Hey, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of Two Dads and Tech.
I'm Troy Monson, and on this episode, Daniel and I talk about how LinkedIn removed Apollo and Seamless from their platform overnight, how vibe coding is the future of enterprise applications, and Daniel opens up about his chronic pain that he has been dealing with for over a decade.
We also discuss a lot more topics on this episode. We really hope you enjoy it. Let's go ahead and dive right in. Daniel Burke, how are you? I'm good, Troy. How you doing, and how is your Dino behind you?
Dude, Dino's good. I actually need to get... If you're watching this video, people, I need to get, like, clear screws, 'cause these screws are... I can't point.
Oh, now I see what you're talking about, how, like, pointing backwards is actually pretty hard. Yeah. So yeah. Right? I need to get, uh, I need to get clear screws, uh, but happy birthday.
I wanted to start this episode off- Happy birthday... immediately. Lot- Start it off immediately... lot of news lately on LinkedIn. Yes. Seamless AI and Apollo.io, their company pages were removed. I wanted- Oh, man...
to get your thoughts. What do you think about the removal of Seamless AI and Apollo on LinkedIn? It's a great question. I ran a poll on LinkedIn about specifically this question.
I think you reacted to that poll or at least clicked the poll. Yeah, I did. The poll itself was, "Should LinkedIn be allowed to kick off entire companies from the platform without notice?" It's gotten 170 votes.
Not my most successful poll, but neither here nor there. Currently, 69% are in favor of, "Yes, absolutely. LinkedIn should be allowed to kick off companies without notice," and then 31% actually said, "No, that's crazy."
I'm not gonna lie, 31% is higher than I would've thought would've said no. Uh, I assumed it was gonna be, you know, rather one-sided of people just saying like, "Yeah, it's, it's LinkedIn's platform.
They can do whatever they want." But my own opinion on this, it depends on how they were breaking the terms of service. So here's my thought,
is Seamless and Apollo, it's a little ironic actually that they're data companies who boast good healthy data for B2B to do outreach,
that they themselves are being caught by a company like LinkedIn breaking pretty standard scraping rules in a TOS that says, "Don't do this."
I almost feel like Microsoft just sort of like decided one day that they were gonna use this as an example.
Like, "Hey, we do what we want, and we don't care if you're Joe Smith with 20 followers who's using AI chatbots to comment and like on a billion different creators' posts," which Troy and I both are annoyed by because people do that, or if you're Apollo and Seamless AI who have, you know, many tens of thousands of followers and otherwise successful companies.
It's a sticky one. I know people at both of those companies. I think, Troy, you probably know people at both of those companies.
I think it could've been nice to have a little bit of like a, like a notice letter, like, "Hey, you need to stop doing this or else." Although, I don't know if they had that.
LinkedIn may have given them a quick notice, maybe several, several notices. I don't know. What do you think? Should LinkedIn be able to kick off Apollo and Seamless without notice from their platform? Yeah.
So you did have a poll, and I reacted, yes, they should. Like, if you violate the TOS, then you should be able to do anything, and that should hold up.
Now, what I think about it, I think it's weird that you go after two large B2B contact databases versus many of the LinkedIn automation platforms that automate the connection requests, automate likes, automate comments.
Like, that is a huge issue right now on LinkedIn, is these AI-generated comments, these AI messages, and that's much more annoying than somebody scraping a profile to understand what their email and phone number is.
So I don't really know why they went after them, but then they left, like, the other big fish, which was ZoomInfo, and, um, maybe ZoomInfo's doing it in a way that doesn't violate the TOS. I'm unsure.
But one thing that I also think about is, oh, man, it caused so much uproar. Everybody was posting about it.
But at the end of the day, I don't know one single LinkedIn company page that I go and visit where I'm like, "Heck yeah, I'm glad I'm getting my content from this company page on LinkedIn."
It's the users at those companies. So if they block, let's say, Brandon Bornancin or whatever, anybody at Seamless AI or Apollo from posting, I'd be like, "Oh my goodness," like, "What is going on?" But when's...
Like, have you ever been to a LinkedIn company page and, like, have been like, "Yes, I'm glad I'm here. I'm enjoying my time on their company page"?
Well, it leads me to a question about whether or not you follow the Two Dads and Tech company page, and now I'm a little bit offended because my hope was that you yourself spend gobs of time on the Two Dads and Tech LinkedIn page, which [laughs] let me check the latest stats.
I think it was 27, like, yesterday. Yeah, I was gonna say, I believe we're up to 29 followers. Heyo. [laughs] Um- We are, we are a small business here. We... 916% increase in search appearances in the last seven days.
Hey. Up from 0 to 61. I mean, we're blowing up to say the least. But, uh, I mean- No, I agree... that's, that's different though, you know? I, like, it is.
'Cause you're sharing, like, hot takes and things like that on TDIT, and plus you have, like, sarcastic comments- Yeah... that you always do. But, like, what does the c- removing the company page do?
I think it sends a message more than anything else. I don't think Seamless or Apollo are sitting there, like, hurting for business now whatsoever, you know? So- No. I don't know.
I, I think, I think there are seldom company pages that I actually read what they're saying or engage with the comments. Honestly, in Gong's heyday, I was a big fan- Yeah...
of their LinkedIn page, uh, like way back, like 2019 to 2020. Like, their, their, their- Yeah... company page was, like, so funny and, and it was, like, before its time. Like, it was posting, like- Yeah, it was...
hilarious stuff on LinkedIn. ButI don't know. I, I love the Beehive company page. Shout out Beehive. Shout out this hat, Beehive. But yeah, I don't... I think you're right. You gotta have a personal brand.
