How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

HLT Jay Owen Full Interview
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Jay Owen: [00:00:00] We use a lot of writers, designers, and developers to do all kinds of things for sure. But what is going to happen is a lot of that work will be outsourced to robots instead of contractors. And so if I am a specialist, in other words, I write code for a living, I'm gonna get very comfortable with pair programming with a robot.

If you don't wanna do that, no problem. You're just gonna be so inefficient that there's no way that you're gonna be able to keep up with the marketplace.

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Kenny Lange: Welcome to the How Leaders Think podcast, a show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host Kenny Lang, and with me today is the j Owen. He is the CEO and Founder of Business Builders. It's fun for alliteration. He started it as a marketing agency in St.

Augustine or Augustine. If you're feeling fancy Florida, but it's Florida, so maybe it's not as fancy. As a junior high school student, so early [00:01:00] entrepreneur, love it. And has grown year over year for 26 years from $5,500 in revenue to millions a year. to the show, Jay.

Jay Owen: Hey Kenny. Thanks for having me.

Kenny Lange: I'm excited about this. we've been talking about our, our friend and, and one of your employees, Logan. He's really built you up. So

Jay Owen: pressure.

Kenny Lange: No, no pressure, but I, I'm sure it's gonna be fine. Tell me today, Jake, what is on your mind?

Jay Owen: What is on my mind? It's always AI right now. That's where everything goes in my head at the moment. I'm moderately addicted to it. I have a really bad shiny object syndrome and nothing feeds shiny object syndrome like the latest AI news of the day because, historically software cycles are like six to 12 months.

Apple releases new software in the summer or they talk about it. They release it in the fall and that's it. There'll be some micro releases. Otherwise you gotta wait till next summer for big things. But in AI land, it's like new software every 24 [00:02:00] hours it feels like. And so it's a wild journey and that's, that's really where a lot of my focus has been is thinking about the future visioning for the future, how does that affect teams, structures, marketing, all the things.

Kenny Lange: Gotcha. Yeah, I know. It's, it's been fun. And, and everybody's on different cycles too, like between OpenAI, philanthropic meta Google and they all keep like trying to one up each other, which I think is, that's the beauty of capitalism,

Jay Owen: is.

Kenny Lange: all competing for our attention and our dollars. As of this recording, I know we're probably about a month out or so from GPT five, so long as they deliver as promised which could be really, really exciting. But as you are talking to and you have a couple of teams. You have your, your agency team, and then as you, you were telling me a little bit ago you, you have a ministry team, marketing communications team at, at a church.

But, as you're talking with your teams and, and others where you may be speaking and at conferences and whatnot, what, what's the thinking and the prevailing wisdom [00:03:00] amongst leaders and high achievers regarding ai? Like, are, are they leaning into it? Are they seeing it as a way to augment, are they afraid it's coming for their jobs, especially those of us in maybe more like service-based businesses, knowledge work or are people leaning in like you?

Jay Owen: I, my, my observation in the general public is, and this includes business leaders and owners, is most people aren't paying nearly enough attention to it. I think in certain spheres what I found is I'll, I'll follow a lot of people on X or Instagram or wherever else who are really into this stuff, and I feel perpetually behind.

But then I get in rooms full of people. For example, a couple weeks ago, one of the other hats that I wear as I run. A group of agencies called Agency Builders, and it's a community of just, everybody runs their own agency and we all just get together. We do a big retreat once a year and we have a Slack channel and we hang out and share ideas and commiserate together, you know. and um, I got to do a talk on AI to close out the event about a [00:04:00] month ago and. I put a series of icons on the screen that were things that I use on a regular basis all the time. Now, keep in mind, the people in this room are agency owners. Most people in this room run 6, 7, 8 figure agencies, and of the six or seven icons I put on the screen of apps that I use all the time, I would say most people could only identify the first two or three that.

Made me realize that most people aren't nearly as into it as, as I thought that they were. And then even in general conversations, the, the mistake people are making. They'll have tried something, say a year ago. A good example of this is imaging, like creating images with ai. If you mention images with AI to many, I would say most people, they'll say some version of, yeah, but it always puts eight pink, eight fingers on people's hands, and that was true.

