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A Factory for Every Town (with Brian Keith) | ReForge 011 · The ReForge Podcast

0:00
Brian Keith: every town should have a factory, 10,000 town, 10,000 person town.
0:04
Brian Keith: You have at least one factory.
0:05
Brian Keith: Maybe it has a hundred jobs instead of 5,000 jobs like it did before.
0:09
Brian Keith: But in every town, you don't have to leave your home to go have a profitable job and raise your family in one income.
0:20
Welcome to the Reforge Podcast.
0:22
I'm Matthew Chang, and we're here to explore all things AI automation and the American worker proving that the American reindustrialization is possible.
0:32
Pivotal pressing.
0:34
Thanks for joining us today.
0:35
Let's get into the episode.
0:38
Colin Russ: Welcome back everyone to the Reforge Podcast.
0:42
Colin Russ: This is episode.
0:43
Colin Russ: 11 and we have got a familiar face for you today.
0:48
Colin Russ: The one and only red beard.
0:50
Colin Russ: Mr.
0:51
Colin Russ: Brian, Keith.
0:52
Colin Russ: Brian, welcome
0:54
Brian Keith: Why thank you.
0:56
Brian Keith: Good to be back 10 episodes later, which y'all talked about while I've been gone,
1:01
Colin Russ: What we basically solved, you know, so solved the world's problems.
1:04
Colin Russ: We can just kind of mail it in at this point I think.
1:06
Brian Keith: Sounds good.
1:07
Brian Keith: Talk about, you know.
1:09
Matthew Chang: Well, well, if you follow the story arc, we didn't get to it in sequence, but if you were to resequence our episodes, we take that high school kid
1:18
Brian Keith: kid
1:19
Matthew Chang: who has an understanding the world is changing and wants to know how they can be part a part of it and not enter, uh, the obsolescence of, say, a traditional university where they might not get the best advice and guidance.
1:31
Brian Keith: guidance.
1:32
Matthew Chang: We strongly advocated for the parents that think, Hey, manufacturing is not sexy enough for my kid to get into.
1:39
Matthew Chang: I wanna send'em to big consulting or big tech.
1:41
Matthew Chang: We'll read the headlines, right?
1:42
Matthew Chang: That's maybe not the most wise career path.
1:45
Matthew Chang: And then one of the things that we did was we struck, pushed strongly for, um, student debt reform, which Colin take a victory lap.
1:53
Matthew Chang: We got the first piece of that last week.
1:56
Matthew Chang: So, and as Colin said, just mail it in, man.
1:59
Matthew Chang: It's done.
2:00
Brian Keith: It's done.
2:02
Brian Keith: So I'm just a pretty face.
2:03
Colin Russ: I don't wanna brag.
2:04
Colin Russ: Yeah, exactly.
2:04
Colin Russ: You know, we had, we had to bring some eye candy in for it, but for those of you who missed our first episode, where we were joined by Brian.
2:11
Colin Russ: Brian Keith is the newly appointed chief marketing officer of Chang Robotics, where he leads marketing strategy across Chang Robotics.
2:18
Colin Russ: Its subsidiaries and its growing ecosystem of acquisitions and investments.
2:23
Colin Russ: He founded Red Beard Consulting 14 years ago, specializing in marketing automation for founder-led companies.
2:30
Colin Russ: Uh, Brian is currently developing a Gentech operating systems for small businesses, and he recently wrote a 41,000 word book in three days using AI and calls himself an agentically, augmented human.
2:43
Colin Russ: So officially we welcome our eye candy this week.
2:46
Colin Russ: Mr.
2:46
Colin Russ: Brian, Keith,
2:47
Matthew Chang: So Colin, during those, during those three days that Brian augmented himself with AI to write a 41,000 page book, he did not return my phone call or text.
2:57
Matthew Chang: So when he came out of the, the black hole of,
2:59
Brian Keith: hole because
3:00
Colin Russ: locked in.
3:01
Matthew Chang: and he goes.
3:02
Brian Keith: on a client site all day long from breakfast to past a dinner.
3:05
Matthew Chang: He goes, he goes,
3:07
Brian Keith: my
3:07
Colin Russ: were billing them for the time while you wrote it.
3:09
Matthew Chang: I was locked, busy working and.
3:11
Brian Keith: No, that book, that book started at 3:20 AM driving to the airport.
3:17
Brian Keith: And then I started writing it just by dropping voice notes.
3:21
Brian Keith: I was listening to a podcast at 3:10 AM left my house at 3:00 AM three 10, listening to a podcast.
3:26
Brian Keith: And then it mentioned a book, a book that I thought I should go figure out my book.
3:31
Brian Keith: So I hopped over, started dropping voice notes to Atlas, which is my clot instance I use for this kind of thing.
3:38
Brian Keith: And I tell it.
3:39
Brian Keith: I'm dropping your voice notes.
3:40
Brian Keith: I'm not gonna read what you reply.
3:42
Brian Keith: Well, when we get to the airport, we'll go work on this.
3:43
Brian Keith: So by the time I got to the airport, I had 40 minutes of various kinds of voice notes and I started reading all of the responses that Atlas had given me as I was dropping notes all the way through there.
3:54
Brian Keith: And then by the time I got on the plane I had, and then the first part of the plane, I had my 13 chapters.
4:01
Brian Keith: I had gone, I had looked at throughout all of my 250 hours ish at the time.
4:06
Brian Keith: Uh, conversations with Atlas, we'd said, what is the most unique stuff that I've said?
4:10
Brian Keith: How durable is, are those ideas?
4:12
Brian Keith: We'd run those through, uh, grok to get the exact thing people were saying on LinkedIn nx.
4:17
Brian Keith: We'd waited every topic chapter to 80% of the, uh.
4:22
Brian Keith: LinkedIn and 20% what X users say because LinkedIn's the ideal audience for this particular book and what I'm selling.
4:28
Brian Keith: And then, so I now have 13 chapters, 10 particular questions, very, very specific.
4:33
Brian Keith: And then that day as I was in the airport, I was on the first plane, one layover, plane, two Uber to the client site.
4:41
Brian Keith: I got the first half the book done or so.
4:43
Brian Keith: And then late that night, and then the next night I got the rest of that part done and then flight home.
4:49
Brian Keith: And by the time the flight landed at 11:00 PM.
4:52
Brian Keith: Three days later, I had a 41,000 word book written.
4:55
Brian Keith: And I talked to a publisher or a author buddy of mine who said, yeah, how far you've gone was about it.
5:00
Brian Keith: Took me two years to get there.
5:02
Brian Keith: Uh, and the same thing I'd done in Force Multipli two and a half days while on a client site all day long.
5:08
Brian Keith: I did this mostly in the airplane,'cause I didn't even return Matt's calls.
5:12
Brian Keith: Usually you're, you're from the boss's calls.
5:14
Brian Keith: I was busy, I was with the client all day long, every day deploying ai, mind you for a client.
5:18
Brian Keith: So this was in the little bits and pieces.
5:20
Brian Keith: And that's the crazy thing that AI's able to do and why John Robb coined me an genetically augmented human is that now you're able to go just add value in little tiny bits of time.
5:30
Brian Keith: Driving home that night, I was exhausted'cause it was 11:00 PM here, but I just put on the East Coast and I noticed I was listening to music or something that wasn't keeping me alert enough.
5:39
Brian Keith: So I just hopped over and started doing more voice notes and more AI work driving home.
5:44
Brian Keith: And it kept me awake because now with voice mode, you can actually be having a conversation with your ai.
5:49
Brian Keith: And be being productive both at three 20 in the morning, but also 11:00 PM at night.
