Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today I’m gonna talk about a few various topics including AI recipes, like cooking recipes, and I’ll also talk a little bit about maybe the, the food blogging world and recipes by bloggers in the past. I will. Try to remember that no one wants to listen to someone else complain, even if it’s a little bit funny by, by the way, I don’t have any jokes planned or any kind of humor, so I think it’ll just sound like complaining.
I’ll talk about some other stuff and tell some stories, but I’ll have to remember, you know. Keep this positive. No one wants to listen to you complain. And I’ll talk about other random stuff too including a show I recently went to in a book that I’m, uh, reading. And I guess I can give you a little update on my reading physical books and trying to read more.
There was an episode a few. Weeks, months ago, I, I don’t remember exactly. And I was like, you know what, I’m, I like reading physical books. I’m gonna try to do more of that. I made a commitment to you. I made a commitment to myself to read more and I’m still on the first fucking book. Alright, I’ll, I didn’t do as much as I thought, but I, I did finish this book called Food for Thought.
Elton Brown essays and ruminations and it’s very good. I really like Elton Brown. He has been in many shows on the Food Network. The one that I discovered him on was Good Eats, and that is a great show. I think I’m gonna go back and watch. From the beginning, I think there were maybe 16 seasons, and I watched maybe the first, it could be anywhere from like five to nine seasons or so.
And then it kind of dropped off towards the end. And then I think he had a bit of a reboot where he redid some recipes from like the very first season. And I watched, I think the 10 episodes or 13 episodes that he published there. But anyway. Good book. I haven’t been reading books like I said I was going to, but.
Like, someone promising to be on a diet, I’m like, you know what? I am gonna start, I’m gonna start next week. It’s coming right up. It’s just gonna be, you know, all I have to do is do what I said. But this time I think I’m serious this time. It’s for real. And I’ll, I’ll talk maybe a little bit about that.
So we’re gonna be going all over the place. I’m also gonna talk about something that. Is maybe a little timely or not timely by the time you hear this, and undoubtedly probably won’t be relevant in the future. But it’s gonna be a very small segment, and it’s just something that has been on my mind a little bit.
And the thing is, you don’t, you don’t know when I’m recording this, except that I’m gonna tell you it’s, it’s just April 15th, 2025. So. A little while ago I got pretty far ahead on the schedule ’cause I was taking time off and traveled a pretty huge amount from like mid-February until yesterday.
I’ve been home a lot too, but like, it’s been like resting, getting ready for another thing. So like, actually there’s been a lot of, uh, travel overall, so. Just couple, couple things in my mind as well. So the main thing was the AI recipes, and the thing is, I, I do recommend this book. We could put a link in the description.
I think it was like a. Immediate New York Times bestseller. Alton Brown has a lot of, um, he’s, like I said, he’s been on the Food Network for like 20 plus years and he’s been on a bunch of those competition shows, which I actually didn’t like. And I think that’s when he maybe got even more popular because people love those fucking shows and they’re like, all right, start cooking some food.
Alright, let’s just change everything and not give you enough time. And. Not give you enough ingredients and then see what happens. And I’m like, what? What are we doing? So anyway, good Eats though. Solid show. He basically put together like Julia Child, Bonnie Python, and Mr. Wizard. Great combo. So there’s some, there’s humor, there’s some science in there.
There’s the cooking part. And I have been a huge fan of Alton. He has this essay in here about. You know, kind of AI coming for his job as really a, you know, a recipe writer. And, I mean, he does a lot of stuff. He’s an author and all that stuff, but basically he put in some random ingredients. He had a system to do it, so it was sort of an ingredient.
Randomizer put it into AI and said, I, you know what? I don’t know what prompt to put in there. Why don’t we put in the style of Alton Brown? And it came up with. Kind of a, just a weird recipe that doesn’t make sense. There’s an example in the book, and the thing is, my wife and I recently saw him actually just the other day, it was why we were outta town.
We went to, uh, a nearby town here called Greeley. It’s about an hour away, like in the opposite direction of Denver. We usually see shows in Denver, but we were like, let’s check out Greeley. Let’s see what it’s like up there. It was fine. Great show. And, um. He actually did a little demo of one of the crazy recipes.
