Cars & Author David Fradin

0:00Welcome to user friendly 2.0 with host Bill Sittance, Technology Architect. And this is user friendly 2.0. Welcome to this week's show, Joining me Gretchen and Bill Welcome. Hello there. So I'm feeling irrational today and we'll talk about that in the news. More than normal for, you know, all the comments I'm going to get back on that because I just stuck my foot in my mouth, but hey, Hey, did that all the time you're used to it? You know, nothing out of the woods there. Not to change the topic or anything, but let's jump into the news. All right. Well, apparently today is irrational. Yeah. So today is National Pi Day March 14 or 3.14.

1:01And for anybody that doesn't know, this is a mathematical thing that has to do with circles, circle diameters, and so on. Something that we've probably all seen in school, but a lot of us kind of went what this doesn't make any sense. And there you are. So the geeks in the world can read pie out to certain planes 3.414157 blah blah blah. And this is something that has actually been used in mathematics for a very long time for computing everything from the, like I say, the diameter of a circle to the diameter of a planet and beyond. So the number is considered to be irrational because of the fact that 3.14, etc, etc. Just keeps going and going and going. Yeah. Well, isn't there something about how far you really needed to go? Yeah, I mean, you know, but the thing of it is is we want to dive into those details.

2:02Engineers and scientists kind of argue about this all the time. And okay. So we'll be stirring the pot. We'll be stirring the pot because the thing of it is is there is a point. Okay, and 10,000 foot view explanation on that. There is a point where if we go out any further, it's not really going to matter because it's not going to change anything except that keeps changing as we start measuring smaller and smaller things. And when you start getting to things like quantum physics and those type of computations which quantum foam is very small, all of a sudden going out further does make a difference. Yeah. Open AI and Thropic feud could help Google. Yeah. So, you know, all about helping Google, right? So basically what's going on here is this is as it says, feud between these two AI organizations, although to my understanding the actual AI's are getting along just fine. So that's good. You know, check their social media and see if there's

3:02gossip. But at the end of the day, when you have two companies going at it, and this is related to a number of things, primarily the dropping of the government contracts for use in war. And that's a whole other story which is out there that we've talked about in the past. If you want to read more about it, check out a show from a couple of weeks ago. But what happens is now we have a third party that's going, hey, we're going to get along with everybody. And that's essentially what's going on here. So like everything else with AI right now, this is all stuff that's in flux and changing very quickly. And what is planned to happen today may not be the case tomorrow. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. But yeah, it's looking like this could be a winner for Google at the end of the day. All right. A 1,300 pound NASA satellite set to crash down to Earth today after 14 years in space. Now, is it possible for me to have any influence on where this crashes now? Because I can

4:06know anyway, either here or there. So yes, the Van Allen probe A launched in August of 2012. And there's a B as well that goes along with this that had originally been projected to come in back into a ground in the 2030s. The second one still being in that range for the first one because of the solar flares and number of other things that are going on has sped up its return and demise. So it's expected to burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere for the most part. Some components may survive re-entry. And you got to think about what your luck is this week. There's a 1 in 4,200 chance that you might get hit by something. NASA, however, said that that number is low. Okay. Five places where smart glasses like Meta-ray band should never ever be worn. Yeah. And this falls under kind of just being ethical and considerate of people. This is the

5:10same kind of issue that came up when smartphones came out when you had cameras and things where you wouldn't have otherwise a similar idea of a concern. And what they're referring to here is some of the new smart glasses, all of the Meta-glasses have been around for a while. But some of the newer smart glasses that have the ability to record a video, motion video as well as take still frame cameras or pictures. And that being said, there are some places where it would be inappropriate to use these like the locker room at a gym. And I think some of this is very common sense. Yeah. But you know, they put these things out there for that standardized testing. There's another one. They don't really want you taking pictures of the tests that post online. So everybody else can have it. What about if you're a borg and can receive stuff like data or something in the same way as that, man? Well, you're already strange and they can't handle it. So don't even worry about it. Okay. So it would all be another rabbit hole and go down some day probably. Yeah. Another one is hospitals. Now, this one actually is something that I would think

