Sean Kinney, Editor In Chief/Principal Analyst, RCR Wireless News

Sean Kinney is yet another one of our guests who had at least one parent, his mother in this case, who was a school teacher. That's clearly a theme for journalists. What's a bit new this time around is that his mom later went into the insurance world, along with his dad, asking the tough questions to get to the truth of the matter, just like a reporter does.

Sean does the same, just as an analyst and as a journalist. And with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona just weeks away, we talked to Sean, the editor in chief at RCR Wireless News/principal analyst at RCRTech, about what we should expect the truth to be at this year's show, 6G, Wi -Fi 8, AI and more AI. In addition to previewing Mobile World Congress, Sean joined us to discuss his early days as a reporter in, of all places, Key West, his shift from the Keys into telco wireless, and his love of Ole Miss football.

Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing is the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech, hosted by Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley's Media & Influencers Practice.

Here's our chat with Sean. Enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy 0:00

Sean Kinney is yet another one of our guests who had at least one parent, his mother in this case, who was a school teacher. That's clearly a theme for journalists. What's a bit new this time around is that his mom later went into the insurance world along with his dad, asking the tough questions to get to the truth of the matter, just like a reporter does. Sean does the same, just as an analyst and as a journalist. And with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona just weeks away, we figured we'd talk to Sean, the principal analyst at RCR Tech, about what we should expect the truth to be at this year's show. 6G, Wi-Fi 8, AI, and more AI. Yes. Yes and double yes. In addition to previewing Mobile World Congress, Sean joined us to discuss his early days as a reporter in of all places Key West, his shift from the keys into telco wireless, and his love of oldness football. So close this year. For this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's media and influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Sean. Here's our chat with Sean. Enjoy. I've been wanting to have you on a long time. I've had some of your coworkers on in the past, and uh it's a real pleasure to have you.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation, Dave. Really looking forward to the conversation.

Dave Reddy 1:40

Yeah, so let's start at the beginning as we always do. So you grew up in the lovely town of Biloxi, Mississippi, made a little bit more famous than it already was by Neil Simon with Biloxi Blues. What was that like growing up in Biloxi, Mississippi in the Deep South?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Well, yeah, I mean, deep south, I guess, is sort of an interesting place to start. There's a lot of sort of conflation, I think, culturally, between South Mississippi, Biloxi, Long Beach, Gulfport, and New Orleans, which is really like a 45-50-minute drive away. And to put a point on that, what I mean is that I think the more accurate read on that area is maybe the Northern Caribbean more so than the deep, deep south. There's certain some of that, you know, lingering bit of antebellum history and emphasis on southern hospitality, but culturally, it's very different. It's very much centered on uh proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and all the things that uh go along with that.

Dave Reddy 2:42

Primarily. So a different vibe, it more of a uh it's if I mean when I think Caribbean, I think happy go-lucky, which may which may only be because I've only been there as a tourist.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah, I think that's uh a little closer to it. I think if you have in your mind uh pastoral scenery or cotton plantations, you're you're picturing it wrong.

Dave Reddy 3:02

So what what did mom and dad do in Biloxi?

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Mom spent part of her career as a public school teacher. And then later on she pivoted into uh sort of sub-specialization of uh insurance adjusting work, where she focused primarily on investigating high-value loss events, which is uh, you know, kind of as I say it out loud and and think about it in my own lived experience, not that different from journalism, and that you're out there looking at what is objective fact and then looking at multiple perspectives on that objective fact to try to arrive at some sort of conclusion. My dad, you know, I try to make it a short story, but in college he studied landscape architecture. Then he got interested in cars. That led him into a part-time job at an auto mechanics office in Starkville, Mississippi. He later had an opportunity to buy that shop, which he did in an ownership role. He liaised extensively with insurance companies to agree upon scope of work and compensation, et cetera. And he eventually switched sides there, moved over to the insurance side, and he spent a 30-year career with uh State Farm, where he retired at a corporate role overseeing Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

