The AI Revolution - Cryptocurrency Trends - Trading Cards: A Billion Dollar Industry - The Impact of US-China Tariff

0:01Lowe's knows you've got a job to do and we help get it done with the Milo's pro rewards program eligible members save more with volume discounts on qualifying orders for a quote of$2 ,000 or more quote of $2 ,000 or more quote$19, more quotes for free of$2 ,000. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now.

0:56It's our weekly business news episode here on Friday, April 25th. We take the BS out of business, baby. Hey, it's business meets barstool. That's what you can call it. And we're not barstool. We don't need barstool. We've got the number one show on marketing. Thanks to all of our loyal listeners. We appreciate you out there, wherever, whenever, however you're listening, as we take all the bullshit out of what's happening out there, Chris. What's up, Chris Hanson? What's up, Brian Alfred? How are you, bro? I'm good, man. Just ready to take the BS out of business. Just ready to take it all out. You know, looking at our show notes, and it's kind of like a slow, busy week, like for business news.

1:43It's like there's stuff happening, but it's not like there's 17 headlines. It's like, it's kind of the same old, same old here. We've got the U.S. and China. Tariff talk cooling off a little bit. The markets are up. Crypto's up. And, hey, Elon's got to get back in the saddle over at Tesla. Get that whole thing flipped around. He needs some, I don't know, CPR on that thing. What's happening in Miami this week? It's a beautiful week out, honestly. It's nice. The weather's great. sunny windy kind of quiet after easter weekend i think i read a report that miami uh real estate was cooling off i don't know if that's true or not i don't know i'm not in the game enough to know of course if you ask any realtor they'll tell you it's not so hard to gauge yeah exactly yeah hey if we're a no bs show we can't really talk about realtors i mean yeah and i love them i got some good friends in it.

2:51Mark, it's always good if you're a realtor. Oh yeah. It's always a good time to buy. Always a good time to buy. Real interest rates are high. Hey, that means you got a lot of supply out there and you get your choice and Hey, you can always refine a couple of years. I mean, I'm making, I don't even know what they say, but I can imagine that's it. Um, so we're going to get into the headlines. I liked this, uh, this line that we got, uh, says, China says it wants peace, but there's a lot like my ex-girlfriend. I got a lot of battle scars that would say otherwise. I don't know who's blinking here.

3:27It doesn't really matter. We've said this from the outset, Chris. We've said we don't need terra force. Like, okay, I get if it was the art of the deal and all that, but we don't need destabilization. There's no need for it. I think the one thing I liked, I know Trump's always going to shake things up, and I like that. I like shaking things up. But there's this fine line between shaking things up and unnecessary destabilization. And it felt like we teetered on the other side of it. I don't know what you think. I think the most exciting thing of all of it was all the designer luxury brands being exposed, that they're marking up the handbags like a thousand percent markups did you see that i did not see that let's go down that road this was this i think is relevant so many people were talking about this over the weekend that amongst these tarif wars all these manufacturers in china that manufacture birken handbags louis vuitton all these high-end luxury goods were basically saying hey you can just buy direct from us it's the same quality bag literally in the factory and they're showing the bags they're saying you can buy from us for 250 instead of Louis Vuitton for five thousand dollars so in a way it was kind of I mean I think this is a bigger thing of people kind of the illusion of luxury because what these Italian handbags are doing they're they're basically manufactured in China and then in Italy they'll put on the hardware right they'll put on just the metal clamp that says made niddily exactly so i think uh i did see a lot of the especially the female influencer world going uh kind of wild about it and people feeling they've been duped for many years paying these outrageous prices which i mean what do they think i mean what did you think was going on i know yeah come on you're buying the brand and i'll I'll believe it when I see it, when women stop buying the luxury brand labels.

5:29I don't know. I don't know enough about the young generation, but it sure seems like that gets passed on from generation to generation, the luxury appeal of certain brands. And the exclusivity, scarcity, if you didn't know it was getting marked up like hell, then I don't know what to tell you, but I'm sure there's a subsegment of people that will. I do see, I mean, is Trump blinking or was this part of the plan? Come on, man, this is Trump. It's all part of the plan.