Your employee advocacy's gotta be strong for your company to mean anything on LinkedIn, and I think LinkedIn itself is leaning really far into actual personal brands more than company brands right now.
Yeah, and speaking of personal brands, dude, the impressions, the reach, the exposure on LinkedIn right now, I think they're also sending a message to creators. I don't know what's going on.
I have spent gobs of time away from the TDIT company page and more so on writing content. Yeah, what the heck, man? Like, this morning I wrote such a long post.
I hit the character limit, and I had to change it, and it got maybe, like, 1,000 impressions or something like that, a couple thousand. But then I share a meme that's, like, so dumb. [laughs] I know.
Look, I know it's right up your alley. I share a meme that's so dumb, 10,000 plus impressions, hundreds of likes, and I'm just like- That's right...
[sighs] I think I might have to start leaning into the Daniel Burke method because, at this point, like, I'm not gonna waste 20 minutes on a post again just to fall flat on my face. You know,
someone once said that if you're trying to find something out to China that you've Trina'd too close to the sun. Mm-hmm. That's the- Yeah... probably the insideist joke I've ever told.
I guarantee one person probably even understands the sentence that just came out of my mouth, but dude, memes on LinkedIn are current. It, it is, it is what LinkedIn is boosting.
I have a, a conspiracy theory that LinkedIn doesn't even realize it's boosting it. Like, LinkedIn has no idea that I am flying under the radar, talking about the absolute dumbest things, like dumb- Dumbest...
no, no concepts- Dumb... nothing of substance. [laughs] Look at my... Like, today I posted something of substance about newsletters, and it was great. Yesterday, I posted something about health.
It was great, but, like, I post 20 times a day sometimes, and probably 18 of those posts, no substance. None. Nada. It's actually my strategy. I want my top of funnel to be so chaotic- [laughs]...
that I get a lot of people following me for idiot stuff, and then I pick and choose from those people which people are gonna go bottom of funnel with me to the Beehive world or to the Two Dads in Tech world.
Some people would call it a terrible strategy. Yeah. Yeah. I would probably agree with them, but it is my current strategy. [laughs] I, you know, I love the strategy. I think it's... I mean, you definitely have...
There's many times, I'd say almost every day, where I, I'm laughing at my phone. My wife's like, "What's so funny?" And I'm like, "Daniel's stupid posts. Like, it's so dumb." And then, like, stupid comments as well.
What? There was something the other day, it was the dumbest comment, and I was like, "Oh, my goodness." Like, this guy is such a goofball. And was it the Alan comment? Should we shout out Alan? Shout out Alan.
You know who you are. Shout out Alan. You're not listening to- Yeah... this podcast, but you know who you are. I know. It... Maybe he is, and he's probably like, "I wanna see if they talk about tech next time.
That's what I wanna listen to." [laughs] He's like, "If these, if, if these, if these stupid Two Dads in Tech don't talk about technology in their podcast," oh, man. Watch out, Alan.
If- Maybe we should do a full episode that just doesn't even consider, doesn't even get close to topics about tech, just to see what Alan says.
Just way off, and, and if you're listening and you don't know who Alan is, Alan posted on, made a comment on my post of the release of episode 14 and said something along the lines of, "Why is this called Two Dads in Tech?
It sounds like just two dads complaining," whatever, something. Whatever it was. Who cares? Two dads talking about things not related to tech.
Yeah, and I was like, "Well, it's Two Dads in Tech, not Two Dads Talking About Tech." Like, we're just in tech. We don't have to talk about tech.
But Alan, this episode's for you because I'm actually gonna have Daniel blind rank tech. Daniel, I've got five pieces of sales software. Let's blind rank. All right. I will say- Throw me in the water. I'm going to.
I'm going to, and it was in the shared notes tab that I sent over to you. Did you see them or no? 'Cause I deleted it. I didn't, no. Okay, good. So you deleted it just in time. All right. Sweet. Cool.
So we're gonna blind rank some sales tech here, and we're gonna... And they're not related whatsoever. Some of them might be; some of them might not be. But the idea is that Daniel has five pieces of tech.
He's gonna blind rank them one through five, one being the best, five being the worst. Let's go ahead and start off with the controversial one right now, and that is Apollo. All right. Uh, let's say, let's say three.
I wanna be conservative. Three. Apollo is three. Cool. Cool. I think that's a pretty good spot to put Apollo. Okay. Let's go Salesforce. Okay. Well, I have a specific spot in my heart for Salesforce.
I'm gonna say five because I just, I want any other tech you could possibly mention to beat Salesforce. Five is the worst is what we just decided. It's one through five. Salesforce is at five. Salesforce is five. Okay.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Ooh. I have three spots left. I love LinkedIn Sales Nav. It's a very useful tool, particularly for sellers. I wanna put it in one, but I also don't know what else is coming.
It's definitely not four. Three is already taken. I'm gonna say two. I'm gonna, I'm gonna play this safe 'cause you might throw out Beehive. I mean, I don't know.
I didn't see the list here, but I gotta reserve number one just in case. Yeah. All right, go ahead. Give me some more. Yeah, yeah. LinkedIn Sales Nav is number two.
I think you're doing, I think you're doing pretty good, and I did not include Beehive 'cause I knew you were gonna rank it number one if I did. [laughs] And so [laughs] I purposely did not include it.
Plus, I don't really know how much of a sales tech it is. I think it's more, like- It's true. Yeah, it's true... for marketing, but whatever. The, uh, I think we're on number four now.