6:15is also important to think about because patient privacy is important. And if you're taking photographs inside a hospital or an urgent care or something, that's not cool. And a women's dressing room like in a store. Yeah, men's dressing room. Any place, that's like the locker room. The bathroom. You know, just places you wouldn't, you know, look at it this way. If you have your smartphone, you wouldn't use your camera in the smartphone in any of these places. But the difference here being is that with the glasses, people aren't as likely to notice you using it. But it's still the same basic thing. What about the casinos? The casinos, you know, when we first started this show, one of the very first things I talked about was Google Glass. And at that time, Google Glass was the very first system like this. And had these capabilities. And the casinos at that time were for lack of a better term freaking out. But also in those days, you had rules that you also couldn't use your mobile phone on most

7:19casinos floors. Now, fast forward to 2026, a lot of that is lightened up. But I have a funny feeling that the security is trained to watch for these signs. And if you do use it in a way that you would be cheating, just like anything else, I would consider that unadvisable. And, you know, it's what they might do about it. Well, watch some of the movies about, you know, Las Vegas when it was run by the mob and just consider that and ask yourself, is it good that I use it here if that might be the outcome? You know, no seriousness. It is a thing. And on that line, too, is court's courtrooms. A lot of courts don't allow recording devices in the courtroom. And here's a situation that if you do get caught with something like that and you're not supposed to have it, you will probably get in trouble. And the other one that I thought was kind of interesting that came on this list of recommended places to avoid this is cruise ships. Really? And you know, you think about that, okay, well, what is this? Well, again, it's a privacy thing. People that are on the

8:19cruise probably don't want the world to know that they're there. Now, if you are on a cruise ship taking selfies or recording and streaming from your cell phone, again, that's pretty obvious. If you turn the camera on in your glasses, again, they might not know about it. So I think the biggest thing here is just again, it's etiquette in a lot of cases, but another place is like a court room and stuff. It's potentially a criminal act. If you do things, you should never cheat in a casino. So obviously, if you use this or any other device to cheat in a casino, that would be bad and bad things would happen, right? So it's the same type of thing there. So it's just, you know, be thinking about this kind of thing when you are out there dealing with these things and more is this stuff becomes more ubiquitous. We're going to see this kind of technology around more of an issue. The other thing too is to check out and again, I'm not an attorney, but just, you know, from the way that I read these things here in the state of Oregon, there are rules where you cannot secretly record people in public. That's another area that you would want to be aware of and you don't

9:21want to get yourself into trouble. Now, I've had glasses like this for a long time. Mine are a little bit different that I've kind of programmed on myself and using further thing, but they are based on the meta glasses. I've had them for about four years now. And some of the stuff I do, especially on YouTube and things, I will use it the live stream is very handy when you're walking around some places supposed to instead of having to hold a camera and a mountain, all that kind of stuff, you can just stream what you're saying. So there's a lot of advantages to this and a lot of good uses for that. But again, like any new technology, it's possible to use it the wrong way, and there are people that will use the wrong way. And as time goes by, this will get a little more solidified. But again, if you are in a place where you shouldn't use the camera in your smartphone, it's probably obvious to not use another form of a camera, especially one that people don't see in your glasses. All right. War videos are a concern. Yeah, and this is interesting. So if

10:25what's going on in Iran, bringing this to the forefront of this, of course, not being anything new, we've been having a problem with this with Ukraine for a while. But they're saying that the Ukraine war is the first major AI information war. And this is one of the first wars where generative AI and deepbakes are a central part of the battlefield. And you're seeing it, not just with missiles and drones and so on, but also on social media timelines. And governments, activists, users and so on want to shape the narrative using manipulated video. And it's very hard now to know what's real and what isn't. So we are seeing AI generated war footage flooding social media. So platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok and so on have been inundated with fake AI generated videos of missile strikes and destruction and so on. And some of the clips are really altered or show things that actually

11:27happen. Yeah. And I watched some of the comparisons. And it was like, whoa, but the ones that seem really dramatic and over the top. More than likely, that's a load of, of course, minute. Yeah. Well, like there was one photo that was released that showed or reported to show a US base before and after they had been completely destroyed. And you look at this and you know, a big part of the reason why they do this is exaggerating success and demoralizing your foe. So getting these things out there also pushing opinion for against, you know, given narrative for the war. You look at the pictures and the one of everything being destroyed looks very real. But if you look at them side by side, you'll notice the cars in the parking lot are the same cars in the same spots between the two and some other things like that. So it's clearly been, you know, modified or fabricated even. But again, at the end of the day, most people don't do that.

