#248 Revolutionizing the Call Center Industry with AI: A Conversation with Chris Barkhurst, CEO of BBCE

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and we'll come back to any episodes of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me Chris joining me from the US. Chris, thank you very much for joining me today. Usually I like my guests to introduce themselves because it's the best way I believe someone can introduce himself or herself. So the floor is used. 

0:00:22 - Chris
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it. I'm Chris Barkhurst. I'm the CEO of BBCE. We are the I guess you could say we are the parent company of Barkie AI, which is a virtual call center agent on product that's pretty much blowing away the call center world in the United States right now, as well as abroad. We are also the parent company of Benson Lloyd card grating company, which is disrupting the card grating agent card grating market as we know it. It's taken over. So we are very proud of our two products right now. 

0:01:12 - Mehmet
Great and thank you for your time today on the show, chris. So the first thing, julia, by curiosity, I asked what brought you in the area of AI, especially with Barkie AI, and how did you envision its impact when you decided to start it? 

0:01:39 - Chris
Certainly that's a great question. We started BBCE about in around 2015, and originally we started as a consulting company and where we went into businesses to help optimize their processes and help innovate with ideas. And at about that time it was when GPT2, that open source, came out, and about 2016 or so is when we started really taking GPT2 and forming that into a product to help with project creation and project leaders and stuff like that. And what that really basically started with was we would put a bunch of information about the project you know who was the stakeholders, what was some of the project code, who do you go to for this, who do you go to for that? So people could rudimentarily use it as a knowledge base and just use it as a real time. I have a question about X, who do I go to to see for Y? And GPT2 was able to answer those rudimentary questions through this library. 

So from there we were able to basically come up with the skeleton of what Barkey is today, which is that AI system. So that's how we got into it. Then more and more companies wanted it. So we went into more and more companies with this product. So that's kind of how we got into AI. And then we grew with our AI engineers and they came up with better tools how to hone Barkey and then finally, gpt2.5 came out. And then finally, you know, this past year, when GPT3.5 or Chad GPT came out, all of our past clients are like why are people using this? We've been using this for the past three or four years and we're like I don't know, that's great. So we were able to be on top of that already. 

0:03:59 - Mehmet
Great. So you were kind of pioneering that area. But when Chad GPT came out to the public, that affected the way you would plan who would be your ultimate customer. Did that do something that forced you to change your strategy? Or because you were previously in the game, I would say so just said OK, fine, this is another, maybe tool in the market that people can use. So how does the Chad GPT appear? At the end of last year affected the strategy of your company. 

0:04:41 - Chris
Well, that's a great question and how we answer that is. When Chad GPT came out. It was such a great product because it took the GPT3.5 library and it made it public to the masses. And when you make anything public to millions of people, millions of people will bring their ideas to the table and show what something can actually do and push it to its limits. So when we were using just GPT2 or 2.5 or even 3, for that matter, when it was released, we were only giving it to a select few hundred or thousand people at a time, so we were just using it for tech-based products. How do we do this? How do we do that? And then when you give it to a massive amount of people, like what OpenAI did and gave it to them and started saying you know, write a book like a pirate. You know, we never thought of that. You know that had a capability. We just knew that. Well, you know how we could do it for coding and how we could do it for answering this question as a chat bot and stuff like that. So we took that information, what the public did, and we did them stuff further. We said, okay, we now know what it can do this Now? What can Barkey do now to get ahead of the tech curve? 

So we went back to our roots and I have 20 plus years of call center experience. Before I was a consultant and I said, well, there's definitely a gap in the marketplace where people call up and there's a and they hate, they hate waiting on hold, because whenever I was consulting and I ever had a problem with my VPN or problem with my password, I would have to call the help desk and the help desk would always put me on hold for 20, 30 minutes and I hated that and I said it'd be great if I could just call somebody for an entry level technical question and just have somebody pick up the first time I asked the question. It just do it for me in the back end and be done with it. And my AI engineers are like yeah, you know what, with the current state of AI, we can do that with our tools and stuff. So that's how we develop Barkey AI. 

We develop an internal system which allow us to do speech to text and text to speech relatively fast. And then we went to one of our call center partners and we said, hey, we have this new tool. Can we put it into testing with you and they said sure, please, by all means, here's a client, let's do it. And we took over 500,000 phone calls for them and they loved it. It was amazing. So we said hey, let's bring this to market. 

