170. AI & Humanity With Jeff Bullas

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builders Secrets. In this episode I interview Jeff Bullis from jeffbullis.com Jeff has been helping entrepreneurs make sense of the digital world since 2008 when he first discovered social media. Today, he shares insights on his blog about how AI is amplifying human potential and pushing the boundaries of personal growth, creativity and purpose. He has also interviewed over 240 entrepreneurs on his podcast, the Jeff Bullis show and been named a top Social Media Influencer by Forbes and several other publications numerous times. We dive into how AI can unlock your potential and amplify the work you do. Enjoy. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus Root will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

I made a switch into technology and sales and marketing back in the 1980s when the PC revolution started taking off and that was exciting. And since then we've seen the rise of the Internet network revolution, communication revolution, the social media revolution. Today we have the AI explosion. For me, this is the most exciting. I think it's the biggest game changer to humanity in millennia. Foreign.

To Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and tell you I'm joined by Jeff Bullis. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Will, it's great to be here mate, and see your smiling face on a Monday morning. Usually it's thank God it's Friday, but thank God it's Monday maybe is a better way to describe today, that is.

Yeah, it's a good point. We probably haven't caught up on anything but a Friday for a long time. But Jeff, before we dive into things, I just wanted to give a bit of a context on who you are and why you're here. So we met for the first time in 2015, I think it was, and we've been colleagues and friends ever since that first meeting. At the time, you'd been blogging about social media and digital marketing for around seven years. So you started back in 2008 and that was before most people had even heard about Facebook or Twitter or any of that kind of stuff. One thing I've always admired about you is Your desire to learn and grow. You never let a trend pass you by, and you're always at that forefront of understanding, you know, what's happening in digital and everything like that. And the latest trend that you've been learning about is what will influence human behavior at a global level when it comes to AI, which I think is extremely interesting and valuable to our listeners. I guess for anyone that's wondering about who you are, you've pretty much been listed on every social media influencer list in the last 20 years. Also had a huge impact on my life personally in terms of the perspective you provide on humanity and how it intersects with the digital world. So really excited to have you on today.

Thanks, Bill. That's very kind of you. And I'm glad you made that all up. That helps me out a lot.

No worries. Well, why don't we dive into it then? How is AI influencing the way we understand and express our humanity?

Big question. But let me start with a story. It was less than two years ago. I was in Lake Como and living and working as a digital nomad. We'd rented a villa for two months. I was sitting at my desk and I had an email from a colleague of mine who was a copywriter, Ray Edwards, who had attended some of his masterminds in the USA over the years. And Ray is a slight genius copywriter. And he'd sent this email with a video to me showing how AI could help him with copywriting. And I watched this video of nearly one hour, and at the end of it, I said, wow, there are so many ways we could apply AI to help us both individually to learn to grow not only individually, but for our businesses. For me, that was a game changer. I can remember sort of sitting at the high desk overlooking Lake Como with the snow on the peaks across the lake, and I went, wow, this is just like the aha moment I'd had with social media back in 2008 was, this is going to be technology that changes the world within a week or two. I told my team that we need to lean in. And one of my editors said to me, she said, geoff, I'm a bit worried that I might lose my job. And I said, well, no, you're not going to lose your job. You're just going to be more productive and maybe even more creative. But it means we maybe don't need writers anymore. That's not true, but the reality was that I saw it as being an incredibly amplifying and enhancing tool for us as humans. So. And that's what's unfolded over the last two years. And yep, so for me that was an aha moment I won't forget. You know, just keep in mind how quickly this has become embedded in society and humanity and in business is that within eight weeks 100 million people had downloaded the app and started using ChatGPT. And what's interesting about ChatGPT is when you give technology a friendly human face, let's call it a friendly human interface, that's when society starts using it. And we only have to think about the browser. Back in the 1990s that was taken up. Before that the Internet was the reign of geeks and researchers in dark caves hiding in universities. Today they put Netscape browser was brought out and others, Mosaic's another and today we have Google. But that gave us a simple prompt box to actually ask questions of the browser. ChatGPT did exactly the same thing. It was a user interface that actually allowed us to ask just prompts or questions of the actual app. So for me you only have to look at the take up of it to say there's something happening. Where there's smoke, there's fire as they say.