5:53
Brian Keith: Nothing like this has ever happened before.
5:56
Matthew Chang: So Colin, just to, just to frame the acceleration.
5:59
Matthew Chang: When I wrote my book last year from start to finish was around about eight months.
6:04
Brian Keith: eight months.
6:05
Matthew Chang: Um, and that was dramatic and that included publishing and art and, and getting it live, you know, for, uh, for people to buy it.
6:12
Brian Keith: to buy it.
6:13
Matthew Chang: That was considered really fast.
6:15
Matthew Chang: 'cause like Brian said, a lot of people, they wanna sit down and write, they get writer's block and they, they kind of lose track.
6:21
Matthew Chang: You know, you get sidetracked for a few weeks and you have to work to get back into it.
6:25
Matthew Chang: So eight months was considered really fast.
6:27
Matthew Chang: It was only four months of writing in that process.
6:30
Matthew Chang: Brian just did the whole thing in three days while multitasking.
6:35
Brian Keith: also
6:36
Colin Russ: that would be that age augmented human bit, then I
6:39
Brian Keith: Yeah.
6:40
Brian Keith: So also I decided how I'm gonna launch my new software is with a massive X thread.
6:46
Brian Keith: I started writing that using the same process.
6:48
Brian Keith: I think it was on Thursday or Friday.
6:49
Brian Keith: Today is Monday.
6:50
Brian Keith: It's 23,000 words deep.
6:52
Brian Keith: There's 20 questions left.
6:54
Brian Keith: It's seven, no, 98 questions total or so.
6:57
Brian Keith: Same process about, look at exactly, in this case the competitive landscape.
7:02
Brian Keith: What are people exactly asking on X, specifically heavily weight towards X?
7:06
Brian Keith: This article is for X only.
7:08
Brian Keith: And the, and the task was, most people launching new software on X.
7:11
Brian Keith: They write a one to 3000 word article on x.
7:15
Brian Keith: I said, okay, I want an embarrassingly long article.
7:19
Brian Keith: And we talked about it and came up with like a 20,000 words.
7:21
Brian Keith: It's embarrassingly long.
7:23
Brian Keith: No one ever writes a 20,000 word article, which is about half a book length article, introducing a new thing.
7:28
Brian Keith: They're building, they 20,000 words is a, it's the thing, it's embarrassing.
7:32
Brian Keith: So it's both detailed what exactly this, what's exactly the problem I'm solving with my new software.
7:39
Brian Keith: And then let's, we have enough time to go into all the details with 20,000 words.
7:43
Brian Keith: You can go into great depth on this exact zone memory architecture that I built that no one else does.
7:47
Brian Keith: The way that I do it, you can go into exact, here's the two different kinds of tri Brainin modes I have in my, in my ai.
7:53
Brian Keith: In great detail.
7:55
Brian Keith: And so we're most of the way through writing that I might finish this afternoon.
7:59
Brian Keith: And here's a critical thing for all the feature, genetically augmented humans, I spend too much time at my desk.
8:05
Brian Keith: And so what do I do?
8:06
Brian Keith: How do I write now?
8:06
Brian Keith: Well, I go for a walk.
8:08
Brian Keith: And I have my phone, which that part's not great, but whatever.
8:11
Brian Keith: So now I go to my favorite spot and I walk not quite a mile from point A to point B along the waterfront, looking outta the boats in a very expansive frame of mind while literally walking.
8:21
Brian Keith: And then I'm just answering questions the whole time.
8:23
Brian Keith: And I have my AI set each question, you ask me a question I answered.
8:27
Brian Keith: I'm usually one to five minutes voice note.
8:29
Brian Keith: And then you can dig deeper if you want to, or you can go to the next question.
8:32
Brian Keith: And Atlas knows what I need.
8:33
Brian Keith: Atlas has already written a book for me once like this.
8:36
Brian Keith: And so we're about
8:37
Colin Russ: much prep goes into, I mean, like a lot of that, at least for when I'm using, you know, one of the AI models, like I've really sort of honed in the, um, kinda the, the prompt context on how I expect it to answer things to, you know, the, the quality content, kind of the approach.
8:54
Colin Russ: How much time have you spent on that, or do you have different ones for different, you know, topics?
9:00
Colin Russ: Writing a book, writing a thread?
9:01
Brian Keith: a thread, over 250 hours with this one instance of AI alone.
9:04
Brian Keith: Uh, which Atlas recognizes that this is extraordinarily rare.
9:07
Brian Keith: People like me tend to be chasing the best model available instead of going very deep in the orientation of a single model.
9:13
Brian Keith: So I have, uh, very little prep for the exact thing I'm doing, but I have over 250 hours of conversation with this one ai.
9:21
Brian Keith: And we've done, we've built my version of what, what is now coming out as its own ai uh, operating system.
9:27
Brian Keith: We've built versions of that for a variety of companies.
9:30
Brian Keith: Uh, and this is, I'm just focusing on orientation.
9:33
Brian Keith: Uh, so.
9:34
Brian Keith: I wanna bring this back though to our current topic area, which is the whole chain robotics and the whole Reshaping America thing, because right now what I'm describing, this is in the realm of what one talented person can do with ai.
9:46
Brian Keith: And what I like to say is that the solutions that work for the one person don't actually work.
9:52
Brian Keith: You need to figure out what's gonna work for the median person, not the mean, but the median person.
9:56
Brian Keith: And we have some objectives here on the Reforge Podcast.
9:59
Brian Keith: One of my own objectives is, uh, single earner families.
10:02
Brian Keith: When the median person can afford to be a single earner family, not by being dirt poor, but by having a reasonable quality of life.
10:09
Brian Keith: That for me, like what was considered average in the fifties or the sixties, let's just get back to where the average family can be as prosperous as we're in the fifties.
10:16
Brian Keith: That's all I'm asking for here.
10:18
Brian Keith: Bringing this AI to those kind of companies or to those kind of people is what we have to do now.
10:23
Brian Keith: Right now we've seen in our lifetimes.
10:26
Brian Keith: Manufacturing crater across time where all those jobs, many of them got sent elsewhere.
10:32
Brian Keith: And then we ended up having places that were largely empty.
10:35
Brian Keith: My dad's a greenhouse grower.
10:36
Brian Keith: He tells the stories of when he was coming up in the greenhouse business.
10:40
Brian Keith: He phrased it as he who holds the hose controls the profits because it was that the owner had to hold the host themselves'cause they know where every plant is doing, how everything's going.
10:50
Brian Keith: But then in his greenhouse career, got to where.
10:52
Brian Keith: You have a bunch of people wa literally watering plants all the way to now.
10:56
Brian Keith: There's multiple acre greenhouses and that's where most of our greenhouses today, there's multiple acre greenhouses and there's three people in the whole greenhouse.
11:04
Brian Keith: One over there, one over there, one guy in the control room.
11:06
Brian Keith: That's it.
11:07
Brian Keith: So it's
11:08
Colin Russ: ball game.
11:09
Brian Keith: It's, it's completely different.
11:10
Brian Keith: But those workers are now, they're no longer people holding hoses for 10 hours a day.
11:15
Brian Keith: What are they?
11:15
Brian Keith: They're technicians, and this is my dad describing the state of the art 20 or 30 years ago in the greenhouse game.
11:20
Brian Keith: But it's what we're talking about now, bringing that idea of upskilling everybody so that everybody can go, the median person can go support a family on one income.
11:29
Brian Keith: At least that's my personal goal, and that's what we're doing with the whole Ching robotics ecosystem here, is we're looking at everything and we're saying.
