can tell you
anything that bent or moved hurt. Oh,
Frank. So that's. And then the other thing I'm going to add is like, you
know, add a sponsors, affiliates like you mentioned. Yeah.
You mentioned an audiobook called Vibe Coding. Fun fact. Did
you know that we have a sponsor? That sponsor is
Audible and if you go to thedatadrivenbook.com
you will be routed to Audible and you will get a free audiobook on
us and you can have it be Andy's book
or that he mentioned called Vibe Coding or Jeff
woods book called the AI Driven Leader.
So it's really kind of taking this to the next level,
right? So the advantage of, the advantage of this is that
realistically, if you're going to launch a podcast, and I say this to any
podcaster or budding podcaster out there, right?
Obviously the microphone's important, the camera's important, all that stuff.
But there's a lot of other things to think about, right? Not just the mark,
a lot of it is the marketing of it. Right? Who's your target audience? You
know, what's your. The cool kids call that your avatar, right? Your typical
thing. What's your audience? What are you trying to do? But the other thing,
increasingly, in a noisier and noisier world, how are you going to
market this show across various social media networks? Right?
Right. And we've solved that problem
with things like dingo and buying
opus and things like that. But the
next problem you have is
creating content, right? Like, not just creating content, but
managing it. Right? So generally speaking, opus is the
clip that'll take a video and kind of cut it into like little
short form videos, you get about 1 of those per minute,
roughly, right? So let's just say, so a, a 60 minute
podcast or. I already mentioned that you already have four bits of content,
right? You have the actual audio of the show, the transcript, the
thumbnail, possibly video as well, like the full on
full length video. But then now you add,
if it's 60 minutes, you're going to have roughly 60 short
videos. So now you go from, you know, now
you have 64, 65, 64 items
now to track, right? And it doesn't sound like a big
deal, but when you're trying to organize things, it becomes a very,
very tedious work right away, right? And
what if you make an. What if you write a blog post about, you know,
the particular episode? Well, that's another asset. You have the track. Be nice to know
you. Because up until then I was googling it
basically against my own site. Like, where did I write that? Where did I put
that? So now with this ability, you have the ability to track
all that metadata in one place. And
as it goes further along, I'm going to add the graph feature
where I'll be able to upload metadata about each guest. Like
this person works here, this is what they do. And then I want to be
able to kind of track that. And I think that that will also, aside
from satiating my inner data visualization nerd, I think it
also could help people figure out where the next
opportunity is, where the next opportunity to
find guests. Maybe I'm over covering one type of industry,
maybe I'm not covering this.
Eventually I'd like to tie it into
download statistics so I can say like, hey, every time I talk about
bioinformatics, like this happens, right?
That sort of thing. And also help manage kind of, you know, all these
affiliate programs that we have, right? We have a program for Audible, we
have a program for Opus. It'd be nice to kind of have that in one
place as opposed to going around. What I do now
is I go around different websites and find it. Candace, to her
credit, shout out to you, Candace. She has them all in one spreadsheet. But that's
still, I. It's still a cognitive kind of
switch of, oh, I got to go to a spreadsheet. It'd be nice to have
everything, one place to rule them all.
So that, that's my stump speech. I know I got to work on
shortening my elevator pitch for it, but you're
muted, Andy, so we can't hear you. I'm sorry, I. I
didn't Want to cough last time. It's a great stump speech, Frank. Thank
you. So if folks are interested, let me know. Not that hard to
find LinkedIn or whatever if you reach out to me.
And we do go into wider beta testing unless you have it.
And obviously if you're a longtime listener or even a short time listener,
whatever. I tried to decide to charge, you'll get a solid discount from
Gotcha but cool, man.
Testing the data driven book.com
and I believe the,
that that was first off, I know the link has changed.
It's been. I don't, I don't want to use the word hijacked.
When did it work? Did it work the data
driven dot com? It doesn't.
No. That works for me.
Does it? Yeah, it works on my machine.
You know what, we'll include willing in the show notes. We'll include the actual
affiliate link.
I'm, I'm not sure what's going on.
I've got us. I've got a sneaking suspicion I do know what's going on.
All right. So in any case, we'll make sure we put in the proper link.
But you know, there are other things too that like you said, like I've been
working on optimizing things and things like that. It's more about,
you know, it's a testament to 1%
improvement every day will compound into a
ridiculous amount of optimization. So, I mean, like I can turn one bit of
content into, no exaggeration,
like I said, like 60, 70 bits of content. Oh,
goodness. Yeah, Easy. Opus is a big driver. Opus is going
to be a big driver of that. But there's other, there's other secret sauce I
haven't shared yet. Like, like shared with you, but I'm not shared publicly yet.
Right. So there's definitely things you can do and if you use your imagination, it's
a lot hard to figure out. Right. With all the other tool, generative AI tools
that we have, you know, whether it's
infographics, Notebook, LM like that sort of thing, you can
get kind of, you know, one of the things I discovered is you can
get kind of orthogonal views across different AI models
off of one transcript and compare them
and see what resonates in one engine and what
resonates versus another. There's a lot of opportunity there. Right.
