Complexity Kills Innovation

00:03 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

And if you can't explain in a YouTube short format how to actually use your tool, or if it's not incredibly self-evident how to use your tool, you're probably going to see massive amounts of abandonment. And so some of these other patterns relate to the feedback that might come from when the user is interacting and how you could quickly bring that back into the app. So this notion of feature flag testing, modern quote, unquote, a-b test, design at scale, sharding, communities and segmentation, those are all things that I think the business to consumer app world has been using arguably for years, but to get that into a permission space for the fintech community, especially with more established brands, has been challenging.



00:58 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Hello listeners and welcome to Banking on Disruption. I'm Fred Cadena. This week's episode is a long time in coming. I've been trying to get my guests on the show since South by Southwest way back in March. In fact, the first date we had on our recording schedule was the last day of South by that date pushed. Then I had travel, then he had travel, I had a tornado, he had a canceled flight. In any case, it's June and I could not be more excited to have Jay Kuthrell on today's podcast. Jay is the founding partner of Kuthrell Consulting, a consultancy providing pragmatic, generative, ai-infused advisory services to service providers, startups and investment groups. Jay is also the writer of Fudge Sunday, a weekly newsletter that's published you guessed it every Sunday. Now, if you're a fan of learning about how you can leverage tech disruption in your institution, I highly recommend becoming a subscriber. To learn more and subscribe, visit fudgeorg Now. While you're listening to this podcast, why not take a moment to follow us on LinkedIn and at the Banking on Disruption podcast and on Instagram at at Banking on Disruption Now? Sit back and strap in and we're back.



02:19

I am very excited this episode to welcome my friend, jay Cutthrell. Jay is the founding partner of Cutthrell Consulting, a consultancy providing pragmatic, generative AI, gen, ai infused advisory services to service providers, startups and investment groups. Cutthrell Consulting helps clients navigate, reach and exceed their goals. To learn more about Cutthrell Consulting, visit cutthroatconsulting and, believe it or not, consulting is a real top-level domain. Now I wonder if I go to accentureconsulting, if they've already scooped that up? I would hope so. I would hope so too. Otherwise, there's an opportunity out there. Jay is also the writer of Fudge Sunday, a weekly newsletter that's published you guessed it every Sunday. To learn more and subscribe, visit fudgeorg and I will say, if you're not already a subscriber, I highly recommend it. Jay, welcome to the pod.



03:14 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Fred, it is wonderful to be here.



03:18 - Fred Cadena (Host)

It's been a long time in coming. I think we've had to schedule and reschedule this about four or five different times your travel, my travel once I had a tornado. I had to schedule and reschedule this about four or five different times. Your travel, my travel Once I had a tornado I had to deal with. So there was just a lot going on. Excited that you're here, though, just for the audience, can you share with us a pivotal moment in your career that solidified your current path towards focusing on innovation within the enterprise space?



03:44 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah. So, as hard as it is to say it this way, about 15 years ago I was part of a little tiny startup called Acadia and we were going to try to solve some really big problems in the world of enterprise IT for really really big companies that were consumers of enterprise IT, and the goal was just create a very simplified all-in-one solution that would streamline the process for how they would deliver what were called private clouds at the time into their data centers. So you fast forward a few years from there, and one of the things that happened with Acadia is the investors for that were VMware, cisco and EMC, and so we changed the name from Acadia to simply VCE, but those did not stand for the initials of our investors. That was actually the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition wing, wing, nudge, nudge. So from that point we were really there, focused on helping CIOs and CFOs, more importantly, make sense of what is it to have, say, the unit of IT and how much does that unit of IT actually cost, and helping them with that buying pattern for infrastructure, knowing that they were going to do some compute, some amount of storage, data protection, networking, virtualization, and so offering that single, pre-engineered experience allowed them to move forward significantly de-risk within a deterministic power, weight, cooling and geometry footprint, obviously for a very deterministic price as well in terms of scaling up and scaling out.



05:09

So, long story short, most successful joint venture in IT history grew to a multi-billion dollar run rate, culminating ultimately with being bought out by one of the investors, emc, and then later, after that, emc was, of course, gobbled into Dell Technologies for around $67 billion, because one of those companies included with EMC, of course, was VMware, which is now, as we sit together talking on this call, a completely separate company now underneath Broad. So the one thing about IT is like if you sit around long enough, eventually like something gets gobbled and something know carved out and something else gobbles it. So a really interesting time. But yeah, vce was really how I went from being known as the telecom guy to more of the you know IT and enterprise, you know IT guy and you know since then it's just progressed. So now I'm probably more commonly associated with the cloud and all the things that we are so excited about recently related to the entirety of all things AI.



06:09 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I think that is one of two truisms that you know companies get bought and spun out. I think Dell's definitely spun a lot of things out of their portfolio really in the last three to five years. The other one is you know you have to continuously reinvent yourself as the technology keeps evolving. And I think you know you have to continuously reinvent yourself as the technology keeps evolving and I think you know you've done a great job of doing that. I think our listeners can learn a lot from you know the path that your career's taken. I'm curious, you know, again, our audience primarily banking, financial service-related industries. You know, taking that background in, like new product innovation, what are the factors that you think determine whether a new financial product is going to succeed in today's digital landscape?



06:56 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Oh well, you know we live in a time of. In my personal experience, I've had multiple times where I've gone through what I call these concurrent nested mergers and acquisitions or, as people in the know would say, nested acquisitions. It's the thing that gobbles the thing that gobbles. The thing that gobbles the thing and what can really be part of that is, you know, you can have value creation or you can have value destruction. So if you want to have a truly a creative combination, I think identifying up front where the innovation centers are and getting those individuals in the innovation centers to kind of corral around an idea is important. But you could really drastically simplify it Like what is your say-do or do-say gap? Does what this thing purports to do? Is that what the marketing says it does? And if the marketing says it's going to do something, does it actually deliver this?



07:42

So that kind of a marketing assertion, that's really your brand pledge and if you don't do those things, that's an anti-pattern. You've got to stay away from that because the worst that could happen is someone uses it thinking it's one thing and then comes away with a completely poor experience as a result. I'm not saying, like you know, under promise over deliver. I'm saying the inverse is actually quite common. I think we've both experienced like the hype of like the next great thing, and then you try it, you hire it, it's just, it's abysmal. So my guiding principles are you have to think about the ruthless removal of annoyance, rroa and anytime you can delight the user, whether it's through the conversion path or anything you can do to converge other convenient factors into the design of your product. I think that becomes an ultimately a winning combination.



08:35 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I love that concept, the ruthless removal of annoyance, and I think that you know I spent a lot of time talking with my clients. You know banks and credit unions, especially around customer experience, and you know banks and credit unions, especially around customer experience, and you know both in branch and digital. But I think you know digital is certainly an area that has been a significant focus and I guess my question would be and I know again, not necessarily coming from as much of a financial services background, but just thinking across industry what are some of the things that you've seen, you know, help people remove that friction, help companies remove that annoyance from processes like opening a new account, beginning a new relationship, you know, adding on an additional product, you know what. What are some things that you think financial institutions can take away from, from what others are doing?