’cause he, he got a handful of recipes and it was, I can’t remember the exact stuff, but it would be the equivalent of like taking broccoli, like mixing it with chocolate and then putting it in pasta and then. Putting it into like a jello mold and with gelatin, and then you have some sort of weird chocolate broccoli gelatin situation and it’s, it’s just weird.
It’s like, what are we even like, what is this? This is a horrible idea. Nothing makes sense. It won’t taste good. These flavors don’t go together very well. Broccoli and chocolate. We don’t see that. We don’t see that out there. I don’t think that’s the thing that we want to do. So anyway, he, he makes a, a good point there.
And I mean, some people ha have tried to use them. I’ve actually not really paid attention. I, I typically, I don’t use recipes verbatim most of the time. I usually will read through, make some amendments, make sure. Let’s say I’m making a mole or something like that. I’ll make sure I have like the main point or the main spices and, and things that I need to have that are signature for mole of the region that I’m trying to make, blah, blah, blah.
So I’ll do research, but typically I don’t follow the recipe straight up. So that’s a, a little unusual, I think. For maybe like newer cooks, but let, let’s move on from that. Basically, I’ve never used like AI for a recipe and I would have potentially some, I mean, I would not follow it exactly ’cause I don’t usually follow recipes Exactly.
Unless I’m trying to like dial something in and. The other part of it is I kind of stopped looking at recipes written by bloggers. Part of the issue is. I guess the industry that I worked in for a few years, and probably many of you, dabbled in with websites and niche sites, and basically, unfortunately, I put out all this content about how to write content, and some people applied that to recipes and they didn’t have.
The culinary chops or time or desire to test the recipes. So I’m not saying you have to be an experienced cook or chef or have any kind of. Advanced learning or even classes at your like local community center or whatever. Nothing like that. You could be awesome from, you know, learning from your family or trial and error or watching tv.
Like I did. I basically just watched TV shows for years since I was a kid. Like, I remember watching like PBS and uh, like who’s the Cajun guy? Justin. I’ll think of it later. Anyway, so since I was a kid, I remember watching cooking shows. So I had like a lot of, uh, visual experience, I guess just watching and then listening and learning.
Eventually I got cookbooks and just like trial and error many horrible dishes. But over time I like developed some intuition. All that to say, I eventually figured out that like a lot of the. Recipes that are out there just fucking suck. Like, I don’t even know if the person made the food at all and tested it.
’cause I was like, this, this doesn’t even make sense. They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and this, this is off. So over and over again, I would, I was running into that and I’m like, man, I’m looking on my phone. I’m trying, I’m trying to find a recipe. I gotta search everywhere. And then I also discover that there’s all these fucking videos popping up.
Now I hear myself complaining, but there’s all the videos popping up. I’m reading something and then some other thing slides in there and moves everything. And I. Reading about someone’s like long story about something that’s obviously made up and we don’t need all the backstory and we don’t care about it.
So you end up with that. I’ve complained about this before, so I never loved looking up the, like the blog type recipes in the last, say, 10 years now. I do remember reading other blogs. Years ago. One that comes to mind is the. Five minute per day bread recipe. It’s a wonderful set of books now, but it was a great blog and you can read about how they came up with the idea.
There’s actually a real story behind it. And now they actually have books. So I’ve actually checked out those books and we’re gonna end up coming full circle. Right? So I am not going to use AI recipe builders and. I’m probably not gonna read blogs. Next episode I’m gonna talk about my, some disappointing search results on Google, where, I mean, I’m just trying to find information and I’m just, I’m having a really hard time.
I’m having a really hard time, a little frustrated, and that’s the next episode. But I wanted to give you a little teaser, different topic. I’ll complain about something else. Don’t worry. So. We’re at a point where I’m not looking at the other, those other two sources. Now, I have had or I, I do have for many years, I have recipe books and I have several of Alton Brown’s books.
I think this is the 10th one that he’s published, and I have maybe five of the others. I’m missing a, a handful of ’em out there, but. I’m going back to Alton Brown recipes. I’m going to America’s Test Kitchen where they do test stuff and they, they actually do have like culinary degrees. They know what the fuck they’re talking about.
And again, they’re actually testing stuff now. You can’t go, I mean, YouTube is a great source that’s much tougher to fake, especially, they’re literally like cooking the food, but you get a pretty good idea of. Sort of the qualifications by the way, the person’s talking. And again, I’ve watched a lot of great YouTubers who, they didn’t go to culinary school.
