What If It Did Work?
What If It Did Work?
Harnessing AI: From Business Revolution to Everyday Tool
Remember when we used punch cards, microfiche, and spent months developing business plans? That world is gone. Today's business landscape demands speed and innovation—and AI is the game-changer making it possible.
John Munsell, CEO of Bazooka and LSU's go-to AI instructor, unpacks how businesses can implement artificial intelligence without creating organizational chaos. Unlike consultants who merely explain why AI matters, John focuses on practical execution that delivers measurable results—helping companies generate $15 million in revenue over just two years through strategic AI adoption.
The conversation demolishes common AI misconceptions, revealing that everyday tools costing just $20 monthly can transform business operations. John walks through real examples: generating comprehensive business plans in hours instead of months, creating custom legal documents without expensive attorney fees, deploying AI note-takers that allow for fully present conversations, and building specialized GPTs that become invaluable knowledge repositories for your organization. One student slashed patent costs from $3,500 to just $300 per filing—demonstrating the immediate ROI that intelligent implementation delivers.
Perhaps most compelling is John's approach to workforce transformation. Rather than replacing employees, he advocates training existing team members who already understand your culture and processes. "It costs seven times more to replace an employee than to train them," he explains, outlining how his 2-6 week training programs help companies retain talent while dramatically increasing productivity.
Don't be the last business to adopt this technology. As John warns, "The company that learns to get everybody thinking AI-first, the fastest, is the one that wins." Visit Bazooka.com to discover training options through LSU Continuing Education or explore John's book "In-Grain AI" about creating an AI-first culture in your organization.
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I never told no one that my whole life I've been holding back. Every time I load my gun up so I can shoot for the star, I hear a voice like who do you think? All right, another day, another dollar, another one of my favorite episodes of my favorite podcast. Yes, I am biased, it's my own podcast. What if it did work? I got to say this is a treat, I've got with me John Munsell. He's the eight-figure man the flagship school of Louisiana, lsu, hired to teach AI to their students. John Munsell, ceo of Bazooka, is a go-to expert for companies who want to implement AI services for their entire organization without creating chaos. What a word. Well here, man, you have to explain that to me Because overall, I'm just reading it and it sounds like I'm reading because I'm like, because overall, I'm just reading it and it sounds like I'm reading because I'm like these are big words. I just got a degree in journalism. When it comes to one word, two words. I'm looking at your bio and it's very impressive, but overall, man, I mean.
Speaker 2:Overall man, I mean, oh yeah, look, at the end of the day, what I do is I teach businesses and their employees how to use AI the right way so they can retain more employees and increase their market share and their profits. That's plain and simple. And I have I'm an adjunct instructor of AI for LSU, so we go through continuing ed to teach businesses how to do this stuff.
Speaker 1:I got to say, because I don't know whether it's because I'm an alum of the Louisiana State University Agriculture and Mechanical College, but I consistently see like, hey, I can learn AI. There's two things I see a lot of. I can learn marketing from my own home, social media marketing, or I can learn AI. Is that like something that you're implementing, that dinosaurs like me and people all over the country can strike up the computer and learn AI?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly the way I like in it is. You know, when you were a kid and you learned how to ride a tricycle, you pretty much just did it on your own right. It was easy. But then a whole new world opened up to you, right? But then you saw somebody on two wheels and you thought, oh, I got to learn how to do that. Well, you had to get somebody to teach you. Your dad probably taught you how to ride a two-wheeler. You know, for a little bit you had training wheels on, but then you, you were able to ride a two-wheeler. Now a bigger world opened up to you and then, as you progressed, you got to drive a car. But you had to learn how to drive a car and an even bigger world opened up to you.
Speaker 2:Most people can hop on an AI tool right away and just start using it. So that's kind of like the training wheel move. But when you really want to use it to get killer results, to really solve business problems, to grow your business, that's when you need a little help. You need a little training. When you want to get really advanced, you need more training. It's either that or you try to figure it out yourself. I don't know about you, but I took programming at LSU when they had punch cards and I only did it because they made me. That wasn't something I wanted to do.
