Supply Chain Saga

Welcome to Supply Chain Saga, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the interconnected world of supply chain and logistics. Join us as we unravel fascinating stories and engage with thought leaders, innovators, and operators who are revolutionizing this dynamic industry. Each episode brings you fresh insights, explores cutting-edge trends, and uncovers the technologies that are shaping the way we move goods and ideas across the globe. Whether you're a seasoned professional or simply intrigued by the complex networks that power our modern lives, Supply Chain Saga offers an enriching and enlightening exploration into the ever-evolving realm of supply chain management. Tune in, and let's embark on this epic adventure together!

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Supply Chain Saga

From Sega to Salesforce: How Jonathan Green Uses AI and Platform Thinking to Transform Supply Chain Operations | Supply Chain Saga Ep. 017

January 05, 2025 • Mark Taylor

0:00 | 35:22

Jonathan Green became VP of Technology at Colliers International at 22 and spent 13 years scaling the company from 40 employees to 15,000 across 122 acquisitions. He went on to build direct-to-consumer systems for medical device companies, reverse engineer claims processing in healthcare, and now runs Health Admins — acquiring TPAs and rebuilding them on Salesforce. In this episode, he shares practical ways any supply chain operator can start using AI tools today.

TOPICS COVERED: 
- From making video games for Sega and Activision to becoming VP of IT at Colliers International at 22 
- Building Snap-On Smile's D2C system on Salesforce in eight weeks — from $2M to $18M in revenue 
- Why Salesforce is the only platform that inherits security, updates three times a year, and interrogates your code 
- WMS systems are a race to the bottom — why none are leveraging AI effectively yet 
- Notebook LM for supply chain: upload contracts, manifests, and invoices and ask questions of your data 
- Custom GPTs: build one for marketing, one for manufacturing, one for logistics 
- Crystal Knows: AI personality profiling from public data to prepare for any meeting 
- Make and Zapier: workflow engines that stitch together WMS, Zendesk, Slack, QuickBooks, and Bill.com 
- Why curiosity and critical thinking matter more than technical knowledge for adopting AI

CHAPTERS: 
0:00 Introduction 
0:44 Jonathan's Story: Video Games, Colliers International, and Medical Devices 
6:44 The Common Thread: Stitching Together Existing Technologies 
9:35 Why Salesforce Is the Only Platform That Verifies Your Code 
13:40 Real Estate, WMS, and Where AI Opportunities Exist in Supply Chain 
16:31 What Steps Should 3PL Operators Take to Keep Up with AI? 
19:11 Getting Started: Notebook LM, ChatGPT, and Custom GPTs 
23:23 Stitching Tools Together: Make, Zapier, and Workflow Automation 
26:00 Building Your Online Brain: Crystal Knows, Storyworth, and Personality AI 
28:59 AI in Real Life: Diagnosing Appendicitis with ChatGPT at 1 AM 
31:30 The Big Picture: Starlink, Rural Access, and Why Curiosity Wins 
32:13 Tool Recap: Crystal Knows, Notebook LM, Superhuman, Make, and Salesforce 
34:52 Closing Thoughts

ABOUT THE GUEST: 
Jonathan Green is the CEO of Health Admins and a technology leader with 30 years of experience. He became VP of Technology at Colliers International at 22 and has built technology systems across commercial real estate, medical devices, and healthcare.

KEY TERMS: 
Jonathan Green, Health Admins, Colliers International, Salesforce, AI, artificial intelligence, Notebook LM, ChatGPT, custom GPTs, Crystal Knows, Make, Zapier, Superhuman, beautiful.ai, WMS, workflow automation, direct to consumer, platform thinking, TPA, claims processing

Supply Chain Saga is produced by Mark Taylor, CEO of Warehouse Republic, a 3PL serving omni-channel e-commerce brands that sell through marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify, as well as retail partners like Nordstrom, Scheels, and Bass Pro Shops.

Website: warehouserepublic.com
Podcast: supplychainsaga.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/warehouse-republic
Host: linkedin.com/in/marktaylor

Have a logistics question? Email mark@warehouserepublic.com

Mark Taylor (00:03):
Welcome back to Supply Chain Saga. In this episode, we're joined by Jonathan Green, a visionary in technology leadership who at just 22 became the VP of technology at Colliers International. Today, we'll explore practical ways to engage with emerging tech tools that are reshaping the industry. With a proven history of building innovative teams and leveraging technology, Jonathan shares pragmatic ways to begin using AI to drive supply chain innovation in your own business. Let's dive in. With me today is Jonathan Green of Health Admins.

Jonathan Green (00:38):
Yes, sir.

Mark Taylor (00:39):
And as I like to start all of these, how'd you get to where you are today?

Jonathan Green (00:44):
Oh God, that's a long story. How far back do you want me to

Mark Taylor (00:48):
Go? As far back as you want to go.