09:23 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah, I think you know traditional financial services and the clients and the customers that I've had have had a strong element of look, we already know the customers, we have great relationships with the customers and so some of that was incredibly personal. You had a personal banker. You've probably been told many times please talk to your personal banker. And I think there's also a part of the population that believes that banking has become incredibly impersonal. So, in some ways, the notion of going from a human teller to the automated teller machine, this ATM, and so one of the kind of counters to that I think that's occurred within product management recently is this notion of a product-led growth pattern. So in a product-led growth pattern as opposed to a sales-led growth pattern, we're looking at different strategies and so this is how legacy financial services companies become fintech companies, and to make that jump, to be part of that fintech exercise, we really have to think about what are those product pathways and if it's from the point of clicking to cash or getting some kind of a self-reinforcing improvement telemetry that informs the product owner within the fintech portion of the company so that they are not having to chase down somewhere in IT where the logs went. That relate to the user experience or how that's measured.



10:37

By the time a customer's complained, it's too late, and there's been some really phenomenal talks I've attended recently around this notion of monitoring and taking action based on API. One of the interesting ones I had heard recently was for a mobile app for users that are first this is their first job, this is their first banking relationship. If in an app experience, if you have to take more than three different paths or clicks to accomplish a function, the app actually gets abandoned within that age bracket. Okay, so I think we've all heard about the. You know the attention economy and the appetites, but if you ever thought through in your design around how do I keep engaged someone that is used to, for example, youtube shorts? And if you can't explain in a YouTube Short format how to actually use your tool, or if it's not incredibly self-evident how to use your tool, you're probably going to see massive amounts of abandonment.



11:33

And so some of these other patterns relate to the feedback that might come from when the user is interacting and how you could quickly bring that back into the app. So this notion of feature flag testing, modern quote, unquote, a-b test, design at scale, sharding, communities and segmentation. Those are all things that I think the business to consumer app world has been using arguably for years. But to get that into a permission space for the fintech community, especially with more established brands, has been challenging. So in my experience going back to what we were saying before about mergers, acquisitions we've even seen instances where the team that came up with the concept of the MVP literally the bank buys that agency, brings it in and makes that their new app team.



12:20 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, I think that's a great way to generate some acceleration. Can you give a little bit more background on kind of the concept of product led growth and where it came from and maybe again how you've helped organizations that don't have those types of capabilities you know?



12:40 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

to kind of again reinvent myself. I actually registered for something called Reforge and Reforge is a community product management and product leaders that educate other product managers and other product leaders, always available. Salesperson is your app, is your website, is your electronic interaction. If you think about this, this makes a lot of sense. Again, I have a personal banker. Am I going to call the personal banker at 11.30 pm in the evening to quote, unquote get something done?



13:18

And if you're in that situation where you're doing something financial and you're doing it your hours on your time, what if the product was able to upsell you or cross sell you on something that's useful based on what you're interacting with right now and that never sleeps, kind of ethos?



13:33

The app never goes to sleep, you know, the website never sleeps.



13:36

That, I think, is really at the heart of what product-led growth would be about is putting all those elements of technology into a space that's far more accessible for the end user and then providing all that telemetry, feedback and information into those product teams so they can make better product design decisions week over week or release over release.



13:56

And specifically, one of the functions that I was most interested in was data for product leadership and so the ability to understand what data you're getting back from app use, website or application use. That can help inform or drive, maybe, how you prioritize certain parts of a backlog of features. I think we're all like we have an abundance or we're spoiled with ideas about what we could be doing, but then product-led growth would give you ways in which to synthesize or come up with a thesis to prioritize those features and backlogs and associate those with something that's like a top-line measure or a KPI that would be of use to the business. You know, for the sake of being cool cool, but for the sake of driving greater business. Now you have my attention.



14:43 - Fred Cadena (Host)

No, I like that. I think that's a framework that makes a lot of sense, kind of moving for that. You know, more broadly, one of the things that I've enjoyed topically in a lot of your writings the Fudge Sunday and other places is seeking white space and seeking adjacencies in the market. And again, you know, kind of again with a focus to the banking sector specifically, where do you see some white spaces that you don't think are currently being addressed?



15:11 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah and I'm going to avoid mentioning specific companies one where you talk with them about how they're going to do something with your money to the world of the robo-advisor. You know the electronically, you know all of the algorithmic investment vehicles that are out there, and what I think is interesting is not that you could quote unquote, put your money to work differently. What I think has really been interesting is the way in which tranches of dollars that you could have like could have been sitting in a humble checking account just as like a lump sum. But what if I gave you a way to virtualize that and envision like well, here's the amount of money that as you go into it, it's going to start to level up in this bucket. It's going to level up in this bucket and so these periodic weighted transactions that give you a way to automatically assign where your money is going to go. But it's still effectively in the same account. But it's a gamification to understand how you're leveling up. And I think those are really fascinating user interfaces that effectively do the exact same thing as maybe a traditional checking account would, but with the benefit of knowing that, hey look, my buy myself a toy fund just matured and now I can go harvest that.



16:29

The other ones I've noted that are really fascinating are ones that simplify or streamline transactions that you know you're going to make on a recurring basis.



16:37

So if you've ever dealt with the humble single-time transfer versus the periodic transfer, anything you can do to take friction out of that experience, I've got a couple of different companies that I personally use which have made that almost, I would argue, frictionless.



16:54

So the proverbial kind of set and forget and then occasionally it'll come back and, hey, do you still need this? Remind me that I've still got that going, because I think we've probably all experienced the situation where we had an account you watch it draw down oh, I didn't realize that was going to happen. And if we've learned anything from the overdraft fee, what the press has done with overdraft fees and talking about that, I think these are all technological solutions that actually probably build better brand loyalty by thinking in terms of not how we are extractive, you know, from the customer base but are complimentary and acknowledging how complex life has become like you know, kind of a traditional kind of subscription-based service, or you know auto bill pay kind of, depending on whether it's, you know, actually being managed through the service provider or through the financial institution.



17:54 - Fred Cadena (Host)

But how have you seen that maybe evolve and be done differently or better?



17:59 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

The one that I think is the best example is early, probably 10 years ago, you could set a certain dollar amount that could go in.



18:06

What I've seen most recently is that you can put accelerators in so you can say, over time, move me from 1% now, bring me up to another percent, and when I hit 15%, stop. And then, when it hits this high watermark, let me know. And then, once I've hit that mark, here's some other things for you to consider, and so I remember the complexity of doing, like you know, CD laddering. But CD laddering now could be a more automated, gamified, you know story. And the other one, a lot of these compelling UI is showing your growth, but as a, as a, as a projection, you know, and if you, and if you do this, here's what, here's where you'll be, and so a lot of these kind of life planning ones. It may not be for all age brackets I'm sure that the product managers would tell you that these are really only useful for people over the age of like this mythical 45 to whatever it is. But those gamification elements and those projection stories, those are effectively free user interface things that I think would again build greater brand loyalty.



19:10 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, I like that. It sounds really exciting, I think the idea of adding additional gamification, finding ways to get people that maybe especially people that are non-traditionally engaged in thinking deeply about their financial situation whether it be on the spend side and kind of budgeting and figuring out where the money's going, or on the save and invest side through something, and I think it would probably also tie in some of the concepts you mentioned before about like keeping it short right, if you can't explain it in a YouTube short, you're probably not going to get a lot of stickiness either. So kind of combining some of those elements together, I think would probably more than double the dividend.



19:54 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah, and I think the last one I would add because of the timeliness of all things related to AI is that machine learning against your running expense list and doing arguably better auto-categorization and understanding or interpreting sentiment spatially and temporally. I think there's been vast improvements. I think we've all looked at the end-of-year report on your credit card to see which buckets you're spending in, but then being able to say did you know that these are the top five brands you're spending on? Did you know that these are the top five brands you're spending on? Did you know that these are the top three locations where you tend to spend?



