Alexis
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Data Dave Dives Deeper, your favorite companion podcast to Talk Tech with Data Dave. I’m Alexis, your host of this podcast, and I’m here, as always, with my dear friend Data Dave. And for all of our Data Dave Dives Deeper episodes, we have a very special guest.
Before we introduce the special guest, I always like to remind our listeners, if you have a question for Data Dave, please email it to talktech@d3clarity.com. You can connect with Dave or I on LinkedIn and send us a question there. Or you can submit a question right on the D3Clarity website. You can do all three of those things if you’re interested in joining us for one of these Data Dave Dives Deeper episodes as well.
I’ve got my pitch out of the way. Dave, how are you this morning?
Data Dave
I’m very well, Alexis. How are you?
Alexis
I am good. I’m excited about our guest today. This is going to be a good one. I know.
Data Dave
We’re delighted to be joined today by Jonathan Mast from White Beard Strategies. Without saying very much about Jonathan, I’m going to ask him to introduce himself and take it away with his story as to how he got here and how White Beard Strategies came into being.
Jonathan Mast
Well, Dave, I mean, thank you very much. Alexis, thank you for the kind words. Excited to be here.
As you mentioned, I got into AI probably like most people, a couple years ago when ChatGPT decided to put an interface on top of it. Ironically, I think we’ve all been using AI a lot longer than we realized. I remember back to renting a Hertz car many years ago. I’m older than both of you, especially Alexis, and going into LA and making sure it had their Hertz navigation in it because I didn’t know where I was. We think back to GPS and things like that. Those are things that still use AI and that we’ve used for many years.
But in its current context, as we think about it, it really started in 2022 when ChatGPT gave us an interface in which to kind of interact with things.
My story, real short version, I’m an ADD visionary entrepreneur and I resemble that to the T. And that means that I’m really good at ideas, I’m really good at getting things done in short spurts, and I really stink at details. And I learned very quickly that AI helped me extend the length of the time that I could focus because instead of my brain getting ahead of my fingers as I was typing, AI allowed me to work faster and that allowed me to stay focused longer. Ultimately, that allowed me to get a lot more work done, to be a lot more productive, be more profitable. And I’m like, “This is so cool. I want to teach everybody how to do this.”
And I really saw two things happening with AI. There were two sides. There were the people that were standing in front of Learjets they didn’t own, trying to convince us that AI was this magic money tree that we’ve all been looking for years, which I don’t believe. The other was the other side of it, where people were literally holding their fingers up and going, “It’s evil!” And we shouldn’t do anything with AI.” And I didn’t feel either of those were accurate.
The other thing I heard a lot of is, I heard a lot of team members because I work with a lot of teams, worried that AI was going to replace them. And I don’t believe that’s going to be a prominent thing. Will there be some people that get displaced? Yes. But I don’t think that’s going to be prominent. And I really felt a desire to teach those teams how to leverage AI to amplify their skill and experience so that they became more valuable to their employer to not less. And that’s really kind of where we started.
Alexis
Jonathan, I wanna stop and I wanna go back because I have, like, just a super, I guess, personal question that you can not answer if you choose to. I have a lot of neurodivergent friends. We just are a group of weirdos that got together, and as we’re getting older and as the world is moving on, we’ve discovered that a lot of us are quite neurodivergent. But you said that you are ADD, and you learned that AI has really helped you be more productive. Can you share a little bit more about how you’re using that or what you’re doing? I’m gonna be like, “Yo, buds, you should check this out. Check out my podcast. There’s a guy who shared his story that I think might be helpful.”
Jonathan Mast
Yeah, so I actually got diagnosed at 43 years old. So I’m 55 now. I got diagnosed 12 years ago, and it explained a lot. You know, it’s like, “Oh, that’s why I do that.” My wife probably appreciated it more than I did just because of that. But one of the things that being diagnosed really helped me with was understanding and leaning into my strengths. I’d spent most of my career trying to be and fix those things that I wasn’t good at.
For example, details and paperwork. I’m terrible at both of those. And I’d spent most of my career trying to be good at those things. And candidly, I failed miserably. And when I got diagnosed and learned what I was, I felt more comfortable leaning into the fact that- okay, this is how God created me. This is who I am. How can I do this better? Because I have a unique perspective on things. I have a unique brain.