The fourth one is going to be Fathom. Ooh, I gotta do Fathom at number one. I gotta do Fathom at number one. Fathom is a great tool. Fathom has to be number one. Fathom is a great tool, and the last one is Gong.
[laughs] Whoa. Boom, boom, boom, boom. [laughs] Air horns. The noise- Wow... of, like, the- Um... the tape recorder going backwards.
Well- [imitates tape rewinding] Well, Gon- yeah, Gong's, Gong's gotta take number four then. I, I'm sorry, Gong, but Fathom has dethroned Gong in this moment.
I actually think that's a great segue into which recording software you prefer, Troy. Is it Gong or Fathom?
They are both incredible tools, so I think that that needs to be said because if I say one or the other, somebody might be like, "Oh, that one sucks."
Right now, I'm saying Fathom, but if I'm working at an enterprise company, a large enterprise, or even, like, a fast-growing startup, high-growth startup, mid-market company, I think I would go Gong.
But at the same time, I mean, Fathom is, is really starting to, to make waves in the recording space. So-It's tough. It's tough. Save budget, go Fathom.
Want something a little bit more robust with more bells and whistles, go Gong. That's the way I think about it.
You know, speaking of Gong, Brian Lamana, who I heard has been able to, since the day he was born, lift an entire fully grown adult gorilla with both arms independently. Unbelievably remarkable, if you ask me.
I reached out to him recently. Mm-hmm. And if you don't know who Brian Lamana is, we had him on as a guest in an episode recently. Check out our page on YouTube or Spotify or Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts.
It's a great episode, and he's a tremendous enterprise seller, uh, which is part of what I wanted to say is he was recently promoted at Gong to an enterprise AE. So congratulations to Brian.
I feel like that's both well-deserved and a bit overdue. I'm, I'm actually surprised- Yeah... he was in mid-market until now. Feels like- Yeah...
his quota attainment being at, I think last I checked, like ninety-two thousand percent per quarter. Yeah. Yeah. You'd just expect him to be in enterprise, but yeah. Yeah. Congrats, Brian.
Yeah, you know, I thought that he was an enterprise sales rep, and then he said that I'm an enterprise sales rep. He made the announcement.
So I assumed when he told us, "I have an announcement coming soon," I thought he was gonna go into management, but he didn't.
And yes, if you have not heard of Brian Lamana, one of the best sellers out there and shares some of the most helpful tips on LinkedIn when it comes to selling, breaking into accounts, closing accounts, et cetera.
But I thought he was- Yes... I thought he was m-more than a mid-market rep, not saying anything negative- Same... about mid-market people, but I thought he was. Nothing wrong.
Honestly, SMB, some people are crushing quota in SMB and mid-market and raking in revenue because at, at this point, I mean, depends on your niche. It depends on the spread of inbound.
It depends on who you're selling into, what positions. I mean- Yeah... SMBs are, are, are making bank in, in many cases.
I was gonna add though, I asked Brian when I reached out to him, I said, "Have you given feedback to Gong on their email tool?" They have a... Y- your Gong records a call.
You can send a follow-up email with their software, and it's like, when I first started using Gong about eighteen months ago with Beehive, it was eighty percent of the email.
Like, I would, I would edit it about twenty percent, and the AI would kind of generate a follow-up for me.
Now, I actually don't use it at all except for the notes, and I have my own custom-built GPT where I'm taking the notes that the Gong software creates the email for me, pasting it into this GPT and taught this GPT to, like, make the email literally the, the instruction is less lame.
It's hilarious, and it makes an incredible email that's ninety-five percent ready, and then I tweak it the five percent extra, and I send it off. Great for that first follow-up email after a demo or technical call.
But I asked Brian, I was like, "Have you given feedback to Gong on, like, how bad this is?
'Cause, like, there's no way you're using it 'cause you're definitely not making any sales by using just the email tool that Gong provides."
Anyways, I was given, uh, I was given some feedback from him that it has made its way through Gong that needs to be improved. So Gong, if you're listening- Yeah...
you can both sponsor "Two Dads and Tech" and you can please improve that tool because I am using it a lot in Beehive. Yeah.
Would you say that twenty percent that you had to spend fixing that email, now you have this process to send it through a ChatGPT.
Would you say you're spending just as much time sending it through your ChatGPT process versus fixing it in Gong? No, no, no. No. Uh, it's...
Right now I would say the content created email from Gong from the call is literally twenty to thirty percent good. I'd have to rewrite it from scratch. So it's got the keywords. It's got the flow.
It's got, like, important notes. Yeah.
It's saving me ten minutes easily because you've got four or five bullet points of things we discussed, four or five bullet points of actual next steps that we discussed in the call.
You've got people who are in the call, you know, depending on how, you know, wide the account is. You got specific multi-threaded humans- Yeah... that you're addressing.
Then I have snippets that I have directly in HubSpot where I'll expand on that email with, like, packages we discussed, you know, different quotes, et cetera, so. Yeah. Definitely saving a lot of time. Yeah, yeah.
And Gong, if you're listening, a lot of people right now are creating tools to help write emails and building software to write emails and follow-ups and things like that in their multimillion-dollar businesses.
They're not three hundred million in ARR, which congratulations, Gong. Huge milestone.
Recently surpassed that, but a lot of people are building software to do things just like that to try to go in there and get an acquisition from somebody like Gong. Alan, is this enough tech for you?
I feel like we've done our due diligence here to make sure that you're a happy listener.