12:28You're going through your feet and see this stuff. And it's like, wow, that's, you know, that's amazing. And that's where they want to go. And the other one that I thought was kind of interesting with this is video game footage. It's being manipulated and off. So your call of duty is suddenly showing up on Facebook of this is what happened wherever. And I've been seeing a rash of videos where there's avalanches and people are running. And I'm looking at these going, okay, I think these are probably fake. I've seen some things with pets that I also suspect are very fake. So, you know, when you watch these things, take it with a great assault. Now, I saw a rock video of Ramstein being performed by cats. They were doing a very good job. There's no way that was AI generated. Oh, okay. Land in Florida for you. You know, one of the ones that stands out from this is something that recently happened is a

13:32video of a naval battle from a game called War Thunder. I had something like seven million views before it was finally debunked. And what's happening with that is in addition to it making a splash and, you know, being clickbait and things, politicians and major accounts are sharing these videos before realizing their fake. So it gets even more, but, you know, so one of the other things, old war footage being recycled or changed a little bit. But the thing of it is is where this gets to be a little bit dangerous or a lot of dangerous is from the standpoint of state actors that are actively pushing propaganda and have the ability to sit down and do the manipulation of these things to a point where it becomes almost impossible to tell that they're fake in some cases, you know. And right now, they're seeing things where I ran linked accounts are spreading AI videos exaggerating damage to enemies and then rational line networks impersonating as official sources are picking them up, amplifying. And this is a coordinated thing that's actually happening, actually going on. Now, disinformation isn't anything new. But in this case, it's easier to do

14:38and it's being coordinated. And again, this type of thing, it can spread panic, influence opinion, manipulate markets and so on and trigger reactions in a way that you just didn't see before, you know. So what to look for in this, if you see a video, if something looks off like strange shadows or if it's a video and something appears and disappears or there's something unrealistic like explosions and that type of a thing, that's one way. And the other thing is to check the source. If you're looking on Facebook or whatever and see this great video, and it's from an anonymous account or a new account that was just formed, maybe take a second look. Well, this is going to irritate some people, but Xbox membership prices are increasing. Really, people aren't going to love this. I think we actually need to do a deep dive on this because this is something that in a lot of the comments we get is one of the most frustrating things that are out there are subscription costs

15:40which we've talked about. But I'm going to just throw some numbers at you with this. Xbox is leading in the most expensive subscriptions. So if we look at Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, since they are kind of them being three, the comparison is interesting. So just for these numbers, quick numbers that we're going to throw out at you, we're assuming a five-year ownership, which is the average lifespan of a console you buy it and use it for about that period of the time. You buy the console once, you're buying the version that uses physical media, and you have the highest subscription tier available. There's different tiers and they do different things. And in these amounts, that's all it includes, no extra controllers, hardware, game purchases, that kind of a thing. So Xbox Series One X, your five-year total cost of ownership is about $1,700. Okay. Um, PlayStation five, it's about 1,300. So it is less. And um, both of those consoles are $500 or $499. So just to read that. Oh, no, no, no, no, you can't do $499 anymore because the

16:42penny is going to be gone. So they have $999, but it's $99. We still have dollar bills, I think, I who knows in this world. No, no, but it's going to, you can't have that $0.99 thing anymore. No more 99 cents, but here's the thing. $499 is a great price for you. These consoles, but if it was $500, too expensive wouldn't do it. That's too late. They're going to have to change their marketing plan. Yep. And there you are. So, but yeah, so Nintendo, which comes in a distance for at least for right now with the switch, a total cost of ownership, the consoles, roughly 300. And the five-year total would be at $550 because their annual cost is $50 a year. But don't feel bad for Nintendo. It looks like there's going to be another tier coming out for the switch to that we'll put them more in line with the other two so that they're not going to miss out. So don't feel bad about that. I'm not feeling bad. All right. Technology originally developed for space missions now part of everyday life. Yeah, this is on NASA's website where this