0:07:46 - Mehmet
Great. So I'm asking you, chris, to also count as a maybe guide us, and I will ask you at the end about your thoughts for fellow entrepreneurs. But for now, do you think, because you narrowed down the problem and you narrowed down, who is your ultimate customers that will benefit from AI? This contributed to the success of Barkey AI. 

0:08:19 - Chris
Yeah, I would say that we narrowed it down through the possibility of not just who our ultimate customer was, because, at the end of the day, we want every day to be our ultimate customer. Because, personally, as an individual consumer, as just a baseline consumer, I use Barkey AI as my voicemail. I know Apple has a great voicemail platform right now where you can actually see the voicemail as it comes in and you can see it transcribing in real time. But personally, I use Barkey AI as a voicemail tool so when somebody calls me, it will actually have an entire conversation with a caller. 

So, for example, I had a doctor's nurse call me yesterday and she had to reschedule an appointment I had, and Bar-Key AI took care of that from the front, from the beginning of the phone call, the end of the phone call, by checking my schedule, by checking my calendar, saying, yeah, we can take care of that between two and three, and then at the end of the phone call, sent me a text message, sent me a calendar invite, took care of all that. 

So at the end of the day, I mean, Bar-Key AI has a ability to have everybody be a customer of it, not just a corporate client. But what really set Bar-Key AI apart from anybody else was that we were able to be ahead of the curve, and the way we were able to do that is not being such a large corporation Like, you see, so many corporations being so large, and we are so small and so nimble that I give my engineers, I give my developers free reign to say, hey, I see this change of direction, let's go for it, let's you know instead of being a big cruise ship trying to turn around. 

Let's be a small kayak that we can turn around. And you know, I've had faith in them, I trust them, and if we mess up, hey, no problem at all, we can erase it and fix it tomorrow. So you know, we made some slip-ups in the past and we've we've owned up to them and we said we're sorry and we've made it better. So that's how, that's how we're able to do it. 

0:10:41 - Mehmet
Yeah, great insights from you, Chris. Now, you know, when I was preparing, something caught my eyes like actually it's not like you currently leading the company, but also you have the technical background and you know you have the knowledge of how these frameworks work in the back end. So a lot of people come sometimes to me because I'm an AI enthusiast I can't call myself right Like I know the high level behind, but how easy it is today to get into this field and because I've seen, you know you work on not only the frameworks of open AI whether it's the you know Dali 2 and now they have Dali 3, whisper, and you know GPT 3.5, but also you know there's the back end part of it, like you know Python and you know the data lakes and all this. So now if someone, chris, want to start in this career right, do you think they have to go from the basics or because of the AI today, actually, they can start from a more up level and get into the game more easy. 

0:12:00 - Chris
Oh, definitely. You can definitely get into the AI space relatively easy. There are tutorials everywhere on YouTube, on the internet as a whole, just through you know the academic, you know store of grants and whatnot that you can take within a few days and get a great understanding. There's a couple of YouTubers that I recommend following that you can get into and they show you front-back, step one to step end, how to create an LLM, how to make it so that you can all got the term to step left of mind, but you can parallelize it without LLMs to basically have more LLMs running in parallel with each other, and then you're able to get that set up in less than an hour. 

And then, if you have that, you can add in image generation on top of that and then the world is yours. After that, you get those basic concepts down and you figure out how do I flip that? Have I pivot that? There's something that nobody else has done? And then you figure how to do that and make a website out of that. I know that sounds like it's a huge thing, but there's website tutorials and there's easy to build websites that are already made for you. You just have to do some plug and play and you find somebody who's crazy enough to get along with you on this journey, and for just a minimal B of just heck, I think. If you go with AWS or Azure, they give you money, they give you start. They say you get so many credits for free and you can just use a start at this, that initial credit. Put it on TikTok for first. Like, look at this new thing and get people go to it. You probably have some going on about a week or two and then you have a huge thing going on. 

Personally myself, when I hire developers or I hire AI engineers, I don't look for people who have 15, 10 years experience. I look for people with passion. I look for people who have that drive and who have that. I wanna learn mentality. So when people come in and they say, well, I tell them that we use AWS, we use this type of image generation, we use this and that, and they say, well, I don't know what I said, that's perfect. I don't want you to know it. 