Please give us a five-star review on podcasts wherever you listen to it, and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel, Alan, I feel like we deserve it at this point, so please do. [laughs] Oh, Alan. Alan.
Well, gives a great segue.
You mentioned building tools and email tools, and I think we've talked about a lot of tech on Twitter this week, now called X, although if you're cool and not, you know, a loser, you still call it Twitter, in my opinion.
Probably a conversation for another day. Vibe coding, huge topic right now.
Vibe coding is basically the ability to use the tools like Replit and Cursor and all the different chatbots out there to create usable, functional apps and tools or even video games.
Uh, I know a bunch of people, Levels has created this whole flight simulator plane video game using some of these tools and is already generating supposedly over seventy thousand dollars a month just from, quote- Mm...
vibe coding. But what is vibe coding? High level, this is not a ChatGPT description. This is just a Daniel off-the-cuff description.
It's the ability to create complex code while you're just chilling, and you're not deep in the, in the sauce. You're not necessarily a developer or a coder.
You have maybe no history in software whatsoever, but conceptually you understand enough about code and enough about what you would ideally create as a product to just tell Cursor or Replit or some of these different softwares that are built with AI how to develop the product you want to build.
That's vibe coding.My question to you, Troy, with vibe coding taking over right now, and if you haven't heard of vibe coding, this is your first introduction to it.
I promise if you listen to "Two Dads and Tech" and tune into the internet long enough, you're going to hear more about vibe coding weeks from now, not years, weeks. It's, it's absolutely taking over the internet.
Is vibe coding enough to create sustainable enterprise solutions at scale- Mm. -for people who do not know how to read the code?
So one thing that you said there specifically was enterprise level applications that could scale and things like that. Mm-hmm. Let me give you my take on vibe coding first, and then I'll answer your question.
So I recently learned about vibe coding in the last two or three days.
So this morning I spent three hours vibe coding actually, and I used Cursor for it, which first and foremost, Cursor is the fastest company in the world to go to one hundred million dollars in ARR. So- [whistles]...
massive, massive milestone, and that just shows how popular it is to go and build software without having that software developer experience. I will say, so I've been playing with it for about three hours.
I think if I spent a weekend playing with it and learning it more and more, and those three hours were definitely interrupted with calls and things like that. If I spent a weekend, I think that I can build
really any of these, I, I wouldn't say enterprise grade applications, but I would say- Mm. -you know, just these little like,I wouldn't call it a ChatGPT wrapper either, right?
A little bit more past that, like something- Yeah... that is definitely fruitful and that can definitely scale with thousands of users on it.
I think enterprise level, like are you gonna go sell something to like IBM, like you actually might, assuming that it has the right security controls in place and it's like ISO compliant and stuff, you probably could sell up market a vibe coded tool, even if it was like just a small little fix.
So what I've been doing, there's a lot of features that I wanna build in a demo, but because we're bandwidth constrained on the engineering side, I'm trying to build like little MVPs because it creates the code for you and it creates it with like Tailwind, it creates it with Next.js and Node and all this stuff.
And so I'm trying to pass that code over to my developers and be like, "Hey, I built this. Can you now spend ten percent, twenty percent of the time it takes to clean it up- Yeah... and make it better for our site?"
And so I do. I don't know how many years, but I do actually believe that there will be people like you, there will be people like me that will be able to build an application.
Now, enterprise level like Salesforce, give it some time. Today, no. Yeah. But give it some time. Yeah.
And like, I don't think people understand the rate at which AI is learning right now, and regardless of any political views, I think the AI regulations were lifted, like there's no stopping the privacy and the, and the security and how quickly AI is growing right now.
So yeah, give it some time. I think it could build a really robust solution.
Today, I think that anybody can spend a weekend or a week learning Cursor, learning Lovable, learning Replit, any of those, and they can build a working application and go make seven figures in ARR in twelve months if they built it correctly and it had some sort of viral effect to it.
So yeah, that's kind of my- Yep... stance on it. I think y-you said something... You said you don't feel like people realize how fast AI is learning right now, and I wanna repeat that back and make a point.
A lot of people don't even have that concept of AI in their brains yet.
They still view AI as a concept, as something requiring input from humans to get better, and I think that is why I agree with you and would argue that enterprise level solutions will be vibe coded
maybe i-in this calendar year. Yeah, I agree. Because what we have to understand about AI is it does not sleep, it does not require food, it does not require human input.
It continuously learns from everything it has at its disposal forever at
such an infinitely larger rate than a human brain can do, than a hundred thousand human brains could do, that it is learning faster than we can teach it.
Now, real true AGI, like what Sam Altman is, you know, proposing should be built and what OpenAI and all these different, you know, DeepSeek type of companies are ultimately building toward, i-it's different.
That is a fully autonomous artificial intelligence. Yeah. But I don't think we're that far off from that.
And so the argument I think against this, to be my own devil's advocate, is, well, if you're a fully, you know, product-based salesperson, you're not an engineer at all, you don't understand the code whatsoever, you won't ever be able to release something into full production because it'll require bug fixes, and it'll require, you know...
Like what you're saying with demo, eighty percent builds passing off for the extra twenty or the final twenty percent. That I think disregards AI picking up that twenty percent and fixing its own bugs.
And if that sounds crazy to you, whoever's listening here and say, "Oh, that could never happen," that absolutely will happen and is happening right now. Yeah.
AI will be able to identify its own bugs and fix them one hundred million times faster than a human could. Yeah, and I actually have proof of this because, again, I've been on this weird vibe coding obsession.