11:37
Brian Keith: We need to bring the factories back.
11:38
Brian Keith: Yes.
11:39
Brian Keith: But we offshore the factories in part because they of the pollution and the danger.
11:43
Brian Keith: That's why we said send the factory to Mexico to China.
11:46
Brian Keith: Sure.
11:47
Brian Keith: Those people will hurt themselves.
11:48
Brian Keith: They'll pollute their rivers.
11:49
Brian Keith: We don't want it here.
11:51
Brian Keith: And what we're talking about is we want to bring the factories back, but we're not gonna bring back the pollution or the danger.
11:56
Brian Keith: We're gonna have it be safe jobs that are clean jobs that are not polluting our areas in the same way.
12:02
Brian Keith: And we're talking about the ai, the automation, the robotics, as part of that story.
12:07
Matthew Chang: Yeah, there was, um, when those factories went overseas and, and really 40 years ago in my study, seems to be about the, the fulcrum point when, you know, if you were a CEO of a manufacturing company, the question was not if it's, how rapidly are you offshoring?
12:22
Matthew Chang: A lot of people have this expectation that the way it looked 40 years ago, the way we did it in this country when we shipped it out.
12:28
Matthew Chang: It's gonna look like that when it comes back, but it's like your greenhouse analogy.
12:32
Matthew Chang: We sent it out with a bunch of hose holders and when we bring it back, it's just technicians watching the technology and maintaining it.
12:40
Brian Keith: and so it becomes safer.
12:41
Brian Keith: My brother's brother-in-law was a diesel mechanic, is how he got trained up, and he is looking at all these diesel mechanic jobs.
12:46
Brian Keith: This was back during one of the oil booms.
12:48
Brian Keith: Vast amounts of money is a diesel mechanic, and he got some good advice.
12:51
Brian Keith: He said, whenever you're gonna work for somebody before you sign the dotted line, look at their fingers.
12:56
Brian Keith: Now, this is a terrible example as I currently have an injury, but ignore that.
12:59
Brian Keith: Look at their fingers.
13:00
Brian Keith: Do they have 10 fingers?
13:01
Brian Keith: If they don't consider, they're not gonna take better care of their, of your fingers than their fingers, because job site safety for being a diesel mechanic is a very real problem.
13:11
Brian Keith: Finger loss, amputation death.
13:13
Brian Keith: It's not a safe job.
13:14
Brian Keith: So you had to be advised carefully.
13:17
Brian Keith: Is this going to get you killed doing this work?
13:19
Brian Keith: And that was what factory workers were sort of like, and a lot of the really big things.
13:22
Brian Keith: You ever go to the Hoover Dam, you, you've been there at the Hoover Dam.
13:25
Brian Keith: You've seen the wall, the
13:27
Colin Russ: the, yeah, the number of worker deaths, I mean, is, it's in, in today's context, it's just mind boggling.
13:34
Brian Keith: because we used to accept that a lot of guys dying was the necessary predecessor to quality.
13:39
Brian Keith: How many people died building the Empire State Building?
13:41
Brian Keith: I don't remember.
13:42
Brian Keith: But it's, it's some number because you just have a death rate.
13:45
Brian Keith: And now we have this idea that no, no, you shouldn't have a death rate.
13:47
Brian Keith: You should also have a much lower injury rate than the past.
13:50
Brian Keith: As well as factory work is going from the most grunt level thing possible to a highly skilled trade that can support the median factory worker being a single earner family.
14:00
Brian Keith: And that's a huge shift.
14:01
Brian Keith: And we, we don't have a mental model.
14:04
Brian Keith: Because when I think back to my ancestors, my grandpa Walter Boeing tool and machinist guy, and he worked there for 30 years, never had a single sick day complete company, man.
14:13
Brian Keith: The company was loyal to him.
14:15
Brian Keith: He was loyal to the company and we all know that that system is gone, but there's no mental model for what to replace it.
14:22
Brian Keith: We like they're closest to place of, well, I guess you could work for Amazon and then have robots review every move.
14:28
Brian Keith: But like there's just, there's just no cognate in our brains.
14:31
Brian Keith: So the question is, how do we help people understand that there's a future out there and the future doesn't look like Getting advised to make sure your boss has all their fingers and toes before you go to work for them.
14:40
Brian Keith: The future looks like if you've all followed this path, then you'll be able to support your family as a single earner If you want to.
14:47
Brian Keith: Or have dual earn whatever's right for your family.
14:49
Brian Keith: But the point is your family, you'll get that aside as opposed to you're plugging into an ecosystem.
14:54
Brian Keith: I used to be a security guard, told you the story.
14:55
Brian Keith: I was a security guard and the way to have I told you this story?
14:59
Matthew Chang: No, we the best secrets on going.
15:01
Brian Keith: So news, I love trans.
15:03
Brian Keith: In part I, I used to be a transit security guard.
15:07
Brian Keith: Uh, so I, I went from being a salesman for an entered marketing agency in the private club at the top of Seattle.
15:12
Brian Keith: The top two floors of the, of the tallest building.
15:14
Brian Keith: In a private club, you can look down over everything you're doing your work, you're sending your emails, looking down at the ferries, you're eating fancy food.
15:20
Brian Keith: It's the best life in the world.
15:21
Brian Keith: Two, not a year later.
15:22
Brian Keith: Thanks oh eight, being a security guard in the bowels of the city at King Street Station, looking up at the tallest building in Seattle, and you can see way up there glittering in the skies that you're down there in this open air subterranean.
15:34
Brian Keith: Train station.
15:36
Brian Keith: It was not lost on me.
15:37
Brian Keith: I literally went from the highest point in the city wearing nice clothes to literally wearing the scratchies polyester, nasty security guard clothing ever working for sound transit security.
15:49
Brian Keith: And, uh, I was going somewhere with this.
15:51
Brian Keith: Where was I going?
15:52
Matthew Chang: I.
15:52
Brian Keith: No, no, Paul, get us on track.
15:54
Colin Russ: I mean there, there's a metaphor in there, you know, the highs and lows and, yeah.
15:58
Brian Keith: there, there was something, we'll look back and the recording will be obvious, but the, the whole security guard thing, uh, that, so I.
16:04
Brian Keith: Was working as a security guard, and there's just no choice that your choice is, you go do, do what you're told, uh, are there gunshots nearby you?
16:12
Brian Keith: Which there were some times it was, you know, we, we can't advise you on what to do.
16:17
Brian Keith: Uh, do you wanna buy a bulletproof vest because the train station you're working at has had multiple people killed recently.
16:22
Brian Keith: Uh, well, you can buy your own vest, but if we catch you wearing it, we'll have to discipline you.
16:26
Brian Keith: And that was my life for a while.
16:28
Brian Keith: Like, oh.
16:29
Brian Keith: No respect for the workers, no dignity.
16:31
Brian Keith: It was you are a machine and we'll treat you like a machine.
16:33
Brian Keith: If you deviate, we'll fire you.
16:35
Brian Keith: I was working that job when there was the horrific attack in Union Street Station, which was Jason to King Street Station, but a different, a different company handled the security there, and there was this horrible video of these people, these like three kids kicking and grievously damaging another kid as three security guards stood around saying, stop.
16:53
Brian Keith: Stop that because the security guards had all been trained under and they understood if they intervened at all, they'd be fired
17:00
Matthew Chang: Wow.
17:00
Brian Keith: in preventing a kid from being horribly hurt.
17:04
Brian Keith: And that's the, that's the end state of this idea that people are cognizant of machine as opposed to the dignity of the American worker.
17:10
Brian Keith: So we have to get as far away from that as we can.