Jonathan Green (00:50):
Well, I'm told not to tell the story anymore because I've told it too many times.

Mark Taylor (00:53):
Okay.

Jonathan Green (00:54):
But I'm one of those strange kids in high school who actually used to work for Sega and Activision making video games back in the old days. Oh,

Mark Taylor (01:00):
That's awesome.

Jonathan Green (01:00):
Yeah. Especially when your dad tells you that you got to go to college because you'll never make a career out of playing video games. That was a little bit of a mistake. But yeah, so I started doing that and I realized I loved computers and anything to do with technology. So of course I went to college for business and pre-med because my dad wanted me a businessman. I wanted to be a doctor. So I said, why not do both? That led me into doing a bunch of businesses. Don't know why. So through all the businesses that I ran when I was younger, including restaurants and dance clubs, as I mentioned, and things like that, I just found that out of all of them, I loved really good ideas and bringing people together to making things happen that made a difference. After college, I had a roundabout way of doing things and I started working at a commercial real estate company because they needed somebody to fix their computers.

(01:42):
Within six months, I became their vice president of IT. And then I worked with them for the next 13 years, going from 40 employees to 15,000 running all their IT systems as we acquired 122 different companies.

Mark Taylor (01:52):
Is this a real estate company anybody would have heard of?

Jonathan Green (01:54):
Colliers International. So the largest in the world. So did all that, went around the world, had a great time, was very, very young, had a lot of executive coaches that they wanted me to talk to because I was in my 20s, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and people wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. And I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. So I did all that and it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot and I had a lot of great educational opportunities through that. They trained me a lot and it was a lot of fun. After that, I got married along the way and had kids. And so very shortly after we had kids, my wife said, "You're gone through weeks of the month. You got to do something different." So I left Colliers and I went to another company, medical devices.

(02:32):
My father when I was younger, he had invented a titanium implant coating called the hydroxyapatite coating, which essentially allowed bone to grow onto metal or get tighter to it. Nowadays, they do plasma coating and things like that, but this was an early one. And of course, being around 13 when he did that, and I worked in his office and I helped build the ERP system so that we could do all the FDA protocols to make sure that we were selling medical device things that get stuck in you. So I went back into that world. I worked for a company called Denmat out in Santa Barbara. And they made Rembrandt toothpaste. They made Lumineers. They made Snap on Smile. And in that process, I find myself back into IT. And basically my CEO at the time was a guy named Steve Ziskin. And Steve Ziskin is infamous for ... He was the guy who brought Ginsu and Eyes to the market and he basically mentored me on how you do direct to consumer.

(03:25):
And he challenged me. He wanted me to build a product that would allow him to sell a perfect set of teeth that you could snap on over your existing team. Think Invisalign, but these were just perfect right out of the gate. And he bought the company for about $2 million out of New York. I went out there and helped them get the company and drill the protocols, bring all that back to Santa Barbara. And we went to market with that, but I had to have a system ready in eight weeks that would allow a dentist to basically scan your teeth, upload them to a portal, design them virtually, and then manufacture them virtually and accept credit card payments from individuals as they got into a portal, if you will, and had eight weeks to do it. So they actually had a system called salesforce.com. So we built that system.

(04:11):
It was the first time anybody had used Salesforce as a prosthetic device manufacturing direct to consumer product.

Mark Taylor (04:19):
Oh, wow.

Jonathan Green (04:20):
Yeah. We went from about two million a year to about 18 million a year in eight weeks. It was a lot of fun. A lot of sleepless nights. We had call centers we had to set up. We had a lot of fun things to do to make all that happen. And then that company got sold two or three times. And that same group who saw me at that company, there's a lot of other stories about that company, but they told me there was a company in Austin, Texas that had just acquired the lap band. If you remember lap band weight loss surgery. So they're like, John, we're going from, I think it was three million a year to 115 million a year in three weeks. Wow. So they're like, "You're the only one who can work that fast and that hard, would you come out and do that?

(04:56):
" So my wife begrudgingly agreed to come to Austin from Santa Barbara and we came out here and we built out their global manufacturing. So manufacturing Costa Rica, 14 call centers worldwide, took care of all their people and made sure they had all the right tools and information to take that product to market. So that was fun. And after that was sold, I went, decided to go consulting. So I started as a consultant, a friend of mine who was another IT guy, one of my business partners now. He had VCIO. So we started VCIO and went out and consulting in the health insurance space. His first customer had basically 30 developers walk out one day and their systems all shut down. So they had over 100,000 claims in the backlog. Had Aetna and Transamerica breeding down their throat, "Hey, you're going to pay your claims, going to pay your claims." So I had to walk in and reverse engineer how claims processing claims worked.