I want you to learn on the job, because when you learn on the job, that's what makes you better, and because we can train anybody. You can train anybody to do anything. You can train anybody to code. But when you hire people who have that experience, they're kind of trenched into. This is the way we do it. This is the way, all the way to do it. So that's the point I'm trying to drive to. Is that anybody who wants to learn how to do this, anybody who's new, anybody who wants to know how to do AI there's incredible YouTubers like Nicholas for a Met Tech with Tim there are a couple of people off the top of my head teach you how to do this stuff and in just a week, maybe two weeks, you can have something off the ground ready to go. 

0:15:53 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's a great one, and actually I was reading a book today by one of my guests he sent me the copy, zach Retner, and he mentioned something similar when he was starting his company and he wanted to hire his first web developer actually. So he hired someone with a background which is not technical, but she just attended a coding bootcamp and he sold this ambition and the passion. So, and I love these approaches because it's also giving some people who are talented the chance to show that they can do the job maybe better than, as you said, someone who had like maybe 10, 15 experience. It's like about the attitude, as you mentioned, chris, and I really I love this approach. Now, again, one thing that I saw in your bio is about using AI for counterfeit proof systems. So and this caught my eye, because I have also, like you know, passion to see how AI can solve different problems, and want to hear from you, like, how you leverage AI in this use case. Yeah, absolutely. 

0:17:09 - Chris
So my other company that we have going on is Vincent Lloyd Card Grading Company and Trading Cards, if you may or may not know, has grown significantly since the pandemic. It's a multi-billion dollar a year of business and whenever you have a growing business like that or growing trend like that, it's bound to have counterfeits or bad actors come in with counterfeit or spoof cards. You know one of the number one draft pick, victor Rungaya. His rookie card is the most counterfeit card out there. There's estimates that 17% of all of his draft cards are counterfeit. And so when you are a buyer and you want to buy one of his draft, one of his rookie cards, and you're going on eBay or you're going to a trade show, these counterfeit cards are so good because the printing is so good nowadays that you don't know if it's a counterfeit card or not and you have to buy from a reputable seller and even that reputable seller might be a hoodwink. You don't know. I'm not saying that they all are, but you don't know. And we have found out because we've actually taken interviews with former card graders who worked with the major card grading companies and we've asked them like can you tell us about what you've done in the past and they've told us some secrets about what has gone on in the back rooms and stuff. And it's horrifying to hear about how card grading has really become more of a money making operation than something for the hobbyists, something for the investors. It's shocking. 

I'm a card collector myself. I've been collecting cards for quite some time and I want to know, I want to be assured, that when I get a card it's a non-to-counterfeit card. So what we've done at VBCE and Vincent Lloyd Card Grading is we actually developed an AI that will actually take basically a micro microscope that's at 200, excuse me, not 200,000, 2000 times magnification, a picture of your card. And this is about the magnification of looking at an ant's leg from a football field away. That's the magnification we're looking at at a card. And if you think about a card, it's about you know, yay, big, I mean I've got one right here. It's about it's about it's about yay, big. 

And you look at this card with a 200,000 magnification, we take a picture of it and then we store it. And not, I mean, when you store that card you're looking at all the bumps, all the imperfections, all the scratches, all the little nooks and crannies that you can't see with a naked eye. And then we look at. We also have a laser that takes the laser grid at it and measures it from top to bottom, side to side, and takes a top graphical image of it. And then we also have a spectrometer that measures it as well to see what kind of you know the type of paper was printed on and the color vibrancy it was printed with. 

And then we take all those factors and measure them with an actual card that was printed from tops or panini or et cetera, and then we see that's a counterfeit card and on with all those factors, put them together and then we store that card digitally in the cloud with all those factors. And then we also imprint that into a microchip. It's a patent pending microchip that's embedded into the label of the card. So when that card is encased in a slab I have one already over here so when that card is encased in a slab right here, like this you can't see, but embedded in this label right here, you will have that topographical, that magnification and that spectrometer information embedded in this card. So if somebody tried to swap this card for another card, for like a counterfeit card, you can't because we can take this card out, measure that, test again and see that there's a scratch over here on the counterfeit card. 