They’re home cooks, they’re experienced, they’re good teachers, or maybe even better, they’re good entertainers, so they kind of hook you and yeah, they, you know, everything’s not perfect, but they’re making food and they’re enjoying it. And that’s great. I, I love that. So. I think more people will be going in this direction or going to good sources.
Like I said, America’s test kitchen pro, probably most of the people on, like the food network, they, they do test those recipes and like it is important, you know, if a recipe book comes out or if you go grab one from the library. Library’s great folks. You can go check out books and they have ebook versions, but I mean, there’s these print versions, which are awesome, which are really good to use if you are looking for recipes and stuff.
So, I mean. You could go and basically never run out of recipes or, or, or books to go through. I know at our library here in Longmont, there’s, I’m trying to think at least two or three. I think there might be two or three rows, maybe two rows if you can’t front and back of just cookbooks. All different cuisines, different focuses.
It’s great. I, I could, I would never, like, through the whole rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to go through all the books. Right. So if you pick a couple of them for specific recipes, that’s great. I. And highly recommend the, the book that I mentioned here, food for Thought or other Alton Brown Books. If you want recommendations, um, let me know.
I think he even, ’cause my, my wife actually really enjoyed the show. I forced her to watch a couple short segments of Good Eats in the past, and I think I. Have recommended that she, you know, check out specific recipes, like she made pineapple upside down cake, and I was like, Alton Brown has a great recipe.
Why don’t you check that one out? She literally made it. It was awesome. And she, uh, did a great job. Now, cool thing with the show, we splurge, uh, like this, this is so unusual. We pretty much never do this. We often get like discount tickets or something like that. We’re frugal at heart, so it’s tough for us to spend more, but I don’t really care about celebrity.
Even the bands that I really like, I’m like, ah, do I wanna go to that show? Like I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of the. Bands that I really like in the past already many years ago in their prime. So now I’m like, ah, do I wanna make the drive? Like, do I really wanna do that? The tickets, parking, all the, all the things that we can make excuses about as it were.
Well, I assume other people make these excuses while they’re getting older, but we got the VIP tickets, so that means we got to go in early. We actually got signed copies of the book, so I have, I already bought the book, but I actually have one signed right here, which is cool. And, uh, my wife got one too, but, VIP, so we got to go in early for a q and a session. And there, I’m trying to think, there might have been 50 people. I’m not a hundred percent sure. Maybe around 50. We were right in the, the front row. We got like some pretty good seats and the, like I said.
Alton Brown is like one of the few people where I’m like, I, I would really, yeah, I would wanna do the q and a. The funny thing is I don’t, I, I didn’t even have a question. I thought about asking him something about writing, and my wife for some reason was like building this up weeks ago. She was like, what are you gonna ask him?
You gotta come up with a good question. And it was like, I was trying to brainstorm in different stuff and I’m like, you know, I mean my podcasting interview brain, I had some like. Harder questions, which maybe you could squeeze those in, but it’s like usually a really good question has like kind of a longer answer and you know, he keeps it moving.
Super relatable, very cool, very polite, seemed really appreciative. The show is hilarious. Highly recommended if people are interested in checking it out. I will. So the topic around e-comm is kind of related to. Tariffs and other volatility that we’re seeing in this timeframe here. So if this is years in the future, or even months ahead of time, you know how things turned out.
My hunch is everything’s fine, but the volatility. Is a little tough to deal with. Before I hit that, I do wanna mention performance Lab here. So I use the multivitamin. I have this here, and I, I have been using their Mind Lab Pro product that’s a neutropic for, for a while now, and I first got hooked up, a listener, viewer of this channel. They, um, they were like, Hey, I work over at MindLab Pro, you wanna check out some of the product? And I was like, yeah, sure. This, this stuff is awesome and highly recommend it. So the nootropic, it’s one of the ones that I use often, so I would recommend it if people wanna check it out.
I’m an affiliate, so I get a commission if you do. Sign up, but they have a full range. And like I said, I got the, uh, multivitamin here for men. And then I think they must have that for women as well. And then you have the Mind Lab Pro, which is the nootropic. They have some other stuff too, so check out whatever you want.
They have great bundles and we’ll link up so that you can check it out. So. Back to kind of the potential e-comm issues, which I, I have no, no skin in the game directly, but I could get impacted ’cause I, I recently set up my printify drop shipping and then linked it up. And technically it’s print. I drop shipping ’cause someone else is handling that portion and the fulfillment.