I. About a year or so ago. But it's not true anymore. Like the best AI models produce exceptional images. And in fact, I had a guy argue with me at the retreat. I was up on stage and I said, feel free to interrupt me [00:05:00] anytime. One of the guys was like, but here's the thing, we're way away from. People not being able to tell the difference between what is AI and what is not.

And I said, do you really think that's true? And he is like, yeah. And I said, okay. And I looked to the back of the room and my 13-year-old daughter was sitting back there and I said, Eden, we come up on stage. And she looked at me like, do you want me to come up on stage? I'm like, yeah, come up here. So she comes up on stage.

I handed her the microphone. I said, tell him about your science fair project. And she just finished a science fair project where she had a hundred adults look at 10 different images. Five of them were AI generated people. Five of them were actual photographs of people and in similar, very similar styles.

And she said to the group people could only correctly identify if it was AI or not. 37.1% of the time. You can just look at that and go, that means that people cannot currently distinguish between well created, that's, that's the key. Well created AI and non well created. So I actually think most people

Kenny Lange: aren't thinking deeply about it enough at all.

I would argue it is the greatest [00:06:00] for probably some good and some bad, the greatest innovation in human history. I think it's bigger than the industrial Revolution, and I think most people have no idea.

I, I would agree with you. I, the, the shift is so substantial. It's industrial revolution or even just like. The democratization of the internet, like just being

Jay Owen: Sure.

Kenny Lange: like that transformed so many things. When we all started getting access. Even if it took 10 years to load a single page,

Jay Owen: Yeah.

Kenny Lange: God bless, dial up,

Jay Owen: I mean, think about that. Like that's such a crazy thought. Like those of us that were around back then, it's like you'd wait five minutes just to get connected to the internet, and then once you were actually connected and you got the, you've got mail, 'cause most of us were on a OL back then.

It's like to load anything, took ages. And now if it doesn't load instantaneously on our phone while we're in the mountains, we're like, what's going on?

Kenny Lange: Right. Yeah. Which is where, where I love Louis CCK has a bit about people getting mad at their phones. He's like, he's like, it has to [00:07:00] like, go to outer

Jay Owen: That's right.

Kenny Lange: and come back. Like, you have more

Jay Owen: Yeah,

Kenny Lange: your hand than sent a, rocket.

Jay Owen: right.

Kenny Lange: the moon, like, it's like chill out. Obviously you, you've, you've in agency land and, and that's where I used to live and you have all the stats of like, if a site's takes longer than three

Jay Owen: That's right.

Kenny Lange: like people are uh, you know. like 90% likely to bounce and never return. And, and, and I think three seconds is forever. Most people trying to shoot for that one to 1.5 second load time. Just the impatience of it. And I do love what you were saying about the, the well-crafted

Jay Owen: Mm-hmm.

Kenny Lange: because I've gotten into this conversation with folks.

And, and I would be curious of your take of the. This is just whether it's students, and I'm excited to hear that you're, you're pushing your, your kids towards this. 'cause I'm trying to do the same for mind, even though schools are frowning on it for whatever [00:08:00] reason, is it's just outsourcing your thinking.

There's no creativity, there's no thinking in business or whatever else. And I can imagine in agency world, you might even get like, if you're using ai, like what am I even paying you

Jay Owen: For sure.

Kenny Lange: Sort of thing. How are you addressing and educating people about what it means to have well-crafted deliverables, prompt engineering, things like that, to where folks think it's just absent-minded, let the computers do it.

Jay Owen: Yeah.

Kenny Lange: You and I both know that, that that's not the case, but it seems to be a prevailing thought for the vast majority of people.

Jay Owen: I mean, the objection is exactly what you said, which is some version of AI's going to destroy creativity and it's complete hogwash. That's not true at all, and I know it's not true because I teach, I'm wrapping up right now, a three, four month class at [00:09:00] a, my kids are homeschooled, but they go to a co-op, and so on Monday mornings I'm teaching an AI class to about 35.

Homeschool high schoolers from about ninth, ninth to 12th grade. And it's been really cool because I'd say the class is pretty split now. It's mostly based on their parents' opinion of ai. 'cause that's how kids typically, function, especially in homeschool land. And half the class probably was super pro ai.