(05:45):
And as I did that, I realized just how bad the industry was set. This was a fairly large company that I was working for and they had probably 25 different systems cobbled together to make it all work and do what the government wanted them to do in health insurance. So six months later, we had that all fixed up. Somebody saw me fix that, said, "Hey, go help these other guys." That was Crown Administrators. And when I got to Crown Administrators, after we got them fixed and stood up, they asked me to be their CEO. And I said, "I'm more of an IT guy than a CEO, but I'll do it as long as you need me to. " That was about six, seven years ago. So in that time, we took this little company from probably, gosh, they were managing maybe 3,000 families. Then we got them up to, I think we're managing closer to 20 or 30,000 families over the last six years and the pandemic in the middle, we kind of took a pause.

Mark Taylor (06:36):
Oh, wow. Yep.

Jonathan Green (06:38):
So yeah, we're basically reinventing how people get access to their healthcare.

Mark Taylor (06:44):
So for fear of oversimplifying, it sounds like the thing that you've done time and time again is you're not necessarily creating new technologies, you're figuring out very efficient ways to stitch together technologies that already exist.

Jonathan Green (07:00):
Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of like if you look at Zapier or Make or any of those other companies that basically have our workflow engines, Nintex, the rest of them. What we do is we look at what's out there and we say, "What do we need?" So in healthcare, one of the biggest problems is security. So we built our entire claims adjudication system, enrollment system, billing systems, all that inside salesforce.com, so we could inherit all of their tools. So unlike when I was at Colliers, when we had global teams that would follow the sun to be up 24 hours a day to make sure those systems work, Salesforce has already done that. So I just used what they had and underneath it, it's just a big Oracle database. So I can pretty much do anything I wanted there.

Mark Taylor (07:39):
And so I think this is an interesting point because your average Joe can't go and get an Oracle situation or pay $10 million to get it up and running and-

Jonathan Green (07:48):
Or an Akamai accelerator or any other stuff you inherit.

Mark Taylor (07:51):
And so utilizing somebody who's built their entire architecture on top of those extremely powerful systems and then basically makes it very, very accessible for me or you to go in and start at $100 a month or whatever. I mean, obviously not $100 a month. I can get a little 36 if you want. There you go. But then go up and up and up. I mean, it becomes not only really access to this incredibly powerful tool that you didn't have to pay for like you would otherwise.

Jonathan Green (08:18):
Yeah. People don't think about transactions like they used to. And things are changing so fast as you and I have talked. We don't know what cash is going to look like in a few years, but this system allows us to secure that with blockchain and everything else so I don't have to go out and reinvent that and spin up a bunch of Amazon web servers and then maintain those web servers and then make sure that I've adjusted those web servers or all the underlying architecture's been updated and somebody's done secure code review on that. I don't have to do any of that. Yeah.

Mark Taylor (08:45):
So I think this is interesting. There could be interesting for the listener is what are some of the other systems that exist right now that kind of would allow the average Joe to take advantage of extremely powerful ...

Jonathan Green (08:57):
I honestly believe that Salesforce is the only one because it has its single security model. If you look at Azure, if you look at Amazon Web Services, each one of those are going to have a separate instance that you have to set up and then you have to maintain that instance. The underlying architecture, they'll secure for you, but what you build on top of it is not going to be built the same way. And with Salesforce, you basically have a development environment they've built, which interrogates all the code you write already.

Mark Taylor (09:19):
There you

Jonathan Green (09:19):
Go.

Mark Taylor (09:20):
So from the security ... So it's not to say that there aren't other things out there that offer access to incredibly powerful systems at a reasonable rate, but Salesforce is the only one that's actually also verifying your work

Jonathan Green (09:33):
To

Mark Taylor (09:33):
Make sure that it stays secure.

Jonathan Green (09:34):
Yep, you got it.

Mark Taylor (09:35):
Okay. Well, that's really helpful. So going back to the Colliers years, when did you start and what was your tenure there?

Jonathan Green (09:42):
It was 13 years I was there. I'd have to go back and look. It was 22, 23, so probably 30 years ago. So reverse that back out of it. 2004?

Mark Taylor (09:53):
That'd be 20 years ago.

Jonathan Green (09:57):
Yeah, thanks. So

Mark Taylor (09:58):
94?

Jonathan Green (09:59):
Second cup of coffee.

Mark Taylor (10:01):
We'll get you another one. So around 93. I think the reason I'm curious about it is because the industry, the supply chain industry in general was in a very different place in 93 than it was in 2003.

Jonathan Green (10:14):
Oh, real estate was a different thing. So this is basically, let's see, there was a couple companies that are still out there. One of them is called LoopNet. One's called CoStar. Yep. So both of those guys, Dennis DeAndre andrew, came to us because they wanted us to see their software that they had built to track commercial real estate properties. I'd already built it. So they came in, they said, "Hey, we want some money." And I said, "I want to give you money. I have all of that. " Now, obviously it was a big mistake because they went and sold off and made millions of dollars and I just built an infrastructure that helped Colliers grow. But that system of tracking real estate was the first. I remember when I walked in the door and every broker had a stack of paper on their desk, which was their Rolodex of properties in the Bay Area and all the lease rates.