6:12Yeah. Well, I mean, there's some theory that, you know, if you muck it up enough, then you can always say it was part of the plan or not. you know i mean as long as you're getting the outcomes that we want i guess you can say it was all part of the plan right i don't really care like ultimately i mean i do i mean i care but i don't you know i that's why i just at the end of the day i just didn't think we needed destabilization i don't know that maybe we're getting you know more negotiation than we would have without it that's to be seen but i don't think it does us any good i don't think we need And I don't think Trump, like I told you, like Trump likes the good headlines.

6:52He wants, you know, I do think he wants what's best for himself. Yes, I can see that. But for America, you know, and I think he likes the good news. So and to own it. And I don't think he wants to own 5000 point drops on the stock market in a day. You know, I don't think he wants that. I mean, nobody wants it, but I think he sees the bigger picture that you have to do this. The only other solution was literally just raise taxes on Americans. Right. So, yeah, well, we'll see where it all nets out. But it's just so amazing. The swings on sentiment.

7:34It's like everything. You just got to zoom out, you know, because it already feels less painful than it was. Yeah. And I just think it goes back to what we said, though. Just ignore it and go in. Never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, solopreneur, whatever. You know, it's all the tools are there. AI has enabled so many things like that you would have needed a team for three years ago.

8:02So either run real lean or you can do a lot through AI automation and a lot of these tools that are out there. It's crazy. I mean, like, I mean, the democratization of a lot of tasks that's taken place that would have taken specialized labor, especially with, I think, white collar type jobs and information driven jobs. Like the Internet democratized information in a way, Chris, like, you know, like access, you know, I didn't have to. And suddenly, if you had to do that report, you didn't have to find an encyclopedia around the house. You know, like 30 years ago, the Internet, you know, democratized information.

8:48Now we've democratized information and skill sets at a very high rate. And just things that from coding websites to creating videos to generating ideas or research around concepts, processing data and charts to give you insights. Stuff that, you know, 10 years ago, I remember doing research reports where I'd call over these charts. And I enjoyed it. But now the machine, the artificial intelligence can do the legwork for you. You still have to distill it maybe to the key points and add the human dynamic to it. But it's just the speed with which these things are happening enabled. Like, if anything, I think that's what we want to be the champion of is just the opportunity.

9:42no matter what's happening with some of these headlines, the opportunities have never been greater with the tools that are at our hands. And it's also sort of made us all a little lazier. So it's like, hey, another opportunity. Because a lot of people just don't want to, I don't know, put the grid in there, you know, and get after it. That's the only thing that pains me. I mean, as I think of just computers growing up in general, right? It's like you get to a point where you're not as good as learning stuff on computers and like the younger people are. And that's where I think people need to be really active to try to learn some of this AI stuff.

10:26Like you said, whether even if it's not for business, just for your personal use. I mean, there's a ton of even me being sick. I was using like diagnose myself. But to speak on kind of what you said, I saw, I can't remember if it was Tim Cook at Apple, but essentially someone saying like in the next 10 years, a lot of these white collar jobs are going to be gone. And I know for one, like think of lawyers, right? Like you can draw a contract up relatively quickly on chat GPT. Yeah. Trust will. Yeah. All of that, You know, you don't need a lawyer. Yeah. And, you know, I guess those divorce court lawyers will still be in business.

11:10But that's about it. Well, as long as people are going to need those guys. But when it gets down to just, like, knowledge of the law and contract writing, oh, see ya. I mean, that's already here. Go give the chat to you some prompts and maybe get it run by. like you're gonna get like a lesser version like someone that can glance over it versus writing the whole thing it's like all those hours they could charge for you know their time just goes down to like one instead of like 12 hours to do something it's one hour yeah just proofread it and sign off on it sign off on it well i mean will there become a day i saw this was really interesting I think AI is, you know, this is a relevant topic, but like, will there come a day where there's an AI that's like a law, holding a law degree?