Yeah, you were at the coal face in terms of that social media revolution right at the beginning where it started to take off and change the way everyone lived their day to day lives. Do you see some similarities in what's happening now or is it happening much quicker and everything than you ever thought could be possible?

Look, it's the same, the reaction to it's the same, but I think there was a lot more doubt about social media earlier and it didn't grow as quickly. I've never seen a technology that has had the velocity of AI and ChatGPT, you know, 100 million users in eight weeks, unprecedented. On top of that, now I think there's about 1.5 billion people using ChatGPT every month. The amount of money that is pouring into AI investments, both into data centers, into buying the chips that power AI machines, and also the actual development of software, both horizontally with the chatgpt or chatbots. And then there's actually the niche developments that sit underneath that. The velocity is something I've never seen before and I've been in several, what are called tech revolutions. Revolution is a better term than evolution because it's the pace of it. Reality is that when I joined I used to be a teacher and I sort of decided very quickly, observing teachers in their 40s and 50s, they're really old people and I was 22 or whatever it was and going they look just tired and worn out. I said I didn't want to look like that when I was 45. So I made a switch into technology and sales and marketing back in the 1980s when the PC revolution started taking off. And that was exciting. And since then we've seen the rise of the Internet network revolution, communication revolution, the social media revolution. Today we have. The AI explosion is maybe a better way to describe it. So the reality is that this is a game changer. But there's two views to this game changing and that is you can see it as dystopian if you're a pessimist, or you can see it as utopian if you're an optimist. And for me, I sit on the optimist basket. For me, this is the most exciting. I think it's the biggest game changer to humanity in millennia, if not ever.

One thing you always lean into, Jeff, is the creative process and how that's important for your growth as a human being, but also I guess, your mental wellbeing as well. It's something that you really strongly aligned to. You also touched on before that when you were talking about your editor. It could unlock more creativity than using AI and things like that. What do you mean by that? How can AI unlock those creative processes?

Yeah, so my first reaction to what I was watching in front of me with AI unfolding was I actually first time I asked it to write a blog post for me with a, you know, the title, you. I can't remember the title. I at the end, when it produced like a 700 word blog post in like two minutes, I sort of had a feeling of dread and almost an existential crisis because I'm going, if the machine can write this world this fast, why should I bother? As a writer, what I've come to realize is that I see AI and ChatGPT specifically in terms of our general day to day use. It's an enhancer and amplify our humanity. I think that the reality is that a lot of us come with very, very fixed ideas to the table when we sit down to write, or we sit to work, or we choose a career. Because over time we as humans, when we were young and foolish and children, we just bounced around different things without any judgment until parents started putting rules on you. And then we have society putting rules on us. And then religion puts its own level of judgments and rules around everything as well. So we've got all these sort of parameters that are fighting to keep humans in a box. And I think our challenge as a human is to try and explode that box so you can think more creatively. And I think one of the things I noticed, and I love about ChatGPT and AI is, is that you might be stuck for writing a headline. So say write 10 different variations of this headline, but you give it the initial prompt. So I think for me, and also write an outline for a blog post or an article for my website, if you're, you know, got a website, include all these questions or list these and come up with ideas that you hadn't even thought about. Because as humans, we're trapped in this box of fixed thinking which has been basically calcified us over, you know, decades of living. So I think for me, ChatGPT and AI gives us a window into the world of the intelligence of the planet. It is not, we're not talking about artificial intelligence here, it's actually misnamed reality is that it's actually the intelligence of humanity captured in ones and zeros, bits and bytes, and organized by the machine for us. So for me, it is not artificial. It is actually, it is access to the intelligent wisdom and creativity of humanity which has been organized by the machines.