So a few days ago I was using v0 and I created... We're building this pretty complex feature right now, a demo, and I built like the entire UI for it on v0.dev. It's owned by Vercel.
Essentially the same thing, ChatGPT prompt. They're really good at front end. They don't do anything too much on the back end, so you still gotta wire a lot of that stuff up.
But then I learned of Tempo Labs, which is a Y Combinator-backed company.
They just came out of Y Combinator, and they're taking it a step further where-When you're building with Tempo Labs, what's very interesting is it'll literally say forty-three bugs detected, and there's a button that says, "Fix it or use AI to fix it."
So just like what you're saying, they are already debugging the software- Yes... that they are building and making mistakes on. And the more and more bugs they fix, the smarter and smarter the technology gets.
And like you mentioned, I don't think people are really grasping what's going on, especially because- Yeah... the majority of people in the world are so far removed from AI. But it's- Yeah... it's insane.
And then I was like, "Okay, let me go one step further," which I believe Lovable, Cursor is one step further than v0 and Tempo Labs. Those are more UI-based, UX-based. Cursor, Lovable, like, you can build.
Yes, a lot of it is, like, scary to me, a lot of it's foreign to me. I don't really understand it 'cause I don't come from a coding background.
But I know, like, just with enough hours, a handful of hours, I would be able to understand it 'cause it walks you through step by step what it's doing. Says confirm, says approve, says change.
Like, I mean, it will build a full application for you. It's, it's insane. Yeah, and honestly, human developers make a lot of mistakes. Yep.
And so the argument does not have much solid ground to stand on to say humans should have oversight in this and do manual debugging. Like, they should right now, sure.
But there are bugs in software comprised of humans because humans put the bugs in the code. Like, that's, that's why there are bugs. That's why debugging exists. That's why QA exists.
That's why there's entire organizations at massive companies devoted to fixing the bugs [laughs] that were- Yeah... coded by the humans into the software.
So I mean, guys, AI is gonna do this faster and better than humans can. It's not, it's not a matter of if. It, it will happen. It will happen. What do you think the future of, of software engineering looks like then?
I think there's a really interesting image, and it actually affirms what you mentioned on Cursor being the... What did you say? Cursor's the fastest-growing company- Yeah... at a hundred million ARR. What was your stat?
The fastest growing company from zero to a hundred million in ARR, and I think they have, like, twenty people. Yeah. Yep, yep. So I have this image pulled up now. Uh, Cursor's right at the top.
Uh, the image is, is, it basically says, "Small teams are the future. Cursor, zero to a hundred million ARR in twenty-one months with twenty people." And then it goes down a list, and I'll just spout it off.
"Midjourney, zero to two hundred million ARR in two years with ten people. Lovable, zero to ten million in two months with fifteen people. Bolt, zero to twenty million ARR, two months, fifteen people.
Mercer, fifty million ARR in two years with thirty people." It goes on and on and on, and then it says, "Two Dads in Tech, zero to two hundred trillion ARR in five seconds with two people." But you get the picture.
Uh, the first several were real, and the point is, small teams are the future. So to your question is what does the future of tech look like?
I mean, it's scary if you're in tech because if you are the expert coder in your very large company of tons of engineers, I hate to be the one to deliver this news to you, although I'm sure you are more tuned into it even than I am, but you have to figure out a way to differentiate, and you have to do that right now.
Yeah. And so my brother is a software engineer, a really successful software engineer. He's using Cursor to be different and to make sure that he's successful ten-plus years software developer.
Like, he, he could build the stuff Cursor is building. But he wants to make sure he's also building the stuff Cursor's building with Cursor because eventually these small teams are just gonna be how things operate.
You're not gonna have organizations comprised of tens of thousands of engineers because, you know, one Cursor deployment can do the work of,
in, in the worst case, two to three engineers, in the best case, two hundred engineers. You know? It's like, it's, it's building that rapidly. What do you think?
What does the future of tech look like considering some of these things? I, I'm right there on the same page with you. I, I was reading through this Reddit thread today about Cursor specifically, and... Or no, sorry.
It was, it was a YouTube video of Riley Brown.
So everybody, Riley Brown, I don't know who it is, I found out about him recently, and he has a two-and-a-half-hour YouTube video of how exactly from start to finish without knowing a single thing about coding, how to code applications with Cursor.
Amazing. So I'm halfway through it, and it's why that I've been playing with it so much. But Riley Brown, great video, two and a half hours.
Literally goes from creating, like, a pinball game all the way to a complex application, and shows you, like, tells you every little word. What does this CMD mean? Command, right? It's, like, everything.
So you don't need to know anything about coding. You can watch this two-and-a-half-hour video, and you can build an application by the time you're done with that video.
So all that to say is, I mean, yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lean team thing.
I don't know what that means for people that are, you know, in massive organizations because you could just send an AI debugger out there and debug. Like, that could be the entire QA team gone.
I don't know what it looks like, man. I don't think I'm smart enough. I don't think I get paid enough to know that stuff.
But what I do know is our podcast will probably be named Two Dads That Are No Longer in Tech at some point, and then we'll have to figure out what to do because we're not gonna have a job.
Well, we're salespeople, so we're good. [laughs] Yeah, we're, we're fine. I, I will sell- Yeah... I will sell anything that exists to anyone with a wallet.
By the way, if you're listening to Two Dads in Tech, we launched in December of twenty twenty-four. This is our fifteenth episode, and Troy and I recently just kinda put it out into the world. We're manifesting this.