12:08Like when you think about it, like, you know, Ralph, your AI companion, he's a certified lawyer. Yeah, you're going to have your personalized like robot that's like your personalized chef slash lawyer slash accountant slash bodyguard. And he, yeah. And he's certified. I mean, he's got all the knowledge in the world. He's just, cause he knows everything the internet knows and that all the information that's out there, he can from any state. So he's certified in every state. So he can, he can, his digital hand writing on, you know, like e-sign, e-doc signing by Ralph, the robot. I mean, I mean, look at dieticians and personal trainers.

12:49Like, I don't need that now. Yeah. Because you could literally program an AI like talking person with the knowledge of like anything that you get from ChatGPT it could become the human you know human like version for distilling that to you I mean that those pieces of salt that's already kind of there I'm not saying it's perfect yet but like you can totally create an AI avatar that's a human-looking person on screen and make it say anything. So if you feed that knowledge base of the prompts you're asking, ChatGPT or whatever it might be, it could then restate that so that it's, again, in that human form on screen.

13:41It's fascinating, man. And I'll say this. I saw this was happening, and it didn't surprise me, but I guess I hadn't really gone there. You know, like if I had enough hours in a day, I'd sit down and think about all these applications. Someone had, you know how you, within ChatGPT, you can create, you know, like projects. Like you're, it has memory, it can remember, and you start asking it certain prompts that are all about a certain subject. So you're kind of creating a project there about that one topic that lives within ChatGPT and a line item. And well, and it's almost like each one of those is its own potential persona in a way, depending on what you direct it.

14:27And what this person was doing was creating an org chart, an organization of the AI avatars of each one and giving them duties, essentially. So like, you know, let's use an ad agency, for example, since that's my industry that I came up in. It had, you know, Ralph AI, the creative director, and it gave it very specific prompts of what its persona is, what its job was. And then it had Timmy, the accountant, Ralph in strategy and, you know, Gene in account management. And so it was creating an org chart and these different personas and then feeding it work so that each one of those kind of did their own task.

15:16Because now, I mean, you know, these things can generate emails. They can facilitate a lot of like digital work. And from emails to copy to creating images, generating images, generating video. And again, I'm using the example of an ad agency in the structure within an ad agency of the departments. But it was fascinating how that was because then they're kind of they're they're working within the framework of that organization, how it normally work. And each one of them have a specific task and they're informing each other to maximize optimism. I was like, whoa, OK, now I see. I mean, does that blow your mind or what?

16:03Like, I mean, it makes sense that you hear it and you see it, but I couldn't unsee it. It's kind of crazy. You're building a whole team of just automated robots, which I feel like major companies have been doing this, and it's just giving people the ability now. And I think when I think about, I was just thinking, because when you create on ChatGBT, you're kind of doing these independent tasks, you know, like, hey, hey, give me some good news articles to talk about today. Hey, how do you make these compelling? Whatever. But if you literally created the personas of each one as different sort of, we'll call them GPTs, that's, okay, your job is to continually farm the internet for the most compelling and engaging topics based on the history of click data, you know, clickbaity stuff.

16:58and you're creating the master list. Your GPT's job is to create all these. This GTP's job is to pick the best ones and create the hooks. Then this one, yours is to add some imagery and video to go with those for social media posts. Then your job is to create the newsletter and your job is to send the emails out to the list and to post it to social media. It's, there's your team. I mean, but that's what this stuff is enabling. And the only thing sort of in the way right now is the education and desire for everyone to take advantage of it or to use it. I mean, because it's there. It's not perfect.

17:47I'm not saying it can replace anything, but all of that's sort of there. and I don't think everyone is wrapping their head around both the opportunity and the potential threat of what that means.

18:08So you can frame that however you want. Is that good news or bad news? I don't know. I think if you take advantage of it's good news. The good news is, man, you can move quick, nimble as hell. And, but you just got to have the idea, the core idea. Okay. How can you leverage that? And that's what you got to think about as a, as a business owner, think about your business today, what you do and what I just described, how could you leverage that to be more efficient, to move faster, to serve your customers better? I bet you come up with some ideas. You need to think more about thinking about AI. Like I don't sleep on this.

