In this episode of Business Brain, we get into a lesson that landed on Dave’s doorstep — literally. A local candidate finally cracked the code by leaving cookies at a door that’s asked for exactly that for six years, proving that when people tell you what they want, the smart move is to listen and act. We connect that to Read more
In this Casual FridAI episode of Business Brain, we get real about the AI tools that let us down and the ones that blow us away. You’ll hear how Shannon tried a buzzy new text-to-video service, hit a wall of tokens and friction, and gave it a thumbs down—only to get a personal email from a founder mid-recording asking to Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we dig into what happens when you finally step away. Shannon walks you through his experiment of doing “nothing” with his thriving mastermind community—handing off the day-to-day and discovering that the business didn’t just survive, it kept getting bigger and better. You’ll learn why identifying the work you actually love is the real key Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we dig into a question that’ll save you money and focus: before you buy yet another AI tool, ask the tools you already have if they can do the job. We walk through how connecting your existing stack—using AI as the glue—often beats chasing hundreds of shiny single-purpose apps down the rabbit hole. Shannon Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, you’ll learn why the smartest marketing move is to get out of your own spotlight and put your customers there instead. Shannon and Dave break down how making your clients the heroes of your story—showing what they built, how they succeeded, how their lives changed—beats any “me, me, me” pitch every time. You’ll hear Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we dig into the tools that make us better operators, starting with Markdown, the plain-text format John Gruber built to be human-readable and computer-friendly, and now the format our AI overlords love because it burns fewer tokens and runs faster. We share a free live-preview tool at markdownlivepreview.com and Dave’s go-to Mac app, then Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we welcome a special third brain to the table for World Brain Day as Lisa joins Shannon and Dave with real questions about turning household clutter into a reselling business. We walk through the exact path we’d take: start by selling what you already own, research your market before spending a dime using eBay’s Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we get into when to stop using chat and move to Cowork. Chat is a great place to start — it’s just not where we should live. Dave’s signals: more than five back-and-forths, or constantly pasting in screenshots, log files, and PDFs. That’s the tell. Point Cowork at the folder instead and stop copying Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we dig into the exponential timeline — the long, flat stretch every business grinds through before anything looks like growth. We break it down as chutes and ladders: you climb, you slide back, you climb higher. The problem is most of us quit before the hockey stick ever arrives, because the middle part sucks Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, Shannon Jean and Dave Hamilton kick off Casual FridAI with a $10,000 surprise. Dave got an unsolicited email about a domain he’d owned for 21 years and never used — exactly the kind of message he’d normally ignore. This time he fed it to Claude, treated AI as a confidential collaborator, and worked through Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, you’ll rethink everything you assumed about failure. Shannon and Dave dig into why America’s culture of embracing failure, from bankruptcy protection to at-will employment, fuels entrepreneurship in a way most other countries can’t match. You’ll hear how low switching costs mean low experimentation costs, why VCs invest in founders instead of ideas, and why Read more
In this episode of Business Brain, we break down Anthropic’s surprise release of Claude Sonnet 5, a leaner, more agentic model built for the daily grind of coding, automation, and multi-step tool use, and why we’re shifting our default from Opus to save tokens without sacrificing quality. We also dig into the new OpenClaw iOS app, which finally gives us Read more