17:46comes from and it goes through and talks about some of these things. And you know, we've talked about there's two things in the world primarily that push the advancement of technology and it's war in space. So developing for the military or developing for space stuff like NASA, this is where this stuff comes from. And the article primarily talks about some different things, but it's primarily talking about camera on a chip technology that was used for space missions. Now, the idea of this is that lighter, less components, less to go wrong, especially when it's going to be flown is a good thing. And back in the day, 1980s when this all started, the size of a sensor on a camera was well quite large, especially by today's standards. And I can remember the old VHS cam quarters, which was, you know, like walking around with something almost as heavy as the jetpack might be exactly right in touch there. But it felt like at a times, you know, and they've created technology based on this that I believe CCD, which is

18:53how we see this is what is a charged couple device, I think is what that acronym stands for. And this is the type of technology that has been used in our compact cameras, which we're seeing billions of them around now because pretty much any camera you have that's whether it's in your phone or a security camera or the metaglasses that we were just talking about or whatever uses a form of this technology. And this time goes by, these sensors get smaller and sharper so that they can pick up higher resolution, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, we'll continue to see that going on going forward. But again, this technology would not exist, at least not in the way that it does right now, had it not been developed for the use on NASA or being able to make things that they were sending up lighter and smaller and more dependable. And in all honesty, they are dependable. You can drop your cell phone and other cameras and, you know, if you do it too hard or abuse it or something, it might damage it. That's possible. But in most cases,

19:55it probably will survive. And I can tell you what, if you took a 1980 VHS cam quarter and dropped it, it would be toast. I mean, you know, besides all of the mechanical components for the VCR components, the lens on that thing is glass and has different layers and all kinds of other things that can break, come apart and come loose. And while there's layers and all of that within modern camera technology, it's done in such a way that is very, very resilient to all of the things that we might throw at it, you know. And it's just one of those things that's interesting to see where all of this goes. And there's a lot of other stuff too, but this being the one that this mainly touched upon. So anyway, all right. So 10 points day this week talking about cars. And we're going to be giving you some details on this in the next segment. But just to give an overview of all this kind of stuff, the new car industry is in a bit of a, to lightly call it a reset, right now. And the reason of this is the price. In December, the average transaction price for a

21:00new car hit $50,000. And what that means is that half of all the new cars sold are more than that and half or less. That's a lot of money. It has come all the way back down to 49,000 something now. So, you know, now it's okay. I mean, it's that whole 99 thing, Gretchen, you were talking about. But the thing of it is, is at the end of the day, people are not wanting to pay this much money for a car. And you know, some of the numbers that come out of this too, because I remember what the last car I had that I had payments on was a BMW. So fairly higher in car. And I think my payment on it was 320 a month, which at that time, which was about 15 years ago now, was considered quite high. You know, at least I considered to be quite high. And now you look at these things and the average car payment for a new car that people are paying is around $750 a month with one in five being over a grand a month for their car. That's crazy. And this is just the car payment, not the insurance registration maintenance, all the other stuff that would go along with it.

22:04And that's an increase of about 40% since 2018. So, you know, you're looking at this too. And then the other thing that's happening with the car loans too to make this feel like it's more affordable is a five year loan back when I did my last financing on a car was considered a big deal. We're seeing in some cases 10 year loans now to get the payments now. Now, of course, what you pay and the interest on something like that is two to three times the amount. But the monthly payment is a little bit less because of the duration of the loan. And to me, this is something where they're shooting themselves in the foot because number one, if you have a loan that long, the person buying the car is not going to be back in the market to buy another car for a long time, or they'll have negative X. So, you know, it's a court term thing, but for the longer term, it isn't going to be something there. It's also closing the door on the new car owners, the younger people, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the other thing if it is is how many cars last 10 years, some do, but that's not necessarily the norm. In fact, it's far from the

23:08norm. So people are going in to use cars now, which is driving up the prices of use cars. And during the pandemic, we started to see this, but it is unusual because like my car every year, gets older, seems to go up in value. My Nissan that I have now, which was not the norm at any time that I'm aware of in the past. So when we get back from the break, we're going to be diving into what's causing this a little bit. And then we are going to have a special guest on who is an author, but is one of the people that was involved in, among other things, the Apple 3 computer from a few years ago. This is user friendly 2.0. We'll be back after the break. Welcome back. This is user friendly 2.0. Check out our website at userfriendly.show.