If you’re neurodivergent, you certainly know what I mean by that. We have unique talents.
And while society often looks at that as a negative, I look at it as my superpower, especially when I combine it with AI. And the biggest part of that for me, Alexis, is, as someone with ADD or that’s neurodivergent, I have the ability to really hyper focus. The problem is I can’t hyperfocus for a long time, and I never really understood why. I just knew from working in leading businesses and running businesses that I was really good for about 15 to 20 minutes of hyper focus. And in that 15 to 20 minutes, man, I could get a lot done. The problem is, I could only do that a couple times a day. Now, the good news is that, literally, in that, based on the right occupations, and I’ve been in sales and marketing most of my life, I could do enough that I could still get a full day’s worth of work done with the little bits that I do throughout the day. But my day actually was quite chaotic because it was always “SQUIRREL! Oh, there’s something new.” I’d switch tabs in my browser, and I would totally forget what I was trying to do because I’d see something else in the process. And it literally might be four in the afternoon. And I’d get back to a tab that I had been on at seven in the morning, and went, “Oh, yeah, I never got back to that.” And I truly never thought about it all day long because of having all these new squirrels that popped up.
What AI has really allowed me to do, to get to your question, and sorry for all the backstory…
Alexis
No, no, I love it.
Jonathan Mast
AI has really allowed me to get things done faster before I get bored with them. And it’s not that I just don’t care, but my mind gets too far ahead, and I can’t remember back. You guys are probably not old enough, but you’ll get there. You’re going to get up from the living room and walk into the kitchen someday, and you’re going to go, “I walked in the kitchen. Why did I do that?”
There was a reason when you left the living room that you were walking into the kitchen, but when you get to the kitchen, you can’t remember. That was my day ALL DAY LONG. I’d be switching tabs and I would literally be trying to remember, “Why did I press alt tab? There’s a reason I was doing it.” And I sounds crazy, but that’s just the way my brain would work.
AI has allowed me to do things so much faster that it’s been really cool because I now get to explore some of my more creative side and things that I’m really interested in because I can get them done in a timely manner and so what that’s meant for me is that… I used to keep lists. The problem is I would write lists down, and I would make lists, and I would never actually go back to them and do anything because there was always more coming in than time to go back.
And AI has really given me that ability that when I have an idea, I can run with it because I know I can focus for 15 to 20 minutes, and I can often get most of or not all of that done, at least far enough that I can hand it off to my team.
So with AI, that just means everything from creating SOPs for the business, or whether that comes to, “Wow, this is a really cool report. I’d love to dive into it,” and go, yeah, there’s no way I’m going to keep focused on that now. I can use AI to do that data analysis and to dig into that and to learn things. And then when that gives me more ideas, I can actually follow through on some of those and make those happen. And because of again, just who I am and being very reactionary, as somebody who’s neurodiverse, AI allows me to react quickly and generally, because I’ve trained it, what I would say, it still reflects me, it reflects who I am because I’ve given it my tone and my style and my values and all that.
And as a result, now that email, for example, that we all need to send clients once in a while, that we’re just dragging our feet on. That in the past I would be terrible about sending and sometimes just wouldn’t because I could never take the 15 minutes to think, “How am I going to tell Dave that his response is reasonable, but I need to put some boundaries in place and I need to nicely tell Dave that that’s not how we do things. So while I appreciate his desire, this is how we’re going to recommend.” Those emails with all those details just overwhelmed me and therefore, a lot of times they wouldn’t happen or I’d hand it off to somebody on my team and go, “Whatever they do, it’s going to be better than what I’m going to write because I’m just not going to get it done right now.”
I can literally, as I’ve explained it to you, I can go and tell AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever. “Hey, Dave just sent me an email. I want to respond positively, but I need to draw a couple of boundaries in place and explain this. Help me out.” And in three to four seconds, I’ve got an email that is professionally written, that is respectful, that does what I asked it to do, and then I can go in and edit it. And it’s much, much faster to edit that than it is to do anything else. So literally, you know, Alexis, I’m doing, and I’m not lying, hundreds of prompts a day for things. I could look back today if I pulled up my screen and ChatGPT. I’ve probably used it 30 times already and we’re recording this, you know, in the morning, just because it’s for everything from how do I respond to this to I need help with this and it just let me do that stuff faster and therefore I get a lot more done.