(10:59):
That's how they knew what market was available and how much it cost. And I also remember that we were one of the first companies that made a mobile app that allowed them on their Nokia phones, so no touchscreen, Nokia phones to get lease rates directed to their phones.

Mark Taylor (11:15):
Oh, that's cool.

Jonathan Green (11:16):
Yeah. Those ricochet modems that we were using at the time, something crazy like that.

Mark Taylor (11:21):
So as you started working from the time you began to the time you finished, I mean, obviously enabling that technology or that flow of information to flow in a much more digital manner had to have been one of the competitive advantages that allowed all the acquisitions- 100%. ... and roll up to occur with Colliers.

Jonathan Green (11:39):
It's actually what we're doing at Health Admins. So one thing we realized is that back in that day, this is pre dot com, I think, early internet, it was coax cable, if I remember. People were all dumping money into technology and they had no idea what it was. Somebody said, "Hey, I can build a website here's a million dollars. Go build me a website. I don't know what it does." We're doing the same thing now because people are basing, "You have artificial intelligence here's a million dollars. Go do something with it, make me some money off of that. " What we realized at Colliers was that if we just pooled everybody's money together and actually gave it to people who knew technology and liked technology, we could make more out of that investment than they could individually, and that would help them accelerate and do what they do really well, which is relationships.

(12:19):
And that's how Colliers grew. So we're trying to do the same thing in healthcare. Healthcare has spent millions and millions of dollars on systems that have failed because they're not technologists. They're basically just say, "I think this is how it should work. Here's a million dollars. Go build it for me. " They build it, it falls apart and no one knows what they're doing. We built a system six years ago that's still scaling every day because it's on Salesforce. It's updated three times a year. It's robust. It just keeps scaling billions of transactions. We're going to the TPA market and saying, "Hey, guys, stop spending money on technology. Just focus on the relationships. Let us take all the stuff you're not good at," which is technology.

Mark Taylor (12:54):
And is that kind of join the coalition or is that more of an you're playing and going for the acquisition, so it's like you're actually going out there and trying to acquire?

Jonathan Green (13:04):
Yeah, because one thing you find with many companies is that they didn't grow up on change management. They didn't grow up with lean manufacturing concepts. So when they decide to spend money on software, you have to implement it. They're not good at implementing it. So we originally thought, "Hey, let's sell the software to people. " Yeah, it took a year for the first customer to realize that they didn't even know how the business ran. So when you're configuring things, how do you configure something if they don't know how it works because they inherited it from somebody previously and nothing was documented. So we decided it's easier if we just acquire them and then we'll do the analysis of how the system should work and back them into other thing and it just seems to be faster.

Mark Taylor (13:40):
Interesting.

Jonathan Green (13:41):
We bought four, I think, last year.

Mark Taylor (13:43):
Nice. So when we first met and we were discussing things, I was discussing the aspect, the need to own the real estate to really do what you need to do and make investments in automation, make investments in your technology infrastructure and things like that. I mean, that of course would move with you even if you move properties, but it puts you in a much better position if you're owning the real estate.

Jonathan Green (14:10):
100%.

Mark Taylor (14:11):
And I still think long term, that's real estate's king. I think it's going to continue to be king.

Jonathan Green (14:17):
That's McDonald's. That's every company that has scaled to the point where they realize that they're not in those businesses, they're in the real estate business.

Mark Taylor (14:23):
But we're also in this moment where you've got this ... And I mean, my WMS friends hate it when I say this, I think, but WMSs are just a race to the bottom. It's data management at the end of the day. And then depending on which WMS you go for, some of them are going to be great at EDI, some of them are not going to be good at EDI, some of them are going to be excellent at APIs, and all of them are trying to really quote unquote leverage AI. Not a single one of them that I've seen so far is doing a great job of it. And so you're kind of in this, because there's such a shifting bedrock, I guess you could say, or it's more sandy than it is bedrock right now in the technology space. It sounds like you would probably say that there are some very interesting opportunities also happening in supply chain.

Jonathan Green (15:13):
Oh yeah. So when we had the consulting company, we actually consulted for a lot of brands that you would know today. They're massive international companies and we helped them to migrate some of their technology onto Salesforce again because simply put the systems that were out there just couldn't do or wouldn't do what Salesforce could. And again, Salesforce updates itself three times a year. So when AI came out, guess what? The next release of Salesforce has AI embedded in it. When blockchain came out, the next race of Salesforce has blockchain in it. So what we did was we took all the products that were out there. You've got your container management system that we talked about. You got your boat movement systems out there, you've got your docking systems, your warehouse management systems. And we basically clawed out whatever EDIs we could, where we could to get this much data into Salesforce because there we could actually use the data.