But I have my Etsy store and I currently, I just have like a couple things in there. It’s mostly set up for my other podcast to mile Hi-Fi. ’cause a lot of people were like, Hey, I wanna buy a t-shirt. I have a handful that I was given out at a conference recently, but some people want some of the like tech material, like the dry, dry fit wicking stuff so they could work out or, or just maybe they’re hot and sweaty people like me and they want, want something a little bit cooler and not cotton, which is fine. So anyway, I set that up. I’ll put some of my other I guess print on demand worthy things over there as well, but.
Anyway and I’ll link up so you can check it out. I’ll put some of my photos and whatnot over there. But I have been observing from afar, even though I don’t look at the news and try not to pay attention, the volatility in the markets, the bond market, and just all the tariff type hijinks they’ve been going on.
And whether you agree or disagree. The volatility is tough to deal with. And from a, you know, investing perspective, this is not advice. Nothing that I’m saying is, is advice. This is all just entertainment. But I mean, we’re, we’re investors and we’re investors in equities and a small amount of bonds and. We see the volatility, however, we’re long term investors, so like volatility is, is part of the the game.
So we, we know this happens, we know that every few years you’re gonna have a recession every like a little bit longer. Every 10 years or so, you’re gonna have like some fairly large anomaly and you could look back and kind of see that you don’t know what it is. You won’t know what it is. You don’t know when it’s coming up, but it’s coming up.
And. If you have a long enough time horizon to access that money, then you’re probably just fine most of the time. And if you have a really robust like portfolio and a really robust plan, then you have accounted for short term recessions or every few years, you’re gonna have some major issue. Where the markets might be down for several years.
So that is something that happens. And again, we have a short timeframe of whatever, a hundred ish years where we could see. And, and that’s not very much of a timeframe, by the way. There’s only a handful of recessions that you could actually look at. I don’t know the exact number. It’s like eight or something.
So we have like a, a decent timeframe. It feels like a long time, but it’s really not that much. We don’t have that many samples to look at. So anyway, the volatility is crazy, but with the tariff madness going on, basically, I wonder how e-comm is gonna. Figure this out because they don’t know how to plan.
They don’t know if, if they should buy a lot. Now I’m on an email list for a guitar manufacturer called, uh, Orangewood. I don’t have any other guitars, but they made a good push for sort of a direct to consumer model, and the guitars are made overseas. They, I think they show up. In California and they set up and do a lot of sort of the fine tuning, the final touches and finishing of the guitar before they send it out.
So reasonable quality materials and all that stuff, but they set it up here in the us. And it’s a little bit closer to when people are gonna get it. So basically like it could be finished in a, you know, high level and it’s only going from like California to wherever, right? So anyway very reasonable price.
But I got an email and they were like, Hey, we ordered a bunch of stuff. Prices are probably gonna go up. If you wanna buy something, now’s a great time to get it. ’cause like prices are gonna go up. We’re monitoring, we don’t know. Much. And a lot of companies are getting ahead and I’m sure they’re telling, like other companies are telling their retail locations that are not direct to consumer.
These companies that aren’t direct to consumer and they have a guitar shop here in town that needs to order stuff, they’re like, order a bunch of stuff. Now we’re gonna be raising prices. So I don’t know how all that’s gonna play out, but looking at sort of like. Other people that shifted from niche sites over to e-commerce or drop shipping, or maybe they have products on Amazon, who knows what’s gonna happen.
I mean, it, it’s it very volatile. I have no I have no advice for, for people. So not helpful. Just an observation and I think. I think the, the companies that are able, that, I guess we’re planning ahead for downturns or volatility or essentially just like a rainy day in the future, some companies are able to keep more cash, have higher cash flow situations depending on their margins and other, a number of other factors.
But the, I mean, the fact is a lot of e-commerce shops, or if you’re doing like drop shipping, for example. Some of the business models sort of required you to run ads. So drop shipping is a great example. Not not everything, and I’ve never really done drop shipping. Talked to a lot of people that have, but basically it’s like I.
You run ads, you sell the product, you have a margin, it’s a little bit smaller, especially if you’re not handling, um, any of the fulfillment in a lot of those other details. Your margins are much smaller because you’re outsourcing other services and, and portions of the whole process. So at the end of the day.