20:30

You know in this regard and of course, there's a fine line, right, some of it is do I want you to have that amount of information and knowledge presented back to me? So the ability to maybe alarm or concern the user, I think, is another important element. So having a human factors, a psychologist on staff to think about these things before you just throw the feature in is another important element to that and related to that within product-led growth, really thinking systematically about the way in which you're turning on these features, sharding your community, finding those that are truly the pioneering users and then determining if those features are going to make more sense for the wider general audience. Those are all really hallmark elements or items that you would see in a product-led growth strategy.



21:14 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, and I would think also probably as part of that, you probably don't want to treat every user the same way. You probably don't want to expose the same type of insights to every user. Obviously, in financial services there's always like the element of compliance. You don't want to be discriminatory, you don't want to be, you know redlining or falling, you know afoul of any of those types of regulations. But more just from a preference perspective, whether it's something as broad as you know younger, you know lower, you know early earning years people might be interested in different insights than somebody who's five years away from retirement, right, and so yeah making sure you're thinking about that as well, I think would be a big part of it.



21:54 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah, and that's where, like and I'll mention this one because everyone uses Starbucks but like, if you've noticed, in Starbucks, the tipping utility within Starbucks is not only during the transaction but any time after the transaction.



22:06

You can still, like you know, alter or change tip, and one of the most innovative ones I've seen is and I won't say the company but if you want to decide that a certain part of what you're doing goes towards a charitable fund, like and just making that implicitly part of like how you get something done, like one of the charity products, I can just set it and say look, it's automatically gonna go here, it'll literally come right out of your paycheck and it'll divert automatically, just taking again the friction out of something you know you're gonna be doing. But you don't have to get out the checkbook, you don't have to write a check. By the way, for you kids, listening in, checkbook is where you actually write down and you write in cursive and then you sign it with your name and then from that piece of paper, people get money out of where your paycheck goes.



22:53 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, and sometimes you have a duplicate on the back and then you sit at the end of every week and you put all those entries in your ledger so you know how much money is in your bank account. So you don't have to go to the bank and figure out how much is in there.



23:06 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

And we call that balancing and it has nothing to do with like, it's not this, it's balancing. You know what goes in and what comes out of that ledger we just talked about. But go back, go back to YouTube shorts. You'll be fine, it'll be fine.



23:19 - Fred Cadena (Host)

It's amazing how far you know stuff has come. I think that's a great segue to you know you're always exploring. You know the intersection of technology with industries, including finance.



23:41 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

You know we've talked about a few things so far, but what are the emerging technologies that you're looking at that you think might have the most significant impact on the banking industry, let's say, over the next five years or so? So every year I go to South by Southwest that's my great pilgrimage to learn about things that make me technologically uncomfortable, because that's where you're going to learn about the future. And so you have a lot of Marcom and other intelligence. You've got every major sector and industry represented, and they're all telling the stories about not only what they're doing but what they're planning on doing next. So the big things that I took away from this were convergence of all of these new technologies, data analytics, what we're now calling AI. All of that is literally becoming incredibly accessible to more people that are developing these next generation apps, and in fintech it was absolutely on display Everything from emerging economies to very established, mature economies, some of which those tools we've talked about today a very Western, culture-centric conversation we just had. But the second most important one, which I sort of maybe brushed against when I was saying, like, what about autochagorization of how you're doing your spend side is privacy. Privacy is incredibly fragile right now in these Western nations and I'm going to call out us in the United States very specifically there's a lot of not on the books as relates to law here. I think we all know that there's regulatory things, but in some of the capabilities that you get into with these convergences of data and analytics and precision, I mean, the phone knows where you are, the phone knows where your fingers are on the screen, the phone knows whether you're jogging, walking or standing still while you're doing your transactions in the app. What information is really required for a fintech company to be innovative?



25:19

And going back to that earlier point, the third pattern is like the amount of friction that's being pulled out of systems is decreasing and while I'm not saying we're all going to be like the hedge fund person that like happened to hit the wrong key and then bought you know 500 million versus 48 million, whatever that, like that fish, it's like a fish story. The number gets bigger every time when they made the mistake of hitting that one expert key. The friction is coming out of these systems. I'm not sure if you've heard any of the pre-AMBL for what's going to happen at the Apple Worldwide Developer, but man, they're going to have a password app. Most likely they're going to take all that friction of all these different passwords and it'll all be happily baked into your device. The friction is just going to go away. It will have never been more easy than it will become to spend your dollars, right. So the ability to part you from your cash.



26:08 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Or if you lose control of your device, for someone else to spend your dollars on your behalf.



26:13 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

And that's that root of trust, man. So when I say privacy is fragile or that friction is decreasing, I mean like everything, you just hit it, man. There's a flip side to everything. And so the fourth kind of pattern that I saw, though, because there's so many different brands there, they're all building From the biggest of the big. I'm not kidding you, there were people talking about innovations in toilet paper at this conference. Right, there were people talking about innovations in toilet paper.



26:43 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Are we talking three-ply, four-ply, double-weave?



26:48 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

So imagine you're in a like go back to I don't know your college days, whenever you had roommates last where you had to split the bill for, like the common, you know accessible materials of the household. What are they? Paper products, probably, like paper towels in the kitchen, toilet paper in the bathroom. And what if there was a way you know kind of like when you think about how you use these? You know different, like micro payment acts to split a bill? You know no-transcript. Let's make it commensurate, right. And so there are literal teams thinking about these kinds of challenges that do exist in our economies.



27:24 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Finally, justification for taking your smartphone to the bathroom with you.



27:28 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

You know what? You're not wrong, you're just not wrong.



27:32 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That is insane. I think those four trend areas make a lot of sense to me, one that I want to dig in on, and they're not all fascinating. But first is privacy, and I will say I mean, obviously, in this country, california has kind of led the way from a government perspective and I kind of threw a little shade at Apple, and there's a lot of ways. Apple's not perfect, but I think of the tech companies and this is my opinion, love to hear yours especially the consumer facing tech companies, they seem to be the ones that, whether it's mostly window dressing to keep the government out of their business, or whether it's well intentioned or some mix of both, they do seem to be the ones leaning the most into privacy and, at the very least, transparency. Right, like letting users know, app by app.



28:23

You know what's being collected, what's being you know. So there's at least the ability not that anybody probably reads these things for somebody to say, wait a minute, why does my bank need to know X? Or why does my app for my car need to know Y, you know, for me to be able to drive the car? Or, you know, connect to the car with my app. So you know what are kind of your thoughts on where you see privacy going. You know both from a you know government and kind of regulatory perspective. And then you know I personally I'm a bit of a cynic that the government's going to get a lot of done on that in a short period of time. Do you see more companies wanting to lean in and make privacy maybe a differentiator or, you know, make privacy something that is more in the forefront for them?