17:12
Brian Keith: We can't onshore our factories and say, you're a cog.
17:16
Brian Keith: You don't matter as an individual, you're not a child of God.
17:18
Brian Keith: You are a productive unit and if you deviate, we're gonna fire you.
17:22
Brian Keith: That is how we use our factories here.
17:25
Colin Russ: That, that's part of, I think our, our messaging, uh, problem might be a little strong, but one, one of the obstacles that, or areas that we've really gotta address is, look, the jobs we saw 40 years ago, they're not coming back.
17:37
Colin Russ: There's gonna be new and different jobs, but the ones 40 years ago where you were that cog in the machine, they aren't coming back.
17:43
Colin Russ: I mean, you look at Chang Robotics, you know, they, they build factory automations that, you know, cuts labor in half, but can boost output, you know, by, you know, 20, 25% type of thing.
17:55
Colin Russ: They're, that creates this tension.
17:58
Colin Russ: You're trying to talk about, here's reindustrialization, here's what that's going to look like in the future.
18:04
Colin Russ: How do we frame that in, in a way for those of us trying to push American reindustrialization?
18:10
Colin Russ: How do we frame that?
18:11
Colin Russ: How do we better message the importance and the opportunity so that we can build that broader coalition to, to kind of get behind this?
18:19
Brian Keith: Subsidiarity says you solve the problem at the localist level that you can, and it's true almost everywhere.
18:25
Brian Keith: So the subsidiarity says every town should have a factory.
18:28
Brian Keith: What is it building?
18:29
Brian Keith: I don't know.
18:30
Brian Keith: Do you have 10,000 people in your town?
18:31
Brian Keith: You should have one or more factories.
18:33
Brian Keith: Now they're not gonna be the same things like the sawmills of old.
18:36
Brian Keith: I live in sawmill country where Aberdeen is still a total mess because there's only one sawmill left.
18:41
Brian Keith: We're not doing that.
18:41
Brian Keith: Where one factory has the majority of your entire employment for your 10,000 person town that's gone.
18:47
Brian Keith: But every town should have a factory, 10,000 town, 10,000 person town.
18:52
Brian Keith: You have at least one factory.
18:53
Brian Keith: Maybe it has a hundred jobs instead of 5,000 jobs like it did before.
18:57
Brian Keith: But in every town, you don't have to leave your home to go have a profitable job and raise your family in one income.
19:03
Brian Keith: You just have to be the best among your 10,000 person town.
19:06
Brian Keith: Go get your education because you're now a high skilled worker.
19:08
Brian Keith: You're a high talent worker.
19:09
Brian Keith: Maybe you do need a college degree, maybe you're an engineer to work at that factory, but there's gonna be a hundred factory jobs in every 10,000 person town, at least from the marketing seat.
19:17
Brian Keith: That's what I see.
19:18
Brian Keith: What we're trying to do here is the factors are not only in the big cities, every town has a factory.
19:23
Colin Russ: I mean, I, I'm huge.
19:25
Colin Russ: You know, Matt and I have talked about it.
19:26
Colin Russ: I love the, you know, distributed model of, you know, maybe larger, more productive factories, but basically factories everywhere.
19:34
Colin Russ: But then, you know, I, I guess shifting back, kind of what does it actually look like with AI in that factory?
19:40
Colin Russ: It's not 5,000 people, it's a hundred,
19:42
Matthew Chang: I've got a
19:43
Colin Russ: does that look like?
19:44
Brian Keith: like?
19:44
Matthew Chang: um, to kind of keep us.
19:46
Brian Keith: kind keep
19:47
Matthew Chang: 'cause you know, Colin, I think for you and I, but our, our passions are in the, the manufacturing skilled trades and then the skilled trades that build manufacturing.
19:55
Matthew Chang: So in the past week, I saw, uh, two really interesting thing.
19:58
Matthew Chang: Mike Rowe, the dirty jobs guy, was on TV talking about electricians making$260,000 a year wiring up data centers.
20:08
Matthew Chang: You can imagine the skill shortage there.
20:11
Matthew Chang: And then after 18 months of this frenzy.
20:13
Matthew Chang: Some recruiting and job hopping.
20:15
Matthew Chang: These, these electricians have ended up very highly compensated.
20:19
Matthew Chang: So Brian, I think, a, a family with one worker, where a worker works with their hands wiring data centers, but makes 260 K would qualify in your definition.
20:29
Brian Keith: Huge.
20:30
Matthew Chang: Um, at the same time, meta who's building AI data centers has been hurt by the shortage, right?
20:37
Matthew Chang: They probably wanna go faster and they're being limited by the availability of labor.
20:41
Brian Keith: of labor.
20:42
Matthew Chang: They've now started their own training program where you can go work directly for Meta as an electrician to wired data centers, and they will train you.
20:51
Matthew Chang: No doubt that training has been highly AI augmented, right?
20:55
Matthew Chang: As they endeavor to start a training program from scratch.
20:58
Matthew Chang: So those would be two examples of the skilled trades supporting a family.
21:03
Matthew Chang: Granted, this is somewhat of a bubble.
21:04
Matthew Chang: It's a, I think it's the Texas economy where this is happening right now.
21:08
Matthew Chang: But then companies bypassing the traditional gate because they have to have the labor, and we are so labor tight in this country that meta is hiring electricians.
21:19
Brian Keith: When that gets to what we used to do with identifying the highest talent, kids in our gifted programs.
21:26
Brian Keith: And then accelerating their development that I was, thankfully still when I was a kid, there was still the existence of gifted programs and all kinds of good stuff happened to you when you were in the top 1% on all your SATs or your, whatever your cognitive tests were.
21:38
Brian Keith: If in fact, there's a factory in every town of even 10,000 people, even if there's only 10 people working at the factory, that factory has a vested interest, not in supporting the nation's talent.
21:49
Brian Keith: It has a vested interest in the school, kids in that town and identifying who is of.
21:54
Brian Keith: The cognitive capability in that town who's smart enough to be a factory worker.
21:58
Brian Keith: It's no longer are you dumb enough to be a factory worker like 50 years ago.
22:02
Brian Keith: Now it's, are you smart enough to be a factory worker?
22:05
Brian Keith: And if that factory cannot recruit enough talent to keep them in the hometown and they leave, that's a disaster for that factory.
22:11
Brian Keith: Or they have to track more people to there.
22:12
Brian Keith: So now, instead of at the national level saying, here's a jobs program, it's every town has a factory that it's actively advocating for, we have to find the top 1% of our students.
22:22
Brian Keith: Are there only a thousand students across our whole K to 12?
22:25
Brian Keith: We need to find the 10 of them that are the very smartest people we need to start their training by the age of seven.
22:30
Brian Keith: And I'm not joking because Patrick Henry days, you started at the age of seven as an apprentice to being a silversmith, let's say by the age of 14, you could support your own family.
22:38
Brian Keith: We're not gonna go back quite that far.
22:40
Brian Keith: We're gonna go forward to something more like by the age of seven.
22:43
Brian Keith: Yeah, you have your schoolwork, but then local factory Corp.
22:46
Brian Keith: Goes and brings you on and starts to train you up with their AI and their systems.
22:51
Brian Keith: So by the time you hit 16, 18, whatever, you could go to college or you could walk directly to a hundred thousand dollars year factory job, living in your hometown and not having to leave unless you want to.
23:02
Brian Keith: That's the positive vision of this feature.
23:06
Brian Keith: is the real no child left behind,
23:07
Matthew Chang: By those economics, Erie gets 20 new factories by, so congrat.