Dave Reddy 4:28

Wow. So you were uh you're the son of two insurance agents, for lack of a better phrase. My mother was an insurance, the former president of the Massachusetts Association of Insurance Women, I might add. Hey. I'm also intrigued by the fact that your mother was a school teacher. I cannot count how many folks on this show have said that one or both parents were either school teachers or college professors, which I think is pretty interesting. Make it make sense. What's what's your read? I think it's all about history as a story. And if you're a school teacher and telling stories, I think I I'm going to guess that that bug, whether it was inborn or not, came passed on to you from both of them. And you're right. I mean, my my mother as an insurance woman, I mean, she was mostly dealing with auto, but it was all about questions, what happened, who was at fault, and things like that. And that's to your point, that's very similar to what a good reporter does.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

The search for truth.

Dave Reddy 5:20

Yeah. If there is such a thing anymore. But we won't get into that on this podcast. So you stayed relatively close to home. I'm I I have to admit, Mississippi is one of the states I have not been to, but you stayed relatively close to home and went to college at Ole Miss, graduating in 2008. Why Ole Miss? Was it the hometown school, or does it have a great journalism reputation or anything in particular, or you just want to stay close to home?

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Well, I'll tell you, I was accepted to a lot of uh universities, including Ole Miss, and I made a very last-minute decision to go there, and it was almost a reflection of my own lack of clarity. I didn't really know what I wanted to study. I part of me was very much interested in specifically chemistry and physics, and they were able to provide that from an academic perspective. I was also deeply interested in journalism. They have a very good, when I was there, it was a department, now it's its own school. And then they've also got a long, long pedigree in literature, kind of born from William Faulkner's presence as a staple there in Oxford, Mississippi. Recall my early great Southern writers, yes. Yeah, to call earlier description of rolling fields of cotton and antebellum homes, that's Oxford, Mississippi. So it's it's still there. But yeah, ultimately went to Olmus, and I think it provided me kind of all the different options that I wanted out of both a liberal arts and a uh science-based curriculum.

Dave Reddy 6:52

Taping a few days before the NCAA football final, and so offline we we discussed, John. And your deep hatred of Lan Kiffin. Did I just put words in your mouth?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Hey, I mean, I'm happy to say him as well. Uh it was it was a great run. It's our you know, first one since uh 1960, I believe, where we were in competition for a national championship. It was uh a great pleasure to watch the team compete throughout the playoffs. I uh got back just a few days ago from Phoenix for the Fiesta Bowl. Disappointing loss, obviously, but hell of a season.

Dave Reddy 7:27

You're a true fan going all the way to Phoenix from your home in uh Fayetteville, Arkansas, which we'll get into a little bit later. Now back to Ole Miss. Were you involved in school media at any point? At what point at Ole Miss did the journalism bug kind of take hold? And you said chemistry, smemistry, and and you know, and the other things you were interested in. I'm gonna focus on journalism.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah, I think uh I kind of moved away from the hard sciences in my junior year. So I I mean I I pursued him for a while and and came out with uh, you know, some some minors that are relevant to those fields of study. Um, but yeah, I started to get interested in journalism as a way to kind of take what I had learned about literary theory and about narrative and all that sort of thing and apply it to something that was new and dynamic. And so that was, you know, journalism in a nutshell. And I I started as a junior in a you know 101 class with a bunch of freshmen and uh saw it through eventually and uh along the way did some jobs for the Daily Mississippian, which is as the That's the school paper? Yeah. Okay.

Dave Reddy 8:32

That's uh a daily and uh I was gonna say daily or weekly? Okay, I uh it had to be daily at a comp at a at a school that big. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Fairly good circulation for a small SEC school located in a very small rural Mississippi community. But yeah, that was kind of my first foray at uh uh into journalism.

Dave Reddy 8:49

As a former sports writer, I have to ask, was the daily Mississippian like half sports, half everything else, or am I just being uh silly?

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Man, it right it had it definitely had a sports section, but I there was a good mix of uh arts, culture, news relevant to the university, and even news relevant to the broader Oxford community, because like I said, that was uh you know, the I don't want to disparage the fine work they do at the Oxford Eagle, but uh it was interesting to see a market so small that supported two daily papers, one of which was a college newspaper that competed in circulation with the city's established newspaper.