29:10 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

I would answer it in a couple ways. One is yes, a company like Apple has both a financial incentive to differentiate as being the privacy-led company, not the product-led growth company, but the privacy-led company. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a moat, and so I would be remiss if I did not remind you and your listeners that something called a secure enclave has existed within Apple for roughly a decade. First it started in their Apple Silicon for their, you know, desktop and laptop devices. But that system on a chip secure enclave the ability to process data on device where it stays on device has existed now and is now pervasive through their product line. And my belief is that you know again, this will all come out on the WWDC, so I'm in a little bit of a prediction mode here, but I have to believe that what they will do is they will lean into their pioneering in secure enclaves. Not that Google or Microsoft or other, you know companies haven't done that with silicon, but I think because they're first and because they baked it literally into the product, I think they do have a leg to stand on. But because they're having that in their silicon, they're also creating an incredible moat and they can market. As I said earlier, before that marketing or that brand pledge, do you trust your data to our devices? And Apple devices are iconic. We want to hold them and put them in our pockets, but the competition is most likely going to seek out lower cost devices that maybe don't have maybe those chipset features baked into them and they're going to offload a lot of that data to the cloud, and the cloud is not guaranteed to be. You know, in this example, it's not Apple Cloud, it's going to be AWS, it's going to be Microsoft Azure, it's going to be Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud. Or, if you're outside of the US I know we've been very US centric in this it could be AliCloud, you know, with Alibaba or Tencent or something like that overseas. So I see it as Apple embracing privacy, both, truly, to you know, keep third parties, any government on the planet, away from the data that it believes is a sanctity between you know the user that purchased the box, the thing, and keep other third party prion eyes out of it, whether it's an advertiser, frankly, you know that hasn't paid. Apple, let's be clear or or or you know a government or entity and then, for everyone else, I think, the kind of like the privacy shifts from rapidly from on device to, hey, we put all our data up in this cloud, right, and so Apple's ecosystem being, you know, kind of closed circle you know it's the iCloud experience Everything goes up into that secure, you know, double protected.



31:51

I'm not sure if you knew this or keep up on it, but one of those stories is also around this notion that quantum computing might one day render completely obsolete the current encryption that's protecting us talking right now. Okay, and so post-quantum encryption, as the kids call it these days, is how are you anticipating that any data that happens to be saved somewhere, even if it's encrypted and you think it's safe, if it could be, you know, unlocked in the future? So a post-quantum encryption standard really is going to benefit kind of future generations that we have to think clearly, soberly, about these realities. And so I think that more emphasis on privacy today, again California being a great example, california almost feels in some ways like once it's good for the EU or UKI, then California has permission space to bring that forward as legislation to protect California citizens, and I think that what will happen is other states within the 50 will adopt standards based on that same California legislation.



32:59

I think that'll become more prevalent, not less, and then eventually we'll get to the point where you know maybe it'll be, you know, slightly, you know, watered down. But I think national level privacy standards giving you know kind of teeth to FTC, fcc and other related entities will help, almost like a digital users bill of rights if you will come into being. But it's still kind of early innings, I think. Still the US is a bit wild west when it comes to that and Silicon Valley will happily merrily run as far ahead of the laws as it can until someone says you can't do that and that goes to the heart of the. You know asking for forgiveness instead of permission, and this we're going to veer into ethics and empathy and product led design. But that's sort of what I think about when you say what does privacy mean? Going forward?



33:50 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, I think that's a really well thought out and dynamic answer. I definitely agree that on your points around Apple and kind of the differentiation they've built into their whole ecosystem, I think it is very much a competitive advantage. I also think you know the fact that California has been leading the way in that and you know, in other regulatory matters I mean frequently even without other states taking action you know they tend to kind of move the needle just due to the cost of creating differentiated experiences across. You know a number of different. You know states and other jurisdictions right, probably a little bit, you know, more prevalent in things like automobile manufacturing. It's a little bit easier to differentiate in digital products. But still, like, is the juice worth the squeeze to create a California privacy experience that is separate from the other 49 privacy experience?



34:45

So I want to dig in also on friction, and this is an area that I give a lot of thought to because I definitely, you know, in my own personal kind of consumption of products financial and otherwise I'm always looking for the frictionless experience. You know, to reduce that as much as possible. But there is also the very real risk of fraud and you know bad actors, you know kind of getting in the middle. How would you, if you were in a bank or advising a bank, how would you help them kind of figure out what is the right amount of friction to balance customer convenience versus risk management?



35:25 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

I think it would be probably like a three-part formula, like, first and foremost, situational awareness. We are in some ways, we have any number of ways we could think of how we inform ourselves better about security concerns. And if you think about that, as how do you not necessarily having everyone read everything, but how do you give people an intellectual curiosity for what it means to secure and de-risk a transaction or the relationship with the customer and the safeguarding of their data? And I would say, much like someone told me once you know, when you're engineering a product, you know you have to think about it like you know the proverbial. You know you don't tell the people building the boat how to build the boat piece by piece. You instill in them a longing for the sea and then they'll figure out what needs to be done. And so I think setting out that situational awareness of, by the way, this is the, this is this information we have available to us that we could absolutely consider in our thoughtful design and design patterns and getting everyone to think in terms of the safe experimentation. One of the areas I think is really interesting for team dynamics right now is you're going to hear a lot more of it in the future, if you haven't heard already, is psychological safety. And so when something is done and you know that something bad happened quote, unquote what is the psychological safety afforded within that team to have a real frank and open conversation? You know kind of a radical transparency of what could we have done better and there is no one who is above. You know a criticism, and it is not a criticism of individuals as much as it is a criticism of our collective process and what we, you know, manifest as a product experience. And to tell the story with facts, the second leg of this is called observability. Observability is really a big part again with that product-led growth strategy, some of those same techniques and understanding, more importantly, when the data flows, when data is correlated, what other systems would also be informed by that data and what is the impact of that data being informed to certain degrees or lesser degrees throughout that process. And so some of your really interesting metrics that might come out that you would realize that, man, based on what we're observing, we're seeing that the cost of acquisition for a customer is actually quite a bit higher than we thought. If we could decrease that, where can we reinvest those savings in this product experience, and how does that translate into what that might mean for us in terms of the total customer experience and value? Does that translate into how that might mean what that might mean for us in terms of the total customer? You know experience and value along the way.



38:05

Now, to get there, you may have to go back to some very familiar ones, like a Kaizen method, or think in terms of constantly, you know, reiterating and transforming yourself, asking five whys every single time.



38:17

You know why do we have this and why did we make this and why did we make that decision and why did we believe this was a decision we had, and so on and so forth, until you get to that fifth why, and you've exhausted like, oh, in fact, we actually have permission to let go of this and adopt some other technology option.



38:34

And so I think of this as these are the ibals and the ables exploring the art of the possible to get it to where you have that permission space, making it permissible, figuring out what's the sustainable way to show this Some people call that an MVP but then taking that to where it can become repeatable and ultimately that becomes something advisable. And once you've got that situation where you do risk it and you've got buy-in from all those players, you really can move forward far faster velocity if you're not taking that approach. So you know, I would say you know situational awareness, think in terms of observability and then be ready to transform. And you know Kaizen and 5Y yourself every single time as part of that iterative. You know flywheel for product.



39:11 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, I love that. I think that's a very like, usable and accessible framework. I love the 5Y technique especially. I work. I love the 5Y technique especially. I found it to be a very dangerous tool to use, sometimes inside organizations that have been around for a while, but it's very powerful. It really gets people to let go of, you know, things that have been, you know, in place for a long time and may have made sense five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but just don't make sense today. Well, jay, I gotta say this has been a great conversation. I think you know, as we kind of planned what we'd talk about, I think we've only gotten a third of the way kind of through what we wanted to cover. But I think, you know, always leave the audience wanting a little bit more. You and I have both been on the road quite a bit If people want to connect with you. Are you going to be out at any conferences or anything else over the next few weeks?