Uh, I hate, I hate people that say manifesting it, so I'm just doing a little barf there in the, into the mic. But, uh, we're manifesting this. Six figures in twenty twenty-five. Yes, we are. Two dads in tech. Yes.
That- I think it, I think it can be done. We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it. That, that's me manifesting it. Are you un-manifesting my six figures right now? No. No, no.
Man- I feel, I feel you un-vibe coding my manifestation. No. No. I'm gonna vibe code that all the way until we make six figures. Vibe code it all the way.
No, I, I agree with that, but I did wanna quickly move away from tech. I think we did Alan more than enough justice on this episode. I know. Seriously, God. FriggingFreaking Alan. We talked about a lot of tech.
So Alan's gonna be the reason why we talk about tech. Um, so- Yeah, we're so, we're so insecure. Like, look what you did to us, Alan. Yeah. God, just like all we can talk about...
I'm gonna try to like stray away, and next thing you know, I'm gonna ask about software. But quick question. I know that you've been focused on your health journey. Yes.
Is there any specific diet that you follow on your health journey? Or like what are your goals when it comes to dieting and stuff like that? Or do you not really care?
Is it more so I'm just gonna run a lot and it'll burn the calories that I eat, that, you know, I eat that day? It's a great question. Uh, shout out to Sam Parr, who is one of the co-hosts of My First Million.
He and I had a conversation recently, and he gave me a referral to My Body Tutor, uh, which is an incredible company that I highly recommend.
They're not paying me to say this, uh, I just had a really good time with the coach that they assigned me to, especially if you like don't know where to start. The coaches are certified.
They're gonna help you lose weight or, you know, get into shape or, you know, meet your goals, whatever those are. And so to answer your question, do I follow a routine or a specific diet? Right now, honestly, I don't.
I have in years and months past when I first started my health journey. It was just elimination. It wasn't, "Oh, I need to hit my macros. I need to hit my fats and my carbs and my proteins and all that stuff."
Like I, I had honestly no concept of that. I knew macros as a concept. I literally could not have told you what that meant, not even exaggerating. So at first it was, "All right. I'm gonna eliminate gluten. Okay.
Now I'm gonna eliminate dairy. Okay, now I'm gonna eliminate carbs." And so I eliminated all carbs complete, like keto diet, except obviously keto includes some of the stuff I had already eliminated. "Okay.
Now I'm gonna eliminate alcohol. Okay. Now I'm gonna eliminate processed sugar."
So I eliminated all of those things in almost 100% as much as you can without like looking at like the sauce that you put on your, you know, salad and stuff. Yeah.
I wasn't being like anal about it, but I was eliminating that stuff. And so I did that for about three or four months. I lost about twenty-five pounds, uh, just from doing that.
I was running a little bit, but not far and not enough to lose weight like that.
Uh, then I lost another twenty-ish, maybe close to twenty-five more pounds over the following six months from continuing to eat kind of like that, although I was having sugar sometimes, I was running a lot more.
But after I ask you a question on that because I know you're really tuned into like specific diet stuff, which I wanna hear about, I wanna come back to, to some of the things I'm dealing with now in my health journey.
I think it's important. I think a lot of people will learn from it.
But tell me about what you do with your diet, because I think what you're doing is admirable, and you're doing a lot more than even what I'm doing in the, in the diet realm.
So I don't follow a specific diet, but I have a specific thing that I wanna hit, which is two hundred grams of protein every single day. Other than that, I don't care how I get there, but I also wanna be mindful.
So one good example is, like right now, I'm actually tracking what I'm eating because I just haven't done it in a while.
I usually do that once every three months or so just to kind of see how many calories I'm eating per day, because I snack a lot. I snack a lot.
But in this current state today, two kids, running a software as a company, like I am in the best shape I've ever been in in my whole life.
And I think a lot of it comes down to, one, I just, I'm definitely more into lifting right now than I think I've ever been, but two, I'm going after two hundred grams of protein with twenty-seven hundred calories a day.
So anything twenty-seven hundred and below. Oh, that's, that's actually normal. I was, I was shocked at first. Yeah. But what is... What's, what's like average calorie count?
It's like twenty-three hundred or twenty-five hundred? I, I actually don't know. Yeah.
It depends on body weight, but like if you were to, like growing up, they said two thousand calories was like the daily limit, but I burn a lot of calories throughout the day.
Dude, I burn twenty, I think it's twenty-seven hundred by doing nothing. That's what I'm saying. So I'm in a calorie deficit. I learned this recently.
Like I'm in a calorie deficit if I'm not eating twenty-seven to thirty-two hundred a day- Yeah... which is way more than I eat.
So I'm just constantly losing weight right now, which is like a new thing, all because of how much I've run in the last nine months or whatever.
People don't understand how many calories they burn just sitting there doing nothing.
They think that, "Oh gosh, I had twenty-seven hundred calories, now I gotta go do cardio for twenty-seven hundred calories to burn it all off." That's not how- Right... the world works. It's not how your body works.
Like that's just not it. My big thing, I don't care. Let me just hit my protein goal of two hundred grams of protein that day and then be mindful of the calories. That's really it. I've been eating these, actually.
No, those sponsored ads or anything. David Bars. Oh, nice. David Bars. Are they just called David? They're just called David. So- David... so founder, founder of the RXBAR, Peter Zahler. Dude, I got sold on him.
Stupid expensive. I... TikTok shop got me. We were talking about stupid things that we bought.
Anyways, Peter Zahler, he founded RXBAR, sold it to Kellogg for six hundred million, created David Bar, which is twenty-eight grams of protein, a hundred and fifty calories. So the best macro bar on the market. Yeah.