Dave Reddy 9:29

That's awesome. Yeah, I I I only got two and a half pages a week as sports editor of the American University Eagle, but uh that makes total sense. So then you get into journalism and you don't go into tech, even though you'd already mentioned that both science and technology were of interest to you. You end up, in fact, at the Key West offices of the Miami Herald. Now, the Miami Herald is a fantastic magazine. Key West is, I presume, a wonderful place to live. How did you end up there covering what were you covering?

SPEAKER_00 10:01

I ended up in Key West. My parents took my then girlfriend and now longtime partner, Catherine, on a trip as a graduation gift when we finished our uh studies at the University of Mississippi. We went down there for a week. We uh didn't really have a firm plan and said, you know, I mean, this is pretty fun. It's uh beautiful weather, it's a little small contained two by four square mile island, got everything you need on it, just uh headed down there. And I immediately started looking for a uh job that would let me kind of continue doing journalism and found one. You know, always be gracious to our publisher and our my first editor down there, Larry Kahn, and uh later on David Goodhue, for kind of taking a chance on me, showing me the ropes and uh setting me down a path that would define the next uh 25 years of my life.

Dave Reddy 10:55

That is that is one of the most random first job stories I've heard. I mean, usually it's like this is the job I got, Dave. So instead, maybe it's less random. You went on a vacation, fell in love with the place, and said, I'm staying here with my long now longtime partner, and I'm gonna get a gig here.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

That's awesome. Exactly right, man. Our first apartment was at uh 402 Caroline Street at the intersection of Caroline and Duval. For those of you familiar with Key West, Duval is the bourbon street, the Beale Street. It's the main drag. We were right there in the mix. And, you know, for for a field reporting job, that was kind of the place to be. City Hall wasn't too far away, the city's admin offices weren't too far away. Just hop on my bike, go out and see what was happening, and then write it up and press in.

Dave Reddy 11:44

Well, Key West, I mean, it small town might be too strong a phrase, but Key West is certainly one of the most famous, if not the most famous, smaller towns in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

There's a lot going on down there, man. And it's uh got you know big transient population, big snowbird population, big military population, hosts uh uh what I'm sure is uh well over a million tourists a year when you factor in cruise ship guests. So, I mean, there's a there's a lot going on for such a tiny place, which uh was interesting from an early career journalism standpoint because it's kind of like a choose your own adventure. What do I want to go write about today? Do I want to write about the impact of cruise ships on the coral reef? Do I want to go write about what's happening at the Naval Air Station? Got a federal courthouse down there. Maybe I go sit in on some of those cases, see what's going on with the federal court.

Dave Reddy 12:36

So you pretty much got to choose your own thing. Were you uh how how many people were in the in the office there?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

One to two?

Dave Reddy 12:44

Wow. Yeah. So how what did you learn? Because um, you know, especially these days in a remote workplace, uh, you know, we we talk all the time here at Big Valley and at other places. It's it's tough to teach younger folks because you're not in their face every day. What did you learn as a young reporter, you know, largely on his own, working for one of the biggest newspapers in the world in a satellite office?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

You got to be curious about things, even if they don't immediately spark your interest. You know, I referenced the impact of cruise ships on coral reefs. Not anything I know about, not anything I thought about, but uh when you live on an island where that's a big issue, you start to really appreciate the nuance of land use policy, of what it means for a tiny island to play host to 7,000 people all at once as they march off of a cruise ship. What are the downstream implications of that when the population grows by 33% and the impact that that takes on your roads, on your water system, which is very fragile in a place that's essentially at sea level? So it was just kind of a great experience in I used the phrase choose your own adventure, but I'd say also kind of understanding how a system works. This one little input changes all of these other things. And when it's a small enough place like Key West, you can eventually at least maybe hubristically feel like you see the whole thing and understand it for what it is.

Dave Reddy 14:18

That that is uh I was I'm thinking too that you lived you lived in Faulkner's backyard and Hemingway's backyard. I don't know if you ever thought about that.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

But oh yeah, there's I there's a lot of patterns that have uh shaped what what I do.