And I certainly, I think if nothing else,
transcripts are incredibly important, not just for
accessibility but like just for the ability for
AI to ingest the content and it
becomes very malleable. And it's,
you know, I think That I don't think people in Mass have realized
that just yet. Hopefully. I totally agree.
Hopefully Podzi will change that. Hopefully Podzi will be a big driver of that. But
we shall see. And if you think about, you know, what LLMs
actually do, it's right, they're. They're all about the words
Brother. Right? 100%.
And so transcripts filled with words.
I like that. That should be the. That should be the tagline
filled with words. You heard it here first.
And I know you've been doing some exciting things with Claude.
It's just. It's such a. It's very easy to
get into the Debbie Downer mode of oh, my God, AI is
going to take over. But I see opportunity here
left and right. You have to.
There's a lot of opportunity here when it comes to
how you can use AI to be more efficient. Right. The
idea of us having a podcast. Doing a podcast is one thing, but
doing a podcast and
having it appear everywhere. One of the best compliments I got was when I was
in. When I was at Ignite, somebody knows me from LinkedIn,
they're like, oh, my God, you. You're everywhere.
You know, and it's funny. And, you know, we get emails
and. And it's like, you know, this is a ghost for you and your team.
And I'm like, I don't think they. The team's not as large as they think.
I take it as a compliment. It is, you know. Yeah.
So. And I'm excited because, you know, again,
we're going to. Sometime in the spring, we'll will have season 10 of
Data Driven, if you can believe that. Wow,
is that crazy? I know.
And that's like nine more seasons than I
thought we'd have.
And I didn't expect us to get nearly to this many episodes. I mean, we
were excited, don't get me wrong. And we, you know, we got out there and
did the best that we could at the time. And I thought we had a
fair start. You know, we. We lined up some
excellent guests. I think we nailed that to start with.
And that may be the secret sauce that propelled the podcast
through to episode 400 here and beyond.
So, yeah, 101 of the best.
One of the next logistic challenges, logistical challenges I gotta address
is scheduling. Right.
Calendaring. We. We did use Microsoft bookings.
I want to keep our clean language rating, so I won't give people my opinion
of there. There's two versions of bookings.
There's the version that, the way you think it's going to work or the way
the advertiser works and the way it actually works. Yeah.
And so I actually switched back to calendarly,
so as soon as I get that fixed up, that'll be on the site. I
know we have a lot of folks reaching out to be in the show. Don't
take it personally. It's just. It's been. I was talking
to somebody this the other day, like, between, like mid November when
the water heater broke till basically this week. I feel like I've been,
like, running behind, you know, trying to catch up, but.
But Again, thanks to AI, I was able to crank out over 30,000
lines of code in the spite of this. Right. That,
you know, and I. I think we all have had those projects that have been
back burner ideas that you think I'll get to it someday. And
someday never comes. Right, Right, right.
You know, if you look at a calendar, there's seven days of the week. None
of them are someday. I mean.
Very true. So thank you.
I want to say thank you to everyone who helped us get to 400 episodes.
It's pretty wild. Like, I remember listening to
podcasts just, you know, when I was just a young lad living in
Richmond, I was listening to.net rocks and they
were already at, like, episode. I think by then they were like, at episode
three, 400 they were up there. And I was
like, wow, man, that must be some achievement to get to that many episodes.
Not just, you know, having a podcast and doing that, but getting to that
point. And here we are. I
know, it just seems surreal that we, you know, that we got
here and we definitely
could not have made it here this far without our
audience. Y' all rock. And we do really
appreciate y' all hanging with us through all this. We
had, I'd say we had a couple of challenges with.
With, like, scheduling. Certainly you mentioned that, the schedule with the
calendaring part. But even there was.
There were a couple of times where we had trouble getting guests lined up
and the number of shows being put out lapsed.
And part of that was just due to stuff
going on in my friend's life that happens.
It certainly wasn't intentional. And
one thing I took away from it, even then, I was surprised by how
many people would reach out to me and say, when's the next episode of Data
Driven coming out? You know, it weren't mean or anything about it. It
wasn't accusations. It was all right, right. Lines of gosh,
you know, we missed the show. We miss hearing from you guys, and that's
Good. That's nice. That's nice. It was a compliment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We
are going to work on that. Like even if it means that we have. We
had Candace as sub in for Andy. I don't want
people to think that, you know, if Andy doesn't appear for a while, there's nothing
personal. It's just that he couldn't make it. No, right. Like I don't want to
start that. I don't want. Candace is a lot more strict with
the scheduling, so she's effectively
joined our team. So she's a lot stricter with the stress. You know,
she's awesome. She's
joined our team and you know, so if Andy can't make it, she'll show up
and maybe we'll have a few more surprise like stand in guests.
Johnny Carson did it. Yeah. Work for him.
Yeah, he did pretty well. Most kids today won't know who Johnny. Carson
is, but he was the host
before Jay Leonard. And you know what? Some kids won't know who Jay Le. I
was gonna say. Was it Jimmy Kimmel?
No, it was. Who. Who has guest hosted,
I think on the Tonight show for a while. He did. He did.