24:09One place you send us your questions, your comments, your ideas, and check out our past episodes and everything else that is user friendly 2.0. So we've got two things we're going to be diving into. We're going to continue talking about our tech here in just a minute. And we also have an amazing guest this week. His name is David Frieden. Classically trained HP product manager through the Bi Apple brought the first hard drive to market, first hard disk drive. I mean, you know, that kind of was a milestone. Five megabyte for the Apple 3. And I believe the Apple Lisa as well. And I don't know, Gretchen, you had an Tori ST and wanted to get a hard drive. And I remember it was some exorbitant cost. It was $500 for one megabyte. Yeah, you know, it's not even the size of a floppy disk, but hey, you know, got to start somewhere. And these things are really cool. So he's going to be talking to us a bit about all of that. And he's an author and just it's a very interesting interview. So we'll have that coming up for you in just a minute. But before we get to that car prices, we were just talking in the back half of the previous segment about how

25:14the average transaction price for a car in the United States, New Car hit $50,000 in December, backed off a little bit, but it's still quite high. One in five people to buy a new car, have a payment of a thousand dollars or more a month. And what is driving up these prices? Well, in addition to all the normal stuff with inflation and that type of thing, a lot of comments have been made about the onboard technology. And is this something that we are having to pay extra for? And is it something that's worth it? And is it one of the major contributors to this? Well, what do you think? Possibly. Yeah, I was looking into it too. You know, are we going to have some sensational thing that it's a big part of it? And that was the case. There's two schools of thought on this. And definitely new technological systems you're paying for engineering and additional equipment and that type of a thing. So that would certainly add to the price, especially on things like battery electric vehicles, development costs are really on top of it, but those systems are completely new. So the tech in there definitely is something that can contribute to these type of

26:20things. So what's in there? All modern cars, driver assistance systems, these require all kinds of sensors and different things to be able to function. These are things like if you go outside, if you're laying it, tells you about it, if you start to nod off, it tells you about it, that type of a thing. Large-imple payment displays. So the big screen in the middle of the car. And this was gone two directions. I know in a lot of cases, this was heading to where that was your entire interface and people don't like that for the most part. Yeah. And so you have no real gauges, you have no buttons. So what inadvertently happens is I want to turn on my windshield wiper, so I've got to go through menus on a touch screen, which seems like not only would that be annoying, but could be somewhat unsafe while you're... A recipe for an accident. Exactly. Radar and lidar systems. These are things for auto drive, which hasn't been perfected, but self-driving cars, or what they call self-driving cars. But you also see this and other things too. I know my

27:20Nissan has adaptive cruise control, which uses a form of this kind of technology to be able to work. And you're making a face at me, right? Oh, just nothing. Anyway, cruise control basically. The nice feature is you set your cruise control to 55 miles an hour. And the guy in front of you slows down, so I'm actually slow you down and then speed you back up. That's what that's for. But that requires different sensors and things to be able to work. Some of the other things, the onboard computers, emission systems. Now, what this can save money on is things like over-the-air software updates. At least that's what they say. My problem with videos is I have an 82 Toyota pickup truck. I have never needed an over-the-air software update for it. I was just going to say, you know, the 66 Volkswagen we have doesn't need that either. So I think that could be arguable either way. The stuff that's kind of irrelevant,

28:23it's not necessary. Now automation in factories, which is based on technology, not directly what you have in your car, that can lower prices. At least over the longer term. Or I don't know if this is that new because Henry Ford came up with this idea a little while ago too with the Model T. But the idea of it is that you can be able to push that along. So what does this mean here is our automakers pricing the middle class out of the new car market. You know, it's a valid question when it comes down to these type of things. And also do we need some of these technology? And you look at it, you know, some things, okay, if it makes the car safe or I'm all for it, and I think it's worth paying for that within reason. But some of the other things are, quote unquote, features I'm doing the air quotes here, that you may not consider to be important, at least I don't. And some of them, and he saw as one of the bigger offenders of this, and we're going to deep dive into this a little later in the year. But at least the accusation is, is that some of these onboard systems that you're paying for when you buy the car, you as a for