Dave Reddy 14:34

Do you ever live on Long Island? Uh we're gonna get into uh not Hemingway, but uh Fitzgerald. So so you're there for several years. You do a cup of coffee at a trade outlet in the health tech space, and then you move on to RCR Wireless. And I believe you started as managing editor, correct, in 2014.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

So we wanted to, we wanted, we were ready to leave Key West, and Mark had a job opportunity in Austin, Texas. So I went with her and didn't have a job in the offing. So I just picked up a part-time job at Patient Conversation, and that was again one of those, you know, follow curiosity. Healthcare something that was fairly foreign to me, pharmacology, et cetera. So I just kind of dove in and uh that was a nice little nice little stop for me. Learned a lot, retained a good bit of it, I think. And that kind of served as a a bridge for me into trade media.

Dave Reddy 15:26

So uh talk to me about the learning curve. You you come on at RCR Wireless. It's it's not, with all due respect to the outlets I'm going to talk about, it's not a consumer tech outlet like CNET or The Verge or in Gadget, where as long as you're using these things, you can write reviews. This is this is a deep tech space. This is a place with tons of acronyms, including the one in the title. What was the learning curve like? Had you had some previous experience with the mobile and telco world, or did you just sort of jump right in and learn?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Steep, no, and yes. But you know, fortunately, Dave, I had a lot of coworkers who were industry veterans, many of whom I'm sure your audience will still be familiar with because they're spread out at various other media outlets and research houses all over the world. And uh, you know, they they lent me their time and their attention and they got me up to speed and they gave me criticism when it was due and, you know, reinforcement when that when I would benefit from it. And I'd also say that, you know, this is gonna stick with my theme here, but I was curious about it. It seemed incredibly interesting to me when I started doing it. And then you kind of like deconstruct why is this important? And then you start to understand a little bit about telecom. You're like, oh, okay, it underpins global commerce. Got it. Maybe I should pay attention to this.

Dave Reddy 16:46

And so you're I'm just trying to do the math here. So you're seven years into the iPhone revolution. BlackBerry's kind of done at this point. I'm thinking when you join. Uh 5G is just starting to be talked about.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Yeah, this would have been mid-LTE kind of translation from LTE to LTE advanced.

Dave Reddy 17:06

Right. We're talking about IoT, I think, for the second time at this point. Now we're talking about it as the edge. But so what it was there a particular thing that you jumped on? I mean, uh, you know, you were obviously looking at it across the board, but I was curious, if there's anything in particular that's like, wow, this is going to change the world.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Well, I think early on with RCR and very much by design, I was given sort of disparate assignments to go pursue so that I would learn. That, you know, learn by doing, I think was maybe part of it there, but have a strong support system around me of co-workers with experience so that they could give me the nudges I needed. But uh I I think what I I really took to was the quieter stories, the standardization stories, the the work that engineers and buildings in New Jersey and San Diego and all over the world do every day that's largely thankless, often doesn't come to fruition. But when it does, it delivers things like 5G, which keep this entire industry afloat and and progressing forward. And that's just kind of interesting to me that you can go from an ID on a whiteboard to an academic paper to a proof of concept to a demo at a trade show to a multi-billion dollar technology that's licensed globally for the next 20 years.