You’re floating that ad spend until you get paid by the drop shipping fulfillment company or whatever they’re called. And essentially you end up in a situation where like you just spent a bunch of money on ads, your margins are only like 11% and then your cost of goods are gonna be going up. So it’s like you could be in a situation where like.
You go outta business ’cause you can’t make your cash flow. And hopefully, I mean, in the beginning I could see, you know, companies running like that. ’cause like they haven’t built up the reserves and like, they’re fine tuning things. But most businesses and hopefully not too many retail businesses, but I mean, that is the reality.
If you’re in a place where the rent’s pretty expensive, your margins could be pretty small and then you’re in a situation where you’re like, oh no. We cannot make the cash flow and we don’t have like reserves for the volatility. So like I said, I’ll keep this as a shorter portion, but I hope it works out for people.
And if you have stories, if you’re doing drop shipping or other physical good situations where like materials are coming from overseas in some capacity. Let me know, how’s it going for you? What are you seeing? Are you having your prices go up? And like I said, it could potentially impact the Etsy store that I have, because at the end of the day, I mean the, the print on demand stuff is happening in the us It’s printed there, but I don’t know, I mean, I assume the, the raw goods are coming from somewhere else.
Probably China, I don’t know, probably China in most cases, not always. And then. If you trace some of the other supply chain, like it may not come, like the, the materials may be put together in somewhere in the US and then goes to the print on demand place, but like the original origin of the, whatever, the t-shirt material and the, like, the raw cotton might be coming from somewhere else.
So it’s like if you, if you trace it down, it’s like, if we don’t have the, the raw materials here, like it’s coming from somewhere else, obviously. So anyway. We’ll see how it plays out. So as we summarize here, you know, check out MindLab Pro. If you use the AI recipe, put her togethers, let me know about that too.
How does it go? Are you able to make the food that the AI recipe generator spits out? If you have a food blog, are you one of the people that. Is publishing these horrible recipes. Not you, you’re better than that. Right? But if you are, ’cause I know, I mean, people, people were like, you know what, we have ai.
Let’s just, let’s see what we can do. And I’ll shout out to Shauna Newman. I’m on her and I, I skim, uh, all the emails. I’m gonna mess up some details. But basically. There she has been highlighting some AI recipe sites and like other bloggers that were really in air quotes, putting together recipes. I. I dislike ’em all.
Alright. I’ll just be upfront. I’ll put a blanket statement out there. I know some people actually like making the food. I interviewed shoot, I forget her name. I think her name was Sarah, but she lives locally ish in the Denver area, but she has like a food science degree. Like, so there’s some people with the qualifications at are blogging that’s legit.
They test the recipes. That’s cool. For the people that are just like public publishing mass quantities not cool. I, I, I was not loving. That. And I mean, it’s a race to the bottom. This is gonna go nowhere. Other people will be frustrated and they’re just gonna be like, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna go to a trusted source.
Like uh, I went to king Authors Arthur’s flower, right? So it’s like they have a line of products. I buy those products. They have good recipes, they have like cookbooks and stuff, so they have good recipes on there ’cause they want you to buy more of their flour and they’re testing it. They’re doing a good job and if they want you to buy more flour, they’re, they’re just getting to the point as well.
So they’re not telling these long narratives that I don’t care about. It’s like, just what you need to know, maybe a little bit more, but it’s interesting. And then they have the recipe and no ads. So those are the places where I am looking. And next episode I’ll. I complain about bad Google results, but I’ll talk about guitars.
I’ve been getting more into like continually deeper into the guitar world, but I’ve been getting like, um, these are like fret polishers and then I have like a crowning file. So I’ve actually like been like buying some like, pretty specialized. Different products and stuff like that. And looking up information has been a little bit tough.
So I, again, hopefully this didn’t come off too Complainy, little complainy. I know it did. Next episode. Little more the same. Maybe I’ll play a tune or, or something like that. I got a new guitar. It’s really cool, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for checking this out. And be sure to email me the stuff I asked if you’re, if you’re observing the stuff with AI recipes, if you’ve published AI recipes in bulk.
And then finally, if you’re in the e-comm world, drop shipping physical products in any way, how are the tariffs impacting you so far? And or how are you planning to deal with everything? So thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.