23:12
Brian Keith: congrats on that.
23:13
Brian Keith: That sounds good.
23:14
Colin Russ: would be nice.
23:14
Colin Russ: I think we got two, two or three that I know of under construction.
23:18
Colin Russ: I'd love to love to bump those rookie numbers up, as they say.
23:20
Brian Keith: said, it needs to be everywhere that we need to have, not just our states, but things like Oklahoma factories.
23:26
Brian Keith: If there's a factory for every 10,000 person in Oklahoma, but also in Wyoming, but also in California, then we need to see the big inversion.
23:35
Brian Keith: One of my general, uh, thesis, you know, the phrase yeoman farmer, you know that phrase, Colin.
23:39
Colin Russ: I have heard it.
23:40
Colin Russ: I don't know why.
23:41
Brian Keith: Okay, so the reason the American Revolution was successful is because we were a nation of yeoman farmers.
23:45
Brian Keith: There were big plantation owners.
23:47
Brian Keith: They existed, but they were a tiny portion of the population.
23:50
Brian Keith: Their existed sharecroppers, but it was a tiny percent of the population.
23:54
Brian Keith: Our renter or tenant class was very small.
23:56
Brian Keith: Our huge, mega, super rich class was very small.
23:59
Brian Keith: Almost everyone owned their own land.
24:01
Brian Keith: And there were some people in the cities, but Barini, everyone was a yeoman farmer.
24:04
Brian Keith: So all the decision making we had there said that you, the individual, you own your farm, you own your own means of production.
24:11
Brian Keith: We're not gonna go back to that where every person owns their own factory, but we can get back there with every town owns their own factory.
24:17
Brian Keith: And the world's gonna look very different when even a 10,000 person town can reasonably have their own factory doing something very specialized.
24:24
Brian Keith: It's a very high tech, and it has great paying jobs.
24:27
Brian Keith: When we have that now, it's not gonna be, in the case of Washington state.
24:29
Brian Keith: Seattle controls everything.
24:31
Brian Keith: Their politics controls everything.
24:32
Brian Keith: They write all the laws, they can bribe anything.
24:34
Brian Keith: The whole state has to follow them.
24:37
Brian Keith: But if every small town can have its own factory and have its own high paying jobs.
24:41
Brian Keith: Then people don't have to move to Seattle anymore and they can not be there because it's a horrible place to live.
24:45
Brian Keith: I've lived it for a decade.
24:46
Brian Keith: It's a disaster in many ways as
24:47
Colin Russ: it changes power dynamic big time.
24:50
Brian Keith: Exactly.
24:50
Brian Keith: So we're gonna get put the power back in the hands of the small town.
24:53
Brian Keith: And small town values might be different than big town values in some important ways where you might say, like when I was working at Sound Transit security was, if you want to be promoted, you have to leave your state.
25:03
Brian Keith: That's how Securitas and many large corporations work is.
25:06
Brian Keith: We will uproot you if you want to advance.
25:08
Brian Keith: There is no path to going moving up while working in Seattle itself.
25:12
Brian Keith: That's how a lot of them work.
25:13
Brian Keith: We're gonna change that calculus.
25:14
Brian Keith: We're gonna say you can succeed locally.
25:16
Matthew Chang: Yeah, I was with,
25:17
Colin Russ: I'm, I'm, I'm huge on that.
25:19
Brian Keith: that.
25:19
Matthew Chang: I was with one of our previous guests, uh, this past week, Adam Rossi, and as he's a Virginia resident, he owns a factory in Virginia, so he is, he fits your stat, your profile, Brian.
25:30
Matthew Chang: Uh, but Virginia in a lot of ways just lost its sovereignty because one county, in their case, Fairfield County, an extension of, uh, Washington, DC.
25:39
Matthew Chang: You know, voted to redistrict, uh, and a lot of things.
25:42
Matthew Chang: So the, the local community, especially when you could be a few hundred miles away from DC feels like they've lost their voice, right?
25:49
Matthew Chang: They, they are no longer participating in a democracy.
25:53
Matthew Chang: And I think your model, Brian, is the, is the inverse of that consolidation.
25:57
Matthew Chang: So you've got it in Washington, with Seattle, you now have it in Virginia.
26:01
Brian Keith: Washington
26:02
Matthew Chang: How do we return it back to the local community?
26:04
Matthew Chang: I, I love this idea of, of skills empowerment, technology empowerment happening at the.
26:08
Brian Keith: happening at the localist level possible.
26:09
Brian Keith: And it's also through faith that the kind of church, even the same denomination, a speci choose one denomination, find it in a 10,000 person town in the east side of Washington state, find the same denomination in downtown Seattle.
26:21
Brian Keith: It might say the same thing on the outside.
26:23
Brian Keith: What they believe will be quite different in general, but also about the individual and also about the individual worker.
26:28
Brian Keith: And their relationship to God.
26:30
Brian Keith: So right now we have big cities pumping out culture, much of which is diseased.
26:34
Brian Keith: Some of it's fantastic, some of it is diseased, and the small towns have to accept it because that's the way the world works when you have a factory in every small town.
26:43
Brian Keith: Now suddenly you don't have to listen to the cities necessarily in the same way that you did before.
26:48
Brian Keith: You can.
26:48
Brian Keith: You might, maybe they're better in some ways than the small town version of things, but maybe they're not.
26:52
Brian Keith: And we have a subsidiarity that's gonna apply to God.
26:55
Brian Keith: And how we deal with God along with the financial part of things and how we vote.
27:00
Matthew Chang: It.
27:01
Colin Russ: I mean, I'm, I, I am very much in that, you know, in a community that sees the kind of.
27:06
Brian Keith: kind of
27:07
Colin Russ: The, the loss of both the economic opportunities, just the young people leaving for brain drain.
27:13
Colin Russ: I mean, I'm, I'm a huge proponent of kind of building that local economic resilience, local community independence.
27:18
Colin Russ: Um, because I, I only see good things that come from it.
27:21
Colin Russ: I mean, I, I, we've talked on multiple episodes now just about the community importance of it, and I think, you know, you're kind of just reinforcing.
27:29
Colin Russ: Reinforcing exactly what we've, you know, been saying and seeing, um, you know, obviously Jacksonville being a, a, I would say a
27:36
Brian Keith: would say a bigger,
27:38
Colin Russ: bigger version of that.
27:39
Colin Russ: Um, I mean, would you say that's fair, Matt?
27:42
Brian Keith: Matt?
27:43
Matthew Chang: I mean the,
27:44
Brian Keith: the, uh,
27:45
Matthew Chang: Jacksonville's an interesting place because it is, um, you know, kind of a, a, a mid-tier, large city.
27:51
Matthew Chang: You know, it's a million plus people.
27:53
Matthew Chang: Metro got pro sports, you know, got some Fortune 500 headquarters.
27:57
Matthew Chang: So it's, it's got some notoriety.
27:59
Matthew Chang: Um, but it's also really, it's a collection of neighborhoods.
28:03
Brian Keith: of
28:03
Matthew Chang: so, you know, Brian's done part of the tour with me and I'm, I look forward to doing the rest of them.
28:07
Matthew Chang: It's got five downtowns because it originally was five little communities that pooled together to become Jacksonville when they had to give it a kind of common name.
28:17
Matthew Chang: And then when you look at it, each county surrounding in this part of the metro is, is fighting intensely for its own identity.
28:23
Matthew Chang: They wanna have their own economic development.
28:25
Matthew Chang: They have their own laws, you know, as, as separate counties.
28:28
Matthew Chang: And so we're struggling with this idea of how do you pull together to have the, the gravity of a metro, but then how does each little community keep its own identity?