I ordered them. I was like, "Dude, this is gonna taste like chalk." Unreal. They taste amazing. So if you're in the market for like something high protein, David Bars. But sounds like you've heard of David Bars.
They're making a huge splash- I have.
I follow a lot of running influencers because, of course, I want to be a long-distance runner, and so I just follow runners who inspire me, and they're blowing up right now with like elite long-distance runners, or at least a few of the ones that I follow.
Brady, I think his last name is Homer. I can't remember off the top of my head, but he's a big like David Bar guy, or David's. I haven't tried them yet, though. I, I have, I have my go-to Costco- Kirkland, yeah...
it's a great brand, actually. I can't think of the name off the top of my head. Oh. But actually great macros as well. Very low calories, twenty...
I think also twenty-eight grams of protein, but I, I haven't tried the David ones. You said they're expensive. Do you know off the top of your head what each bar comes out to? Yeah.
So I just transitioned from Kirkland Costco bars that were twenty-one grams of protein, a hundred and ninety calories or so, something like that. Nice, nice.
And they were like twenty bucks for eighteen or twelve, whatever it is, right? This is like forty to forty-five dollars for twelve, which is- Okay. Yeah. So that's cheap- So like-... or that's expensive. Yeah.
Yeah, that's super cheap. If I'm gonna spend ten bucks per protein bar, I'm not- Yeah. I need twelve dollars per bar minimum. Yeah. Yeah.
No, it's, it's more expensive than I-I had a TikTok coupon, and so I decided to use it on that, and now I'm like, "Dang, these are really good. How can I- Yes... get these without, you know, compromising on cost?"
But yeah, David Bars. I wanna circle back to something, and it actually ties everything we're talking about together really nicely. I have chronic back problems. I don't know if I've talked about this on the podcast yet.
I may have mentioned it, but I've had three lower back surgeries. That's crazy. It's crazy.
I, uh, it's a probably a combination to just genetics to degeneration from each surgery where, you know, one surgery causes problems that requires another, so on and so forth. Who knows why?
But I've had a lot of problems. I currently have a bad neck problem, actually. I just got an MRI last week. Back in December, I ran a half marathon. It was great. I felt great. I felt fine.
I was holding my newborn son and literally just doing this. Uh, if you're not watching, I'm just moving my head back and forth, just kinda like dancing with my son, and I felt a pop.
I heard the pop, and all of a sudden it, it just, uh, extreme excruciating pain. And I was like, "Oh, whatever. It's gonna subside. I'll be fine." That's December, so now we're in March.
That's, you know, nearly three months, and I was like, "Okay, this is getting worse."
I'm actually now experiencing numbness from my neck all the way down my right arm, all the way into my fingertips, sometimes so bad I can't use my right hand because there's just so much weakness.
Like I, I'll have my water bottle in my hand and it'll start to slip. It's bad. So I went and got an MRI, and the MRI affirms it's bad, which is discouraging.
So I have a ruptured disc in my C5-6 in my neck, which is pushing into my spinal cord and e- effectively causing, if it's not taken care of, uh, permanent damage to the nerve and to the spinal cord, which is just a whole, a whole other deal.
So why am I saying this in a podcast?
Well, one, Two Dads and Tech talks about things people think about but don't wanna talk about, and there's a lot of people out there dealing with chronic pain, so I want you to know that I know what you're dealing with.
I feel you. It sucks, and sometimes there's not really good solutions. So here's what I did because I am a very cold turkey type of person.
I've communicated out loud to my wife, if ever there's a point where a doctor says, "Hey, you're gonna die of diabetes or heart problems or whatever if you don't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," I'm like, "I'm game time, baby."
Like I'm, I'm doing- Yeah... literally to, to a science what the doctor recommends, and I will have no issue cutting out what needs to be cut out, exercising what needs to be, like I'm the, I'm that type of person.
So I actually went to ChatGPT yesterday. I'm just discouraged with my neck right now. I have this terrible problem. I have an injection, it's a cortisone injection scheduled for two days- Mm...
from right now, so by the time this episode is live, I will have already had that. So next episode I'll be able to, you know, actually update everyone on how that goes. Hopefully it prevents surgery.
But I said to ChatGPT, I'm gonna tell you exactly what I wrote to ChatGPT, and then I'm gonna summarize what it said back to me. I said, "I'm 31 years old.
I've had three back surgeries across four parts of my lower lumbar. Microdiscectomy and hemilaminectomy on L3-4, L4-5, and L5 S1," so that's three different columns in my vertebrae.
I said, "The hemilaminectomy was done on both left and right sides across two separate surgeries in my L4-5. Now I have a ruptured disc in my neck, C5-6. I'm healthy and active but do not have great genes.
Both my parents have back problems. What could be wrong with me? Be completely exhaustive." I printed, literally I'm looking at the two pages it printed out of my printer, which is the boomer-est thing I've ever said.
I actually printed something. Why do I have a printer? I don't know. I printed its response because it's actually gonna send me...
I'm already on a health journey, but it's sending me on some vibe health journey right now, where now I'm like, "Okay, how can I get a full body MRI?"
But high level, it broke down one to like three to seven different bullet points across six sections of things to consider across structural and degenerative conditions, genetic and con- connective tissue disorders, so that's one, then two.
Three is m- mechanical and lifestyle factors. Four, systemic and nutritional factors. Five is neurological and soft tissue contributions. Six being post-surgical factors and scar tissue issues.