It's a good reframing actually, because to your point, it's drawing off human intelligence, isn't it? It's not actually making it up. Well, sometimes it goes on its own.

Tangents, but we tell stories. Okay, so sometimes I've been accused of maybe amplifying or gilding the lily, as I say in the old terms. But storytelling is also a creative art. And for me, I've sometimes been accused of actually why, of maybe enhancing the story, but enhancing the story to get the point across. But there's a lovely quote which I don't know who said it, but why ruin a good story with the truth? And the reality is that storytelling is about getting a point across and telling a story, like a parable, whatever, to actually provide a lesson. Whether it's for children, children's stories, parables, Bible parables, stories, they're all about getting a point across. Storytelling. We all thought that AI was actually going to be just wouldn't challenge the white collar worker or the creator. But what we're having, having see right in front of our eyes is actually challenging the creative industries. Hollywood went on a strike for about what, 12 weeks, the writers, because they were worried about the impact of AI on their jobs and careers and businesses. So the reality is, for me, I think you've got to look at AI as a, what can we say? And a Co pilot that actually helps us expand our horizons and think beyond our current fixed thinking.

Yeah, well, ignoring it or going on strike, it's kind of like the taxi drivers going on strike when Uber came out. I mean, if that's your mindset to your point earlier around the fixed mindset, then you're probably not going to be progressing enough to make the most of AI, so.

Exactly. So the reality is for me is that, look, when I mentioned the two, I suppose the two polar opposites of AI, dystopian and utopian. And there's two good books put out by Nick Bostrom. The polymath out of Oxford University has written two books. One is called Superintelligence, written in 2014, which was quite groundbreaking and it's used and quoted in a lot of different papers and by other writers and authors and speakers. On top of that, then you've got the book he wrote recently, which is called Deep Utopia, which is the utopian version. So Superintelligence was a dystopian vision of one mind controlling the planet, or maybe several masterminds controlling the planet. The other one, the other one he wrote is Deep Utopia, which gets into sort of things like even machine created purpose. And that's one of the things we can get challenged, is that if the machine can do it all, why am I here? In other words, it starts to eat at the edges of what it means to be human and our purpose.

Talking more about problem solving and AI. Like, for example, as you were telling your example of the, you know, putting the headline in and getting some ideas from ChatGPT, it made me think of some of the use cases that I use ChatGPT for. And for example, there's certain emails that might come into my inbox, whether it's from a customer or a partner or someone else, sometimes they're, they're challenging. They're a situation where you need to deal with an issue. And often those emails used to be ones I would dread or I'd be like, I don't know how to respond to that. So you kind of leave them on the back burner these days. Essentially just verbalize my concerns to ChatGPT on my desktop app, give them the context, say that I want to have this sentiment when I send an email across to my partner or the client or whoever it is, and it puts together this email which summarizes exactly what I need to say and how I need to say it. And so it's totally removed that fear of mine of trying to come up with the right words with an email in a tricky situation. And I think there's probably tons of builders out there that would face client challenges or things with suppliers and things where using ChatGPT in this instance would be groundbreaking in terms of overcoming those day to day issues. Can you think of other examples where, you know, problem solving like that has been overcome so well with AI?

Yeah, I think it gives you multiple perspectives. Our human reaction quite often is ego or anger in response to maybe a problem that's risen. The great thing about ChatGPT is that it doesn't have an ego reality is that using it to actually give you quite often a very well nuanced response. You can say you could be apologetic, you could be happy, you could be, you might want to push back a bit because you don't think they're being fair. But we need to nuance that in a certain way. I think what it does, it gives you a tool and an option to actually write faster and quicker and better. But the reality is that, you know, and this is the problem that also arises within, especially the law industry, is that you just don't hand over to the machine. You need to actually maybe inspire you write a draft and then you need to review. And I think that's the important thing is that using the tool to actually do the heavy lifting and then get it to review. And biggest challenges lawyers have, for example, Will, I know we're not talking lawyers, but it's an idea of, in fact in contracts, builders are dealing with contracts all the time. So fact, you can maybe keep your own lawyer on us by actually using it to actually do a double check or a review. The bottleneck comes for lawyers is that you really, as humans, we do need to review the machine's response and review is the bottleneck. Machine can't do the review. You as a human need to do the review.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean there's, I mean the machine can do a review to a certain extent, check for grammar, check for inconsistencies. You can, you know, you can upload a set of guidelines with GPT and tell it to review a document based on those guidelines. But to your point, if, if it's an official document or anything that's positioning your business in a way that needs to be accurate, then you 100% need to be doing a human review as well. Talk to me about the future, Jeff. You've not been to the future, but how do you say AI impacting the future of work in our daily lives.