(16:02):
These other systems would process the data, but we could help you use it. I'll never forget the first time I went into a warehouse. I think it was a UPS warehouse and I saw the little cage in the corner and they've got their stacks of papers and their printers and the guys running back and forth with it. And then you got maybe three people with the digital guns and you're like, I'm like, "What is this? " There's an old green screen system that UPS uses in order to track all their stuff worldwide. Still green screens, still in AS400. Nobody does anything with that data on the floor. It all gets done someplace else.

Mark Taylor (16:31):
Yeah. Another thing that we were kind of talking about ... Well, okay, I actually don't want to gloss over this, but backing up just a little bit. So what are the steps the operators, let's just say in the 3PL side of things, need to start taking to really kind of like get into a place where they're at least keeping up with what's happening.

Jonathan Green (16:51):
Oh gosh, there's so much. Of course. I don't know that they can. So just before we came here, I've got to make these presentations to my company. I've got to do this video stuff, shareholder meetings and all that kind of stuff. And just talking to the communications consultant you bring in, not going to say. My friend was with me. She was like, "Yeah, don't give him a script. He's not good at reading scripts." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm not. Just give me some talking points that'll work." But then it hit me. I should be reading a script. So today I'm creating an AI that's going to read my script for me so I don't have to do the talking head anymore. That's something that just became available this last year. So how is that going to help the floor? Well, how are people being trained today?

(17:34):
How do people walk them around and show them how to do stuff? There's so much innovation happening so quickly right now. I don't know how anybody's going to be able to keep up. I feel terrible for my kids who are 18 and 20. They are too old now, I think, to really be brought up with what the benefits of this new technology world are going to be. They kind of missed the boat by about three years. I'm trying to educate them on it, but I don't think they really realize how impactful this is going to be and how much it's going to change. Just earlier today, you and I were talking about making breakfast and watching that, what was the video series that you used?

Mark Taylor (18:04):
Yes, chef for Masterclass.

Jonathan Green (18:06):
Yeah. Yes, chef for Masterclass. Pretty soon those are going to be AIs and we'll never have to worry about the actors or the individuals. They'll just put a camera on you and digitize your hands and they've got a video they can recreate as many times as they want.

Mark Taylor (18:20):
Well, if everybody's in the same boat, what are the best ways to put on a life preserver?

Jonathan Green (18:26):
I think you got to play with it. You just got to play with this stuff. When I think of logistics, I think I mentioned to you before, I used to own a restaurant and I failed at the restaurant because I didn't realize it was logistics. It's like today we were here, came to your house, logistics. I had to get here in a car that drove itself. And then I came up here and you had eggs that were ready, you had timing ready, you had all the logistics taken care of. All of that is going to be digitized. If you haven't taken a picture of your fridge and asked ChatGPT what you can make, you should try it because it will take a picture and realize what's in your fridge and then give you a recipe of what you have. It's a different world and it's changing really, really fast.

(19:05):
And if people don't get on board with it, they're going to be wondering in a few years why they didn't.

Mark Taylor (19:11):
So how does the average person who's curious get into it?

Jonathan Green (19:16):
I don't watch TikTok, but I've been told that I need to because there are a lot of great people doing a lot of great stuff with TikTok right now. In fact, one of my business partners just told me he's paying a guy 500 bucks a month for an hour of his time to just ask him questions about AI because he's been doing it for six years and he had a really good TikTok pod and he's just telling people what he does with AI every day and how to build your own personal GPTs and how those little GPTs will help you for one for marketing, you've got one for manufacturing, you have one for logistics and you just teach that one thing all you know, and then ask questions of it.

Mark Taylor (19:54):
And this may be getting a little bit more in the weeds than what the average listener wants, but I mean, this is more about what I'm interested in in this case. So the very first thing anybody can do, they can go to Bar, they can go to-

Jonathan Green (20:06):
I recommend Notebook LM.

Mark Taylor (20:07):
Yep, Notebook LM. And that's for spreadsheets in particular, right?

Jonathan Green (20:11):
No, but yes, you absolutely can. We were doing an acquisition and I loaded all the company, all the financials right into that all PDFs right now. It doesn't take Excel or sheet right now. And I just said, "Tell me about the finances." And it gave me an in- depth review of all the challenges in the finances, including the fact that they had liquidated some assets recently that I was not aware they had liquidated and how they had restructured their debt. So I recommend Notebook LM for that aspect. But the other aspect of it is we put in a 200 page basically medical plan document and then we asked it questions about what was covered, what wasn't covered, and how to get access to care, and guess what it told us.

Mark Taylor (20:52):
And then just so practically taking it back to your supply chain operators, that can apply for PDF version. I mean, since it's PDFs, you can upload your customer contracts. Yep. You can upload-

Jonathan Green (21:05):
Manifests. You can upload invoices. You can upload everything. I think right now it's a maximum of 50 documents, but it doesn't say how long those documents have to be. So once you put them in there, you just ask the data, the question you're looking for.