Speaker 1:But I I learned microfiche and microfilm and I I learned the dewey decimal system yes library science. So you know, if there's an old eastern european library that that needs a librarian I I you got the jobs for it, I got a job there. I can help people file and look for research obsolete research. Now I got to ask when it comes to AI, there's way more to it than like everybody that's posting an action hero on themselves correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's way more to it. I mean, those guys are still in the novelty act phase, right, you know it does some really cute parlor tricks, for sure, and that's one of them. But there are a whole lot of us who have to actually use it for a business purpose and what it'll do is amazing if you know how to run it the right way. You know, like you can. When was the last time you developed a full-blown business plan? Me, yeah.
Speaker 1:When my full-blown business plans were handwritten believe it or not with my ex-wife. I mean, we had computers and we had the capabilities, but when it came to marketing, it was all. I mean, it was pre-social media marketing. So for us to even advertise, to even market, it was the Clipper, it was Valpak, it was all these things. Hey, we got 2% return. Woo, better than 1% return. You know, let's keep on doing this. But yeah, no, I see the producer of the show.
Speaker 1:He uses AI just to do the show notes yeah and I, I'm just like blown away because you can act. You can literally if, if you pay because he's shown me, if you pay for the function, if there's enough information out there, I I've written two books. So if I wanted to write blogs or anything, because originally, like a year ago, it was like firstly, secondly, thirdly, you know, you could tell it was like I can write a book, yeah, sure. But now if I put like Omar Medrano write a book, what if it did work in his voice? Oh, omar madrano, write it, write a book. What if it did work in his voice? Let's write a social media post or a blog and I look at it and it's like holy smokes, yeah it's getting better.
Speaker 1:It's like it plagiarized. This looks like exactly you know. It's like where was this? I wouldn't have had to go to the manship school of journalism, I wouldn't have had to. You know, I it's like where was this? I wouldn't have had to go to the Manship School of Journalism, I would have had to. You know, I would just type, I would have just asked you know AI, for you know, 90 seconds later, I'd have everything and I'd be at Tigerland for like yeah, right, for the rest of the day, right?
Speaker 2:No, that's, that's true. Well, I mean like, so you've written two books. What were they on?
Speaker 1:One was on overcoming fear, because what if it did work? Name of the book same thing as the podcast. We always have this knee-jerk reaction of like oh, it's not going to work. Or like why would LSU want to hire me? Why can't I teach people how to do AI? How can I teach other corporations? I can't be the sought-out guy. There's so many other people out there. We always have that need we always we're our worst enemies.
Speaker 1:So the book is on how to overcome that. Yeah, which it's based out of LSU. I mean from Miami, I went to LSU to run away from everything. And the second book is the Vacation CEO. It's about how to become a leader, not a boss.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that's good stuff, so you probably have a coaching deal also, right?
Speaker 1:I did. Yeah, it's like a pain in the butt. It became a pain in the butt because people need to implement, because we're becoming lazy. Everybody wants. I'm sure the one thing that I have to say about AI is that, yeah, it brings us the answers, but we're not the hunters anymore. We're not hungry. We want somebody that just shows you where society's going. Society's going, yeah, oh I, I can learn all my. Why do I need to watch real news when I can just go on social media for a second? You know on some, you know on people get their politics, people get their stock picks. You know it's like we live in a tiktok. Oh well, we can't make this too long, this video, and it's always like dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. The only thing that scares me about AI is we want everything. We don't want to work for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we want it fast and we want it now right.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I'm sure it's like, yes, it can help with the business plan, but you're still going to have to implement the business plan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no. All of that's true, but you also need to know what you're looking for right and to develop a thorough business plan. Let's date ourselves plan. If you're, let's date ourselves. 10 years ago, it would have taken several weeks to write a bill, a thorough business plan because you'd have to do a whole lot of research, right you?