From where it's at today, predicting the future tends to be a fool's folly. It's actually fun to do it. I do remember about 2010, I was lying in bed one morning, it was a Saturday morning, and my partner, we'd both just got. Both had new iPhones and I've still got one actually in. This is one of the early model iPhones.

For anyone small listening on audio. You jump onto YouTube and you can see what Jeff's holding up.

I was just only okay, right. Anyway, she was sitting next to me and we tend to have slow Saturday mornings. And she said, oh, I love you. And I looked over to herself, that's very nice. She said, I'm not talking about you, it's the phone I'm talking about. And this was prior to the App Store being launched. This is prior to using your phone for payments. It was prior to actually using it to do videos and become Instagram influencers. The intersection of technologies that were put into the phone and cameras, forward facing, rear facing now audio able to take video and high definition. The App Store, which are now used for banking and much, much more. It also supercharged social media because everyone suddenly became a publisher because they had a publishing machine in their pocket or purse and that was called a smartphone or the iPhone. What's the future hold for AI? I think it's going to be woven into every corner of our lives. It's going to be used for good and for evil. Scammers and spammers are already leaning into it. It's going to be used for great things. Such as. I think we're seeing it starting to creep into robotics that can increase productivity. It's already being used in Amazon warehouses to actually do packing and robots running around the floor. We're also seeing it being used to do proof checking of documents. So the reality is I think it's going to be woven into every cor of our lives and it will basically make us all polymaths almost in terms of having access to information, I.e. access to the intelligence and wisdom of the planet as well. And I think I love about in the middle of trying to write an article about will AI enhance human wisdom? Because there's a lot of information and data around, but very few much common sense. For me, I see it as an accelerated acceleration of what it means to be human. And of course that's going to accelerate both the good and the bad.

Yeah, it's a great reflection. How do you see the ethical considerations which you touched on there?

Just playing into it, the ethical considerations, thinking about that I'm reminded by of a story by Alfred Nobel, who actually invented dynamite, ended up creating the Nobel Peace Prize because what he discovered was that he created dynamite to actually increase productivity in mines. Other words, explosions do actually increase productivity of the mining industry, but he never imagined it would allow humanity to kill at an industrial scale. So the reality is that any technology comes with a price, and that means as humans, we need to be aware of it. The role of government becomes quite important to provide guardrails because capitalism's great. But the reality is that chasing the dollar sometimes overrides a lot of ethical considerations. And I think what we need to do as society is we only need to reflect back on what's happened to social media. Social media came out just used and media was allowed to publish anything. And it's called freedom of speech. But there's a freedom of speech for an individual to actually harass, bully and then make people depressed. And also it's leading to more suicide and so on, because it's being put in place without guardrails. And now we're trying to put guardrails on social media and we're trying to say, well, we shouldn't be using it at school, we shouldn't let people under 16. This is a big discussion we're having in Australia at the moment about putting guardrails. So younger children. Because the reality is, we have discovered, is that social media creates loneliness and also creates depression and anxiety. Because the reality is on social media we actually see the outside of others, which is shiny and polished before it's published. And then we judge ourselves against that. And also we're watching technology that's both obsessive and addictive because the technology of the slot machines out of Las Vegas was, has been used in the neuroscientists sit in the labs of Facebook, meta and Twitter and the list goes on. So the reality is that we need to consider the downsides, and we've learned a lot by social media's downsides. We need to look at that as well. And we only have to look at people crossing the road with their head buried in a phone without looking up to see whether a car's coming. I've heard personal stories from people that have been killed, basically listening to something pods in another technology phone on walking across the road without looking and you know, influence even fallen off cliffs trying to take selfies. But the reality is that we do need to put in guardrails. And I think government's responsibility, I think, to society is to help put those guardrails in place, just like we have done with road rules and media rules and social media and media per se. Social media had been given very few guardrails, but it's coming and we need to do the same to make sure that we protect human health as much as possible. We need to make sure that it doesn't become addictive, which we've watched social media become. It's something I think that governments do need to step in with a lot of discussion, along with Etters, philosophers and so on, to try and make sure that we don't have these new species of corporations called global corporations that have never existed before, the scale of trillions of dollars that run across borders without almost any constraints. So they're the Googles, the Amazons of this world and more. So really important, I think that we need to actually have healthy, robust discussion that government needs to get involved.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, what would the guardrails be in the AI space? It sounds very complicated. I mean you've got legalities and laws in one country, but then obviously that's different in every country. And to your point, capitalism overrides all. At some point, everyone's trying to chase money and there's always going to be people using it for the wrong reasons. So how do you put guardrails in place so it doesn't have all these detrimental impacts in the long term?