If not, that card was switched and then back to your counterfeit tools. You're talking about this slab right here. This is a promo slab right here, but on our slabs that we give to the public, this slab here has over 15 anti-counterfeit measures that rival the US Mint. So we actually have a former person that works for the, who used to work for the US Mint, who helped consult us on creating ways to protect these cards from counterfeit and these labels from reading counterfeit. So we protect these more than the US Mint protects their dollar bills in some ways. 

0:22:58 - Mehmet
Wow, that's really a great use case for using AI especially, and I think it's only about cards. Maybe it can be applied to different things also as well. I get hooked actually by this Now talking, you know, from drifting from talking about the technology to the business side. So I know, for BSE, you know you achieved incredible growth and you didn't rely heavily on marketing, on social media, right. So can you share the philosophy behind this approach that you took? 

0:23:37 - Chris
Yeah, yeah, it's quite amazing when we talk to people. When we started off with the consulting side, my first client was somebody I met through work and I said, hey, this is what I'm doing now which we're interested in. I said, yeah, I'll hire you. And then one thing led to another and he referred me to somebody else. And then one thing led to another and they referred me to have two other clients. Then I said, okay, this is getting too big, I need to hire somebody else. And then that person I hired was too good. And then we got eight other clients and then I never needed to rely on social media because it's all word of mouth. So we never had a social media page, we never had a website, it was just all word of mouth. You had to know somebody and know somebody. So whenever somebody said, hey, I needed somebody to help optimize my business, I needed somebody to help make me successful, somebody said, well, you need to talk to Chris at BBCE. And then, once we developed Barkey, how that started going was that we had a client using Barkey and one of their vendors came in and said what's this tool? And I said, oh, this is Barkey. Well, who developed it for it? Oh, it was Barkey, it was Chris at BBCE. Oh, we want this tool. Well, here's this information. And then it's kind of grew like wildfire from that. So we never really had the need for a website, we just wanted it to be kind of just very much you have to know a guy to know a guy because we wanted to keep it very. You know, we didn't want to grow too fast, too quickly. And then the same thing with Barkey AI when we came up with that, because we didn't want Barkey AI to fall under bad actors Because if you understand the power that it had and we demonstrated to some people of what it could do if it fell under bad actors we wanted these people who buy a license of Barkey AI and make sure that they're using it for good and not evil. I mean, you can do some wild things with it. So we want to make sure we bet them and not just sell it to anybody who buys it. So we want to make sure that we bet it and make sure that everybody who buys a license is using it for the incentive purposes, not just for, you know, willing nilly stuff. 

Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but for Vincent Lloyd, you know we were active in the card collecting community, as I said earlier, and I just showed it to a friend of mine and I'm like, hey, we developed this. What do you think of it? It was just a passing thing and he's like I love it. And then he accidentally showed one of his friends and he showed one of his friends and all of a sudden we have 50 people in a private alpha and that private alpha got leaked onto the internet and all of a sudden somebody showed a nitic talk and then I'll private alpha URL got leaked and all of a sudden we had 1500, 2000 people sending me cards. So now my wife has all these boxes in our living room full of playing cards, trading cards, and I'm like, okay, well, I think we got our. We got our answer if this is gonna be good for the market or not. 

0:27:13 - Mehmet
Wow, that's fascinating, actually, and sometimes I have this belief that if you're doing something really good, outstanding, to not be misunderstood by anyone, each one has his own or her own use cases, but I believe in this organic growth and word of mouth and getting referrals. Sometimes it's much worse to spend maybe some time and you talk, and this is why I want to ask you here because, like you, talk a lot about being customer centric. So how important to be customer centric and be able to satisfy your customers so they would refer you to other people, to other companies, to have your service. 

0:28:05 - Chris
Well, this answer may surprise you, because we don't think of ourselves as customer centric, we think of ourselves as employee centric, we think of our. I don't call them employees, I call them team members. 

We think of our team members first and foremost, and they are so happy with what they do. We believe in a 32 hour work week. When I was talking to one of our team members yesterday, because we had Monday off and I'm like I think we get 32 paid days off a year, with all the holidays, and we get like, coming to April we get like, whatever you work at, like if you work in New York, you get the Yankees home opener off, or you get the like for me, I work in Kansas City, so I get the Kansas City home opener off, you get that off, and you get all these little fun holidays off and you have a four weeks paid vacation off, mandatory, plus unlimited paid time off as well. So we really see ourselves as employee centric and that really creates a fever. And when you create that fever it really trickles down to the customers. 