40:02 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Yeah, so I'm just getting back from Click Connect down in Orlando. So if you find me on LinkedIn, I was there supporting Tech Field Day as a delegate. So amongst the collection of folks there, we have a ton of content. So if you're familiar with modern analytics, dashboarding and this new future of AI we've been talking about, you know Click is one of those companies a Tom Abravo company. They acquired Talend last year at the same time.



40:25

So a lot of great stories about practical, pragmatic uses of AI in the enterprise, A lot of great financial services stories. There On stage was Vanguard telling amazing stories about what they're doing with literally tens and thousands of databases and how they've had zero data loss. You know, at that scale, really cool stuff. So check out the LinkedIn content. You can always go to my blog, fudgeorg. I also have fahatfudgeorg, which is a paid subscription daily for when you want to have a yeah, that's a whole new thing.



40:58

So, if so, you can always do fudgeorg weekly. You know it comes out on Sunday, as you said before, but I also, if you want more, there's a daily version now too. And then, if you're curious about these stories that we've talked about, one of the things I encourage people to do is go to techmemecom type in financial type in FinTech and it really gives you a good index of where the industry is going, how the press is, more importantly, interpreting that, which kind of brings us full circle. So if I was to say where I am right now is I'm still a technology optimist. I think that kind of came through in our discussion.



41:36

But I do believe within financial services just because you can doesn't mean you should. And thinking in terms of product-led growth and starting with the customer and working backwards, I think those are all really sound ways to be better shepherds of the precious data and capital that your customers help you be a part of.



41:54 - Fred Cadena (Host)

No, that's great. That makes a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to check that out, both the hot fudge and also a lot of the insights that came out of that Click conference. I'm very excited to see you know, especially the Vanguard story, some of the other content. We'll really appreciate the time again, and thanks for being on the show.



42:12 - Jay Cuthrell (Guest)

Thank you, fred, be safe, be well you too.



42:17 - Fred Cadena (Host)

And we're back, excited to have another Quick Takes with Josh and Eric. Welcome back, gentlemen. Good to be back.



42:24 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

It's good to be back. Thanks for having me Us.



42:27 - Fred Cadena (Host)

We they them, they them. We took a little hiatus for Memorial Day holiday and a lot of stuff has happened, so we're probably going to skip over some of it. But we're recording this on Monday, the 10th, and I would be very remiss if I didn't mention the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and we've been texting about it a little bit over the course of the day lots of announcements. I know, eric, you watched it live. I've watched part of it in replay form and I've read about a half dozen summaries of Mashable and TechCrunch and other people's kind of takeaways. So what did you guys think? Josh, I don't know, did you check it out at all?



43:07 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I did, and I've been busy with other stuff. I'm not particularly gifted at dedicating my time to watching conferences online. I just I can't do it. Why would I have to? I like that bird.



43:19 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I like that bird. You said I'm not particularly gifted at fucking off all day.



43:25 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Well, I'm not, I'm not Like I won't do it, but I also don't have to because I can just tune in to banking on disruption. Why would I do that? Now I read other. I read the report from Bureau of Labor Statistics, things like that, you know, but all right, eric, what are your?



43:46 - Fred Cadena (Host)

what are your?



43:46 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah. So I kind of took the day off as an official boondoggle and so I didn't feel as guilty, blown work off just to sit there and watch a conference. But I was pedaling my bicycle on the indoors because it was a little windy outside while I was watching it and I divided up into three spots or three sections. I guess the first part. They talked a lot about the Apple ecosystem and how Apple intelligence is going to be part of their entire operating system. So pages numbers, a keynote, and I'll be very curious to see if that carries over Apple mail.



44:34

Because I'm a workspace shop and I think a lot of people listening to this are probably working in banks or financial services or other more professional environments. And maybe you're using Office 365 and you're using Word and Outlook and PowerPoint and Excel, and maybe you're using a Mac device. But are we going to be able to take advantage of all the coolmarly type capabilities that they introduced and having it contextually know who you are and what you're doing if you're not drinking 100% from the apple fountain? And so I'm curious.



45:12 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I mean I'm going to go out on a limb and say the answer is no. It seems very clear to me that this was an ecosystem play. It seems very clear to me that this was an ecosystem play. It seems very clear to me it was also a hardware play. Not that Apple's having necessarily a hard time making revenue off of its devices. But you, I totally understand.



45:37

One of the things I'm sure you're going to get to is privacy, and Apple emphasized privacy. They emphasized that partly by saying a lot of the things I'm sure you're going to get to is privacy, and apple emphasized privacy. They emphasize that partly by saying a lot of the processing for the features they announce are running locally on your hardware, which is great for privacy. It's also great for device sales. Because, guess what, if you're like me and you don't have an iphone 15 of any kind, you better pony up and buy an iphone 15 pro or max pro or wait to the fall for this 16, because if you don't have it, you don't get any of those features. You bet if you don't, if you're, if your mac doesn't have an m1 chip or better, if your ipad doesn't have m1 chip or better, you better make. Make a line for the genius bar and pony up for some new hardware yeah, because you're not gonna play with any other stuff at all this is how they do it.



46:22 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yep, this is how they do it we're gonna scare away, uh, our two listeners if we keep that up.



46:31

Yeah, they're both gonna be like no, so I guess, like I said, the first one was the ecosystem. The second one was the like, siri and the device and privacy, which you already mentioned. They said it at least two or three times about how their privacy is being done in a way that an independent third party could come in and validate the level of encryption so that if somebody wanted to check in on are you really doing what you said you were doing, apple that they can validate that, because I think they poked at a lot of you've got your data with all these other large language models and even though they tell you that they're not using your information, is there any way you can validate that?



47:15

And so they have set up their ecosystem in a way that and I don't know who these validated third party entities are- Probably the US government, if they're auditors or examiners of the US government, but they have positioned it so that some other third party trusted entity could come in and say, yep, your stuff's locked down, your stuff's encrypted, your stuff's protected. And to the extent that a business or an individual would need to do that, I guess that is a good thing, but I've not heard that come out before. And then they released a number of other features, like on the iPhone. You know the magic erase feature, which Google dropped, I think at the last event. That's been around for a while. The magic eraser, whatever. You could take a picture and if there's people in the background, circle them and then delete them so that you got a clean picture of just you and the family on the beach. Google dropped that. Yeah, well, they, no, they dropped it as in. They released it, not dropped it as in, they got rid of it.



48:12

So it was a feature drop they were pushing that, yeah, yeah and so I played with that a little bit just within google photos. Even even though I've got an Apple device and it works okay, I'm sure it probably works a lot better with native Android.



48:27 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Well, now you can frame pictures that weren't torn in half, so that's cool.



48:32 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I don't know, I was overall relatively underwhelmed with the set of announcements. I mean, all of the all of the whiz bang, features that had any detail were things that are, you know, kind of cool and but very like consumer kind of fun, focus, right, Like oh, we can look in your photos and find everybody that looks like a person. You know, that, that you know, you've, you've specified, you know. I think the one of the examples I read was like your mom, and then it can make a composite photo of your mom.



49:05

Okay, yeah, that's fun but not particularly useful, the one area that I think I texted you Custom stickers Go ahead.



49:15 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Keep going on your stickers. Let's keep doing that, and then I'll mention.