And then. Yeah. Who got the Tonight Show? Was it. It was David Letterman? Was
it Conan? No, it was Conan and then Leno took it
back and then now it's somebody else. I think it's.
He used to be on Saturday Night Live. Yeah. I don't know who's doing
it now. It's been so long since I. I don't stay awake that late at
night anymore, Frank. And you. Only I know you don't either because
there's been plenty of times when I've been here, been in, in the office
here at like four in the morning. And
I'm texting with you. I'm gonna check. Yeah. Get a chat, a
text. This is Frank. Who
has the Tonight Show. Now I gotta know now who runs.
Yeah, it's. I can see the guy's face. I
can't think of it. It's Jimmy Fallon.
Jimmy Fallon, that's right.
So apparently it used to be here. The. The former host was Jimmy
Fallon. Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan o', Brien, Steve Allen, Jack Par.
Wow. Yeah, that goes. Jack Parr.
Steve Allen. Jack Parr. Like our parents. Generation would
know them. Yeah. Yeah. So
that's wild. I don't know how we got on that tangent.
It's kind of what we do. I really would like to start making money with
it so we could have an off road race, rally, sponsorship Car.
Imagine like this data driven on it. It's like, why do you do that? Because
we're always going off track. But dumb, dumb.
That was Steve Gainsworth's idea actually. I think he said that.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Stu and I are in a
very similar place because he posted recently, recently like
four to six weeks ago, about how he's largely
doing work outside the Microsoft data ecosystem.
I think you and I were talking about that and I'm largely, I'm
largely outside the Microsoft ecosystem these days.
I'm lagging behind you guys, but I'm moving that direction.
I'm telling you, man, I know you finally installed Linux
and you did that earlier on when you got your new laptop.
True. I'm, you know, I'm
not going to bet use this space to bash Windows 11. I already have done
that on my LinkedIn newsletter multiple times.
But our next episode, which is set to air, recorded with Andrew
Brust, who is a rd, which is like a
Microsoft mvp. And he, we, we
have an interesting chat about fabric and kind of all of
that. So. Okay. Yeah, I'm really sorry I
missed that recording. Yeah. He says to say hello. He says that at the end
of the episode. Tell Andy I said hello. But we definitely, we got to have
him back on. Right. Because there's only so much you could talk about fabric. Right.
There are definitely a lot of things I wanted to say about fabric that. But
anyway. But I think fabric is
in the right direction in terms of how
you do that. But I, I think though that the world at large,
and this could be my bias is
it's becoming more and more about private AI, local AI,
I think in a very real sense. Right. You know,
because that, that was my number one goal was to be able to run an
LLM locally. Right. And then after that
I want to learn more about how I could train
that LLM, you know, kind of shift its focus
even. And you know, I totally get it.
We, we have some clients at Enterprise Data and Analytics
and some, I guess
I'll use the word partners, businesses that we're
engaged with or communicating about engaging with.
And I learned from one group that is in Europe
that, you know, there are a number of countries where part of the
culture, the technology culture in that country is very
much anti cloud. And it's, it's not paranoia,
it's just a lack of trust. I don't think
the tech industry, big tech industry has done a lot to
engender trust. If you look at. Totally agree, you know, some of
the, the privacy violations that have happened across different
social networks and things like that. I can totally understand it.
And you also remember, like, if you're in the United States,
you have your choice of multiple cloud providers across multiple
time zones. There are not
Microsoft or AWS or Google data centers in every country in the world,
which means your data has to leave your country. Which it turns
out that reality strike. We should call this
phase of the Internet reality strikes back. The
whole idea of the cyberspace is its own
independent, separate thing is not held true. Right. Because
at the end of the day, everything virtual has to exist
somewhere on planet Earth, right? Yeah. What will be
interesting is that if they. If the talk of building,
you know, data centers in orbit becomes true,
that will be interesting. It'll be interesting, right? Will they.
Will they flag them? Will it work like Merchant? I don't know anything about space
law, but, you know, I would imagine
it would probably be kind of like maritime law in a sense. Right? Like, would
it. Would the data centers be. Would they be
flagged? Would they be like, you know, this is operating under US law,
this is operating under, you know, EU
law. That'll be interesting to see how. Interesting
point. Yeah. See how it all works out. It's almost like we should have a
podcast about future facing tech and AI.
Foreshadow much. Foreshadow much.
But once I get Podzi finished and I have a
nice. I have an even smoother workflow,
the barriers that I currently have will no longer
apply. So if you think we're doing a lot barriers,
we don't need no stinking barriers.
So with that in mind, I have multiple
text windows, like people needing to reach me.
Definitely. Stay tuned. We'll talk more about Podzi in the future episode.
And Andy's. Andy's still with us. And
we'll look forward to wrapping up season nine and then kicking
off season 10. It's going to be
awesome, Frank, 100%. And thank you, everyone. Once again,
we'll let Bailey finish the show. That wraps up
episode 400 of Data Driven. Thanks to everyone who's
listened, shared, and supported the show over the years. It truly
means a lot. We've got more coming as we close out Season
9 and head into Season 10. Until then, thanks for
listening and we'll catch you on the next one.