So, like with our customer service department, they really have that fire and that energy to go above and beyond to help our customers, cause they know that, hey, I wanna help this customer solve their problem at the very first call, the very first instance, and our business development people really wanna find the best solution for them so they can really just solve their problem at the very onset. So this causes that fever. And then when your customers see that how energetic your employees are with your company or your organization, they get swept up in it as well and they become an advocate of yours. And then that just causes more and more of that rush of the adrenaline. So they go to their friends and they're calling and say you gotta check these guys out at Barkey, you gotta check these guys out at ABC, these guys got something going on. And then we have all of a sudden we have this huge influx of people that we don't know what to do with, cause there's so many people that wanna say we want more and more and more. 

0:30:41 - Mehmet
So it's quite the feeling 100% and I think you know it's crucial because if the team members and teammates are happy, this will make definitely the customers happy, because they will be eager to serve at the best. So 100% on this. Now I know like I was as preparing and I love to go and check some stuff that might trigger. So you appeared on some podcast before and I've seen like some of them they created a lot of buzz. So did that also help in spreading the word about BBCE and Barkey? 

0:31:27 - Chris
Yeah, I mean I don't wanna toss. I've appeared on this past podcast and a lot of people went and listened to it and it drove a lot of attention to it and to the Barkey name and to my social media channels and it created a lot of interesting dilemmas for me because not to be boastful and anything like that but my personal TikTok channel got a lot of attention because a lot of people wanted more and more content for me and I'm on the content creative by any means. 

So I have to figure some ways to outsource that. But regardless of that, but that last podcast there became his number one podcast that was ever listened to. So hopefully it's the same day for you too. But I work when people hear that, when my clients and my customers here, or my team members here that Barkey is being talked about, or when Benson Lloyd is being talked about or BBCE is being talked about, people wanna know what's coming up, what's new, what's being teased, what's what are they gonna do next? They're always wanna know what's the next thing over the bridge, cause we come out some innovations. It's kinda like when Apple does their podcast event or not their podcast event, excuse me whether they're doing their iPhone reveal or their wireless reveal. 

They always wanna know what's gonna be said where they're gonna reveal. So they always wanna know what's that next thing, what's that next thing? So they always show up to the listen to see now, what can we do? So a lot of people show up to hear. 

0:33:27 - Mehmet
Great. Yeah, hopefully same thing will happen. Actually, I had these moments, so the appearance of some guests usually like it's for me, it's like the graph looks like this and all of a sudden it goes up because we talked about something provoking or maybe a technology that they were interested in. So let's see. Nevertheless, yeah, for me, chris, just for you to know and I mentioned this during the podcast like I do this to inspire as much people as I can, and for me, if even one listener or someone, if he's watching or she's watching, they get inspired by my guests and what we discuss and the conversation, I'm more than happy. 

If that goes viral, okay, that's cherry on top, right. So this is the way I love to see it. Now, chris, because we talked about AI, I'm bringing you back, but just to talk now about future trends and how you are seeing the future, whether it's for what you do currently with Barkey and the BBCE, and they are AI engineers. So what trends we are seeing to happen in the near and mid-future Because I don't like about to ask very long in the future, because this is something that becomes, like you know, guessing, I would say. 

0:34:51 - Chris
Yeah, what I'm saying near and near future is people being more wary of what is real and what is AI, because we've recently had the Mr Beast scandal. I don't know if you've heard about that. Yeah, somebody did a fake Mr Beast and they made an ad of him and some people fail for that, fortunately. So more and more people or more and more bad actors will be doing that because they saw that was a big deal and as AI becomes cheaper and cheaper to do, more and more people can do that. So I mean, you're going to see AI get cheaper and more efficient and so that's going to be easy to do. That's why, as I mentioned before, that's why Barkey AI doesn't do a lot of promotion, because we have had some behind the door demonstrations of what Barkey AI could do from a bad actor standpoint and we've actually had people say wow, we cannot do this because of the possibilities of what they could generate. So that's why we really vet people with Barkey AI before we even let them have a license with it. So I see that coming up as a big deal and I see that coming up as AI being used as a more of a bad actor than as a good actor, but AI will continue to become cheaper and cheaper and more and more efficient. 