Dave Reddy 18:28

Right. And and and I and again, I'm I was sort of in it at the same time. I was doing, I was at Warriorsham, but we Qualcomm was our biggest, our biggest client at the time, or my biggest client at the time. And this was when, you know, nobody knew what a G was. And we were talking about 5G quite a bit, and I think people forget, not that I'm patting the shoulder here, but I guess it is a bit of a humble brag. I think people forget that Intel actually had the 5G lead for about 18 months, at least from a public. That obviously changed. So indeed it did. A lot of things changed for Intel. Again, stuff we will not get into today. Now, another thing that changed for you is you keep putting on new hats. So in 2016, you folks did something that you know a lot of very few publications have done in the last 20 years. You spun out a separate publication, IoT Enterprise Insights, you as part of, or I should say, a sister pub to RCR Wireless. Why the decision to do that? And again, I I believe it's online only, so I know there's no print cost, but it's got to be tough to run two different things, especially in a in an age when you know it's uh monetizing media is already difficult.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, and you know, to skip to the end of the story, we ultimately sunseted that website. But I think to take you through it, when we we launched this, it was initially called 5G IoT Insights. Perhaps not the most elegant URL in the world, but it was exactly descriptive of what we were trying to do. And again, to your point, this was pre-commercial 5G. This was 5G was still kind of the uh the pyramid that that so many people might remember. Massive machine type communication, enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency communications, but none of that was real, none of that was tangible. But our thesis statement at the time was that this is the generation of cellular that expands beyond consumer. It expands beyond mobile talk, text, and data. This is what's gonna usher in a sort of industrial change by connecting machines, by connecting the internet of things. I still believe that is possible. It has not really fully happened yet, halfway through the 5G cycle. So when I go back to my comment that we were a little early, we're a little early in 2016 there. We eventually pivoted that website to be called Enterprise IoT Insights, wherein we try to cultivate a non-telco readership base from the enterprise side that's trying to educate themselves about the technologies available that might help them capture this industry 4.0 momentum in shipping or logistics or warehousing or whatever else. And uh, you know, we gave it a go. We did a lot of very good work on that website. I'd specifically name check my colleague James Blackman over in London, who uh transitioned from that to leading our coverage of private networking, private 5G for Enterprise, but back under the RCR wireless news masthead.

Dave Reddy 21:45

When did you guys sunset uh that that pub? Couldn't tell you. Blocked it from memory. Smart man. Well, I'm sure you're blocking that and the recent oldness lost for memory. What were the challenges there? Again, back to the monetization. Issue. Just it's tough these days to start something new.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Yeah, it's also tough when you say, well, okay, I want to, I want to start a niche publication. Well, who's your readership? Who what's a you know a persona? And I said, Well, okay, it's uh, you know, SVP, CTO, CIO type. And so, okay, well, which industry do they work in? It's like, well, we cover all of them. So all of them? So healthcare, yes. Manufacturing, yes, logistics, yes, shipping, yes. And it's like, oh, okay. So your readership is simultaneously incredibly broad and amorphous, but also incredibly specific as such. It's hard to be everything to everybody, and it's also hard to sell ads when you're trying to be everything to everybody. Yeah.

Dave Reddy 22:48

Yeah. And it's hard to sell ads in media, period, these days. Was that some of the in terms of monetization, how are are you guys looking to do some of that? I'm sure you're also looking to do good work. So I I realize it's both, but was that some of the reason for starting RCR Tech, your your new analyst on?

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Well, you know, I mean, it's not a secret to anybody. This is not a surprising thing that I'm going to say, but AI is important and a lot of is going into it. We started to write about telco AI, so fairly narrow. And as we looked at the body of coverage that was coming out of that, we realized that in order to adequately cover telco AI, we needed to more broadly cover AI. It's you take for granted, maybe now that we're three years into this public discourse around AI, that there was a time when you very much needed to define what a large language model was, what generative AI is actually doing. And once you start to get into that area, you realize, well, wow, you know, the LLM or the AI-enabled application that touches telco is the result of this incredibly complicated infrastructure stack that runs the gamut from real estate to power to cooling to chips to memory to networking to this whole other universe of fascinating and very important coverage that also comes with a lot of new commercial opportunities for us in terms of client relationships we can establish that certainly run telco lines of businesses, but are much, much larger. So we looked at it as a growth opportunity and giving ourselves a broader content platform to leverage what we know in telecom and start to grow into new areas.

Dave Reddy 24:44

So let's use that as a springboard into talking about Mobile World Congress. You were at CES. You wrote afterwards that CES has changed. Uh deeper down the stack, I'm paraphrasing you here, still fundamentally about consumers, but AI obviously is the major reason. And maybe this has already happened at the past one or two Mobile World Congresses since it's it's a while since ChatGPT uh two came out. But how much of an AI focus do you expect at Mobile World Congress this year?