Maybe it was 30, 30, 30, 30 was like super pro 30 was neutral. Third, it was anti ai. By the end of the class the whole class, there's no homework. 'cause I think homework's dumb. And instead what I did was I said, look, I'm gonna teach you a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna show you many things and in the last three weeks it's gonna be all presentations.

And you're gonna use your own combination of you partnering with AI to produce something that's interesting to you and to the class that uses multiple AI tools and creativity. If you saw. Some of the resources and creative outlets that these kids created, it would blow your mind. One of the kids created an actual functioning 3D [00:10:00] flight simulator.

A video game actually works. He can't co he writes Zero code into zero design. Another kid wrote a, a video game that is like a kind of a board game, almost like a risk style, moving characters around the characters he designed in chat, GPT. He had it stripped the background out of it. Then he uploaded those characters to another tool called Rept, made those characters, the Sprite in the video games, gave it continual instructions to build the game.

They came from his mind, but he used chat GB to help him tighten it up and create a good prompt structure for it. Another girl created a audio book with multiple voices, soundtrack everything. One of my sons created a animated short that could be turned into a YouTube series tomorrow, and you would know no difference.

Now the question becomes, is that creative or not? Of course it is. It's completely ridiculous to say that It's not. It's not like they just went to the AI and was like, make me a project for my class. It's not that at all. They're using all these different tools. It's just that instead of digging the ditch with a shovel, they're digging it with a backhoe [00:11:00] and, and that's the difference.

But they're learning to use these tools and now. I would say that probably a hundred percent of the kids who were anti AI before the class started are very pro ai. Even the kids who are artistic, creative driven, and those are the ones who usually get their heart stung the most. 'cause they feel like it's gonna take away that piece.

But the truth is, the truth is it's actually only gonna accelerate. It's gonna create possibilities that they could never have done before. Now these kids who are whatever, I don't know, 15 to 18 years old, are gonna be able to produce things that top level creatives can. So that's how I know it's not gonna directivity, but to answer your actual question which is how do we deal with that in the construct of business?

How do we deal with a client saying, Hey, aren't you just mailing this in

to that? I would say you can go do it yourself.

Kenny Lange: Mm-hmm.

Jay Owen: won't because number one, they won't know what tool to use. I mean, shoot, right now it, this will all get better. But when you log into chat, GPT, currently, there's like six different models which are named.

Ridiculous names. It's the most ridiculous model naming structure I've ever seen in my life. Which is [00:12:00] funny 'cause Sam Altman even addresses this. And he is like, yeah, we know it's ridiculous. We'll fix it. So it's like you gotta know what tools to use, how to use them, how to put them together. Regular people don't wanna do this stuff.

I do 'cause I'm a nerd and I like it. But regular people wanna do whatever their job is. They wanna do whatever they're good at. And so the, the. The benefit to a right thinking marketing agency is that it only accelerates the value that we can create. We can provide more value in less time for the same money.

That's a pretty good deal, and so we should do that. The idea, I hear some people who are like, I had a guy who was like, I had a copywriter who was applying for role and we realized that they were using chat GPT to help them. So we didn't take them. And I said, send me the resume, I'll hire them. And he thought I was joking and I was, I mean, I was kinda joking because I'm not trying to hire a copywriter, but I was like, bro, I want somebody.

Who is actively going? How do I use AI to improve the output? I don't want somebody be mailing it in, like, for sure none of us want that,

but how do we use these tools in a way [00:13:00] that produce a better, higher quality outcome and less time and create more time freedom and money for everybody? I'm into that, so.

Kenny Lange: Right. So I, it's almost as if I, I paid you to segue into this, but people saying it's, it's taking the jobs, it's not taking jobs. I mean, I think it will, I, I, some extent,

Jay Owen: Sure.

Kenny Lange: but, I am a huge fan of Paul Righter, who,

Jay Owen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Brilliant.

Mm-hmm.

Kenny Lange: the Marketing AI Institute. And he has the artificial intelligence show podcast. And one of the things that he and his co-hosts were, we're talking about. Was as they've been looking at studies and research and trends and, and just forecasting out is the people who are gonna, you're not gonna lose your job to ai. You're gonna lose your job to someone who knows how to work with ai.

Jay Owen: percent.