29:26example, attach your phone to the Bluetooth. And it comes on, you know, do I have access to download context and text messages on a plus side of that is it's great because it'll read your text message to you. And you can respond and all that kind of stuff. But apparently what's happening is some of the manufacturers are downloading this data, analyzing all of your private text messages in context and figuring out stuff they can sell you or selling that information to third parties or something, you know. And again, that's an allegation and one that does seem to be playing out from the research I'm doing, but I not only don't want to pay extra for that, I don't want that period. Yeah, I don't either. I don't play with my phone or talk to people outside of the car while I'm driving. I'm focused on driving. And I think that's you're very rare in that now because, you know, people don't tend to have that in their goal anymore. Yeah. In a lot of ways, you know, travelers comes on and talks to us when we get into safety month in October about these things. But

30:29every year, this is an ongoing problem. So we're going to deep dive later. Go to userfriendly.show. Let us know what you'd like to learn about this. As I do my research on it and we get ready to do that segment. All right, speaking of which, let's talk to our guests and talk about computers and things related to that. Here we go. Go ahead of us now, guests. David Frieden, welcome to user friendly. Glad to be with you. So I could sit here and read this bio of all the amazing things you've accomplished. But instead of doing that, I'm going to just make you do it. Tell us a little bit about yourself. As boarded raised a Detroit home of Motown, and then went to the University of Michigan and in Ann Arbor, started the flying club there, started a nationwide student organization and supported a supersonic transport and later in terms and support of science and technology. When I graduated with a degree in interdisciplinary engineering, I moved my association called Fast

31:29to Washington, DC. Lobby Congress for a space shuttle was successful in that. Lobby Congress for project independence. I was not successful in that. Get a guest to move quicker. The wind and solar and geothermal and hydro and so forth. And then I was recruited by a group that started in Minnesota called the Environmental Balance Association and pioneered the field of environmental mediation and helped site new facilities throughout the state and resolved major environmental disputes. And that Hewlett Packard recruited me to go to Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto that had on their community relations for new facilities. And then I was able to move over into product management and HP and got recruited by Apple to bring the first hard disk drive to market, which was an enormous in size. It was five megabytes. It was really cheap. It was really cheap.

32:32It was only $3,500. And nobody could understand why they would ever use five megabytes of space. And they noticed that I knew how to manage, having managed those organizations. I mentioned previously Iran, Al-Qui's gubernatorial campaign in Minnesota, one that John Conley asked me to run his presidential campaign in Minnesota. We got four times more delegates than he did in New Hampshire. We got four of Minnesota. He got one in New Hampshire until he dropped out of the race. And then so I asked an Apple to become the business or the Apple 3 Group Product Manager. And Steve Jobs convinced the executive committee that it occupied a place in the market. The Apple 3 is a business computer where he wanted his get to be introduced or shipped back in touch to be. So they canceled the product line after I was on the job for about three weeks. And John Scully asked me what we should do about it. And so I made him a proposal to set us

33:39up as an independent operating entity, an independent business unit. He agreed with that. They asked me to be the business unit manager. I asked if I could be the general manager. He said we want you to be the bum or business unit manager. And we went out sold 25,000 Apple 3s for an average selling price of about $7,000 each was able to make enough profits to help pay for the development of the back in touch. And I phased the product line out without any of the customers getting pissed at Apple or leaving Apple in place else. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I love it. It's a real quick aside. I like retro computers. I actually do have an Apple 3 and it's one that not a lot of people these days have heard of. And I do have I think it's called the mega file hard drive or something like that. And it's this huge box. And yeah, I think it is

34:39five. I might have the 10 megabyte version. But yeah, I remember looking up how much that originally cost going oh boy. All the profile profile profile. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, mega file profile. I think mega files that are yes. Anyway, that not being here. They're there. It's just an interesting thing. But you're in an author of several quite successful books. And let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I began to put down on paper my experience as a what it takes to build what Steve Jobs would call insanely great products. So my first book is building insanely great products. And it covers the five keys to product success. Then, the book publisher asked me to write a textbook. So they published a little pamphlets, only 798 pages long called successful product design and management toolkit. Both of these books are available on on Amazon as and they're also available as audio books. And then I have another