And then what to do next based on everything it assumes might be happening or could possibly be at play, what to do and which order to do them, and I, I mean, this is just the beginning, right?
I uploaded an MRI scan of what my neck actually looks like from the last few days. Like it's like, "Oh, well, yeah. That looks bad." Yeah.
It looks like, you know, you're dealing with this and asking questions, having a conversation. Guys, what you can actually do with AI right now
to do practical, meaningful things in your life now is mind-boggling, and I'm learning from it in real time, and so that's just me being vulnerable with the listeners here, guys. I'm, I'm in the thick of it.
I have a 10K in four weeks I'm supposed to run, a half marathon a month after that, and I'm signed up for the Chicago Marathon in October, and I fully intend on doing all of those. Jeez.
[laughs] But this neck thing is, is, is, it's throwing me for an emotional loop right now, I'll tell you that much. Dude, that's... One, I can't even believe that you're running these 10Ks, whatever, half marathons.
Like- Yeah. Well, right now-... my-... I'm not running much. I'm running about three miles at a time, and it hurts a lot, so I'm like- Oof... I'm sort of on the couch right now. Feeling like a 90.
I'm, I'm not even, I'm not even really dealing with it until this injection. Hopefully it does some damage, good damage.
And then I'm assuming, my mom just got a, a surgery on a rotator cuff, so did my mother-in-law actually, and they both had cortisols act- injections like I think every six weeks or something like that, 'cause that's as much as you can get it every two months.
Can't remember the exact timeframe. But my assumption is-That's just temporary, right? Like, you're gonna... Like, what- So- How do you fix it? Yeah, so here's the, here's the thing.
Uh, the cortisone injections provide an environment around your disc to ideally heal and reduce inflammation and, and your body can do a lot with that.
Uh, it can last as much as six months, that, that actual injection environment. The hope would be that it... My body does what it's supposed to do, and it starts to heal with some PT- Okay...
and some stretching and, like, you know, doing what is recommended to do. Uh, that not happening is not... The, the chances are not zero.
I've had in- injections like this in the past, and ultimately I've had to get surgery in many of those cases. The surgery he's recommending now is one I've never gotten before.
It is a disc replacement surgery, which- Hmm... sounds severe, uh, and pretty scary.
Uh, apparently it's very common, but they go, they, like, take out your entire disc in the column, which is like, Good God, what are the risks of that? It sounds like I could die from that.
But apparently, again, it's, like, f- minor, um, in quotes here. Like, I don't know, it sounds bad to me, but they replace it with, like, a make-believe disc that's like a gelatin compound.
And, uh, for people who are young and active, it's what they recommend before a fusion or instead- Yeah...
of a microdiscectomy in many cases, because microdiscectomy is going to just shave off the disc itself to get it away from your spine or your spinal cord so that it's not pressing against that nerve in the core just to give you, like, your full range of motion.
But then you're taking away part of the spine without replacing it. Yeah.
Fusion is gonna reduce mobility, which you're young, I'm young, they don't wanna do that, so that's where the disc replacement surgery comes into play. I sound like an expert. Yes. Uh, I'm not. You do.
[laughs] I've just had so many surgeries that I'm like- Ugh... you know, I've gotten the three surgeries on four parts of my back. I've been to physical therapists at least a dozen times in the last 15 years. Yeah.
Not, like, a dozen visits, like, a dozen- Like, like, like cycles, whatever, yeah... courses. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like courses of PT, massage therapy, every chiropractor in the world.
I've gotten surgeries in now three different places from three different surgeons. I flew from Madrid, where I lived, to Boston to have one surgery, which is where my parents lived at the time.
I mean, it's just a whole thing. Like, it's part of my life, man. Oof. It's a, it's a never- Yeah... ending process. Yeah, yeah. And so if you're listening to this and you are dealing with this chronic pain, I have
n- nothing near that bad, but really bad lower back pain. I don't do any deadlifts. I don't do, do any squats because- Yes... it gets horrible. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. If you're, if you're... Dude, I know.
That's what I've realized. If you're dealing with any pain, just know you're not alone. I would say a lot of dads specifically, like we almost like to act tough and hide this pain- Yeah... a little bit.
Like, we try to keep it all in until it explodes, so we're like, "Oh, my gosh. This is excruciating." So yeah, I mean, I'm right there with you.
And I will say I think that's an amazing way to end this episode because we've gone on for- Yeah, I think so... 51 minutes for an uns- an unscripted episode. We had no idea which direction we were gonna go.
We ended up- Yeah, I love it... with back surgery and neck surgery. This is beautiful. That's right. That's right. But Daniel, you always end us off.
So where can these listeners that are having excruciating back and neck pain find us? Yes. Yes. Where can you find us? You can find us in a few different places. You can find us at twodadsintech.com.
We are going to launch our newsletter soon, and so please do subscribe to that.
It'll be a great way for you to just stay up to date on some of the podcast episodes as well as us even expounding on some of these different topics.
And so it's not just a replacement of the podcast, it's actually a, a product in and of itself, and so please do subscribe to that.
If you're interested in sponsoring Two Dads and Tech, there's a form there on twodadsintech.com to fill out to get in touch with us if you're interested in sponsoring us.
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If you're listening on podcasts or on Spotify, wherever, go ahead and leave us a review, thumbs it up. Whatever it is on the platform you're listening on, uh, it's really meaningful. But otherwise- Yeah...
thanks for listening. It means so much to us. This is a lot, a lot of fun for the both of us. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening. Daniel, great chatting with you. I'll chat with you next week.
Great chatting with you too.