49:18 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I was going to say like custom stickers and messages, right, like, oh, you can have a message with a bunch of your friends and it can use the context of the conversation to make stickers. Okay, like kind of cool, but certainly nothing that's going to make me want to run out and buy it and maybe I'm just not the target audience for it. There was a whole lot of like hand waving around. We're going to make your experience overall better because we know you, but very light on the details. I don't know what that better is. You know it's very similar in my mind to kind of the and I know we'll talk about this in a minute some of the promises we heard out of Rabbit. Obviously, I expect a lot better out of the Apple hardware, but you know, I just want to hear more about, like exactly how is it going to take what it knows about me to make my experience better? Because stickers.



50:12 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Just don't do it. Yeah, I agree with you on that mention. Is they demoed a few things in Apple Notes about being able to do audio recordings, ai transcription, and to be able to then pull those into summaries, and I think that would be something I would be interested in, because I do have the Apple ecosystem, whether that's good or bad. I'm hoping that my iPad can support all this new funky stuff. But we'll talk maybe about the financial brand forum as well. But I attend a lot of my events now where I will run Otter AI on my mobile device to capture what it is that's being said, so I get a transcript and then I can go in and have a conversation with that transcript. After the fact I can have it provide summaries and takeaways. I can take inline photos with my phone of slides or other sorts of things that are going on. Maybe the notes feature would allow for me to do that natively. I don't know, I'll have to play with it.



51:17

And then they did say towards the end of this year they are planning on rolling out native GPT-4.0 integration so that if you ask Siri to do something for you and it looks like it'sa little bit more than what Siri can handle. It'll come back and say, hey, maybe GPT-4.0 can do this for you. Would you like to give that a shot? And if you have a paid account, you can register that and get access to all of your paid features, with larger token windows and more queries per day and all that other stuff. But if you don't have an account, you don't even need to sign up for one, it'll just come with it automatically.



51:54

And those sessions are not recorded. And they did say from a privacy perspective, that is also. You're couching that as a positive because you can have that conversation with Siri and it's not going to be used to train the model and you've got direct access to GPT-4. But I've got direct access to GPT-4. Now I can get access to it through perplexity. So don't know, as if that would be a huge Benny for me because I really don't rely on Siri at all at this point.



52:24 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, that was kind of my thought on it too, like what do I need it integrated natively for I've already got it on my phone Exactly.



52:33

So I will say, totally not AI related, but two things that I thought were pretty sick that they talked about. One was more customization options. I very rarely get jealous looking at people and their Android phones, but some of the stuff that's been out around in Android for a while around kind of custom looks and different ways to organize apps on the iPhone you know I do kind of say, oh, I wish we had some more of that and more of that's coming, you know again, not AI, but it was a welcome announcement. The other one that I thought is a little bit more I don't want to say a game changer, but more utility is the same SOS functionality that they rolled out with the satellite based calling for emergencies they're now going to roll out for just regular text messages. So if you happen to be someplace that you don't have an earthbound cellular signal, you'll have the option, they say, to connect to a satellite. So if you see a lot of people going like this with their phones, you're going to have to point it. It'll tell you where to point it to the satellite, and you can send your text message off without a cellular connection, which again, I know that I don't want to be texting like that all the time, but it could be pretty useful in some cases. So I did like those two features Not AI at all, but still pretty useful Cool Well, josh.



53:59

What do you think Now that you heard our recap? But but still pretty useful cool. Well, josh, what do you think now that you heard our recap? What is your favorite?



54:03 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

from eric and I speak, I want to. He says I want it, I want to buy an iphone monster yeah, I mean, that's what I've got.



54:10 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I've got the 15 pro max and, uh, you know, I've got the m whatever badass chip I don't know what it is. It's the new 16 inch, you know, powerful thing. I mean, I think all this stuff is cool. I like stuff integrated. I'd like to be able to say like, hey, siri, gpt this for me, blah, blah, blah. You know, instead of having to go and open an app and then click on the audio and then read it or have to hear it, I like doing that stuff more from my Alexa-oriented devices. So I don't know, I mean, I'm an Apple guy, except for home audio, and that's when I'm probably querying stuff the most, and we all know that Alexa is just terrible.



54:55 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That is true.



54:56 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I'm more hopeful about what Google is going to do or Amazon is going to do with that stuff.



55:01 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I am predicting that in the fall, I'll be at the Apple Store for a 16. I am still sitting here with a 13 Pro Max, so if I want to play around with any of these features, then I will be down at the Apple Store.



55:17 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Yeah, I like my 15, except it's got to do a big thumb reach on the crosswords. You know, that's all. It's my only downside. You know, that's my only downside. I think it's cool. I mean, I like that they're being involved. I think it's intelligent to be focused on this. All of their competitors are, and I feel like they've been a little bit late to really communicating what their plans are and what they're working on. So that they've done that at all is a good idea.



55:46

But we all know whether it's rabbit, google glass, new ai stuff that's going on. Uh, you know all the weird, the cool google stuff that they produce. Like there's, there's so much stuff out there and yet when reality hits, when they actually release it, we're all left with a bucket of disappointment. Yeah, you know, like we are, like it's just, I mean, there's some cool stuff. Like we all love perplexity. That is like our new google search, like we love it. Like there's certain things that, oh, my god, wow. But you know you got to step over three or four, you know pennies to pick up a quarter in tech right now and it's hard to tell what's it going to be. We just don't know until stuff's picked out.



56:30 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, perfect segue into one of the pennies. Two of the three of us have acquired our Rabbit R1. So I've had it in inbox for a little over a week and I only got around to opening it yesterday, and so I've got about an hour of time with it yesterday and maybe 10 or 15 minutes of it today. Eric, you've had yours a little bit longer. Josh, yours is still in route.



57:00 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

It's in route right now. That's my understanding. So we'll see how my experience compares to yours, but I imagine, knowing you guys, it's not going to be that much different.



57:10 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I'll share a little bit. And Eric, you can go next because you've had it longer than I have. So I unboxed it yesterday. Eric had warned me it's going to take about an hour before you can use it. A lot of people have complained online about the unboxing experience. I thought it was fine.



57:28

When I read other people's reviews, I kind of expected to be bouncing around loose in some weird cardboard box. I mean, was it as fancy as an Apple experience? It wasn't. But the box opened nicely, you know, it was nicely padded in there. It came in a clear case that I'll have to admit. I couldn't figure out the right way to open. I didn't figure out you were supposed to swivel it open. I was like prying the two little arms to take the whole you know case off. But I got it open. I hit the button and you take the whole you know case off. But I got it open. I hit the button and I got basically a dead rabbit icon. So 45 minutes or so on the charger. Uh didn't come with the usbc charger or really anything, just this and the case. And then uh hooked it up to wi-fi and uh, probably another half an hour for updates and I could could finally use it.



58:22

In that time I did go online and I believe that the Rabbit Online has five things. Let me see I'll run through them. You can connect to music. Apple Music and Spotify are options. You can connect to Uber, you can connect to DoorDash and you can connect to MidJourney. I tried to connect all five. First thing I found out is you can't connect to Apple Music and Spotify. You can connect to Apple Music or Spotify. So I connected to Spotify, which I and I'm not a big Apple Music. I don't really use Apple Music for anything but I connected to Spotify and immediately Apple Music was grayed out. I did connect to Uber. I connected to DoorDash.