Speaker 2:know, if I go back 25 years ago, it might have taken you several months to write that business plan. Right now, using AI, I can get AI to do all that research and I can probably generate a really thorough business plan inside of a day, with market analysis, with total addressable market numbers, with just an enormous amount of detail. But I still have to execute. But you know, my point is the when you and I were in school, we had to do that old school research. We had to go through microfiche and microfilm and spin it up and then run it to a printer and get a piece of paper that smelled like, you know, formaldehyde. Right, we had to get all that stuff. It would take us, take us forever to get the research, and even the research we got was several years old, right, because we were going through ancient archives to try to find this stuff, or we would have to go through the latest National Geographic, which is already old stuff, you know. So we had our hindrances. But when I graduated from college, that was the year that IBM came out with the first PC and we didn't have that luxury in college. You know, like I said, we were using punch cards and if you spilled your punch cards. You were in deep doo-doo, you know.
Speaker 2:So when they came out with the first PC and I got to see what a spreadsheet looked like, and then when they came out with Lotus 1-2-3, or yeah, that was at Lotus 1-2-3, we could actually sort, you know, I was like dang man. You know, this would have been amazing if I had this in college, you know. And so there's that part of me that's like man. The kids nowadays. They got it so easy. I had to go and do all this crap by hand. I had to calculate an internal rate of return by hand, and I didn't even know what the hell it meant, because that formula was so damn long, you know. But then when the spreadsheet came out, all of a sudden, I could understand, because I could visually see what they were doing to calculate an internal rate of return. So I understood it better and things just got faster and faster.
Speaker 2:So my time to knowledge was shortened and my time to execution was shortened, and now we're at an exponentially faster paradigm in everything. And so we have access to knowledge that's insanely fast. We have access to expertise that we never had growing up, and we have access to ideas and creativity that we never had. Now the question is, what do you do with that? Somebody still has to know. It's like I always say somebody has to know what excellence looks like in order to get it out of an AI tool, but then somebody has to turn around and execute.
Speaker 2:Now you can build AI agents that will do some of that execution as well, but to me, it's an exciting time to be alive, but it's also scary, you know, because I don't know, with this acceleration of AI, I mean, it's going so fast. It's not a Moore's law anymore, it's a multitude of that, right, it's what do they call it? Ohms, orders of magnitude, o-o-m-s. Yeah, so things are moving in orders of magnitude and that's the interesting part, because AI is making AI faster and that's just a looping effect. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's I think it gives a lot of opportunity, but you still, somebody still has to know how to execute. Right, and that's what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach businesses. I'm trying to teach their employees, who are loyal employees, who know their culture and know their processes and know their systems. I'm trying to teach them how to accelerate their output by using AI and using it the right way, so that they can keep their job rather than lose their job to another competitor that is using AI and getting there faster. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:Why do we always hear that AI is going to take everybody's job? But then again, wasn't that the computers and the robots? And whenever there's anything that we find new and amazing, any tool, it's supposed to make everybody obsolete, everybody obsolete. But at the end of the end of the day, like what you said, you're still going to need people that are masters of the AI and you're going to need to pretty much implement it. So there's always. We always lose jobs, no matter what. I mean the guy with the horse-drawn carriage. He lost his job, but somehow we recouped and we found jobs, just like the elevator operator Progress always. There's always jobs that become obsolete.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The question with this, though, is how deep and wide is that trough? Because you know you're already seeing thousands of people get laid off, for instance, programmers. Right Now, you still need a programmer to stitch together the code that an AI tool is going to build. They can't really go from you know A to Z, but what they can do is absolutely phenomenal. I whipped up an ROI calculator for a chat bot for a company that we were talking to. That whipping up that ROI calculator, making it web-based, launching it on a website that would have taken about three days with an internal development team, because we would have to scope it out and all this other stuff. I did it in right at six minutes, using Claude, and had it launched on a website, and it was phenomenal, nice, neatly laid out and everything.
Speaker 2:Copywriters are losing their livelihood um, their, uh, livelihood to AI tools. You know, if you learn how to get the AI to write well, then you only need a copy editor. You don't need a copy writer. Um, legal, uh. I use chat, gpt and some of the other tools to do a ton of legal stuff to prep that before it gets to my attorney One of the guys that went through our class everybody who goes through our training we have a capstone project at the end.
Speaker 2:They build some sort of a tool that automates something in their job so that they get an instant ROI on the investment. In the course this guy built a patent analyzer. So he does about 20 patents a year in the space and paying $12,000 for software that did this. He replaced the software, cut his legal bills from about $3,500 a patent to $300 a patent. Now I wouldn't want to be the attorney that just lost essentially $60,000 a year in revenue to an AI tool.