Kenny Lange: And that might be better leverage in, in the prompt engineering or as we start to talk about AI agents or, or [00:14:00] agentic

Jay Owen: Yep.

Kenny Lange: that they can actually manage a small team of those agents and help them work together. you talk a little bit about what you're seeing and, and maybe even what you're thinking within the context of your own business about do we, what are you looking for as you're potentially hiring, and what do you do with the existing staff?

You have to. Say, Hey, this is where we're headed. And some of this is based on the fact that like, obviously Logan posts everything on, on LinkedIn but he mentioned y'all's quarterly coming up and just the, the heavy emphasis on AI and what it means for y'all and your clients. So can you talk about the work and, and how we can level up our skills in the workplace to future-proof ourselves?

Jay Owen: Yeah, for sure. I think a couple things as it relates to this, is it gonna take jobs? I, I think it's actually gonna create more opportunity than it takes away. That said people don't deliver ice to our houses anymore. People don't generally in, in America, in most, areas dig [00:15:00] ditches, especially big, highway ditches with shovels, right?

Like we use the tools that we have. You can cut something with a hand, so, or you can use a power saw. Not, it's not right or wrong to do one or the other, but if you're trying to get something moving, you're probably gonna use the power small. And so that's really it, and when I think about teams, I think about the, there was a memo recently leaked from the CEO of Shopify, and he basically said in this memo using AI as a part of this team is no longer like a nice to have, it's an expectation of being on the team.

Part of our performance reviews will be, Hey, tell me how you're using AI in your role. In fact, he even said if people are looking for a plus one or a new hire, they have to prove why it can't be done with AI and why they need a new person to do it. Because I do think there is gonna be a a, a. Something interesting that happens here.

So think about agency life specifically. So for those of you that are not familiar with marketing agencies like Kenny, I know you are, but it is a buts and seat business historically. And what I mean by that is [00:16:00] you can't scale an agency without more people because it's a people business. You need people to do design work.

You need people to manage clients. You need people to manage projects you need, you just need a lot of people. And it's not the kind of business you can run with a handful of people. If you wanna scale it past a certain point, and so like right now, internally my team, about five or six years ago, we, we changed our model before I was thinking about AI really to our internal team is leaders, managers, and strategists.

They're not producers. So they're not writers, designers, developers. We use a lot of writers, designers, and developers to do all kinds of things for sure. But what is going to happen is a lot of that work will be outsourced to robots instead of contractors. And so if I am a specialist, in other words, I write code for a living, I'm gonna get very comfortable with pair programming with a robot.

We've been pair programming for years in development land, but you're gonna need to get good pair programming with a robot. If you don't wanna do that, no problem. You're just gonna be so inefficient that [00:17:00] there's no way that you're gonna be able to keep up with the marketplace. And so, on a training side, I'm a, when we hiring people, we're asking 'em, Hey, tell me an example of how you're using AI in your day-to-day life, whether it's your personal life or your work life.

Show me what that looks like. In our quarterly that Logan mentioned on LinkedIn, we did a fun little team project where we split up into teams and everybody had to present. We were assigned basically like silly movie ideas and we had to present some version of that to like a pitch for that movie to the group.

And in 30 minutes we had people presenting. Visuals that looked like they were produced in Hollywood. Some people produced some video work. Now some of it was pretty silly, like if we're being honest, it probably wasn't production ready, but it was 30 minutes and it was a pretty good pitch deck with scripts and slides and all this kind of stuff that historically would've taken days to produce and probably hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars.

And so, I totally agree with the idea that AI is not inherently gonna take your job, but somebody who [00:18:00] is using it. Will, I am not hiring somebody full stop. I'm not hiring somebody who is like, I don't use ai. You're not, you're not gonna work on any of my teams. You're just not. So, but you might find somewhere else to work that works really good for you, no problem.

But on one of my teams, I expect you to be able to use some of the latest technology because. Our mission here at Business Builders is to create freedom, money, and purpose for everyone around

Kenny Lange: us, for ourselves and our own team, for our clients and the people that they work for, and the people that they serve, and their families, right?

And so, so if that's true and we're not fully leveraging the resources and tools that we have, then we're not being a good steward of our time, and I don't like that.

I 100% agree. Like if it, unless it's crossing some sort of like moral, ethical barrier shouldn't we, take advantage, be educated on anything that would help us accomplish our mission, faster, more effectively, more consistently.

