Exploring AI's Role in Our Personal Meaningful Revolutions

Hey, everyone, it's Sean Butner, and welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Now, today, we're talking about the buzzword that's been going on for the last year, and that is AI. There's an expectation it's going to completely change how we do everything. So is that an overblown statement? And how does this change how we authentically show up in the world, relate to others, or what we're going to address in today's podcast? How does AI factor into our personal, meaningful revolutions? As I've been thinking about AI in my business the last year and a half, I made a decision. So quick announcement for y' all that March is going to be AI Month for the Meaningful Revolution, where I'll be sharing how I've been using it in my business. I have a couple of amazing interviews lined up for y', all, and I'm just really excited to explore this topic with you. It's something that I'm passionate about and probably the most excited about in technology since the Internet. Right when I was in high school, that was going to change everything. We knew that it was significant. We didn't know how it would shake out, and things were not how we dreamed of back then. And I feel like we're in that moment right now. We're living through another moment where we have this hugely impactful force surrounding us. And how do you make sense of that when you have dreams and aspirations and your passions that you want to explore? And so I wanted to do a little bit of exploring this. As I've been setting up for this month of March to be about AI, I've been going through a bunch of different iterations of this episode. Should it just be an announcement one? Should it really address that question of how does AI factor into our meaningful revolutions? And after tons and tons of figuring out, we're going to do address that question. I love the philosophical question of how do these AI tools factor into our personal, meaningful revolutions? Because tools are just. Our tech. Tools are just tech. And so we just need to think about it in that way, right? It's not going to replace things that you can do uniquely yourself. It's not going to replace your unique ability to combine things to create something new. It's not going to replace how you do your work, but it can drastically assist you in those endeavors, meaning it can take and can help you fight above your weight class in a particular skill. So if you're a poor programmer, computer programmer, it can make you an okay one. If you're an okay one it can make you punch at the level of an expert. If you're not familiar with any type of medical terminology, it can help you learn that so you have a understanding of it, right? And so there are risks and there are opportunities in this ability to rapidly acquire knowledge and rapidly skill up. So that's exciting. And I feel like so much of the discussion has been on the actual tools. So the focus of this month on the podcast is trying to highlight how we can relate and use these tools in our everyday life to our benefits, without losing that thumbprint of humanity that we have on the things that we create. So a song written and performed by a human is going to be better than one designed by an AI. And our ears are still trained. Now, you know when something's a little too perfect, a little bit too clean, I feel like with music and articles and things, that if I know that it's written by a robot, that it just feels weird, right? And then you start to question, is this really a unique insight, or is this really something that's useful? And that's where we're going to start this conversation with, right? How do we know? How do we keep that thread of humanity and the things that we do and our dreams, our aspirations, our goals, and as we show up authentically to serve those, how does this tool factor in? The first point I want to share with y' all is that it actually doesn't, right? The. They're two separate things. Our passions, our dreams, our intentions don't need any tools, right? We don't need to use Google to research engineering. We don't need to use ChatGPT to do that. We don't need to technically read a book to do that, right? We could sit down and just start trying things, and it would take us a very long time. But you maybe read a book on engineering and you get some ideas on how to proceed. Or you might go to the Internet and watch some YouTube videos of people building little solar cell things, right? Or you could ask a chatbot to help guide you through that process, step by step. And so each one of those tools, a book, the Internet, YouTube, AI, have an increasing effectiveness at getting us where we need to go. And I just want to drill into this idea that it's a tool that helps accelerate. It's not something that replaces what we do as humans. It's just a continuation of what we've been doing for years and years and years. First thing, it doesn't. AI tools don't really matter when it comes to our personal, meaningful, Revolutions. But I highlighted this point just now for the second point is that it accelerates tech is tools. And each one of those had a marked increase in how much we learned our access to information so we could actually see more information to get more ideas and helps us process that even more the further up from book to Internet to AI tools. And so I've been using ChatGPT or in tool, AI writing assistant in notion or descript for helping identify filler words or finding clips to post on social media for things. And it sped up my workflows, right? So it used to take me about a half a day to edit a podcast episode. I can now get it done in an hour. Half if I'm really without any distractions, can sit in and do the talking part, then do all the editing and post processing stuff. This is. These are the practical examples I'm most interested in with AI. I know a lot of people go into the nitty gritty how does it work? And that's important. But I think for most people, having a high level idea of how it works, but more importantly understanding how it can help accelerate the things that you do normally and any risks that are associated with that are going to be very important. And when it comes to there's going to be I believe this year more opportunity for people to do AI clones of themselves. And that's something I've been playing around with in my business. It can help widen the amount of access you have to particular ideas or people. And I'll have more on that in a future episode. So stay tuned in March as I talk about creating an AI bot and my experience with that, if you're interested. I think it's very fascinating and fun anyways. But yeah, so these tools can accelerate. I also think that these AI tools as they relate to our goals, dreams and ambitions can help us iterate on ideas quicker. Right. And what do I mean by this? I initially when I went off to school, was interested in computers and had done a lot of hobby stuff, not too much of a formal education around programming. When it came to go to select college, I wanted to go to school that had a great computer science program and management program because I figured whatever I ended up doing for work, having basic business skills was going to be something that was necessary and I was interested in owning a business and tech. So I figured let me get the business skills. So I went to business school and absolutely loved it. But at the end of that had an opportunity to get a move into programming, right? So I get undergrad degree to get a master's degree, a little bit more technical side of business and managing technology. And my first job, I started out as a programmer for a large retailer that you guys probably know about and I know the company. And so I went from no formal computer science training