Speaker 2:But we did the same thing with a couple of trademarks. We sent the application through a trademark attorney, but previously he would have charged us an arm and a leg to prepare all this stuff. I gave it to him prepped, so I saved a ton of money. So there's a lot of people who are going to be losing revenue. Now the question is what are the new jobs that come up? Everybody says, oh, there will be new jobs, but nobody seems to know what they are, because every time you think about it you're like no, they can build an automation that does that, they can build a robot that does that, so who knows where it's going to go?
Speaker 1:Well, a perfect example. You just said it. Why would you need me to consult on a franchise or consult how to be an entrepreneur? If you're proficient enough, you can create a business plan, you can create a marketing plan, you can create short-term goals, goals, mid-term goals, long-term goals. Yeah, and if something's not working, you just ask it to do. You know, let's, let's pivot and do something else. To me I I find that mind-blowing. Would I have loved that years ago as an entrepreneur? Yeah, because the number one thing that it does, john, is it saves time yeah, exactly, it compresses it, right you?
Speaker 1:know as an entrepreneur, you just threw. It was like the spaghetti.
Speaker 2:You know you throw it up throw it at the wall and hope it sticks what sticks.
Speaker 1:if it doesn't stick, let's, let's uh, you's boil some more noodles and repeat the process. And a lot of money, a lot of effort just wasted. So yeah, no, I'm not the old man on the lawn, get off my lawn. I see it as a tool, yeah, yeah. The thing is, though we you know people need to see it as a tool. It's not just something. Hey, let's create memes with it right right, let's create videos of sharks eating people.
Speaker 2:Yeah more cat videos right yeah, or or what.
Speaker 1:What would happen if a megalodon shark what was alive right now and what damage it does? And then the best is when people don't realize it's ai, even though it says it, and they flip out watching. Oh my gosh, I can't believe all the violence. It's like. No, it's computer generated, right, I know that's not how long john, how long does it take to to master or just to be proficient?
Speaker 2:How long?
Speaker 1:would it take? Like a guy like me, I don't know how to code, I just know how to turn on the computer Right, and you know that's my expertise.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, everything depends on what you're trying to do, you know. So it's kind of like you know, my tricycle analogy. It just depends on how fast you want to get into a motorcycle or a car, you know, you, you could take your time, figure it all out on your own and two, three years from now, you might be in the motorcycle stage. On the other hand, you could go and get the right training on the right focus and say look, I want to learn how to use AI because my field of expertise is HR. So I want to know how to execute AI in the field of HR. Well, if you know it that specifically, or you know it's about sales, well, that means that you don't have to go sit through a robotics course just to learn AI. You don't have to learn all this complicated garbage to do it. Which was kind of my pitch to LSU is I showed them my processes and my frameworks and they're like wow, that's, that's amazing. Would you want to teach our honors students? And I said well, I really think we would have a better impact on the workforce if we went straight to businesses to upskill their employees, because you know schools like LSU and MIT, and I could go on and on.
Speaker 2:They're teaching people how to build large language models. They're not teaching them how to use them. And they're not teaching them how to use them and you know 10 times, a hundred times, thousand times as many people are going to use them. They're not going to want to build one, but if you teach them the right way, they can become extremely proficient in two to six weeks. In two to six weeks, I can teach somebody how to use AI and outperform somebody that's been using it for two to six weeks. I can teach somebody how to use AI and outperform somebody that's been using it for two to three years, because you just need to know some basic principles, but you need to really focus on your skill set and your zone of genius and learn how to get it out of AI and how to use AI as a partner, not as an opponent. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:And you have to be focused.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to be thinking okay, look, I do all these jobs and some of them are repetitive and some of them take a long time. Could I use AI to do this faster? Yeah, Other times it's like. I'll give you a couple of examples. We use an AI note taker. All of our meetings are held over Zoom because we're all over the world right, and so we use these AI note takers in a Zoom meeting and they provide a transcript.