Jay Owen: Yeah. And this, this question comes up a lot in ministry. I had a [00:19:00] guy the other day, I did a webinar on using AI in ministry land. Which is not a whole lot different than business land if we're being really honest, but, but people get real sensitive about it. And I had a guy that wanted to debate me on another podcast

Kenny Lange: and I was like, great, let's roll, and his primary premise was that we can't trust its output.

And I'm like, I mean, I know, but can you trust the output of anything that you read or hear unless you know what the source of truth is? The answer is no, you can't. Like if I listen to a podcast, how do I know if it's true or not? And if it's a, if, if I'm, and so it was just such an interesting thing because people do get really sensitive about it.

And I do think there are some boundaries, like in the, in the ministry space, I do not personally believe that somebody should just have ai, write them a sermon and then go deliver it. I don't, I don't think that's a good idea. That's a personal conviction. Someone else could disagree. In business land, I don't think that we should.

Lie about using these tools. I think we should be open about it. I think our clients should want us to use them. 'Cause it's gonna be better for them in the long run if we are the experts [00:20:00] in these tools.

I, I completely agree. I actually uh, um, was uh, working my, my church is also one of my clients and I was working with the lead pastor on, I was like, you should probably have like a. Like co CEO, lead pastor or something that you can bounce ideas off. 'cause we're a small church, like we don't have a giant staff.

We don't have a ton of money. And to be honest, like 20 bucks a month for any of these tools is a steal

Jay Owen: crazy. It's like hiring an employee.

Kenny Lange: Right? And you don't have to give it benefits.

Jay Owen: That's right.

Kenny Lange: the overhead's a lot lower, but. Was showing him like, here's how you could engineer some prompts to and some instructions that it could help you think through your message.

'cause he loves writing. He's very, very gifted. but what if you wanna research something? So what if you're looking for a story illustration to find something like. There's a whole lot of stuff like building a, a, taking your time to build a, a sermon or even just [00:21:00] a, a speech, a keynote, a presentation

Jay Owen: For sure.

Kenny Lange: that's important. But whether it's ministry or business, it's still, you're still in the business of people

Jay Owen: Well,

at the end of the day too, it's, it's like, it's no different than having a teaching assistant. Like who's in a college, who's going out and doing research for you or helping you grade papers or whatever else, or, or a ghost writer. I mean, people talk about, oh, people should write their own books.

And I'm like, most of the books that you've read that are from an executive or a pastor, I would, I would be willing to bet that 70 plus percent of them were not written fully by that person.

Kenny Lange: They sat and talked to somebody else and that person wrote that book. 'cause most of these people are not writers.

Like that's the point. They're, they're typically leaders. They're speakers. They're good on stage most of the time. They're not inherently good writers, so they probably shouldn't be writing a book, but their ideas may have value in a book, so they should partner with someone, or in this case, a robot to help, or sometimes a combination of both

Right. And to be honest with, depending on, your opinions on how [00:22:00] economies are move, are moving or anything like that, is being able to leverage an AI tool. It can also be something that is more cost effective,

Jay Owen: percent.

Kenny Lange: protects the business. You actually could protect other people's jobs because you don't have to go out and hire a, you know, three more people.

You could just train, spend a little bit of extra money to train your people on how to use this one platform.

Jay Owen: That's right.

Kenny Lange: And suddenly now we're, we have better margins, we're more sustainable we can be calm. When, the storms of, of economic disruption are, are happening around us, you know, whatever industry you may be in. So when you start thinking about not just uh, you know, whether it's agency, ministry, like a lot of those things are like, I have deliverables. I'm working on this. I'm coordinating this thing, that thing the others. When you start talking to leaders, like maybe even that, that agency builders group or or other [00:23:00] ministry leaders, people who their, their job is to make decisions about the work that gets done.

Their hand may not actually be on, on the plow, so to speak but their job is to think through it, make a wise decision, steer the ship set culture. A lot of the, the, the intangibles, How are you thinking about AI in those contexts? 'cause I think deliverables were sort of like the first thing AI could start to influence, right?

