In this conversational interview, Joe Apfelbaum shares a personal story about his childhood fear of dogs, using it as a metaphor for the common fear people have toward artificial intelligence. He argues that fear stems from unfamiliarity and that the only way to overcome it is through direct interaction and proper training. Drawing a parallel to employee onboarding, Joe emphasizes that AI must be taught to operate within a company's specific processes and continuously updated with industry advancements. To help businesses do this, he promotes his "Evergreen AI" masterclass—a monthly three‑hour program that walks participants through step‑by‑step methods for leveraging AI in business development, aiming to eliminate fear and boost productivity. The discussion concludes with a brief acknowledgment of AI’s rapid evolution and curiosity about future possibilities.
Chapters
You want to understand it because a lot of the times we fear things that we don't understand. I used to be afraid of dogs because growing up, I grew up in like a religious society and they didn't accept dogs, and dogs wasn't a thing that people had. People didn't have pets in our community. And so in the whole entire world, everybody has pets. Think about it, your neighborhood, there's more dogs than kids. So if you think about that for a second, like, how could I be afraid of a dog if they're just so lovable and so yummy and they just lick you and they're just so happy and they would never hurt you no matter what? But the fact is, every time I walked by a dog and they barked, I freaked out. I was like, oh my God, now a dog barks at me. I walk over there, I'm like, what's going on, puppy face? What's going on? What do you— what do you need, a treat? What are you upset? Should I talk to you like I'm your Jewish grandmother? What's going on? So I'll just walk over to any dog and I'll pet them. Obviously I'll make them smell me and build trust or whatever. But you know, the fact is that if you're afraid of something, if you don't know something, you'll be afraid of it. And if you're afraid of something, you're not going to interact with it. And if you don't interact with it, you're going to build even more fear. One of the greatest things about AI is that when you interact with it, you become friends with it, it makes your life easier. It ends up saving you a ton of time. And if you train it correctly, it'll do things the right way. That's the key. You want to learn how to do things the right way with the artificial intelligence. You can't expect AI to be trained just like you can't expect an employee to come in trained. We think, oh, we'll hire an employee, they'll know how to do sales, and we'll be successful. Wrong. You need to bring in the employee, you got to train them into your systems and processes, you got to teach them your way, and then you got to continuously train them on the latest technology. technologies in your industry. And if you're not doing that, you're going to fail. So I highly recommend you consider thinking about how are you going to learn how to train AI. We have a masterclass, we call it Evergreen AI, where we train people every single month for 3 hours a month on how to leverage artificial intelligence for business development. We sit down and we walk people through the step-by-step process to do that. People need to join programs like that to get trained so that they eliminate their fear and they start leveraging those tools to help them be more successful.
Okay.
I think it's really interesting, you know, when you're looking at AI, because it is scary, you know, for a lot of people. And, you know, we've definitely covered that kind of at length here. But there's also a lot of opportunity here, Joe. And one of the things that you're providing is training to kind of allow people to tap into that opportunity. Personally, what are you most looking forward to when it comes to this technology? Because it almost seems like it's evolving daily.
What I'm looking forward to using this technology is when we have enough people using it that people get really smart about its training. That's really the key. When you learn how to properly train it and realize this is not to replace you, but to assist you, and then you learn how to properly train it and how to build a relationship with it in a way that doesn't make you seem fake or authentic or anything like that, but instead you actually build a relationship with it, then people will stop being afraid of it.