18:48I think I pan the hell out of the metaverse. We'll play that tape. I knew that shit was a flash in the pan while we were going through COVID. It wasn't ready yet. It'll be here one day. I'm not panning this. This is real leverage and real threat. Proceed accordingly. Good thing Elon Musk is getting back in the saddle a little bit. I think he's getting out of the doge and getting back into the e-car business and getting that in line. I don't think, even for Elon, I mean, I guess if anybody's Teflon a little bit, like the world's richest man is, he's only going to tank so much, I think. But once again, I just think there's a I don't think if he's being honest, he quite wants the unsettled nature of what's happening within his businesses right now.

19:52Right. You don't want that. He's been a little thing. He's just been wrapped up with the administration. We're focused on politics and the business. But it seems like I think there's a it's an I think there's an endorphin, I think, with politics. because it's so charged and so front and center. And look, I mean, Elon's in the news no matter what he does. But I can see the rush that these politicians get from all that. And I think Elon's trying to cut money. He's feeling empowered. Hey, Donald gave him a big role to do. And he's trying to do what he thinks is best. And he sees these clear opportunities.

20:34but I think he probably underestimated sort of the blowback a little bit. Sometimes, and you'll learn this, I've learned this as an entrepreneur, something that seems so clear to me, like an inefficiency or something like that, there's the unintended consequences sometimes of decisions that you make. It doesn't make it the wrong decision, but it doesn't always mean that it was right at the right time or that there weren't other steps that had to be taken to get there. because sometimes you can't, even if it makes sense to blow up the foundation, you don't need the building to fall over unless you're, you know?

21:13So I've learned that in business myself. I'm like, this, this takes no sense. Let's X. And I'm like, Whoa, okay. That had an impact. It wasn't, didn't make the decision wrong, but maybe the timing wasn't. And I'm not saying that with everything that Elon did because it's so diverse and things like that. But I think at the end of the day, you got to get back in the saddle. I don't know how the hell he'd run companies. He's running two or three of the largest companies in the world. You know, like structurally and by value and trying to save the government efficiency. I mean, and he plays video games all night, supposedly.

21:56I think he might be a robot. I think he implanted one of those chips, Chris. He's something. He's different.

22:04And I still have no interest in buying a Tesla, so I don't know. But I didn't before this. So, you know, it's just not my cup of tea. But it's – have you seen any Teslas burning on fire? No, there's none of that down here. Someone would probably get shot. So there's no crazies trying to keep Teslas down here. Yeah. It's all friendly fire anyways. What's happening in the crypto market? It's the last two days, it started to go back up again. I mean, I can't give you an exact reason why. It was probably tied to the general market, obviously. But yeah, Bitcoin's back up over$90 ,000 again. So that's a positive sign.

22:49So a good time to buy. Sentiments seem like positive. Yeah, and I think obviously with what's going on with the overall global economy, like with the tariffs, right, we see some positive movement happening. So just positive signals throughout the entire market is getting some relief to everybody. All back to the sentiment. How do you feel? What, you know, somebody? How do you feel? But at the same time, but when you look at what's happening, this is what, you know, you and I have talked about this, Chris. Like you've got a president who supports crypto and deregulation of currency in a way. And so it should be headed north.

23:33But like, you know, everybody with the tariffs and naturally I get it, like the unsettled nature of it. But when you look at the underlying direction and the fact that more and more like, I don't know, retail day traders are in crypto and promoting it. All the other signals are positive. It's just been sort of this air of like unnatural uneasiness that drove it down. that's why i bought that xrp baby when it hey bought low head it back up right just wait yes i've kept it simple chris you know just one thing to keep up with right now i i can't do the 17 like variations you don't need and i mean i i loved it when it was kind of a little more volatile.

24:34Like I like those swings. Cause that's how you make the money. Okay. I'm not a day trader, but I was kind of a, called a half week trader. Hey, if I could put in five grand and turn it into 15 over three days, watching people like go crazy. I can, that's fun. It's like gambling, but I don't know if those days are, let's go. Are those days coming back? I think so this year. I can't tell you when, but it always comes back. Yeah. Oh, so Instagram launched a new app this week called Edits to compete with CapCut. I did play around with it, Chris, before this. And let's just say back to what I'm saying about the democratization of media.