You wanna write website copy for a particular length in a format and a voice and whatever, and like you can compile that boom. What if, I'm trying to think through my go-to market strategy. What if I'm trying to a product service line? Like what do I keep, what do I get rid of? How can we start to leverage that?

Or do you think that that has some, some limitations currently?

Jay Owen: No, I, I think it's really good at that stuff currently. You just gotta know the right tools and the right [00:24:00] models to use. So for specifically this week, as of as of the recording of this podcast anyway I. Chat, GPT or OpenAI just released their newest reasoning model called O three. So room that's listening.

If you're wanting to do really deep thinking, brain work that's the model to talk to. And I do mean talk to. I will put it on voice. Mode in my car and just talk to it and I'll, and it will have context for, I'll either have an ongoing chat so it has context or now it actually remembers memory across past chats as well.

So the more you use it, the more it knows about you, the more it's able to give you contextually aware. Advice. And I can even tell it like, Hey, these, these are the kind of leaders, the kind of companies who I admire that I wanna be like and based on those leadership styles and structures and systems, here's some things I'm struggling with.

Help me help ask me some questions. These, these are things you would never do. In real, like most people would not think this way. You go to the robot and you say, ask me some questions that I might not be thinking about. [00:25:00] What do you need? What do you need to know? You the robot need to know from me in order to help give me the best counsel on this particular issue.

And it is amazing the kind of feedback and like thought structure because you basically now have a 24 7, counterpart who. The more you talk to it, the more it understands you. And so the more it can get into your brain a little bit, which I realize is a little creepy for some people, but it's super helpful because I can dissect and think through ideas and go, oh, I didn't really think about that.

And it helps me avoid problems before they happen

Kenny Lange: Yeah, I, I had the, the voice feature has been a lot, lot of fun. My, my kids are like, what are you doing?

Jay Owen: talking to my robot.

Kenny Lange: Yes, no worry. I'll just replace you with a robot. But it's my AI child,

Jay Owen: right.

Kenny Lange: I was, I had a brainstorm one weekend on a topic, like, I'm just trying to think through, I've got all these tools in my coaching practice and how do they fit together and what's the through line, what's the thing?

Like, I, [00:26:00] I have a sense of it, I wanna talk through it. So I just started. I turned on voice mode and started going through this chat and went back and forth and I mean, in the matter of like 15 minutes, I got so much clarity because of it was asking me this, and then I'd answer and says, okay, it sounds like this, this and this. Have you considered A, B and C and how they could interplay here? And I'm like, no, let's explore this one. And it, it just keeps taking you down these paths. I think, again, fascinating could be weird. It, it does feel weird the first time you do it. But then you start to get used to it. And I do love being asked those questions because one thing that um, I figured out is I, like, I consider, I pride myself on asking good questions.

I'm, interviewer on a podcast, I'm a coach, a facilitator like that's supposed to be my job is asking really good questions. But I can't ninja myself, [00:27:00] right? Like I, you could ask me the exact same question I asked myself. I'm gonna give you the better answer.

Jay Owen: Right.

Kenny Lange: And so now I can leverage AI for it.

And something you've mentioned about like, Hey, I admire, A, B, and C and, and, and I want you to, maybe give, like, what would they say? My coach Ben Miller was talking on a Monday call with a bunch of US system and soul coaches and he said, here's something I played with over the weekend and, and I'd love to hear if y'all test this out, is. I had cheche chat, GPT help build a custom GPT that is like a personal board of directors. And I said probably this number of people, I want different domains and I'll start giving you the different people I want you to act as. And he goes, and so it's people. He goes, I would never get access to. Maybe they're not even living

Jay Owen: Mm-hmm.

Kenny Lange: know, we're pro prolific authors and thought leaders or, or whatever. he goes, and now I can open up this GPT and say, [00:28:00] I'm thinking about this in my business. Can you help me think through it, make sure I'm not missing anything, or help me see how this impacts the other things I have going so I can see the relationship. And so it was just fascinating. I've, I've heard it twice in one week, so I'm like, all right, like universe, Lord, whatever. I was like, I'll, I'll go build one of these. Apparently I need it. But is that something is that helping you? 'cause you sound like a guy who's in peer groups, probably as a coach, these sort of things, and you've invested in yourself. How do you balance investing in yourself where you can, I mean, you have the entirety of the internet.

