In this solo podcast episode, Bradley Hamner reflects on a year‑and‑a‑half of ChatGPT’s public presence, sharing his modest personal use of AI for tasks like drafting emails, texting, and proofreading his children’s essays. He argues that, despite AI’s disruptive potential across industries, it cannot replace human community. Hamner describes his ongoing effort to curate AI tools in a Notion page he calls “Blueprint Labs,” where he tracks AI‑enabled resources for his business and plans a future episode highlighting the most useful ones. He emphasizes the irreplaceable value of face‑to‑face interaction, describing a Scottsdale retreat called “Beat the Odds” where his team gathers in person, and promoting virtual community events—a free two‑hour “Quarterly” on March 26 and a free two‑day intensive on April 23‑24—both hosted on Zoom with immersive participation. The episode concludes with an invitation to join these events via abovethebusiness.com. The latter part of the recording is an ad read for Club Capital, a financial advisory firm for insurance agents, and Coach P Consulting, a coaching service for agency owners.
Chapters
Well, what are we, a little over, close to getting closer to a year and a half or so since ChatGPT first was announced. I am not an AI expert. I know very little. I play with ChatGPT. I try to get it into my habit to use that in different things, whether I'm writing an email, even sending a text message. And yes, I've even used it to help with my kids proofreading some of their essays. Hopefully their teachers won't listen to this, but I have done that to try to use it. But that's really as far as I've been able to personally go. So what What is the point of this? Well, I was on a call today with some of my team, and I said, you know what AI cannot do? AI cannot, cannot do community. You can't have community. There's no way that you can AI community. And I think that AI is going to, from everything that I've watched and read, it is going to disrupt every industry in ways that we really don't know. I've heard You know, one of my coaches, Daniel Priestley, say that we're at a point in time that we actually can't see around the corner. And I think that he gave examples of the agriculture age, which my father is in farming. And so whenever the advent of the steam tractor and all these other things really kind of changed that, and to see now the things that my dad uses— I mean, they are using now drones to spray crops as opposed to using crop dusters and other things, but they can get in areas that they previously were not able to. And so it's been incredible to see technology, how it's been able to impact farming and other places. I don't know how it's going to impact insurance. I don't know how it's going to impact coaching. I don't know. I do know this. I have— I mean, outside of ChatGPT, I personally have a thing that I call Blueprint Labs, and it's just where I am brain dumping anything that I see. If people that I follow talk about a tool that is AI enabled, then I'm putting it in there. And I'm trying to think through for our community, how can we leverage AI truly, not just to write cool emails and to, you know, formalize summaries. I mean, we use Zoom, the AI summary in Zoom, and it's incredible to summarize these 2-hour-long sessions that we'll have down into a couple of pages, and it's pretty doggone good. So we're using it for that, but I don't really know what it's going to look like to impact every everybody's, um, industries. And so that's not my role, but I'm going to try to lean in. I want to have lean-in team members who lean into problems, and I need to embody that. And so I've got a little Notion page I created that is called Blueprint Labs, and one of the things in there is how do we create AI-enabled entrepreneurs. I don't know right now. And so maybe there'll be another solo episode that I'll say Hey, here are the 3 to 4 tools that I've been able to find outside of ChatGPT that we specifically have been able to use in our business. And here are the specific things that has— that's been able to help us. But until that point, there's not much for me to be able to share. But there are a couple of things that I know that AI, they're just not going to be able to replicate. And that one of them is community. You've heard this quote that I picked up from Michael Hyatt, who said that, you know, it can be lonely at the top. Well, it doesn't have to be, or that's a choice. Okay. It's a choice for it to be lonely at the top. And so at the time that this episode is dropping, not when I'm recording it, but this episode is dropping, I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona with our community of small business owners, helping them to be able to connect with one another. I mean, we're mostly on Zoom for all of our calls, and people connect on Zoom, and it's an incredible platform to be able to reach people around the world. I mean, I have a team— some of my team members are in, oh my goodness, Turkey, uh, Germany, and one of my team members that was in Berlin was just in Singapore recently. I have another team member in Slovenia, have team members in North Carolina, um, St. Louis, Arkansas, Kansas, um, Colorado. There's just a lot of different places where the team is, and that's incredible because of the advent of some of the tools that we have to be able to truly have a global team. It's incredible. But there's never any replacement for getting together. So in the first part of our retreat, we're getting it together as a team to be able to see each other face to face and to be able to brainstorm things and look at this is what we're trying to do and this is what we've Tried to do up to this point, and how did we do, and look people face to face. That connection will never change, that community of togetherness as a team, but also being with our clients. And we call those retreats Beat the Odds. We call them a Beat the Odds retreat. How do we beat the odds? How do we bend the odds in our favor? And maybe AI becomes a tool that we— well, it probably needs to be a tool that we, uh, use, but AI is never going to be able to replace that, that human-to-human connection. And so if you're not going to be joining us in Scottsdale, I would love for you to be able to connect with us at least on Zoom. And on March the 26th, we're getting together for 2 hours to run what we call the Quarterly. So this is dropping on Friday the 22nd, well, next week. So if you're listening to this over the weekend or on that Monday and you would love to join us and be a part of our community, we do as much as I can on Zoom. And we do some things, I think, fairly differently than most people utilize Zoom, is to really make it an immersive experience on Zoom so you actually feel like that you're a part of, of a community, not just sitting with your camera off and listening. Although that's valuable at times, but it's different if you're able to actually be on the call and do certain things and participate. So love to have you join us. Go to abovethebusiness.com, you can register for free, for free. It's totally free to be able to register and to be able to join us on Zoom for 2 hours. We're going to plan your quarterly. We're going to look back on Q1, figure out what worked, what didn't work. We're going to start to plan what does Q2 need to look like. And if you're not able to make that one and you would still love to come and participate in our quarterly, then we have got the 2-day intensive. The 2-day intensive is going to be on Tuesday and Wednesday, April the 23rd and 24th. It's 10 to 12 Central Time. We got some amazing speakers, me notwithstanding at all, but some other great speakers outside of me that are going to be coming on those two days for two hours, both of those days. And we're going to take a topic, and I know what the topic is. I'll share it with you maybe on another episode. and we're going to go a deep dive onto that topic. So you can learn more about that event as well if you go to abovethebusiness.co. Can navigate to the events page and you can register to find out more information about that. Both of those events, totally and completely free. So I look forward to seeing you at both of those because AI cannot— AI can't— AI community. And so being with a group of entrepreneurs and small business owners trying to do the same thing that you're doing is incredibly valuable. So if we're not going to see you in person in Scottsdale as one of my clients, love to see you at one of our upcoming virtual events. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.
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