Speaker 2:I also have this handy little tool here. It's called a Plaudnote P-L-A-U-D. You can see this. It's about the size of a credit card, almost exactly the same dimensions as a credit card, only about twice as thick. That thing. You just push a little button. It'll record a conversation, digitize it, provide the transcript. I'll take that transcript now. Well, in Fathom, I probably have 500 meetings recorded in there, maybe more.
Speaker 2:I can search that entire database for a conversation with somebody that I had, you know, two years ago and refresh my memory really quickly. We had a meeting two weeks ago with a company that built an AI voice agent that will handle inbound calls and outbound calls. Just did an amazing job and we have another meeting with them next week and I was like man, I better remember what the heck we talked about. So all I did was I took that transcript and I tossed it into chat GPT and ask it a couple of questions and it spit it all out and told me exactly what this guy's product was, how it operated and how we could interface with them and how we could work together. So I mean that, you know, happened in about three minutes. It would have been on a conversation with a guy going okay, refresh my memory. What does it y'all do? That wouldn't have gone over well.
Speaker 1:Well, it wouldn't have gone over well, and it instantaneously builds rapport. Yeah, but not only that, it's like John knows me, he remembers, yeah, exactly, he cares.
Speaker 2:But it's also, you know, like. First of all, an AI note taker allows you to pay attention and have a conversation without taking notes and missing something. By the same token, it allows you to not be so consumed with OK, I got to retain all this, right, you can move on. And so now you're note-taking and your AI becomes like this second brain where you can quickly go back and recall it. But it'll give you some really interesting insights. Like, for instance, I built this thing called a custom GPT.
Speaker 2:That custom GPT has all of our product knowledge in it. It's got everything about our business. It's got our target audience in it. It's got our pricing mechanism in it. It's got our pricing mechanism in it. It's got everything in it. I take that transcript and analyze it with that GPT that knows all of our stuff and it'll quickly say here's what products and services line up with what this person needs and wants. These are their frustrations, here's how we can solve it, and it'll write a proposal instantly and it'll be 100% custom proposal, no boilerplate that you would typically have in an old proposal. It saves an insane amount of time.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the most valuable resource right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Well that's the most valuable resource right there. Yeah, exactly, Tedious task is what a time consuming task is. Now it's just mind blowing when you say you know LSU and yes, I'm biased, I'm an alum and my daughter is a freshman at LSU as well but to think that we're at the forefront and I've seen the growth that LSU has been doing for, I'd say, the past 15 years, Like 20, 20-something years ago I probably wouldn't have wanted my daughter. I would have been like, yeah, it's a great school, it's a party school, but it's actually.
Speaker 2:I mean, when it're doing some cool stuff yeah, they're doing amazing stuff there and it's.
Speaker 1:It's like sometimes I'm just envious of you know, my kids are now and I'm like, well, I didn't have all these toys and I didn't have all these amazing programs. Yeah, so now you, only now. Is it the Honors College that?
Speaker 2:So no, I didn't end up teaching the Honors College because I just didn't want to. And there was another fellow that already teaches prompt engineering. So when Roy Haggerty, the provost over there, came to see me, that was what he asked me to do is teach the honors students. And that's when I was like I think we should go after the workforce and go through continuing ed. And so we developed a program to go through continuing ed and then I showed him some other things as we were approaching a business that had 8,000 employees to help train their employees, and he brought in his main AI guy and we had lunch and he's like, ok, I want this to be mandatory for all the students. And so then I taught nine LSU professors our processes.
Speaker 2:Whether or not it actually is part of the curriculum, I don't know, because I'm not a professor and I don't really want to be. I'm the adjunct instructor. So I don't know whether I know that the guy that was teaching prompt engineering was supposed to create it into a one hour course. I know he did that. I don't know. I haven't seen the training. I'll put it that way. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but I still go through continuing ed and teach our stuff. In fact, I mentioned it in the book Everything I taught. I put in a book that I just put out there about a month ago and I even I need to go. That reminds me I got to go bring a copy over to Roy Haggerty. He's the provost. I got to go bring a copy over to him because I mentioned him in there. He's a great guy. He's the one that's pushing AI really hard at LSU and they're doing really, really cool stuff.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and one of the things that I forgot to mention in your bio. And this is what I love, because most consultants, most gurus, most anybody in personal business development. It says unlike most AI consultants, you don't even have to put the AI, you can just put most consultants. John's practical approach focuses on results Results helping companies generate $15 million that's music to anybody's ear and revenue in just two years through strategic AI implementation.