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Yeah, I mean, I I expect a huge focus on AI at Mobile World Congress this year. But I mean, to just track it back a couple years, I think that that initial year, it was hype. I mean, that's that's fair to say, and it's a fair criticism. Vendors didn't have portfolios to put in front of you to make it real. They had visions, they had ideas, they had strategies. Same thing on the buy side. Operators knew they needed to do something with AI beyond what they've been doing for so long with predictive AI and machine learning. Gen AI was new, it was novel, it was obviously important, but there weren't a lot of specifics to dig into. And I think last year we saw a lot more specificity. We saw solutions and we saw data points coming out of actual real-world trials of technology. We saw operators coming to the table being very candid, being very open about what they thought they could get right with AI, where their concerns were, where maturation from the vendor side needed to come from. And if you ask me to take a guess, I think that conversation is going to be even more granular, even more operationally focused this coming year because there's learnings under the belt and we know what needs to happen. So now it's uh about all coming together in Barcelona and having those conversations that kind of set us on a course for the next year.

Dave Reddy 26:41

Yeah, it may seem like a bloody obvious prediction, and sometimes predictions are, but that this is the year that it's it's it's time to get it right and prove that your AI is working or get out of the business. That that would seem to be whether you're at CES, Mobile World Congress, Optical Fiber Conference, whatever, since AI is touching just about everything these days, I think this is the year that you either prove you're doing it or you go away.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I I think that's kind of for me at least, what the true value of that show is it's very difficult for me to get on the phone with uh 70 senior decision makers at a huge ecosystem of companies across all sorts of domain expertise, but I can do it over four and a half days in Barcelona and come out with a very clear idea of what's going right and what's going wrong.

Dave Reddy 27:29

I uh as parenthetically, uh uh having been in this, despite having been in this business for nearly 30 years, I have somehow never made it to Barcelona. I I I recently had a work trip to a town in Spain, Alaga, which is on the Mediterranean and is absolutely gorgeous. So one of these days. I hear it's a blast. I hear it's uh if you want it to be, it can be a party, but it's also a lot of work. What other topics are you expecting to hear about in Barcel at Barcelona? Is it gonna be all AI and AI plus? Or do you think Wi-Fi 8 or even at this point 6G or edge the edge as it were now instead of IoT? And I think that's changed at least twice. Do you think those topics are going to pop up?

SPEAKER_00 28:13

I mean, all of the above really, I do think that they will all likely be kind of qualified or otherwise couched under the AI conversation, you know, the the edge AI using distributed network infrastructure to deliver differentiated services and grow top line. I think that'll be one. I think you've mentioned 6G. I mean, yeah, it started. It started last year, and we're a year further along into the standardization work through 3GPP. So there's, you know, some well-defined areas of study and work. And I think we'll expect some updates on all of those that'll ideally speak to some of the operators' concerns about putting this massive cost item in terms of capital expense and spectrum acquisition potentially up against question mark of results. You know, what are these use cases? Who are they valuable to? How can I take them to market, make money off of them? But I think one thing I'm really interested in, and I'm always interested in that at a trade show where you can talk to real people, to real practitioners who do this day in and day out, is I want to hear about the people side of this, the the organizational process side of this. You know, getting value out of AI is all about, at least ostensibly today, is all about your ability to adapt, to learn, to augment. That's hard to do in a 150-year-old company that's highly regulated. So tell me about it. There's gotta be some kind of give and take there. You hear a lot about workforce reskilling and all of that. Well, I mean, it's one thing to re-skill an individual or a team of individuals. It's a very different thing to re-architect these brittle workflows that keep giant companies together.

Dave Reddy 29:59

Hey, we're we're 35 people and it's tough to do here. We're doing it. So I can only imagine when you get into the 350, 3500, and other other, you know, add more zeros. Change is tough, as Ross Geller once uh famously said on Friends. Uh so but let's so let's talk about that. So, what is your sense of AI as a force in the world, in the tech world? I mean, you know, as we're talking, this hullabaloo about grok and sexualized images of young women as has come to a bit of a head. Is it a force for good? Is it pure evil? Is it both?