Alexis
Oh, that’s a cool story. Thank you for sharing that with me. I really appreciate it. I was just really interested. I know Dave has, like, better things to talk to you about..
Jonathan Mast
Ask me anything.
Alexis
I was like, “That’s cool. I want to talk more about that.” Okay, thank you for the discussion. Please, please go on.
Data Dave
That is cool, actually. And I think I resemble most of those remarks, except I’ve got an Alexis instead of a ChatGPT.
Alexis
He’s got an Alexis, and Alexis has a ChatGPT. I call her Brenda.
Jonathan Mast
There we go.
Alexis
It works.
Data Dave
So what made you realize that AI was the answer or the assistant that you needed? What led you to that path? You must have been almost there before you found AI. What got you there, what got you over that hurdle?
Jonathan Mast
I think to me, it was just that practical experience.
And in typical ADD ability, part of it was I should really start a group teaching people about how I’m using AI, because they might be interested.
And I thought that I might find like, you know, 20 of my friends or so Alexis, like you mentioned, that would go, “Oh, yeah, Jonathan, this is cool.” And I was just absolutely amazed, and I very open about being ADD and talking about that. And it amazed me when I realized that there were a whole lot of other people that had similar work issues. That I had that squirrel and bright shiny object and all those things that affect us, especially in the entrepreneurial world. I found it to be incredibly common.
And next thing I knew, we had 10,000 people, and then we had, you know, 50,000, and then we had a hundred thousand. And yesterday we just got over 370,000 people in that group. Today we’re almost at 372,000.
Data Dave
Wow.
Jonathan Mast
And so to me, it wasn’t that Jonathan had a brilliant idea, Jonathan had an idea, and AI let me actually go, “Oh, I’m going to pursue this one for just a hot minute.” And the audience responded, and I’m like, “Okay, there is a need to discuss this.”
I’m very focused on practical AI. You know, I’m not a theoretician because I’m ADD. I don’t really want to talk about what it’s going to do in six months. I want to know, what can I use it for today? How can you know your listeners today while they’re listening to this podcast or watching it? How can they grab their phone or open up another tab in their browser and do something while we’re talking? That’s the stuff that gets me really excited.
And so I just started talking about it and been blessed. It’s turned into a business.
Data Dave
Very good.
Alexis
As long as we’re there. Before we go on, let’s put a shameless plugin. You do have a business. You have your own podcast as well, right?
Jonathan Mast
Correct.
Alexis
Yeah, put your shameless plugin.
Jonathan Mast
My business, it’s White Beard Strategies. Imagine where I came up with that name. As Dave had mentioned, we do AI coaching and masterminds. So, if you’re a business owner trying to figure out how to leverage AI in your business and you want practical ways to do it, reach out to me at, it’s simple, whitebeardstrategies.com. We’ll find out if we can help out. We have tons of free resources like the podcast and my group and all that. All that’s totally free. And then if you’re interested in deeper dives, some of it costs a little bit of money.
Data Dave
So this could be a really interesting conversation if we go back to AI, because I’m fundamentally an engineer, and I do use AI. Use AI, actually, more than I recognize that I use AI to a large extent. What I don’t actually use is the chat GPT and the large language engines.
I do use it for writing code. I use it for analysis and finding, essentially reading comprehension to a certain extent.
But I also use it from first Principles. Because I have to know things from first principles. I can’t just use things that I don’t understand.
Jonathan Mast
Sure.
Alexis
What does first principles mean, Dave?
Data Dave
First principle, in this instance, it means what is the linear algebra and the calculus and the statistics that every AI engine is actually based on? How does Claude make its determination as to what words it’s going to use next, et cetera, et cetera? What are the engineering principles and the physics principles that are underneath whatever is happening? To a certain extent, what I’ve realized is that one of the reasons, as we were talking, I don’t necessarily take notes and I do things the way I do them is because I have to do them from a basis of why, not a basis of what.