Speaker 2:That works across every department. Yeah, that's the idea, right? I mean, our training isn't like a lot of these where they just regurgitate the obvious. You know they want to tell you why AI is important and what you should do, but they don't teach you how, and that's what I do. I think you already know that it's important, so I'm not going to just bash you over the head with that. You already know that it's important, so I'm not going to just bash you over the head with that. But what I am going to do is teach you how to use it and how to execute. And how to execute need to. They need to operate inside of their existing workflows, but just use AI to accelerate that they can't.
Speaker 2:In other words, there's this, there's this saying that goes about all the time and it drives me crazy every time I hear it. You know you'll hear people on stage saying you will get replaced by AI, you'll get replaced by somebody that knows AI, and I just think that's a bunch of hooey, because, as an employer, I can tell you it's seven times more expensive for me to replace an employee than it is to just train them up. So, if I you know so, it takes about a year and a half to get an employee to really understand your culture and your processes and your systems, and that's expensive bringing them up to that speed. If they leave, you lose all that investment and you have to start all over again. So I would much rather take an employee that's been with me two, three, four years and put them through a two to six week course and now that that employee is infinitely more productive and I still maintain my culture and my human relationships.
Speaker 1:Well, culture is key, and especially with retention. Who wants to work for a company that looks like? You need a roster, a new roster printed out every other day because, it's a revolving door. Talk about money being wasted on having to consistently retrain new employees and all the money that you have to spill throat at like Indeed or Monster or however. These companies are looking for new employees.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, look, every generation is different in what they want out of an employer, in what they want out of an employer. Our generation really wanted an opportunity, wanted recognition, wanted some path to success. The newer generations really want their own lifestyle. So they're really more invested in their own personal life as they go through it than they are in the corporate culture and the corporate system. So AI actually allows both to occur. It allows somebody who wants to move up move up, but it allows that younger generation to kind of have the freedom of time because they can produce a whole lot more in a small amount of time. So you just have to see it in that context.
Speaker 2:Okay, what's the best use of AI for this employee and this employee and this employee? We're about to train a software company on. We're actually going to we're training a really large association in the nuclear regulatory field. About 100 of their employees were trained in the first 25 right now but that's broad right, because it's all over. But we're teaching another group just sales. So we're going to take our program and we're going to really customize it for them, for their 10 people, to really know how to execute AI at scale in sales, and most of those people are that younger generation and man. They really would love if they could finish their work in four hours and get paid for eight.
Speaker 1:Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that you know.
Speaker 2:Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that, especially if you think about it. If I can get ai to produce 12 hours worth of work in four hours, who who's not happy, right exactly?
Speaker 1:results all right and it's. It's funny because you know they. I mean, yeah, we're generation x, but you know, at the end of the day we checked out, we, we've been, we're not the passionate ones to go I'm a baby boner, you're, you're a toddler but? But both are we're, we can't relate. But that doesn't make them. You know they get pigeonholed, that you know they're lazy or they no they just want different things out of life yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, look at, at the end of the day, every generation has a mix of every type of personality. You know we have our group that just says look, I just want to go in work you know nine to five and go home. We have had employees on the younger side that you know. They want to punch in at 8.01 and leave at 4.59. Not a minute above or below, and that's fine. They get their stuff done. Then we have other people that want to be there at 6 in the morning and they'll leave at 6 at night, and they just grind because they love what they do. Hey, that's cool too. I just want somebody that will produce the work that we need, produced at a level of excellence that we expect. That's it.
Speaker 1:Now, john, what's the investment into AI, in AI? I'm not talking about your core. Is it like some astronomical amount, no man, or is it just based on what you?
Speaker 2:need. Yeah, there's several tools that are free Fathom, for instance, which is an AI note taker, it's free. They got a free version and a paid version. You have tools like ChatGPT. You got Gemini, you got Claude, Perplexity, Grok I mean I can name a bunch of these. These are large language models, or LLMs as they're referred to. You've heard of ChatGPT. Most people have, so you can get it for free, or you can pay $20 and get more features, or you can pay $200 and get even more features. Personally, for some reason it's probably because ChatGPT started it pretty much every tool wants $20 a month and I was meeting with an attorney yesterday and she's like should I pay the $20 a month? I was like you're an attorney, Are you kidding me? $20?