Mark Taylor (21:18):
Got it. And then you can cycle it out. So if you were going to build on that, it just sounds like right now it's still the context window, the amount of data that you can put in. If it's only 50 documents, then there's likely going to be a subscription model down the road where you can put 100 or probably been measured in data, but so that's a good place to start. Your other, I mean, just OpenAI is probably the most ubiquitous.

Jonathan Green (21:44):
Yep. And if you haven't started your own ChatGPT, you should. And remember when you're telling the ChatGPT, you have to tell it to remember things. So you have to tell it, "Hey, remember this. " So when you're asking the next question, it will use the context of what you had just said.

Mark Taylor (21:58):
And I know there's a lot of YouTube videos on how to create your own ChatGPTs, but effectively you need to buy two seats, which allows you to pay for the enterprise version. You got it. Which is still what? 40 bucks, 50 bucks a

Jonathan Green (22:09):
Month. Well worth it.

Mark Taylor (22:11):
And then you can go create personal GPT and then go to YouTube and find it.

Jonathan Green (22:16):
And if you have questions like, we're always getting new books that people want us to read and I just say, summarize this book. And one of the things that we did, Dave, you've met before, one of our friends, colleagues had written his own book and we said, "Well, we don't actually read anymore. We do audio books because we just don't have the time." They said, "Do you have an audiobook?" He said, "I've been working on it for a year. I don't have working on it for a year." Three days later, we gave him his audio book because we just threw it into a couple of the AI engines and got a copy of his voice.

Mark Taylor (22:49):
How did it sound?

Jonathan Green (22:50):
Perfect. Even

Mark Taylor (22:51):
Intonations and-

Jonathan Green (22:52):
Everything.

Mark Taylor (22:52):
Contact. Wow.

Jonathan Green (22:53):
Yeah. That's why I'm very excited about my new avatar and not having to do talking head videos for a company.

Mark Taylor (22:59):
So a lot of the human skills that we always seem to get really interested about, or we used to say, this is great, public speaking being one of them.

Jonathan Green (23:09):
Driving. My wife is very, very nervous because I'm the best driver in the family, she says. And she's worried now that I have a self-driving car that I'm going to lose that skill and she's right. Every time I have to drive it, I feel weird.

Mark Taylor (23:23):
That's awesome. So what are some of the things ... How do you start to stitch together? So I mean, we use Extensive, which is a WMS for our WMS, but then our ticketing system ends up being Zendesk and our Slack and all these sorts of things and QuickBooks and then bill.com for invoicing and all these sorts of things. And so I mean, pretty quickly you see you can go to five to 10 to 20 technologies that you utilize that you're paying subscriptions for.

Jonathan Green (23:52):
Yep. And then you'll have Make Soon and you'll tie them all together with Make in the workflow, take your invoices and take it to Bill and take it from QuickBooks and put it into your, probably not your WMS, but you'll take everything out of the WS and put it into one of those other systems and you'll be asking it questions almost immediately and not building complex data tables because it doesn't need those anymore.

Mark Taylor (24:10):
So tell me about Make then.

Jonathan Green (24:12):
Oh, Make is just, it's another tool like Zapier or any others, but it's AI focused. So it's just here, click the button, connect it to your email, and click the button and connect it to whatever else you need. And now you can ask questions of that data source.

Mark Taylor (24:26):
Okay. I mean, because for anybody who's played with AI for any amount of time, you see there's a lot of errors.

Jonathan Green (24:38):
Oh yeah. Well, a lot of people call AI when it's actually predictive analytics, which is you have a predetermined set of rules that are going to determine what the output is. Actual artificial intelligence is supposed to be thinking and learning and changing. And when you think and you learn and you change, you are going to make mistakes.

Mark Taylor (24:57):
And so with that being said, so is make more predictive or is it ...

Jonathan Green (25:02):
No, I think it's pretty close to being artificial because it didn't define the data set. Well, you poked the dataset at it and then it did its indexing and it's thinking about it and looking at it, trying to learn about your data. So when you ask a question, it can spit it back to you.

Mark Taylor (25:16):
Right. Now as people, I don't know, did you ever go into the Black Mirror? Did you ever watch Black Mirror?

Jonathan Green (25:24):
Oh yeah, I love that. Yeah, it was a great show.

Mark Taylor (25:26):
Okay. So there was several years ago, it was ahead of it, not too far ahead, but I mean, quite ahead of its time where it was basically you're just going to upload yourself into, and I mean, your experiences, your data. And so I mean, let's play with this idea of putting your brain out there. I know there are several people in the industry right now who've forgotten more than I'll probably ever learn.

Jonathan Green (25:47):
I definitely have forgotten more than I'll ever learn

Mark Taylor (25:49):
About. About supply chain, but you can start to, I guess, what's the best way to start kind of building your online brain?

Jonathan Green (26:00):
I don't know that there is a best way of doing it.

Mark Taylor (26:02):
What are some of the more ...