Why does it work? Therefore, it must work. Therefore, it has to behave like this. Therefore, I don’t have to know exactly what to do, because I can always infer what I have to do from why it has to work the way that it has to work.
Jonathan Mast
Absolutely, yeah. And I totally get that. And I think that’s part of the reason I love AI is AI helps me often figure out that why, at least my why, as it relates to that.
Data Dave
I know you say you don’t think about where it’s going. What are the biggest pitfalls that you see people falling into when they first start to embrace AI… Let’s use the phrase artificial intelligence. I know we talked about it the other day. I don’t like that phrase. I don’t like that name.
Jonathan Mast
But, yeah, I don’t either.
Data Dave
What are the biggest pitfalls? And explain why you don’t like that.
Alexis
Before we go on, we have to explain why we don’t like the word.
Jonathan Mast
They’re tied together. I think the biggest mistake people make is that they actually assume we have artificial intelligence that can do things on its own, that can just go and run things. And that is not what we have today. We have incredibly smart predictive technologies, but we do not have sentient technologies. You know, it’s not like I can walk up to you, Alexis, and explain what I want done and know that, you know what, Alexis is a brilliant operations person, and she’s going to figure it out and she’s going to come back with answers. Now we’re getting agentic AI, which is getting closer to that.
But back to your question, Dave. I think the biggest mistake people make all the time is they assume that AI can truly replace a person or replace them in what they’re doing. And I believe fundamentally, AI amplifies skills and experience of the user. So if I teach you how to use it well and you’re an experienced engineer, it’s going to amplify that experience. If you’re a heart surgeon, it’s going to amplify that experience. If you’re an operational excellence person, it’s going to amplify that operational excellence.
It could make me a…
Okay, no, it couldn’t. I was going to say it could make me a passable operations person. It could not, because I’m just that far down the path.
But it can take someone that has operational skills and make them more productive, more efficient. And why would we want to do that? If I have my marketing team, I can allow them to leverage AI to make them more efficient, and my sales team can do that, and my ops team can do that. And even, let’s say I’m in a warehouse and my logistics team can be doing that. My warehouse manager can do that. My guys driving forklifts can do it. And you go, what? Yeah, literally, there are aspects of AI. It’s not going to drive the forklift for us, but there are aspects that we can use to help make sure that every one of those roles saves time and can provide more value to their audience, whether that audience is their employer or their clients or the community in general.
That’s my belief, and I think that’s the mistake. Going back to your question, Dave, people assume that we actually have AI, that it’s sentient, and that we can just go, “Oh, you know what? I’m in sales, so I need to get a list of a hundred people that want to talk about AI, and I want somebody to reach out and contact all of them. And when it’s done, I want you to deliver all of my training to them. And I’m going to go have a coffee and let me know when it’s done.” Doesn’t work that way.
Data Dave
I agree. I don’t like AI because as you said, basically, there’s no real intelligence, there’s no artificial intelligence. We’re missing a couple of things. We’re missing invention, we’re missing inspiration, and we’re missing innovation from what AI can give us. Those are the things that we do as sentient beings without necessarily thinking about it. We get inspired, we innovate.
Jonathan Mast
Precisely.
Data Dave
We invent all the time. And your AI engine isn’t sitting there being inspired to do something. It’s not.
Jonathan Mast
Yeah, it can sit there all day long, and if we don’t prompt it, nothing’s going to happen.
Data Dave
If you don’t prompt it, nothing is happening. It’s certainly not going to take a shower in the morning and decide what color shirt it’s going to wear. And it’s the little things that provide us with our intelligence and our innate intelligence that makes us that sentient space. We have that inspiration, we have that innovation, we have those ideas without necessarily being prompted, shall we say.
Jonathan Mast
I love that. Yeah.
Data Dave
Now, I very much appreciate machine learning and the fact that machines can learn some of these problems. I do have a little bit of a problem with some of the machine learning, which is we’ve fallen into a little bit of a trap with some of the machine learning and some of the deep learning and that sort of thing. Because they’re still approximations.
Jonathan Mast
Yes, 100%.