35:43one called organizing and managing insanely great products, which is for CXO level people to know how to structure organize a product management function. Or I prefer to call it a product success function within the organization. That a few years ago, a cousin of mine sent me a bunch of letters. My dad wrote home during World War II and his name was Jaime, like the robot in Getzvart. So I published his letters, which follows the history from my grandmother escaping the Inquisition in 1492 in Spain, about the same time that Chris Columbus started sailing west. And she immigrated to France, where she and her party were being robbed in a gallant young man by the last name of Frayton. The same as mine came to her rescue. They fell in love, got married, and then a few generations later, when the French turned against the Jews, the Frayton family left

36:52and went to Ukraine. And then in 1914, when my grandfather was the blacksmith for the governor of Kiev, he told him he better get out of here because a dog pogrom is coming and they had six before that were of the cradians, the the Cossacks are trying to wipe out the Jews. And he immigrated to the United States so that my dad was born in Baltimore, joined the Marines in 1941. And they kicked him out because he had flat feet that he was able to get back in again so they stuck him in the infantry. And he's a very funny writer. I always wanted to get published some letters by Jaime, the very funny book and it takes you through history, including the fact that later Frayton in France was appointed a duke by King Louis and ignoring the French Revolution, where titles are not passed out. I still say that by I have a duke. I love it. I love it. Well, I can certainly accept

37:59that. So I know in your background, you talked a little bit about HP and Apple and all that, but you've trained actually hands-on trained a lot of managers over the years and didn't quite successfully for my understanding. Can you speak a little bit to that? I have a series of courses that take you through a product lifecycle framework, which is up on my website at SpiceCatalyst.com. And it starts out with a product market strategy that marketing, the social media marketing, those types of topics, and also have workshops that I perform. And my number one client is Cisco. And I've trained I or my traders have trained about half of all the product managers at Cisco. So if your Cisco stock has got up, it's my responsibility if it went down, that's your fault for buying it in the first place. And through the years, I've trained

39:00about 10,000 product managers worldwide, including a company in St. Petersburg, Russia, and including the Botswana in telecommunications company in Botswana. By the way, Botswana is North of South Africa. So I went there to figure out how you can get North of South and the Trade Capital would bank and product management for their digital tools at a number of other companies. Now we have a lot of listeners that are small business owners and have products and ideas. What's the advice you could give them? And would you be somebody they could interact with for help on what they're doing? Sure. I'd be happy to look at what they're doing or help fill in the holes. The key here is the follow of the five keys to product success, which are in my books. By the way, if you just look up my name, David Frieden, F-R-A-D-I-N, on Amazon, all my books

40:00will show up. And the first one is the letter S in spice, which is a strategy. You have to have a product market strategy. You have to understand what it is that your product needs to do for the customer to be happy and successful. And a product is the service is the same as a product. It's just an intangible product. And these principles apply to a service like a dentist's office, to a restaurant, to a gas station. It just as much as it applies to products. And the product market strategy has to then identify who the personas are, the people that you do what the product does. And it spells out to them the value proposition, the product positioning, and furthermore, the competitive research, the market research, so forth. There are 32 elements in the product market strategy. Most companies start products and

41:03or start companies without thinking through those 32 things by going out and observing what their prospective customers are doing by interviewing 40 to 80 prospective customers by surveying somewhere between 800 and 1200 of their target customers. And as a result of that, they follow what Meta and Zuckerberg calls ready fire aim. And oftentimes they miss the target and they go on a business. In fact, 35% of all new products and services introduced each year fail, wasting well over a trillion dollars in the world's assets as a result of not having that product market strategy. Then the P and spice stands for repeatable processes, the I stands for having the information available in order to make informed decisions. The C is the most important that I mentioned a piece of that already and that's understanding your customer. What it is your customer wants to do, why they want to do it, when they want to do it, where they want to do it,

42:08how they want to do it, what's standing there, their way, what how important does it to get it done, and most importantly, how satisfied are they with the current solution. So for example, if someone was thinking of the inventing an alternative pencil, the chances of being successful were quite small because the perfect pencil has been made and has been shipping for thousands of years. So understanding your customer by observing, by interviewing, by serving, and then if you're lucky enough to have big data, you can do analytics and if that big data has populated an AI engine, you can ask the AI engine for more details. And then last is your employees. There are 130 skill sets that I've identified that are vital in order to have product and service success. So you should have an ongoing training program to off-skill your existing employees to assess and