25:25like I'm come up in the agency business and am a hybrid strategy, creative account guy. And all you agency people out there rolling your eyes. Yeah, they exist. It's just, you know, y 'all got too slow. That's why I went and started my own thing and made a lot more money. But the, but the reality is if you're not a creator, didn't know very complex software, five years, even five, three, five years, two to five years ago, let's say that. then you're relying on someone else to do it. But I'll say, you know, ByteDance slash CapCut slash China. CapCut's pretty easy to use and very powerful with what the average person can do with video.

26:11And so you've had this democratization of it. And now Instagram clearly sees that as a bit of a threat. And they've come out with edits. I have played around with it. Pretty slick. It's got some AI features with animating pictures and stuff. Play with it right before this. It's pretty cool. So what's the impact on business? Hey, look, get more content out there. I mean, anyone could be a creator now. And everybody needs to be posting what you're up to in social media and creating awareness for what you're doing. But I liked it. I don't know if you've played with it, Chris, but clearly probably a good way to also spike the algorithm for your accounts.

26:49because I think they've got to have code in those videos. It tells them it was created there, right? Yeah. I mean, I downloaded it last night and it said something, how it tracks your analytics and whatnot. So I'd imagine there's some little, there's got to be some way they're going to try to motivate people to use that instead of CapCut. So I'm going to mess around with it over the next couple of days. We'll try to throw something up, see if it is affected by the algorithm any differently, essentially. Yeah, exactly. I bet it is to a degree. But you never know. But I did think it's pretty slick so far.

27:30I don't know if it's better. It's obviously not where CapCut's loaded with features. I don't think it's obviously going to take time to get there. But first play around, pretty good. And, you know, I bust about the walled gardens of all these companies kind of owning these spaces. But look, I mean, Instagram's done me right. It's where I've grown my biggest audience. Definitely done a lot of business there.

27:56So I still can't quite get like my head around threads other than, you know, a lot of motivational stuff. You know, it's kind of my it's like my daily business devotional. Oh, good on threads. And Chris has always got something thoughtful to say. I'm like, it's one way to think about it. And, you know, Chris Burby Hanson can follow him on threads and Instagram. He's looking good, folks. Guy's working out hard. He's motivating me. I'm like, I did like one more set of pushups this morning because of Chris. Progress on perfection. But you're looking good, man. I mean that in the most heterosexual way possible.

28:40Of course. But yeah, Threads is my daily kind of motivation stuff. Trying to get back into X too a little bit. Still get a lot of news there. Threads still feels like the motivational quote space where X is more news content. That sound fair? Threads is a little bit more positive. X is a little bit more gritty. Yeah. A little bit more news. The trolls. Yeah, more trolls for sure. Yeah. Threads is like the healthier version of X. Yep. I do think it's a good time to point out, you're talking about news. And, you know, depending on the news outlet, you can get it. Look, it's all biased. It seems like right, left, or whatever.

29:27It's a mess. Every headline can be spun one way or another. And that's why I've actually been using for our show, Chris, ground news. It's not just an aggregator. It actually tells you where the spin is happening. It will tell you if it's left, if it's right or center, it gives you these percentages. And I was like using this first. So like, let me give you an example. So this recent story, Trump announced he's going to reduce the 145 % tariffs on Chinese goods. We talked about that earlier. Sounds straightforward, right? Right. It says, but tending on, but tending on, but excuse me, my grammar is terrible.

30:12Depending on where it came from, it gets spin and manipulated. So like, look at this, like literally one can say, pulled together 186 articles on that same story. Some outlets painted as a strategic move, others as a sign of weakness. The bias distribution was 36 % left, 32 % center, and 32 % right. It's fascinating to see how the same facts get spun his way. Anyway, we talk about taking the BS out of business. Ground News was like the perfect partner for us in looking at the news concepts and how they're little, take one quote, and it gets framed differently. And it's, I think it's both education for people because you need to know, I'm still amazed there are people that don't know they're being sort of biased, you know, like, like they don't, the subtle nature with which news can push you one direction or the other.