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Yeah, I mean, I wish there was a simple answer to that, but I I do I do think a lot, you know, not to go on a side quest here, but when it became apparent to me about two and a half years ago that AI was going to one change the business I was in, media, content, distribution, and change the businesses that I focused on in that role, specifically telecom. I knew that I one had to start using AI. I had to get this in my hands, I had to start experimenting with it, and I had to do that quickly just so that I would not get left behind. I'm mid-career. I need to, I need to adapt and stay relevant for a few more decades. At the same time, I also enrolled in a lot of online classes, continuing professional education. I took a NVIDIA class, AI infrastructure for total dumbasses, or whatever it was called. And I just kind of started at the beginning and worked my way. Sounds just right for me. Yeah. And uh I think I wish more people would do that. I know that that wish will not be granted, but it's it's it is something that's very important. It already is reshaping our society, particularly social interaction, dissemination of information, what you know and how you came to know it. So you need to be AI literate in order to consume information in the world we live in. Sadly, a lot of people I think are not, whether that's willful or just because that's how things turned out. Back to your question: is it a force for good? Is it a force for evil? I mean, not to hedge, but any general purpose technology that's broadly made available is going to be used for good and for bad. So I think that just gets us to, you know, AI alignment. What do we want this technology to be? What do we as humans want AI to be and to do for us? Bad news here is that that requires consensus. And consensus is hard to come by these days. And the more that polarizing AI-enabled content is put out into the world, the further we're gonna get away from establishing general consensus on who we are, what we believe, what we want, which creates a bit of a risky situation.

Dave Reddy 33:04

Yeah, I'm sure there, and I'm I'm gonna say this too quickly without thinking it through, but I like what you just said there, because uh while there I'm sure there are other technologies that fall into this category, including social media, there are few like AI that have had that have the way to impact the way we talk and think to each other. Or for that matter, the impact the way something unreal talks and thinks to each other, and therefore impact discourse as as AI has in the past few years, which uh which is definitely complicating. How do you use it in journalism? You you mentioned that you know you good for you. You're taking these courses, these various AI for dumbass courses. So now that you're no longer an AI dumbass, how are you using it in in journalism? How are you not? Is also important.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Well, I'm not using it to fully write anything because by and large, I don't like the way that any of the mainstream tools write. It doesn't sound like me. It doesn't sound like a reflection of my voice, and I don't think it's a good use of time to try to take cycle that I could be spending actually writing something and actually talking to someone to getting an AI model to approximate that. That's that's a waste of time. I think what it is very good at is copy editing. If I show me an AI model that's you know mainstream, uh a chat GPT, a perplexity, a Gemini, it can find misspellings, it can find punctuation errors, and it can do it very, very quickly. And I think that's a a great application for AI in journalism because it it is a, I think it's a fading discipline. I can remember being at the Herald and we had oh, line editors, copy editors, you know, there's not too many of those left anymore. But if you're gonna put professional journalism into the world, it needs to be spelled correctly and punctuated correctly. AI is pretty good at that. I think it's very good at stress testing ideas. I am in the habit of having specific AI tools that I use take on a persona because I want someone who I I endeavor to have read my work, be that a CTO or a financial analyst. I would like to hear their specific criticism. That's hard to get in the real world. I can't just call up Goldman Sachs TMT office and say, hey, could you read this article I wrote and tell me what does and does not resonate with you? Can't do that. What I can do is I can have an AI tool assume that persona and give me very succinct, pointed feedback that I can then incorporate into not just what I'm writing, but how I'm thinking about what I'm writing so that it can resonate with the people I want it to resonate with.

Dave Reddy 35:57

How do you think that will evolve for you and for journalism? And do we ever get to a point? This is a question I like to ask. Did we ever get to a point where AI has a soul and somehow it is not quite Faulkner or Hemingway, but it's writing decent copy?