There's 10, I can't remember them all, but there's Mustafa Suleiman written, has written a book and he's listed 10 guardrails or laws or principles that should be used, I can't remember them all off the top of my head. I think one of the ones he mentioned though, just as an example of what should be doing, is that we should not allow an AI avatar to imitate a human. End of story. For an avatar to actually be your AI avatar, to be your avatar, not impersonating you, but enhancing you, that's a different story. But I think the reality that's one of the rules or principles, I think that's actually worse, you know, having so someone cannot impersonate another person.

Talk to me, Jeff. So you've interviewed over 240 entrepreneurs on your podcast, the Jeff Buller Show. So if anyone wants to check that out, highly recommend that I'm interested to hear what you've learned from that and what you get out of doing those interviews as it ties into the top this topic of AI and humanity. As I'm sure you've been diving into many AI topics With people from all.

Over the world I've interviewed, certainly in the last year or two, we've leaned much more into AI entrepreneurs. What blows me away is interviewing these people is that human creativity emerges and give you an idea. Interviewed a PhD student out of the US that mentioned that there's one sense missing from AI and that is a sense of smell. I went, wow, okay, so he's actually working on algorithms to actually be able to duplicate that. The other things that is watched is discussion philosophically by Nick Bostrom regarding what the future of AI could potentially look like. And he's really out there. That's in deep utopia. The other areas that we've had chats about is just using AI to basically enhance our humanity. There's a whole range of them. So for me, I'm interviewing a lot of what I call applied AI innovators and entrepreneurs that are taking AI to actually enhance humanity and business. So, yeah, so go and check out the show. There's quite a few different topics there, actually dozens and dozens of topics about how to. And a lot of it's actually how to apply AI to business.

Yeah, yeah, man. It's a great. For any of the builders out there that are teetering on that advanced level of AI, it's a great place to go next. If you've already got a lot of the basics covered that we've covered in many other episodes and trainings and things like that. All right, Jeff, so I guess let's round out the conversation. How do we maintain our humanity and that purpose you touched on before, given there's so much efficiency in everything coming out of AI, how do you really find your purpose and make sure that you are having, you know, meaning in your life?