28:39
Matthew Chang: And, and what you're seeing in the data, I had an EXPOST last week, is, um, the top three most business friendly cities in the country right now are all in a row.
28:50
Matthew Chang: So it's Tampa, Ja, uh, Orlando and Jacksonville are one, two, and three.
28:56
Brian Keith: and three.
28:56
Matthew Chang: I mean, being in Florida gives you an automatic boost'cause we've set up a, a pro business state environment.
29:02
Matthew Chang: But when you, if you know anything about the geography, those are connected by I four, right?
29:05
Matthew Chang: So you go from Jacksonville, you head down 95 towards Daytona, and then it turns into Orlando.
29:11
Matthew Chang: You may not notice that it turned into Orlando, and then it turns into Tampa.
29:13
Matthew Chang: You may not notice that's gonna become a major metroplex.
29:17
Matthew Chang: What, like what you see happening with Texas and the triangle right now?
29:20
Matthew Chang: Just across that northern swath of Florida.
29:24
Matthew Chang: And so that issue of kind of maintaining independence, creating your own economic empowerment and staying localized is gonna become more stressful over time.
29:33
Matthew Chang: It's just something we have to be aware of.
29:34
Matthew Chang: I think Brian's idea is highly democratizing because each little locale will have its identity within a larger ecosystem.
29:42
Brian Keith: ecosystem.
29:43
Brian Keith: It's the fight back against the blob that leaves the local McDonald's looking like every, every, every other McDonald's ever, where we at some point it, this, the efficiency of scale said by making a, like B, things get better.
29:55
Brian Keith: They get cheaper.
29:56
Brian Keith: That's why Walmart is the biggest retailer in America.
29:59
Brian Keith: Where we're going to is now AI is allowing us to go the other direction.
30:02
Brian Keith: It's allowing us to say, you can have a hundred factory workers in a 10,000 person town, where literally one out of every a hundred people works in the factory because they're now, now high school jobs and all those a hundred people can support a family on their own.
30:15
Brian Keith: I wanna share a bit about what we're doing inside the Chang Robotics marketing team.
30:18
Brian Keith: Because I'm practicing what I preach here.
30:21
Brian Keith: I only have a few humans in, in this team.
30:23
Brian Keith: It's not a huge team, and we are, the Chang ecosystem is significant in size.
30:27
Brian Keith: So we're not making a plan for hiring another a hundred humans.
30:30
Brian Keith: We're making a plan for hiring another a hundred agents and then getting all of my humans trained to be better and better and better and better at what they do.
30:37
Brian Keith: And we talk about this all the time about, okay, so.
30:39
Brian Keith: You need to be designing what you're doing and so that agents can go support you in all this.
30:44
Brian Keith: And I'm constantly saying of, of your job, what's the 20% that lights you up that makes you excited?
30:49
Brian Keith: What's the 20% that drains your energy and leaves you feeling, blah, we're gonna automate away the 20% or genfy away it so that all of my team members are becoming increasingly, I like.
30:59
Colin Russ: I like Ag Genfy more than more from a uh, you know, PR perspective.
31:04
Brian Keith: Well, there we go.
31:05
Brian Keith: So, so what we're doing is we're, we're just gonna make it so we can go have more and more output.
31:08
Brian Keith: We're gonna have 10 times the output while only hiring another one or two people.
31:13
Brian Keith: Which Matt's gonna love and, but this is a model of we ought to go help the humans stay in their creative state, do the really good orientation work, really have taste.
31:21
Brian Keith: AI doesn't have very good taste, at least not yet.
31:24
Brian Keith: So we're gonna use the humans for their taste, especially tastes that they gathered the skill before the age of ai.
31:28
Brian Keith: So it's not authentically augmented taste.
31:31
Brian Keith: They have native taste.
31:32
Brian Keith: And that's why me being in business since 2012 was critical.
31:34
Brian Keith: 'cause I have a significant track record before AI showed up.
31:37
Brian Keith: So you can trust that in a way that you couldn't trust it.
31:39
Brian Keith: If I today said, here's all this great stuff I've done, you couldn't trust it in the same way.
31:43
Brian Keith: So we're gonna apply those principles inside sharing robotics on the marketing side, and that's gonna allow us to go have a a level of output that is gonna be unreasonable.
31:51
Brian Keith: Like this whole book thing I told you guys I did, and then the article for X.
31:54
Brian Keith: So I've written.
31:55
Brian Keith: Written, uh, you know, 70,000 words ish in the last few weeks over the course of just.
32:01
Brian Keith: 15 hours maybe or so of actual labor time.
32:04
Brian Keith: We're gonna take that concept and everything's fractal now, so we're gonna take that, build it into the Chang marketing team, and that's gonna become available to everyone who connects with the Chang ecosystem.
32:14
Brian Keith: So that, oh, do you wanna go write a book?
32:15
Brian Keith: Great.
32:16
Brian Keith: We have a module in our AI that will take you through the exact process that our CMOs use to write multiple books and also our ecosystem write books.
32:23
Brian Keith: So you could write a book this slow way.
32:25
Brian Keith: We're not gonna say that you ought not to do that, but we're gonna say, here's a fast way.
32:28
Brian Keith: It can get you a fairly high quality thing extraordinarily fast, and if you want the very top tier, you still work with a human.
32:34
Brian Keith: The human will always be the very top tier, but this process will get you a pretty good 80% good result in weeks instead of years to where you can use it in your marketing with your clientele, et cetera, almost immediately.
32:46
Brian Keith: And how do you get access to this?
32:48
Brian Keith: Well, you join the Chang ecosystem in some way, and that's where us imagine like the whole church planting boat.
32:53
Brian Keith: We're gonna be factory planting every 10,000 person town.
32:57
Brian Keith: Let's talk about what kind of factory you guys need in your town, and that's gonna en entail all these little bits of AI, of gentrified behavior across the entire enterprise eventually, where that little factory town, they're not gonna have a CFO at that 100 person factory in a 10,000 person town.
33:13
Brian Keith: They're not gonna need one.
33:14
Brian Keith: They're gonna have an agent CFO, and they're gonna have access to a network that has human CFOs on demand.
33:19
Brian Keith: Because they're part of the chain network, so they're only gonna bring in the expertise when they need it, and expertise will go back to home base when they're done needing it.
33:26
Brian Keith: And that way they're gonna be able to keep their costs quite low, which is how those factory workers, the people in that town, are gonna get paid so much.
33:32
Brian Keith: Because you don't need to have A CFO anymore.
33:33
Brian Keith: You need an agent CFO, and then A CFO on demand as you need it.
33:37
Brian Keith: And that's how we're gonna go boost the productivity.
33:38
Brian Keith: So the median person at our factories can afford to support a family.
33:42
Matthew Chang: Colin, how
33:42
Colin Russ: So if you're an.
33:43
Brian Keith: you're,
33:43
Matthew Chang: Brian gets a, uh, text message from our CFO that we share together right after this podcast.
33:49
Brian Keith: podcast,
33:50
Colin Russ: Nice.
33:50
Colin Russ: Nasty gram maybe.
33:53
Brian Keith: you'll always need the top tier people to be top tier.
33:56
Brian Keith: You just don't need a hundred of them.
33:57
Brian Keith: You need like 10 of them across a thousand factories, and then they can do managing.
34:01
Matthew Chang: wanna make a quick connection before Colin wraps us up.
34:04
Matthew Chang: Is.
34:04
Brian Keith: wraps this up.