I've seen a lot of people create social media using AI as an actor, as a sense, and generate huge followings of people just to gain clout. And I can tell because we have tools behind the scenes to see if an AI image has been generated by AI or not. And we have seen these huge Instagram accounts sprud up with, you know, they have a pretty lady or a handsome man just generate, you know, like here I am working out, or whatever, just getting clout, and then what they'll do is they'll sell that Instagram account to another bad actor who will use it for a scam or something like that. So I will see that as being a trend, unfortunately, but that's what I see is, you know, we need to as a community, as a population, what we need to do is prepare ourselves and teach ourselves how to recognize these swindlers, as I like to call them, and not fall victim to that and just prepare ourselves for what's ahead. 

0:37:59 - Mehmet
Yeah, and that would take I agree with you, chris and that would take a lot of effort from people like you and me and others to educate people about, you know, I would say spotting, you know, these bad actors in action. 

It's a challenge, honestly, but I'm also optimistic because I believe AI will help us fight this at the same time. So, you know, finger crossed I would say on that, but 100% you know, like this is, you know something as we come to an end, chris, you've been in the industry for a long time enough and you've seen it all, I would say, from AI, data and you work on building teams. And, because this show is targeted, you know it's called the CTO shows. Of course, the audience are CTOs and people in tech, but also, you know, we talk a lot about entrepreneurship and you know starting up. So if you want to give advice for other entrepreneurs looking to make the mark in the tech world, I would say and maybe they are thinking to start or maybe they have just started, so you know a couple of you know wisdom words from your side to them. 

0:39:17 - Chris
Oh, my gosh, the, the. I had somebody come up to me I think it was two weeks ago and they asked me you know, they wanted to start an online business. They wanted to sell coffee mugs. And they're telling me you know well, how do I sell coffee mugs? And they want to do a drop should be business. And I said, well, first of all, there's millions of drop shipping businesses, so you have to find. 

Of course, the number one thing is to find your niche, and everybody hates that because everybody well, I can't do that. Well, that's your thing, you gotta be ahead of the curve. And everybody hates that too. I hate hearing that you have to be a curve and you have to find your niche. They hate that. And then the hate hearing that you have to have capital, because nobody has. Nobody has money. 

And then not only that, but once you figure out how much capital you have, you have to 10 exit, because it costs a lot of money to start a business, because you're going to make a lot of mistakes and I know that I made a lot of mistakes and you're going to you'll find out who your true friends are and who will stand behind you, who will stand next to you and who will fall way behind you. And you will meet new friends and you'll meet new enemies and you'll meet people that you can't stand but you have to trust. And you'll meet people that you can't live without, but you have to sit with them and it's just. I mean, starting a business is the hardest thing that you will ever have to do and you have to keep. Every day you have to get up and in grind and you go back and I was saying to myself you go back to when you're in high school or in college and you're sitting there in your you know the most boring class possible and you just look at your watch. You're like man, I can't wait till I'm out of school. And then now you're out of school, now you're, you have an entrepreneur. You're like man, I, I'm my own boss and I hate it. I wish I could go back to college and be back bored and it's just. But let's work that, because once you put in all the hard work and you get everything going, you get the engine going, you get everything turning. You know it's all worth it. 

The last piece of advice I give is don't listen to any advice that anybody gives you either, because everybody will say that they're guru, everybody will say that they know what they're talking about and, at the end of the day, nobody knows what they're talking about. Everybody's path is different. My path is different than yours. Your path is different than mine. 

Some people get it the easy way. Those people are lucky. Some people have to fight tooth and nail and and those people are unlucky, and that's just what it like is. You know, my, my path is more difficult and it sucked. Some people just get a spark and they get it right away. You know those people are lucky and that's the way it is. And see if it will charge you. You know thousands and thousands of dollars to tell you how lucky it is to be like them and and that's just it. There's gonna tell you how lucky life is, and I can tell you right now that Life is not lucky. It's just it's gonna be lucky for them because you're giving them $2,000. But Don't listen to anybody. Just listen to yourself, listen to your heart, read books and, uh, don't listen to any advice. Just figure it out. 