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Boy, how does it evolve? I'll take that one first. I think it it continues in the direction that I generally described there as an imperative. The bent of capitalism, whether I I like it or not, is to maximize profit, which means increasing individual productivity. This is a tool that does that. It increases individual productivity when used correctly. In my example of stress testing ideas against specific digital artificial personas. I mean, I think B2B media is all about knowing your audience and serving them the content that helps them do their job better. You can't spend eight hours a day polling these people in the real world to understand what they want. So you do the synthetic alternative, and based on what I've observed, it gets you closer to meeting your goal of your business, which is associated with content and with financial outcome. Where does it evolve from there? I think really depends on how much journalists all over the world lean into using it. You know, we hear a lot of discourse around resistance to using AI amongst people that are established domain experts. You know, I get it. I I completely do, but that will not be a viable approach in the workplace.

Dave Reddy 37:37

Yeah. As many people say, it's not AI is not going to replace everybody, but it is going to replace everybody who's not good at AI.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

That's exactly right. I mean, Faulkner and Hemingway, they were one of a kind. I'll uh I'll believe it when I see it, but no, I think there's a certain something that lives in in humans' minds that that can't be replicated. But I mean, that said, large language models at the tip of the iceberg in a few years, what we see today with Chat GPT will think that's just boring. There will be something so much more novel and impactful that'll supplant it.

Dave Reddy 38:12

It'll be as novel as a flip phone. So uh uh backing up a little bit before I ask my last question, I never asked you how you ended up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, since RCR Wireless is in Austin. Were you trying to get a little bit closer to Mississippi, but not all the way?

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Well, we for a while we had an office in Austin on the then not so hip, now incredibly hip east side over near Third and Chicone, if you have any local listeners. Great taco shop down there, Veracruz, all natural. But we just had a lot of people whose lives changed. Some of them wanted to move to Europe, some of them wanted to get out of Austin, some of them just wanted a change of scenery. And we decided that it didn't make any sense to have a some sort of forced, centralized presence in Austin, Texas. So we just stopped doing that. And uh, you know, when that happened was around when my wife and I were discussing growing our family, Fayetteville. For nobody that's that's ever visited here, is uh actually quite an interesting uh place, part of a four-city uh metroplex that's got a lot of variety in terms of uh professional opportunities, nature, culture, everything else. So it's uh quite attractive. And we also happen to have a good bit of family in the area, so it was nice to move to a place with a built-in support structure.

Dave Reddy 39:35

Which leads me to my final question, which is the same, albeit different places for everybody. Key West, Fayetteville, Austin, or Mississippi.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

I'm fortunate, Dave. I can hedge. I go to all of them all the time because they're all clustered here together, and I have both personal and and professional occasion to visit pretty regularly. So uh, you know, yes, I like them all. They're all all hold a special place in my heart, and I I like to keep a finger on the pulse of what's happening in each of them.

Dave Reddy 40:09

You know, given that this is the Mobile World Congress preview, I forgot to ask you where Barcelona ranks in that.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Yeah, I was having a conversation with my wife maybe yesterday because I finally bought my flight to Barcelona this year. But uh this'll be number 11 for me, Mobile World Congress. And I think 13 total trips to Barcelona. Typically, I spend at least seven nights there before I had a son. I mean, I can remember one year going for almost a month just because it was appealing to me. And we, you know, maintain a global readership, so it kind of doesn't matter so long as you show up for your scheduled calls. But outside of places where I have lived full time, I have spent the most time in Barcelona. It's a wonderful city. I really look forward to my time there every year. And I have an incredibly well-vetted, well-researched list of bars and restaurants that I uh won't share, of course, but I haven't.

Dave Reddy 41:12

I was just gonna say, so for more about Mobile World Congress, not only what's going on there, but what you need to do there, reach out to Sean Kinney. But I will leave it to for more about Mobile World Congress and what's going on there. Make sure to read Sean Kinney and the rest of RCR Wireless. Good luck at the show, Sean. Safe travels, and thanks so much for your time. That was a lot of fun. Thanks, Dave. Great to talk with you. I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And once again, a big thank you to Sean Kinney of RCR Tech. Don't forget to join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we identified the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at dReady at bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E Double D Y at Big Valley, all one word, dot C O. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters at bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening, and as always, think big.