34:05
Brian Keith: Is
34:06
Matthew Chang: So in this model that Brian's painted out, where every factory, every town has a factory, uh, and it, and it kind of scales with population so that you're harvesting the best talent in the town to work in the factory.
34:17
Brian Keith: the factory.
34:18
Matthew Chang: Well, if you think about the education and skills that that worker gets, that makes it into the factory program number one, they're working with the future generation of this ent AI that Brian's designing right now.
34:30
Matthew Chang: Right.
34:30
Matthew Chang: So it's, it is.
34:32
Matthew Chang: Top of the line, and it's also intuitive, so you don't need formal training.
34:37
Matthew Chang: You just go into it and now you're working with top of the line AI products.
34:42
Matthew Chang: The next is naturally to have that sort of production without the the 5,000 parking spots outside the plant.
34:48
Matthew Chang: It's gonna be highly automated.
34:50
Matthew Chang: You're working with robots for a living.
34:53
Matthew Chang: And then what the, the intelligent people in the factory do is they coordinate those AI systems and they coordinate those robotics.
34:58
Matthew Chang: That's the physical intelligence for the audience, is you coordinate that for the production, right?
35:05
Matthew Chang: So they're going into a high quality, clean, safe work environment that's best in class efficiency, but you're getting all that skills training, and I think what it would do for that top 1%, your gifted students.
35:17
Matthew Chang: Compare that skills training that you'll get hands on in just a matter of a few years on the factory floor to your traditional four year college education that would cause you to leave that town and probably never come back, which is the Erie dilemma, right Colin?
35:32
Matthew Chang: And so are you gonna get more in terms of opportunity cost, going four years into the factory or going four years to university?
35:41
Matthew Chang: The factory student would've made for sure, Brian.
35:44
Matthew Chang: Average of a hundred KA year, the first four years working.
35:48
Matthew Chang: So you could be plus 400,000 and Amids OTJ training, or you could
35:53
Colin Russ: like the physician assistant scenario we were talking about
35:56
Brian Keith: about.
35:57
Matthew Chang: yeah,
35:57
Brian Keith: Yeah.
35:58
Colin Russ: other week.
35:58
Colin Russ: Yeah.
35:59
Matthew Chang: yeah.
35:59
Matthew Chang: It, it's accelerated medical training.
36:01
Matthew Chang: Right.
36:02
Matthew Chang: And then, and then you just have to compare that to.
36:04
Matthew Chang: And then the other thing I, I like about that model is the path to entrepreneurship, because I want everybody to reach a career milestone where they feel like entrepreneurship is a choice.
36:14
Matthew Chang: You may not go that way.
36:15
Matthew Chang: Most people don't.
36:16
Matthew Chang: But if you, if you desire and it's always in your head that you might, after four years of intense world class on the job training where you've now mastered multiple high-end technologies, your path to entrepreneurship, it's, it's such a small gap.
36:30
Matthew Chang: You just have to decide that you'll do it.
36:32
Brian Keith: you'll do it within a few
36:33
Colin Russ: it becomes a real possibility where for so many, it's just not even imaginable.
36:37
Colin Russ: It's so far out of reach or they, they can't even get to a mental point of thinking.
36:42
Colin Russ: It's possible.
36:43
Brian Keith: That's right.
36:44
Brian Keith: By 2030, we're gonna have a Chang Factory school.
36:47
Brian Keith: Where you can apply to get in only the best and brightest you're able to get in and anywhere in the nation that you come to factory school.
36:53
Brian Keith: It's an in-person, say, months long program.
36:56
Brian Keith: And then we support you in building your own factory, in your hometown, anywhere in the nation for free.
37:01
Brian Keith: We'll follow an awesome Allread model where it'll be, yep, it's all free.
37:05
Brian Keith: You cannot pay us to do this.
37:06
Brian Keith: And then we own a chunk of the factory that you build, and that's
37:09
Colin Russ: of that requires for intake getting a mohawk, I assume,
37:13
Brian Keith: Optional.
37:14
Brian Keith: You do
37:14
Colin Russ: instead, you know Marines, they, where they shave the head for
37:17
Brian Keith: or a beard if I'm designed, if you get a good beard.
37:21
Colin Russ: one or the
37:22
Brian Keith: But really it's gonna be a thing where you're 18, you can go, you're outta high school, you're finally free of that prison.
37:27
Brian Keith: You can do whatever you wanna do.
37:28
Brian Keith: Do you wanna go to factory school?
37:29
Brian Keith: Maybe we're starting to go to it when you're 12.
37:31
Brian Keith: But yes, you can just go to factory school and within a year, on average, 72% of factory school graduates within 12 months have a factory that is generating over a million dollars a year because we're gonna have the top of the line ai.
37:45
Brian Keith: And the top, we already have the top of line engineering.
37:47
Brian Keith: So imagine what happens when we say our goal is for factory school to launch a thousand factories per year, of which 50% are still standing three years later.
37:54
Brian Keith: What's gonna happen when factory school descends on all the small communities of America?
37:58
Brian Keith: And anybody says, I sort of wanna start a factory.
38:02
Brian Keith: We say, okay, we'll help you out.
38:03
Brian Keith: We'll provide the financing.
38:04
Brian Keith: We'll provide everything to help you start a factory, even if you're competing with us, because our goal is a healthy nation.
38:10
Brian Keith: And a healthy nation comes from the median person, be able to go support their family in one income.
38:14
Matthew Chang: Ooh.
38:14
Matthew Chang: Tied it back together.
38:15
Brian Keith: together.
38:16
Colin Russ: Boom.
38:17
Brian Keith: It's my job.
38:17
Brian Keith: I think
38:18
Colin Russ: big, big thing, big things coming for, uh, Chang Robotics,
38:21
Brian Keith: I better get hot.
38:22
Brian Keith: I better get this AI
38:23
Colin Russ: gonna be the bull run driver.
38:27
Colin Russ: So I know we are getting, getting kinda, you know, close to the end here and sort of just to wrap it up, you know, one last question, Brian, if you are a worker, you know, in the manufacturing space right now, you're watching all this happen, you know, AI tools, agentic systems, all that good stuff.
38:48
Colin Russ: What should you be doing the next six, 12 months to try and make sure that you are positioning yourself well?
38:55
Brian Keith: two things.
38:56
Brian Keith: One is listen to what Matt talks about because Matt is on the cutting edge of engineering and is working, being the cutting edge of ai.
39:01
Brian Keith: The second thing is create lots of zone one data.
39:03
Brian Keith: In my ai, we talk about zone one is human.
39:05
Brian Keith: Create a data Zone two is AI derivative data.
39:08
Brian Keith: Our world is increasingly becoming full of AI slop as everyone's noticed, which is zone two AI making stuff up.
39:14
Brian Keith: So the most important thing you can do is capture your thoughts and your perspectives.
39:17
Brian Keith: It can be voice notes, it can be written notes.
39:19
Brian Keith: It doesn't actually matter.
39:20
Brian Keith: Keep it on some place that you own.
39:22
Brian Keith: Your thoughts about your work, about the world, about your perspective on everything.
39:27
Brian Keith: The AI is gonna be getting faster and faster.
39:29
Brian Keith: You don't have to learn everything right now.
39:30
Brian Keith: It's a complete distraction in most cases.
39:32
Brian Keith: In most cases.
39:33
Brian Keith: The one thing that will really matter is participatory knowledge that you have from what you've actually done, especially before the age of ai.
39:40
Brian Keith: But even now, document it like you've never documented anything in your life.
39:44
Brian Keith: If you spent an hour narrating every day.
39:46
Brian Keith: Anything you believe, pull up news stories, comment on them, whatever else.