to being a computer programmer. And the skills that I picked up in business were really helpful in business school, really helpful in managing the team and kind of understanding processes. But I, I loved coding, right? So there's a gap of what I was interested in and actually implementing it and then did that for a while and then found out that, yeah, coding is fun. I love the problem solving aspect, the analytical part of it, but sometimes you work on that stuff and you don't see how it impacts people. Right. And I wanted to feel like my work mattered to society in some mountain. And that's what about the time when I'm struggling with that question, I'm like, oh, like what I really love about the technical job is mentoring people, onboarding new people, getting them introduced into the organization. And I liked helping my teammates manage some of the team dynamics stuff, right? Just being someone that's super observant of who's the most quiet, who's the loudest person in, on the team or in a meeting. And then how do you notice that and what do you do to pull out the people that are more quiet so they have a voice of thing, they can voice their ideas because usually they're really good. And how do you help the people that want to talk all the time, listen or process ideas differently, whatever, right? Just noticing those team dynamics and then acting appropriately to try to communicate in a way that people could, could understand. And from that I started, I discovered coaching is a career option, fell in love with that full time. And so that was 15 years into a tech career that started out as potentially just going into business. And so it's 15 year time to figure out the thing that I really loved and wanted to do. And had I been able to explore or learn or had access to more information when I was trying to figure out what to do for college, like going on ChatGPT and being like, tell me everything you know about business. You know, tell me maybe help figure out and draw out things that I loved or was interested about in that, I might have chosen a completely different major or gone down a completely different path and it could have shortened that. So if you're interested in learning how to write code, right, it's so easy to get examples now from Git or ChatGPT or any of the big tools out there where you could get going and see examples of good code, not great code, but decent code, and get it working, that you could say, hey, I really love this, or hey, this really doesn't interest me at all. And you can move on to the next thing much quicker. So there's a quicker iteration period now as we can accelerate the information we can gather and how we can process it. So third point is iteration. The fourth thing it does is it expands access to new ideas and new things, right? And so to go back to the book, the Internet and AI kind of example of things, when we first off, if you don't have any of those tools, you're limited to the people around you and their technical expertise. So growing up in Chicago, Chicagoland, I didn't really have a lot of access to all the technical people here in Silicon Valley, right? In the, the Bay Area or New York or in Boston. So you don't have mentors, you don't have informal learning, you don't have people you can ask questions with. And so you're most likely to do or learn about the industries in your town, right? But if you have a library in your town, then if you have industries that aren't located there, so you could have a book on how to design chips at your local library. And now you're being exposed to electrical engineering and chip manufacturing or chip design, and oh, you're like, oh, this could be a thing that I could do. And you get interested in it and then you pursue that, right? The Internet put that on steroids because you had access to anything that was connected to it around the world. So if you're really super interested in a certain type of folk music from a particular country, you can now listen to it, hear it, and learn how to play it yourself, you know, so it expands that access to knowledge, right? And this is just the next rung on that tool ladder of accelerating things that, because AI can make connections to things like, oh, you're interested in this. This is an adjacent field. You probably want to know about that too. And I don't think the tools are super focused on this now, but I imagine this is where we'll, we'll get, as we move forward with them, it can expand your access to find things that you're passionate about, right? And then find, finally, these tools can actually act as assistants, right? It can walk you through a conversation to help you clarify your thinking, your learning and what to do next. And what do I mean by this? You can go on ChatGPT or I could go on ChatGPT, I've done this and ask it, hey, I want to become a better copywriter. What are some things I need to think about? And could you question me one by one, Give me one question at a time to help me write through how to talk to my target market? Right? He goes, okay, well, who do you think your target market is? And you go, here's my target market. Okay, awesome. What are their problems? And it walks you one question at a time, like a conversation. And at the end you could say, could you summarize our whole conversation into a report? And, and you have a whole thing of copy from your voice that you've created that it's now summarized, that you can now use moving forward. Those are five ways that I think AI is going to factor into our personal, meaningful revolutions. First, really, it doesn't relate to it at all. But as tech is tools, it helps accelerate our learning. It helps us iterate over ideas quicker so we find the things that we are really passionate about. It helps us expand our idea of things that we can actually do and then assists us in becoming better at a particular skill or learning more deeply with the things with the that all said, I'd love to hear what you guys think about this topic. So I'm soft launching the Meaningful Revolution community, which is@mister.shaubatner.com, which is linked below in the show notes. And what we're doing, at least initially, is every week on Friday at 11pm Pacific Standard Time, we're going to go live so that we can meet each other. We can cheer you on. We can celebrate any passions that you've started following or are diving deep in. That's part of what this community is going to celebrate. And we're going to talk about the weekly podcast episode. So we're talking about this episode. So if you have questions on how AI might factor into your personal meaningful Revolution, that authentic movement, that purposeful impact, that fulfilling transformation you are striving for in your life, go there and ask those questions. If you have a question about personal development or anything that we've talked about on the Meaningful Revolution can ask those questions there too. It's just good to cheer each other on for having passions and sharing them. I'm sharing my passion for these AI tools today and this month. And yeah, I just really want to meet y' all and see your faces and you're interested in that. It's free to sign up. Just go to mister.seanbutner.com again linked below in the show notes. Ask your questions, bring your comments, get in the community to cheer each other on for following your passions, and we'll go on from there. So with that, my friends, thank you for listening to Meaningful Revolution. See you in the community. And stay tuned for some amazing interviews about how a licensed clinical psychologist is using AI as an app to augment her practice, and how a professional copywriter is thinking about AI in this field, and so much more. Stay tuned for those. We'll see you on the next episode of the Meaningful Revolution. Sam.