59:08

I found it very interesting that there was a disclaimer. Basically, that said, the DoorDash app may not perform well on the Rabbit and I, ironically, was hungry at the time and I did try to make a DoorDash order from the rabbit and got frustrated and finally just pulled out my phone and did it. And then I did try to connect to MidJourney and after what I feel like was about 45 different attempts to get through the am I really human verification, it just seemed to go in circles. I gave up and so I've got a rabbit that's connected to Spotify, doordash, uber, and then I tried to play some music.



59:51

I asked it to play me some rap and it said we'll find a place for you to go get a rap, like on DoorDash. And I was like, nope, that's not what I want. So I said play me some Luda. And it did play me some Ludacris and I sent these two guys a video of me trying to get it to stop playing music. And even though it kept saying we're going to stop playing music, the music kept playing until eric sent me the the command five quick button pushes to reset which is totally intuitive.



01:00:28 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I don't know why you didn't figure that one out on your own.



01:00:30 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I'm I don't know how you reconnect those apps again no, no, the apps stay connected.



01:00:37 - Fred Cadena (Host)

the the wi-Fi connection remained in memory, so it reconnected everything. It's more like a soft reset than a hard reset. Okay, but yeah, so that is as much utility as I've gotten out of the Rabbit so far.



01:00:53 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I'm curious what's the prognosis, looking out three months, I mean they got to get this stuff in the field, further testing, fix their apis, like you know, sign on more companies that can allow it to to circumvent, I think, certain security protocols, things like that. I mean, the sense I'm getting is that it will all work great right up until you have to update every single thing on there, you know, twice a month, like every other app that you own, like. Do you think that's accurate?



01:01:27 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, the one thing is it doesn't appear that there's any apps running on Rabbit Like it sounds like. Rabbit's running, you know, basically a collection of APIs and all the heavy lift is being done somewhere in their data centers and so there's not. Like I didn't download a DoorDash app, I went online, I logged into DoorDash using their web interface and then Rabbit. It says something to Rabbit, it does some kind of pre-processing and sends it through the API into Rabbit's cloud somewhere, and then it fails processing and sends it, you know, through the API into, you know, rabbits cloud somewhere.



01:02:04 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

So and then, and then it fails, and then it fails, and then it fails.



01:02:07 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Okay, and then it fails. But like I don't know that, there's a lot to update here, a couple of things I did notice, like I was using this in my yesterday in my, my, my office, which is a shared co-working place, and I have the most expensive it's a hundred gigabit connection of the ones that they offer, and it's usually very good for me. There's times that it's not, but it was the weekend, I can't imagine anybody was taxing it too greatly. I kept getting weak signal sitting in the middle of this office with a very strong mesh network. So I don't know what the Wi-Fi radio is in here. I don't know if there was maybe some issues there. I haven't tested it in other places. What I'm excited to do is I did read online where you can go get a data card, basically for free. It comes with, I think, 100 megabits of data for free and I'm going to try it on the cellular network and see if it's any better than going over Wi-Fi.



01:03:15

Because that's another thing that I think would be a pain in the ass is you know, I don't want it tethered to my phone all the time. You know, if I'm in the airport I don't want to have to connect to the Wi-Fi there. So having a cellular card in it might make it a little bit easier to use.



01:03:31 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

That's my first impression. Let me ask you this Did you try any of the features where you'd like take a picture of a plant and say identify this plant Like? What species of plant is this Like? Have you tried any of those features?



01:03:45 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I did take some pictures. I didn't ask anything about them and I'll be honest with you, I don't know where the hell the pictures went, because I would take the picture and then it would just show it to me on my little screen for a minute and then it went into the ether and I have no idea how to get them out.



01:04:02 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I can answer that question for you is it? Is it dive, dive?



01:04:03 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

down the rabbit hole buddy. You got to go into your rabbit hole hole dot rabbit dot tech. That's. That's one of my little pet peeves, I guess there's. There's no way to once you use the device, you can't use the device without a computer. You have have to have a computer. Even to the point where I've gotten I've been able to log in on my iPhone to the rabbit hole using a browser. But even trying to use your browser on your phone to connect Uber or to connect DoorDash, it'll come back and say sorry, you need to use a desktop for this. So it's like they're selling you a device. They're selling you a standalone piece of equipment that is designed to replace your phone, but yet you have to use a desktop or a phone to get access to anything that it's taking You're recording.



01:04:54 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

And do you have to have your phone with you? Like, if you're going to do, can you whatever? Jump in your car, car, drive five miles away, order door dash and have it sent to your home, like you? What do you say? Like, get me a pizza, I don't care why in the device you can.



01:05:09 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

It doesn't come with cellular connectivity, so I'm I'm gonna, if I'm ever and I've not used it out and about but be able to tether it to my mobile device so I can pick up on a hot spot and be able to use it still while I'm out and about. I'm not going to invest in that.



01:05:24 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I'm more curious about, like does Uber know where you are if all you have is the rabbit?



01:05:29 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I don't know. That's a good question If it's got geolocation capability, assuming that you're using a SIM card and you're not using your phone or another hotspot. I'm not sure on that.



01:05:40 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I also could have been a great litigation attorney and I'm not. So there's that whole thing, the capability.



01:05:47 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I am traveling this week. I will test that out. I will make an attempt to get an Uber right from the rabbit and see.



01:05:54 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Did you get a SIM card for yours?



01:05:56 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I learned. I figured out a place that you can get one that is not going to charge you a bunch of money, and I'm going to get one either later today or tomorrow.



01:06:04 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Let me know how it goes.



01:06:06 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I did find the pictures, by the way. I took a picture of us and I can see it made a couple of renderings. I'll put them in the show notes.



01:06:17 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I also did. I sent you guys a screencast link in the chat on this for you to take a peek at Nice. Those are kind of fun and I hate to say I just bought a $200 novelty camera but I think that's probably what I'm going to use this most for that and the fact that I got a Perplexity Pro subscription as a result of buying this device and being in the first 10 phases or whatever the case was. But it is kind of fun. You take a photo. They rolled out what's referred to as Magic Camera, so you take a photo with the device to Fred's point it does show it to you on your screen and then disappears.



01:06:54

And if you don't know how to go into the rabbit hole, you're like where did it go, I don't know. You're like where did it go, I don't know, but it does take that and it turns it into an 80s feel video game mario brother, pixelated, kind of pixel art, approximation, ai generated, wherever you want to call it. It's kind of fun in the sense that it'll always try to figure out a way to work in a little rabbit reference as an on-brand, you know, just to keep the rabbit theme going. And it's fun to take a selfie, or to take a picture of your dog or something that you know and see what the rabbit technology AI renders that as, and, if nothing else, those are conversation starters and kind of cool.



01:07:45

I'm adjusting my mindset around this as it being I own the first pair of Google glasses that came out, or I have a first gen mobile phone or I'm using a Sony Walkman that the expectation is, whatever this device evolves into whether it becomes an app that benefits from what it experiences, or it becomes the meta AI glasses from Ray-Ban, which are way cooler and had ship Wi-Fi not thwarted my security warning, I probably would have bought some on my cruise last week when I was scrolling around on the deck. But the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, compared to Google Glass, way different experience Transition lenses, live streaming audio playback, ai integration, vision capabilities those, I think, have got some legit play for people that really want to have a device external to your mobile apps on your phone that can do some cool AI stuff. I think that's where it's evolved. But how long ago did Google Glass come out and you looked like a ridiculous cyborg with that thing on your face. There's no getting around it.



01:09:06 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Yeah, sitting in San Marco Square in Venice, Italy, jumping up and shouting sell, sell, sell.