Speaker 1:That's even less than Netflix.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I mean, I was telling her. I was like, look, you trade hours for dollars as an attorney. If I could show you how to use a twenty dollar a month tool that would give you back eight hours of your time every single week, would it be worth 20 bucks? And she's like yeah. And then she's like well, how come you use all these tools? I use five, five different tools and I pay. You know we have team versions of most of them and those are $25 a month per user. So it's more money. But she's like why are you spending all this money? And I I said well, let me ask you this If you got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, would you want a second opinion?
Speaker 2:And she's like, yeah. I said what about a third opinion? She said, possibly. I'm like yeah, that's all these AI tools are. They all are good at something. They're not all good at everything. So if I'm writing code, I want to write that code in Claude. If I'm writing copy, I like Claude. But ChatGPT came out with a new version that really writes good copy. Now, if you know how to use style parameters and teach it how to write, it gets rid of all those stupid AI-isms that you were talking about firstly.
Speaker 2:Secondly, and I hope this email finds you well, you know all those garbage things, right, yeah, so Grok does a really interesting job in research. It also does a pretty good job with counting, counting words, like if you tell it, oh, write an 800-word blog post. Chatgpd could never figure that out. And then Gemini is getting to be really badass, especially with the deep research. So there's Gemini 2.5 with the deep search function in it. That's one where I was like, you know, I would love to know what's the total addressable market in AI training in the US, what is our potential to capture what percentage of the market? And I had it do that. I had all five models do that deep research. And Gemini came back first. I want to say it did it in 11 minutes and it just the most insane and in-depth analysis. You can imagine footnotes and everything. And I was checking all the resources and it nailed it. The other tools came in roughly the same. You know 12, 15 minutes.
Speaker 2:Chatgpt took two and a half hours to do that research, which was really interesting. Probably because they got more users than anybody else, I guess. I'm sure yeah, but it was. They all had a different take on it. I asked them the exact same thing, gave them the exact same prompt and what they came back with was different. So then what I took is I took all four of those things and each one was about a 20 to 30-page document. Okay, so it was a pretty hefty document. Imagine trying to write that when we were in school, you know it took me forever, yeah exactly the entire semester.
Speaker 2:Right, the entire semester. Um so so I wasn't really whining about the fact that it took two and a half hours, but but I know it was like a two and a half hour but sounds reasonable All I was doing was cooking and eating during that two and a half hours.
Speaker 2:So I didn't really care. But but my point is, I took all four of those and then I put them into a different AI tool called Notebook LM. I had Notebook LM analyze all four of them, figure out which ones had better points than others, merge them into a single document. That kind of took the best of all of them. That kind of took the best of all of them. And now I had this really detailed analysis of our market and our potential for growth throughout the United States. It was fascinating. But all of those I'm using paid versions in order to do that. But think about how much I did it all in the span of an hour and a half, because you know I did them all concurrently, right? So I'm literally launching each one in a different browser tab. Letting it go went on, made my lunch ate, it came back and ChatGPT was finally finished and then I had it done. I'm like I couldn't have paid a team of Filipinos to do that in that fast a time, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, they're too busy with the call centers right, right.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately they won't. That's another place that's getting ready to go out of business call centers for twenty dollars a month.
Speaker 1:A small business owner who owns a franchise, maybe two locations, whatnot he can literally with. Literally, with only a $20, $40 investment max, he can thrive with AI. He can have his own personal marketer, his own personal business plan guy, his own personal yeah his own personal finance guy, his own personal attorney.