Data Dave
We’re making approximations based off of evidence, and we’re making observations, which is very, very good.
And I think it’s allowing us to do some really interesting things. But we’re not necessarily driving it through the full scientific method, which is observe, construct, predict with the observations, but then model and analytically learn. If you look at Newton’s laws of motion, we can predict all day long from observations when something’s going to hit the floor when we drop it. But it’s not until we actually do the math and work out the predictive model that we get to be able to have a model that predicts what is happening in Newtonian physics. Until that point, it’s just observation and interpretation or interpolation from observation.
And to me, some of that we can ignore with machine learning, even. We can ignore some of the causality in the variables that are causing an event to happen because we can hide them in a thousand other variables.
Jonathan Mast
Correct? Yeah, 100%.
Data Dave
And that is a little disturbing because I want to drive it to the next level. I want to understand the causality, I want to understand the mathematics behind the causality of an event, not just look at all the observations that have been done through history and then start to say, “Well, because of all those, I think it will probably occur like this.”
Jonathan Mast
Yeah. And as you said, I think those are where some of the limitations come in. It’s almost probably a bad example, but I’m old enough to remember the movie War Games when they started playing games of war with the computer, and the computer got confused and actually thought that it was a real war and was going to launch nuclear weapons. That is absolutely, in my mind, not the nuclear war, but that type of a thing happening is a danger if we rely too much on AI. And I think there are certainly people that are more than willing to do that, because, like you mentioned, it’s only using past data to predict the future. And that doesn’t take into account a lot of variables.
Data Dave
But the interesting outcome to that movie is actually the solution they had was they taught it tic tac toe.
Jonathan Mast
Correct.
Data Dave
Which is, if anybody plays tic tac toe and you play a thousand or a million games of tic tac toe, you realize that every game will end in stalemate.
And that’s how they solved the problem, because they taught it tic tac toe. And then they applied that to nuclear war, and it realized that any game it played would end up in a mutual loss, essentially. Stalemate.
Jonathan Mast
Exactly. Yeah.
Data Dave
Which is another interesting approach, which is just, again, taking that to the next step.
Jonathan Mast
And I think that’s where AI is headed. I think we’re going to continue to teach it things like that, such as playing tic tac toe is every game’s going to end in a stalemate. We are going to the amount of knowledge it has and that it can do. It’s great. I often refer to it, AI today, as like having essentially, immediate access to every book and every report that’s probably ever been written, and a very intelligent curator who can help you locate and summarize that content. Can’t give you the exact content. It’s not going to go out and say, “All right, this is what was in chapter three on page 14 of this book.” But it can summarize the book, and it can tell you what the book was about.
The problem is, when it comes to topics, if you’ve been to Barnes and Noble, you know that when you go to look for a book on a topic, there’s not just one, there’s many books. And those books don’t necessarily agree.
Who told AI which one was correct? Well, nobody. And so, AI is not necessarily going to logic its way through to determine which is correct because it doesn’t have ethics and morals. It doesn’t have, like you said, inspiration.
So, it’s literally going to just use data points, and that means it’s going to mess up sometimes. And it’s why, going back to where we started, it’s why I don’t believe we as humans are in risk from AI because it still needs us dramatically involved in that process. It may allow us to lead a slightly more relaxed life, certainly, it may help us find some more time, but it is not going to be able to, you know, I can’t hire AI to mow my lawn outside so that I don’t have to do it. It’s not going to be able to figure out how to start the mower and to run it and everything else. And people go, ”Well, but Jonathan, we can do a lot of that.” Yeah, but I still need somebody to change the oil or to plug in or to recharge the device or fix it when it breaks. We are still needed in that process.
Alexis
Thank you for joining us, Jonathan. Thank you, Dave, as always for being with us. Listeners out there, if you have a question for Data Dave, one more time, email us at talktech@d3clarity.com. If you’re interested in joining us for one of these Data Dave Dives Deeper episodes, you can also reach out to us at that email address or connect with us on LinkedIn or the D3Clarity website.
Gentlemen, it’s been wonderful. Thanks for being with me today.
Data Dave
Thank you.
Jonathan Mast
Thank you.