There's an author who wrote the Hero's Journey, which was the inspiration behind the Star wars movie series, a guy called Joseph Campbell. He studied human myths, including religion, society, stories that are told around the campfire over millennia. He was raised as a strict Catholic. He left that behind. And he had a view about your purpose, and he called it, follow your bliss. He says, no one's really given their purpose. You think about it, when I was 17, 18, and I got on the train to go and do my teaching degree, that's how long ago it was. I didn't travel by plane, I traveled by train. The reality was I had no idea at the age of seven, 18, what I was meant to be doing. And it took me another 30 plus years to actually find that. But it involved a lot of experimentation and I think for me, a lot of us when we're younger just go and choose and do something because we've got to put food on the table. And that's what we've seen people do. And the reality is, I think that following your curiosity and leaning into it is where magic really happens and opportunity shows up, but with intent. And I think for me, I became started to get fascinated by technology after leaving teaching and I've continued to lean into that. And in 2009, I leaned into my curiosity about social media and I just started writing about it and I didn't write a business plan. So for me, you're following bliss yous curiosity is five, let me mention five elements to that which you know about. Number one, I think you need to discover what you love doing and what you're curious about. And there's a great philosophy, Japanese philosophy called ikigai. And that's where the intersection of what you love doing, what you're good at, what you experienced at, what's your innate ability and what the world will pay you for. And you know, for a lot of builders, they're practical people that love building, they love creating. And the reality is that the best builders are the ones generally that get the intersection of how to control, you know, the system and the creativity of the business I started, which came out of the curiosity about maybe building things. Okay, so I don't know what I've been intrigued by some of the stories by some of your builders about why they started building. That would be fascinating. I'm sure the next steps are, number one, why are you here on the planet? What's your bliss? Or what's your purpose? Discover that. So number one is discover. Number two is go and create. Start a business. Number three, share that with the world. In other words, go and create, build a house, sell it, share it with the world. Number four is actually what we call monetize it. In other words, your first idea might make money, but then it's to actually work it. Will the world pay me for this? And number five, once you've discovered that, is to amplify it. And that's called one word marketing as well. But I think as humans, we're told to actually just get a job, become a nurse, a teacher, like I did. I followed the recipe and it was fine. The reality is that following my bliss and my purpose just added a different dimension to life where for me, the magic has happened and I'm so grateful. But a lot of us aren't prepared to do that because some of us in situations where we just do have to put, you know, pay the rent, put food on the table. So some of us I'm grateful for the journey I've stumbled into. Reality is that I think there's much more to life if you're willing to actually do it, actually act on what you discover.

Yeah. I think to your point, a lot of the builders out there that are listening, it might just be a good wake up call to reconnect with their purpose, their why around, why they started building in the first place and how that ties into their daily activity. I mean, AI is obviously an accelerator to a lot of the things you're doing, but if you don't have a strong reason for doing them, it's no point in getting something to accelerate them.

Exactly. And I think the thing for me is in all of our lives is if you go to a doctor, you go to a builder, you go to a specialist and you can almost immediately sense whether they're showing up or whether they're really passionate and curious about what they do. I went to see my GP recently just for an annual checkup and he's a young guy out of, out of uni two or three years and he said, do you mind if I use microphone recorder because I'm just going to get ChatGPT to actually record our interview. And I went, that's innovation. Don't see that often in a doctor. So what I detected with him that he had a passionate interest in his discipline and says good doctors and bad doctors. And for me, I would rather much rather work and have on at my side. Passionate individual, has expertise that'll assist me rather than just someone that's showing up. And in any trade, any industry, there's a lot of people just showing up. So I think plugging into the why is really important.

Yeah, that's a great point. If you can demonstrate to your customers the builders out there that you know are working with people that want to build their dream homes, if you can demonstrate to them that you're at the cutting edge of technology and showing care in everything that you do and wanting to improve, that shows trust to them as well and help you be positioned as the builder of choice in their area.

Exactly. Most as humans, if we actually think back and reflect and watch what's happening in front of us, we can detect someone who's passionate and driven and love what they do versus just showing up.

Well, Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I've had fun chatting about AI and humanity and everything in between. Yeah. I appreciate you coming on. For anyone that's listening Today, check out jeffbullis.com and the Jeff Bullish show on all your podcasting platforms. Thanks for coming on, Jeff.

Thanks, Will. It's been a blast. I've had. I've enjoyed it. So thank God it's Monday.

All right, a big thank you to our listeners as well, wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builders Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.