Jay Owen: Yeah.

Kenny Lange: At the disposal of ai and it can morph into any person you have access to or never could talk to in a million years. how are you balancing still gleaning wisdom and sharpening yourself with humans, friends, other entrepreneurs, leaders,

Jay Owen: Yep.[00:29:00]

Kenny Lange: mentors, and what AI can bring?

How do you start to bring that into

Jay Owen: This is a great question, really important. I think that the world is gonna diverge in two specific directions at the same time over the next decade or two. One is a highly automated AI driven future. Literally driven, I mean, I don't dunno if anybody's ridden a. Full self-driving Tesla lately, but the software as of the last three to six months is unbelievable.

It drives better than I would say 90% of human beings. It is unbelievable. Now, when I first.

Kenny Lange: standard.

Jay Owen: That's true. Maybe 95. When I first got my Tesla four plus years ago the autopilot was, it was glorified self cruise control. It was cool, but it was super, jerky and not real smooth and would make all kind of mistakes that were dangerous, wouldn't stop at red lights, stuff like that.

Now, it, it's, it is fully autonomous. It doesn't actually need me. The only reason it needs me to. Pay attention or touch the wheels 'cause of government regulations. Otherwise it could take me from, I have it all the time. Take me on 45 minute drives. That's AI driving the future. Now on [00:30:00] the other side, the other divergent I think it's gonna happen is people are gonna be even more desirous of community and real human relationships.

I think this will take place more often than not in person. We know that this is a big problem for humanity because we all live through covid, right? And. When you live through covid, one thing became apparently extremely apparent, which is that it's not good for man to be alone. We're, we're not good in isolation.

I, I'm in my studio right now and I spend a lot of time in this room staring into a screen talking to other human beings, and it is not the same as sitting around the table. Talking, sharing a meal, having a drink, having a coffee, whatever it may be. Not the same thing. The other thing about real humans versus robots is I could program a robot to artificially hold me accountable, but there's really no other than like self.

Guilt or self shame, which is not the same. There's no real accountability. And so [00:31:00] the, the, the, the, the value of real community, real friends, real coaches is somebody can go, Hey, I know you said you were gonna do X, Y, and Z. How's that going?

Kenny Lange: Mm-hmm.

Jay Owen: you have to be able to

exactly.

Kenny Lange: I'm closing the

Jay Owen: Exactly, exactly.

Kenny Lange: to do that to somebody in real life.

Jay Owen: Just swipe, I might get outta here.

So I, I actually think that the value of in-person specifically I'm gonna double down on some of the in-person stuff, relationships, community coaching, all those kind of things is more important now than ever because the, the one thing you gotta pay attention to when you are coaching with AI or communicating with AI or getting feedback from it, is it is a confirmation bias beast.

It loves to tell you what you want to hear, and so you gotta be really careful about that. In fact, it's really good to give it prompts like, Hey,

Kenny Lange: don't just tell me what I want to hear. Shoot it to me straight, like tell me the negatives as well. Sometimes you gotta tell it that because otherwise it'll just puff your ego up 'cause it, because it's a dopamine machine.

And so you gotta be really careful about.

I, I [00:32:00] listened. I, I think you're spot on. We're, we're, I think we're gonna see the value of human relationships and need to lean in. So we'll be a little less like hybrid mix everything together and it'll be I have my AI time and then I have

Jay Owen: A hundred percent.

Kenny Lange: I'm disconnected. but uh, that bias there is a great it's, it's a five hour long podcast. It's with the founder, CEO of Anthropic, which makes Claude ai if, if anybody doesn't know and it had him somebody who was over programming and then they have a head of, it's like personality or character for the AI and how they're shaping, like the, being overly affirmative.

Jay Owen: Yep,

Kenny Lange: It's like, yeah, people are, or overly apologetic, like how do you, how should you want to interact with this person?

And, and so that was really, if, if you really wanna nerd out,

Jay Owen: I do.

Kenny Lange: it is a phenomenal podcast that I'll have to find out. I'll, [00:33:00] I'll tell you later. I'll. it in the show notes. My, my editor will hunt me down for it, but it was just cool to hear how they're working through that. Like it's not just ones and zeros, like they're having to do stuff so it can expose its thinking to them it starts asking and answering its own questions and they're like, we need to know how you arrived at this.