Jonathan Green (26:03):
So I was really intrigued by this concept. I think it was called Storyworth. I don't know if you've heard of it. The idea was they're going to call you or email you and ask you a question about your life and then you tell it, answer to that question. And then after a year of them asking the questions, they're going to write a book about your life. This was before AI. I'm 90% sure that someone's going to have an artificial intelligence that's going to listen to my emails, read my emails, and then tell me about my life. I think I shared with you, Crystal knows that other program that just takes what you've written about yourself and what other people have written about you on the internet and gives you a very accurate disc profile and explains to people how to deal with you. I did it just the other day to another person who dropped their jaw.

(26:44):
I just loved doing that. I was like, "I'm just cheating. I want you to know I knew what's about you. " I never met them.

Mark Taylor (26:49):
Right. And you said there was one in particular where it gets so focused that it says, "Don't use big words with this person."

Jonathan Green (26:54):
Yes, that was my favorite.

Mark Taylor (26:56):
Not in an insulting

Jonathan Green (26:56):
Manner,

Mark Taylor (26:57):
Just like ... And the guy, you showed it to him and says, "I hate it when people try to talk like they know something."

Jonathan Green (27:01):
Exactly. It was hilarious. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. But those tools changed the way we react to people. So I was going to a finance meeting, people I'd never met, they learned about my company and they were interested to find if they could invest. And so before I went there, I had my crystal nose red. I had all of my pitch deck gone through ChatGPT and beautiful.ai. So I had all these artificial intelligence things and I was prepared for every question they were going to ask. And as they asked questions, I just kept turning on my screen and they're like, "Wow, you really did your homework." And I was like, "Yeah, it took about 15 minutes before I got here."

Mark Taylor (27:33):
What was the other one? Y said beautiful.

Jonathan Green (27:34):
Beautiful.ai for making PowerPoint presentations. Basically, it's the same sort of thing. You feed a little bit of information and extrapolates and makes colors and all that kind of fun stuff, but there are ways to use the tools together. So I would use my ChatGPT to create the slide content, and then I would add that slide content to beautiful AI and it would just take it and extrapolate on it. So you use them together.

Mark Taylor (27:58):
So once again, we've got a bunch of tools and it's still, and like you said, just get out there and play and figure out what's going to be, what's this, what's that, play with this, what seems to work for you? How do you adapt it to your life? Now the people who go a little bit more advanced and they start saying, so it's like, I think about the master's program I went to, they gave us all these frameworks. I could upload these frameworks. There are particular notes from Harvard or Stanford that I could put up in there and then you start creating kind of the things that at one point you had in your brain that have influenced you in some form or you find PDF versions of books and you put those in there. And then now you've got kind of this data set that says, "I want you to analyze this opportunity using the principles that I've put into this data set."

Jonathan Green (28:49):
That's why you have multiple GPTs. Just put all the data in this one. That's what I want to use to answer the questions here, put all the data here, answer those questions. Did I tell you a story about my daughter a couple weeks ago?

Mark Taylor (28:58):
Please.

Jonathan Green (28:59):
So my daughter was 18, just turned, this was like two, three weeks ago. She had a sharp pain in her stomach at one o'clock in the morning, woke up. So went in, she's had a lot of medical issues and just did the usual diagnosis and I could not rule out appendicitis. It was presenting itself as a radiating pain through the back, feeling nauseous, sharp pain when you pushed on it and released, said, "Okay, this looks serious. I've got to go to the hospital." Now, I realized at that time that I didn't actually have a telemedicine product. So that's one of the things we're adding is because you should be able to call somebody and ask these questions. So I get to the hospital and the doctor is not able to be there the entire time, right? So he comes in, we're going to do some tests, we're going to figure things out.

(29:39):
I immediately pulled out ChatGPT just to entertain my daughter with it and started asking it the questions of what it could be. And it's writing back an exact specific thing of what it is. And I'm having a conversation. So I was like, "Hey, Chad, I'm here at the hospital, this is what's happening, this is what they're doing. What do you think it could be? " And like, "Well, we're glad you're at the hospital. These are the things that it could be. " And my mother's daughter's asking, "Well, what does that mean? I mean, and it comes, well, these are the things that could happen. Oh, I might have to have surgery. Well, how long is the surgery? The surgery should last 45 minutes. Oh, well, how long's the recovery period? Oh, the recovery period's going to be between three to four days afterwards, depending if they do this or that.

(30:12):
The doctor came back in and the answers I got from ChatGPT were better than the ones the doctor gave me. And I was actually texting my family at the same time who's full of doctors and getting better answers from ChatGPT than I did to my family or the doctor in the room. There was more information in chat than there was from the doctors and my family because my family was like, "Yeah, they're going to have to do surgery. It's going to be okay." Yeah, but that doesn't tell me anything about how they're going to do surgery. What are the options for surgery? And that was just another example of if I didn't use the tool, I wouldn't have understood I could use it for that. And it really just helped my daughter relax because she now knew more than the doctors did.