39:49
Brian Keith: Don't publish it just for yourself.
39:51
Brian Keith: That zone one data is through critical corpus.
39:54
Brian Keith: So when Factory school comes online and factory school and you interact with that AI and you say, why should we listen to you?
39:59
Brian Keith: You go ahead and you hand us years worth of your thoughts on everything and Factory school AI can say, okay, we'll give you 10 million and help you get set up.
40:09
Brian Keith: Let's go after it.
40:11
Colin Russ: I mean, that, that's a banger to end with right there.
40:13
Colin Russ: I may, I, I, I can't really top that, but what I will say, you know.
40:18
Colin Russ: Brian, obviously we, you know, we, we know we've got you on uh, X at Brian Keith ai.
40:25
Colin Russ: Um, where, where else can people, uh, track you down and find you and either send you nasty grams from the CFOs or, you know, pick your brain a bit more?
40:34
Brian Keith: Also on LinkedIn, Brian and Keith AI because a couple months ago I realized what was happening and changed all my branding to Brian and Keith ai.
40:40
Brian Keith: That my former fractional COO consulting life, et cetera, that's in the past, that all the value right now relies in being on the frontier and transforming good zone one content into actual business outcomes.
40:52
Brian Keith: And that's why in the CMO world at Ching Robotics, I get work with a significant number of companies on transforming their good zone one content into business outcomes.
41:01
Colin Russ: Fantastic, so people can find you on X, on LinkedIn.
41:05
Colin Russ: Anywhere else, anything?
41:06
Colin Russ: Any last parting thoughts you wanna share?
41:08
Brian Keith: share?
41:09
Brian Keith: Uh, yeah, so it's the, the final title is still in Progress.
41:12
Brian Keith: Okay.
41:12
Brian Keith: So I'll, I'll spill the beans in this last a little bit here.
41:15
Brian Keith: So the book is coming out, uh, to select partners in about a month where it's being used to launch my new AI os that I'm building, but I'm not making it public.
41:25
Brian Keith: I have four launch partners and each one of'em, I'll be doing a live stream with.
41:29
Brian Keith: And then you'll have to be part of that community already in order to go buy the book or go by the os.
41:36
Matthew Chang: He, he basically, we need him back in six weeks so we can, we can, get some zone one
41:42
Brian Keith: You just have to know people.
41:43
Brian Keith: Basically.
41:43
Brian Keith: We need it back in six weeks so
41:45
Colin Russ: There we go.
41:46
Colin Russ: There we go.
41:48
Brian Keith: I am happy to show up and talk to you about the mistakes.
41:51
Brian Keith: Like I, I have a lot of wins and I have a lot of losses in terms of how to identify everything and, uh.
41:56
Brian Keith: Uh,
41:57
Colin Russ: win or you learn.
41:58
Brian Keith: did the math other day, fed the ai.
41:59
Brian Keith: I spent about five and a half hours, seven days a week from February 13th to, uh, April 13th, just with Atlas alone.
42:07
Brian Keith: Uh, that my level of output with AI has been something unusual.
42:11
Brian Keith: Uh, and it's just very satisfying to bring this level of obsession with ai.
42:16
Brian Keith: Two, what Chang is actually doing with actual factories, with actual workers, that a lot of people, there's sort of the tech pro part of the AI world where like, oh, I did this cool open cloth thing and look all this cool tech stuff I did.
42:27
Brian Keith: Then you have the business owners who are saying, I understand I'm at risk because someone else is gonna use AI to clopper my business, so I have to use it, but I'm not sure how to use it.
42:38
Brian Keith: And that's where, if you're a factory or you're an engineering company or anything else, you probably wanna talk to Matt Chang about, well, how do I go use AI in a way to defend myself, but also grow myself while also reassuring as much as I can.
42:51
Brian Keith: Because you know that if you don't, someone else will.
42:54
Brian Keith: And if you stay offshore, even if you have great AI and someone else has onshore and they have great ai, they will beat you.
43:01
Brian Keith: You also know if you onshore, but you don't use good AI and someone else on shores and they use good ai, they're gonna beat you.
43:08
Brian Keith: And you also know from this conversation that when you're rolling with Matt Chang, you're getting better AI than your competition.
43:14
Brian Keith: So where can you go to both onshore while also getting cut edge?
43:17
Brian Keith: Cutting edge ai.
43:19
Brian Keith: There's only one place in the world that you can do
43:21
Colin Russ: What?
43:21
Matthew Chang: Oh my.
43:21
Colin Russ: Ch Chang Robotics, maybe
43:23
Brian Keith: it's the only place because people like me don't work for companies like Chang Robotics.
43:30
Brian Keith: They don't.
43:31
Brian Keith: Why am I here?
43:32
Brian Keith: I'm not here because I need another CMO
43:33
Colin Russ: with the logo on it.
43:34
Brian Keith: On it.
43:35
Brian Keith: It's just interesting.
43:36
Brian Keith: The people like me tend to go be creating AI and we're doing all our custom stuff, which I'm also doing as well.
43:41
Brian Keith: But Ching Robotics, I believe this whole, this whole factory in every town concept, the chicken, every pot, but the city level, the town level, I believe in that.
43:50
Brian Keith: And how am I gonna get there?
43:51
Brian Keith: I'm not gonna do it on my own.
43:52
Brian Keith: I'm gonna use Matt here.
43:54
Brian Keith: Matt already has the network.
43:54
Brian Keith: Matt already is a top tier engineer.
43:56
Brian Keith: I'm gonna use Matt to create the future I want my son to grow up in, and that's why I'm here.
44:01
Colin Russ: Well, I love it.
44:02
Colin Russ: Obviously Matt does too, or else he wouldn't have you around, I don't think.
44:05
Brian Keith: think.
44:06
Brian Keith: He's just beginning to learn.
44:07
Brian Keith: When we started working together, none of this AI stuff existed in the same way that it does now.
44:10
Brian Keith: He did not know what he was getting into
44:11
Matthew Chang: All I knew Colin was that Brian, uh, scored higher on those cognitive tests, and I did.
44:16
Matthew Chang: That's pretty much my initial assessment.
44:19
Matthew Chang: Like, this guy's way too smart.
44:20
Matthew Chang: We need to get him now'cause whatever he does
44:22
Colin Russ: Grab.
44:23
Colin Russ: Grab'em early.
44:23
Colin Russ: Grab'em when you can.
44:25
Brian Keith: verbal SAT 1540 on the math.
44:28
Brian Keith: Another kid at school was 1600, math 1560 on the verbal.
44:31
Brian Keith: So I was almost the best student at school, but not quite On what, on what really matters folks.
44:35
Brian Keith: Standardized testing.
44:36
Matthew Chang: Yeah.
44:37
Matthew Chang: Yeah.
44:37
Matthew Chang: Well, at engineering school, that's all, all that matters actually.
44:40
Brian Keith: I think that the fact you turn factories on and they work, I think that is now our understanding.
44:45
Brian Keith: That actually matters more than taking a test.
44:47
Matthew Chang: Yeah.
44:48
Colin Russ: I, I'm, I'm good with that.
44:51
Colin Russ: Alrighty.
44:51
Colin Russ: Well Brian, thank you so much.
44:53
Colin Russ: We are absolutely gonna have to have you back in a few weeks, talk more about your AI operating system, get into that a bit more.
44:59
Colin Russ: Um, but thank you so much for joining us.
45:02
Colin Russ: This has been great.
45:03
Colin Russ: With that, thank you so much for joining us for the Reforge Podcast
45:10
Thanks for tuning in to the Reforged podcast.
45:13
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45:18
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