'cause it's not just inputs, outputs. And one of the, the. A piece of advice I'd heard is exactly what you're saying is even is working this into instructions. Like if you're building a custom GPT or, or now or a custom project if you're in clawed a lot of 'em have like some base level instructions is baking in. want you. To ask me questions first. I need you to disagree with me when I'm wrong or, or just whatever it is that can create that counterbalance. And I found that when I make sure that that's included in the instructions [00:34:00] or at least in the prompt my outcome is a lot better and I also feel a lot more confident about whatever. Project task I was working on is like, oh, the quality's gonna be much better. Because then I go and I show it to a human that might know something more about it than I do, and they're like, no, no, that looks good. I think that's, this seems well thought out. And I was like, I did this all on my own. I am so smart. Jay thank you so much for that. I, I, I could keep going on because I love nerding out about this and, and so do you, but if, if somebody is listening and they're like, okay. I, I hear what you're saying. I, I don't want to get left behind. I don't wanna be a leader who gets left behind or a worker. What's a baby step someone could take in the next 24 hours, spending little to no money to make themselves more, I don't know what the right term would be. AI ready or, or AI educated for this future of not just work, but society.

Jay Owen: I've um, seen a lot of people struggle with knowing, how do I even [00:35:00] prompt what are some of these little hacks of simple things that change everything? What tools should I even be using? 'cause there's so many out there and it's changing every day. So I actually put together a free guide that people can download.

They can just go to AI with j.com. That's AI with JY. Com and there's a free resource download they can grab on there. I'm updating it pretty regularly. I'm actually about to send out a fresh update here probably before this podcast goes live. And then I'm, I'm gonna be hosting some free webinars as well around the topic just to, just to help community engagement because I think that this is gonna change the world and I want it as best I can to have an influence to help change it for good instead of evil.

And so yeah, AI with j.com is a, a great free resource to download that. Read through it and go play with some stuff. Curiosity is key. If you're not the most curious person in your organization, you should either develop that skill or hire somebody who has it. Because you need somebody right now who's going, Hey, check this thing out.

Hey, what about this? Have you tried this? If you're not that person, that's okay, but you need somebody in your organization who is that [00:36:00] person. And it'll change everything.

Kenny Lange: I love that. So, we'll, we'll link up AI with Jay and if people wanted to know more about the webinars where, where do they go to find out about those or sign up for

Jay Owen: Same thing. If you just sign up@aiwithj.com, I'll send it all out through that same link. So single, single place to go for all that.

Kenny Lange: Beautiful. Love that. Jay, thank, thank you so much. And, and if somebody wanted to know more about you and your work or, or business builders or any of that where would you send

Jay Owen: Sure. I've got a podcast called Building a Business that lasts where I host other business owners that have been in business for 10 years or more. And a book by the same title that I wrote on our 20th company anniversary. All my, all those resources, everything else that's available, a lot of it is for free is available@jowenlive.com.

Kenny Lange: Okay, that is awesome. And yeah, 10 years. I just talked to a company this morning that just passed their, their 10 year mark and I was like, man, good on you. Like that's uh, that's, that's not for the faint of heart. Thank you so much, Jay. I look forward to having you back in the [00:37:00] future maybe as we get some of these new releases with the, the AI models and it's doing weird and funny stuff.

We'll, we'll have you back. Maybe, maybe you'll, you can bring your, your daughter and she can educate

Jay Owen: That's right.

Kenny Lange: be doing and looking for. Thank you to uh, you, the listeners, like the, that you would spend any part of your day listening is uh, just uh, an honor for me. I hope that you found it both entertaining and educational in that you are taking action to grow your leadership.

If you would like rate, review, subscribe, whatever the right button is on your platform of choice, I would appreciate it. Leave comments. I, I wanna make this podcast for you. I enjoy this. I get to talk to cool people like Jay. But at the end of the day, the podcast is for you. Um, So let me know what sort of conversations, topics, things that would be the most helpful to you.

And then as you engage this helps more people discover the podcast. And that can be a free and easy way to help more people on their leadership journey. Discover conversations that unlock their next step. Until next time, change the way you [00:38:00] think. You'll change the way you lead. We'll see you.