01:09:12

I remember those apps back in the day I got to ask you now that you've had it you've just had it for a little bit, you're just still kind of broaching it Would the better play have been to sell the software piece to a company like Android or to Apple, because people don't want to carry two devices Aside from this weird 360 camera. Couldn't you just have it so like sorry, get me a DoorDash, blah, blah, blah. Now it's got the technology to access all of the apps that you've already got, because that's all this is doing.



01:09:46 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

If it worked, I would say yes, and I hate saying this out loud. I know that they've tried really hard, but I don't even think the software at this point is worth disconnecting and bundling and creating a rabbit app. I think the novelty has to have the very, very orange, super bright, crappy speaker, goofy camera. I think that's the novelty of this whole thing. And if it's a software, play any of the apps that I have on my phone that are AI, large language model connected. Blow this thing out of the water. 10x, if not more. So I'm sad to say that because I really wanted this to be a kick-ass little tool and I think it'll still be a good novelty.



01:10:34

If you're in a room with a bunch of people that have never seen this device and you pull it out and you do a couple of you know ask it an AI question. It is not nearly as verbose or thorough as any of the other apps that you can use. Just gives you like two or three sentences Whereas you ask a question on Pi, it's going to give you a whole conversation and make you feel like there's a real human behind it answering it for you.



01:10:58 - Fred Cadena (Host)

This has still got a lot of robotic feel to it, in my opinion so it's an introvert I'll say this, like jesse lou, when we all watched that video, I think eric, you sent it out and then josh and I watched it and then like two lemmings when ordered, right behind you. Who could that?



01:11:18

have been and I remember, even I remember even on our chat conversation, and then I think we talked about it on the show. We all debated, like his. His value proposition was people don't want to do this on a phone. He said, because it was one of the things that was, they came up in that video. Why not just do this on a phone? And he's like oh, this is, this is because people don't want to do this on a phone. They want something smaller, different, more convenient. What have you? I was skeptical. Then I've got this device in my hand. I'm skeptical now, like I don't know that I want yet another thing to charge. Right, I've got my. I'm in a hotel tonight. I've got an iPhone to plug in. I've got an iPhone to plug in. I've got AirPods. I've got two laptops. I've got my Apple Watch. I don't need another another, another device to plug in, especially one that you have to plug in three times a day.



01:12:12

Yeah, probably if I use it. But here's the thing Like, the phone doesn't need them, right, like to your point, android has its own AI, apple has Siri. You know there's some permissions that you have to grant and what have you, and not all of it has essentially been stood up. But there's not a market for you know Rabbit and its founder, to sell this technology to the phones. And maybe there's another hardware that makes sense. I mean, maybe it is a glasses format, maybe it is a watch format. I'll be honest with you, the only thing I use my Apple Watch for anymore is to try to awkwardly look at my text messages and my emails when I'm in a meeting and not get caught. My text messages and my emails when I'm in a meeting and not get caught. You know the Apple Watch, you know the screen is too small to do anything meaningful, right, like, maybe there's another hardware play, but I will tell you I don't think this is it.



01:13:12 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Well, you can sell. I'm on eBay right now and it looks like you can sell it new in the box for up to 300 bucks. Get your money back. I've got here's one listed at 600 with three watchers. I'm sure it's the watchers.



01:13:27 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Are the three people who thought it was a good idea to charge 600 or they have, or they have one and they're wondering if this guy can sell us for six, because they're gonna do the same thing yeah, I mean, but these, but these aren't, these aren't even going.



01:13:40 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I mean, we've got two bids on one that's gone up to 69 bucks. So yeah, it's just going to be like a funny thing that you'll laugh about. And what's funny is, you know it, in its attempt to be retro, and it kind of reminds me of that, that new TV show I've been watching, the big door prize, which is actually a pretty cool show. I don't know if you guys watch. No, there's a, there's a. I recommend it. And there's a. It's, it's pretty funny and there's a.



01:14:07

Basically, this arcade machine shows up in a town, in a store, and you go into the box and when you put your hand on the machine and it tells you, it spits out a card which is like what your destiny is, like, what you're supposed to be. It might say father, or it might say you know card which is like what your destiny is like, what you're supposed to be. It might say father, or it might say you know ballerina, or like whatever. And I don't want to give any spoilers, but effectively it's using the same 80 late eighties style pixel animation art to communicate.



01:14:36

You know, people's dreams and goals. So it's, you know. It's interesting that there's all of a sudden this sort of throwback to that, to that time when we were, you know, people's dreams and goals, so it's, you know, it's interesting that there's all of a sudden this sort of throwback to that, to that time when we were, you know, 10, 11 years old or whatever it was. So, but yeah, it just seems like a clunky thing in your pocket that's not going to add a lot of value right now.



01:14:54 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I'm not going to sell one. I mean I you know to never know how to get the pictures out. I can definitely see myself using it as I'm traveling, take selfies of myself different places. I did find all my pictures from yesterday. My pictures yesterday look a lot more like me. The ones today that I took, and Eric you took for whatever reason. It seems to think I have hair, which I clearly do not.



01:15:18 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

On your face.



01:15:20 - Fred Cadena (Host)

It put hair on the top clearly do not On your face. It put hair on the top of my head. It also made all three of us gray and gave all three of us beards. Not 100%, it definitely took some artistic license, but I can see some use for it. Well, gentlemen, as always, way more content than time Before we wrap up, either of you traveling this week anywhere, people can find you over the next couple of weeks.



01:15:44 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

You can find me in Jupiter Florida.



01:15:45 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

There you go. I'm road tripping through the upper peninsula tomorrow to pick up a colleague in Green Bay and we are going to road trip to a bank in Wisconsin and lead our first of what I suspect will be many AI training, strategy and discovery sessions. So we're going to be on site for two days nerding out on different ways First level setting on artificial intelligence and making sure everybody's at the same level of what it means, what it does, what it doesn't do, and starting from the same starting line and then getting into some deeper conversations. We're going to divide up into small groups and build some custom GPTs and take on some common banking challenges.



01:16:30

Just as an experiment and I am super excited the week after that I'm heading up to Mackinac Island here in Michigan to deliver a keynote on AI in the future to the Michigan Bankers Annual Convention. And then the week after that I'm heading down to Indianapolis for an all-day AI boot camp and then a marketing forum and then popping over to Ohio with the CBAO and going to do a forum for them. So I've got three weeks on the road and my wife is a little bummed because we've got a pontoon sitting out in the lake that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention and I'm gonna be on the road for most of it, so, uh, so blessing and occur I, I feel you, it sounds like your june is like my may.



01:17:13 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I am uh, but I'm traveling this week, just you know, some internal meetings and some client meetings, and so far next week I get to be honed. So a little bit of a change for me.



01:17:24 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Well, I'll take some magic photos from my rabbit and send them to you after I download them from my rabbit hole.



01:17:32 - Fred Cadena (Host)

You need to take your classic selfie in front of the room with the rabbit and see what it comes up with.



01:17:38 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

You never know. See where my rabbit shows up.



01:17:41 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, fantastic gentlemen, we'll chat next time. Thanks guys, thanks everybody.



01:17:44 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Good to see you guys.



01:17:51 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, everyone, we hope you enjoyed episode 30 of Banking on Disruption. Don't forget you can find show notes and a full transcript of the show on our website, bankingondisruptioncom. New episodes drop every other Thursday, so we'll see you in two weeks and in the meantime, don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at Banking on Disruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.