0:43:03 - Mehmet
Wow, I love this, Chris and, uh, the other, I think. 

I I you know, I don't know what's the verb now, but I put it on on twitter, because I put such things on x or twitter and I wrote you know, if someone is telling you pay me money to become x, y or z, probably probably you are being scammed. I mean, that's coming in the in the bad way maybe, but you cannot become a copy of someone else. And if you think you know, like I'll take this course and that will become Chris, or I'll take this course, I'll become Mehmet, that doesn't work this way. 

I felt this trap when I was younger and I figured out no, like every person, because you know, we are living in a Multidimensional world and I believe in this with a little bit philosophical, I would say you are in a particular place, particular time, particular situation around you. You cannot be similar to someone else like you. You can learn from their methodologies, maybe you can learn from their mistakes that they share, but you cannot become them. So you know, I love this, chris Um, because where, where people can find more about you and you know your, your businesses. 

0:44:15 - Chris
Well, we do have a website for barkie ai. It's uh Download barkiecom. You can download our website, our app from there. You can find me on linkedin at chris Barkhurst and, um, I mean, you can always email me at ceo at barkie aicom. 

0:44:33 - Mehmet
So great. I would make sure I would put this information in the show note. Chris, anything that I should have asked or I should have you know, discussed with you today. 

0:44:43 - Chris
Well, I mean, one thing that we do have coming up and this is the, the big tease that everybody's looking for is that, uh, um, I have a college roommate and I and we always have these text messages going back and forth about what if scenarios. Um, and they and I always deal with these off topic things and um, one of One of the things that we always do during our meetings when we ever have a meeting with barkie or with um instant moid Is to start with a really off topic question and um, and people always say it would be really nice To hear what would happen if we had a full 30 to 45 minute discussion about these what if questions. So my buddy, uh tim, and I decided to have this little I don't I don't want to promote it on here, but it's a little bit um Many podcasts, if you will call the beaver an otter show, and it's nothing big it's. It's nothing, it's not a, it's not a business of any sort. 

Um, but we're going to intertwine it with some ai guests. So we've done that in the past where we actually went on twitch with two ai characters and had them intermingled, and so we're going to bring on like, like shrek, for example, and have shrek be a guest. We're going to bring on you know um who's you know dark fader and have him be a guest and just you know, use the barkie ai engine and just do that and just and see what happens, um, and it might just go three shows and be a flop. 

But, um, you know, um, the, the fans of barkie always want content and they always want to hear stuff. And uh, um, tim and I we were in a comedy troupe back in college and, uh, we're, we're friends for, you know, over 25 plus years now we talk daily. So, uh, um, it's not a, you know you, probably, like I said, it probably go three episodes and flop, so We'll see about that. But that's, that's the big thing that we're teasing. Um, no new company yet. Uh, so we'll, we'll see how that goes. 

0:47:02 - Mehmet
Yeah, good luck with that. Actually, I had this thought because, before I I shifted my podcast to a interview format, I was doing solo episodes and you know I start in jan, and when barth came out, I had an idea of bringing chat gpt, you know, using, of course, like something like 11 slab or something and bar, and let them ask each other's questions. But then I felt the idea you know, I didn't know like how to do it, but yeah, it's a nice idea actually. So, so a good one um to to learn about that. You're working on it, chris. 

Well, chris, you know, uh, the time, you know, flew really like I, your conversation was really insightful, a lot of Information and useful hints, especially, you know, regarding how to start with AI, and you know how to build the business, how to rely on employee first penalty, and we talked also about, you know, um, the entrepreneurs and how they should figure it by themselves. So really a lot of insights in today's episode. Thank you very much for sharing that with us today and, as usual, this is how I end my episodes. Like, guys, if you have any feedback, any Recommendations, please let me know. I'm, you know, enjoying reading your feedbacks and I'm urging every episode, not only to say like it's nice. Of course I love to read these ones compliments, but I love to hear some Constructive feedback from you with anything, any topic you want me to bring, maybe some you know Stuff that you want me to change also as well in in the, in the podcast. I would love to hear that also from you. So thank you very much for tuning in and we'll meet again very soon. Thank you, bye, bye, bye. 

0:48:49 - Chris
Bye. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page