Mark Taylor (30:51):
And that's actually an interesting point because as the doctor comes back in and says, "Hey, this is what's going on. " It's what she expected. Yep. Exactly. It's funny. It's like when things are really chaotic, just how much just having a feeling or how much believing that you know what the potential outcomes are, it's like once you face them, how much more in control it makes you feel.

Jonathan Green (31:14):
Yeah. And also think about what it's going to mean for the world because now when you have these small countries that are connected to Starlink, they're not having access to a doctor, but wait, yes, they do. Now they can ask questions of what they should do for their health in these small rural communities that never had access to that knowledge before.

Mark Taylor (31:30):
Okay. So let's have a little fun. And that is, we're in this rapidly changing world that only a few people can really even keep up with. And probably nobody's keeping up with it technically. Why don't we just all throw up our hands and go to the park and just get some sun?

Jonathan Green (31:47):
It may happen. It may be there one day, but for those of us who really are curious and like to learn and like to play, it's a great time to start playing.

Mark Taylor (31:56):
Yeah. We'll have to talk again like six months because it'll be a completely different

Jonathan Green (32:03):
Conversation. Oh yeah, that'll be great. Actually, I'd love to see what's going to happen in six months. I look back six months previously and I was not playing with any of the AIs. I knew they were out there, but I didn't have time.

Mark Taylor (32:13):
Yeah. Interesting. Let's just do a quick little recap before we sign off. And that is, so Crystal knows. Interesting for just ... And I mean, I know that one, that one's so fun. It's C-R-Y-S-T-A-L.

Jonathan Green (32:25):
Yep.

Mark Taylor (32:25):
And then K-N-O-S. Yep. And then that one, I think they've got a free version.

Jonathan Green (32:29):
Yeah. Yeah, they do.

Mark Taylor (32:30):
But effectively scrapes the web for things that you've written, your LinkedIn profile. Any public persona that you have that's on the inner webs uses that to create a personality profile. Yep. And that goes for anybody that you want to have it analyzed that you might be meeting for coffee. You got it. So great tool. Notebook LM.

Jonathan Green (32:51):
Yep. That's an amazing one. Very easy to take data out of PDFs and ask any question of it.

Mark Taylor (32:56):
Okay. Notebook LM was another one. I know you also like Superhuman for email.

Jonathan Green (33:01):
Oh yeah, that's life changing. Superhuman basically takes your email and contextualizes it. So it wants you to focus on your email and not to use the mouse. That is the hardest thing you'll find doing. Yeah. But without the mouse, you can be very, very efficient on a computer. And yeah, we'll just categorize all the mail so you can go through it much, much faster.

Mark Taylor (33:19):
Okay. For something more complex, like getting into Salesforce and starting the low thing, what level of technical knowledge do you need to have before you can start kind of building tools that would work within your company?

Jonathan Green (33:35):
I don't think it's a knowledge. I think it's a curiosity. It's the critical thinking I think that a lot of people lack. And if you don't have critical thinking and you're not able to problem solve, you're going to struggle with all these tools. You really need to spend time just to learn how to be curious again. I think a lot of people that I've talked to that struggle with these, it's because they were told to do things, they do the things and that's all they do. So they're not inclined to poke it and to break it and to see how it happens. But the best thing I've told people is if you're going to get a free account for Salesforce, put your contacts in there and then just write a reminder to send an email on their birthday.

Mark Taylor (34:10):
Simple

Jonathan Green (34:11):
As that.

Mark Taylor (34:12):
Simple as that. And do you recommend, is that similar to the same thing as just getting on Sapier and building automations?

Jonathan Green (34:19):
So when you've got your contacts inside Salesforce, you can use the flow in order to send that email out, or you can use Zapier to tie Salesforce to a free active campaign or whatever email system you want. And yeah, you can do that. You can actually probably use Sapier to go to Crystal Nose and write a nice little story and then insert that story into your birthday card.

Mark Taylor (34:40):
Nice. And then Make was the other one that you said.

Jonathan Green (34:43):
Yep. Another workflow engine like Sapier, but a little more artificial intelligence in there from my limited use of it. I'm still deepened and still trying to get more things to connect to it.

Mark Taylor (34:52):
And that's just, is it make.ai, make.com?

Jonathan Green (34:54):
I think it's make.ai.

Mark Taylor (34:55):
Okay. So M-A-K-E?

Jonathan Green (34:56):
Yeah.

Mark Taylor (34:57):
Cool. Well, I really appreciate you sitting down. This one's a bit of a ... I'm not a technical person, so this is extremely helpful to me and I hope everybody else, I don't hope. I know everybody else that listens to it will find the same.

Jonathan Green (35:12):
Cool. Thanks anytime.

Mark Taylor (35:13):
Thank you.

Mark Taylor

Host