43:08analyze what skills you have or what skills your organization needs to acquire and have a plan to bring those people on board. So you mentioned this before and it's obviously a topic among technology and has been for the last couple of years. How has AI changed your direction and even starting up businesses because it seems to have flipped a lot of stuff on its head and you've been working in the field for a long time. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the differences you're seeing in a good way to be able to interact with AI or is it something you should ignore? You should not ignore it because it's getting better and better every day and it speeds up the process of putting that product market strategy together. But you have to keep in mind that it's only regurgitating back to you what has been printed previously. So if something has been printed that's wrong, some of the AI models will regurgitate that back to you. An example of that where there was some kind of post on XR, Twitter, about Elon Musk being

44:15Hitler. And then if you did certain kinds of queries, you could come back and tell you about Hitler. Also, there have been several people that have committed suicide because of their AI chat box encouraged them to hurry up and kill themselves. So it can go the wrong ways. I like to test AI's by like for example putting my name in and if it comes back fairly accurately that I'll trust it. I use an AI tool called perplexity which seems to do a very good job. And the AI mode in Google has recently gotten pretty good. I tried out Microsoft's AI a year or so ago and I put the name in a former business partner of mine and it came back and said that he went to Harvard. He didn't said he graduated from NIT. He didn't even have a college degree. It said he worked at several companies that he'd never worked at. So what it had done is taken his name which

45:16not entirely uncommon and mashed it together with other people's names and then came up with a bio that was inaccurate. So you have to be very careful of it. Another thing that I tried to do and it worked fairly well and I published this on a blog on my spicecatalyst.com website. I asked perplexity what is it that people do and it came back and told me you know we eat, we sleep, we dress, we transport ourselves to work, we work those kinds of things and it put all the things that people do and some nice neat little categories and then I which is something that would probably take weeks of effort for an individual to figure that out. And then I asked it which of these things could AI do and it came back with a very explicit description could do this, could do that, could do this but it cannot do this and it cannot do that. So I published that as I mentioned in a blog on my

46:21website. So that's an example of rapidly speeding up the process. Another thing that if you're in the software area, if you can figure out how to use it, some AI tools can write the programs for you eliminating the need for the engineers, the software programmers. Yeah, I know from my own standpoint as a programmer I've been using it a lot more for you know being able to do a lot of the basic tasks and these are the way that it's growing and you know what you can do with AI today compared to even six months ago is very very different and you know and it's one thing and it is good to emphasize that you speak of AI's having hallucinations which is when it brings back all state or incorrect you know information that kind of stuff or the legal profession I think has been seeing things that have been entirely made up so you do still need to check the information you know. Yeah, a lot of lawyers have gotten the trouble of using AI to write their briefs. Yeah well it's easy to do if you have case law that's just random but

47:24it's good for you. It's not real but it's a part of your position right now and I can see where stuff like that could be come very embarrassing and problematic at the end of the day you know because it's it's not through information so yeah you you got to watch it but it does sound like it's you know making changes here and I would think so too if business startups there's no reason it wouldn't be but it is something that in this day and age it's starting to become as important to know how to interact with AI as it was to use a computer in the 90s you know so going that direction can make it or break it. Was there anything else you'd like to tell us? There's a newsletter whose name escapes you right now that I get daily which updates me on latest developments in AI and what should I think it's simply human or human sufferer you should seek that out subscribe to it and keep you up to date as the latest developments. Okay that's great. All right well listen thank you for joining us today give us your websites again it's a spice catalyst one word dot com and my name is David Freighton FRA DIN

48:31you could look me up on perplexity and find out more things about me than I ever do. That's makes sense thank you for joining us today. Thanks for putting up with me. I don't know you know we have a lot of interesting questions that come in on retro technology and stuff like that the apple 3 was a unique system and one that many of I think they're all really cool but just kind of fun to be able to learn about this until next week this is user friendly 2.0 keeping you safe on the cutting edge user friendly 2.0 copyright 2013 to 2026 by user friendly media group incorporated all rights reserved the content is the opinion of the show's participants and does not necessarily reflect this station or platform requests for material use interviews disclosures and other correspondence may be viewed and submitted at user friendly dot show