Speaker 2:So I'll give you another example. I built a GPT that I call Bazooka In-House Counsel and it's a legal GPT that knows everything about our business. But it also knows our tax ID numbers, it knows our account numbers, it knows our DUNS number, our addresses, our shareholder makeup and all that stuff. So anytime somebody wants me to sign a legal document or I need to create a legal document, I just run it through that and it spits it all out. It'll analyze a document, it'll modify it, it'll insert the data that it needs to be inserted in there. It's phenomenal. So it saves me a ton of time and money in just about every case. I have one that I created that holds our employee handbook, and so our employees can go and say are we getting Good Friday off? And then it'll just spit back so they don't have to ask me, they don't have to ask anybody else. It just spits back an answer and it says you know, yeah, you get a half a day off, but you know, we also get Mardi Gras off, right?
Speaker 1:So anyway, but the good times roll yeah.
Speaker 2:If they want to know when's open enrollment start for health insurance benefits, It'll tell them all that. So there's so much that you can do and it's conversational, as opposed to this. You know this decision tree where you have to click down and click down and click down and click down in order to get an answer to something. You just go, you know hey, are we off this Friday? No, Okay, that's a whole lot better than clicking down into vacation schedule, into a holiday schedule, into something else you know.
Speaker 1:Now John bazookacom.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's where we find all the different courses that you offer. Yeah, correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's bazooka B-I-Z-Z-U-K-A dot com. We've been around for 26 plus years. We used we've been around for 26 plus years. We used to be in the web development space and the web design space, and we also grew into be a digital marketing agency. But I sold that off four years ago to go into the world, and in so doing, that's where I created all these frameworks and in so doing, that's where I created all these frameworks and that's what I teach through LSU's Continuing Ed and we teach direct as well. So you can find all that at bazookacom if you wanted to. You can also figure out how to get the book that way too.
Speaker 1:Well, we've been very quiet about the book. The book's not even mentioned in your bio.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I know what's the name of the book.
Speaker 2:So the book's called In-Grain AI and it's about ingraining an AI-first culture in your organization, from strategy all the way through execution. And so the book. With the book you could literally learn everything that we teach in our training, except for it doesn't quite go as deep, but you'll learn all the frameworks, you'll learn all the processes, you'll learn the one thing that we do differently is what we call scalable, prompt engineering. You'll learn how to do that. So you learn all that in the book.
Speaker 2:And a lot of businesses will read that book and go, wow, we need everybody to learn this stuff. But instead of it being kind of broad when we teach people, we have this thing we call the AI skills builder to where we teach everybody in the organization three foundational aspects where that way everybody understands AI the same way, they can speak the same language. But then they go into skill tracks based on their discipline. So we have 10 skill track, like one for HR, customer service, sales marketing, legal training. You know all that stuff. So we can go really deep with people there. But I always say look, you know, get the book. If you're a business owner, get the book so you really understand what AI can be in your organization and how to think of it as a partner and when you can think of it that way and think of it as a way to help you just find new ideas and new thoughts, as opposed to thinking of it as a fast typewriter. It's an amazing tool.
Speaker 1:Talk about an amazing tool Five years ago. I'll get you. There's this tool that'll help you retain employee retention, especially your top talent, helps create culture. With this implementation, you will amass, you will revenue. It increases your revenue. It can help decrease your expenses. It can help decrease your expenses. It can help write business plans. It can help market so you can be ahead of your competitor. I'd be like sign me up and I'd be like oh, this has got to be. Like you know, $ 100,000.
Speaker 2:Well, the contractors and the contracting relationships you can get rid of are amazing.
Speaker 2:You know, like if you have somebody on your team that understands marketing, then you can get rid of an agency, you can get rid of a stable of copywriters, you can get rid of graphic designers.
Speaker 2:You can get rid of all that.
Speaker 2:You can get rid of all that and you can do all that with AI. But you need somebody that can take what AI produces and either make sure they must have the vision to get AI to produce it well, but instead of you maybe hiring an outside agency to do a lot of this stuff, you can do a lot of it inside, but you might get an agency to, you know, look over it and clean it up, but you don't use them nearly as much. And and same with, like I said, with legal, you can cut back on your legal, their copywriting expenses, I mean, I could go on and on. And so it allows a performer who might, you know, have challenges, who might have issues, you know, whatever it might be, that is disruptive to their workflow. It allows that worker who potentially would be performing at a C level, it allows that worker to perform at an A level, and so that's why I say it'll help you keep employees, because that your loyal employees will become vastly more effective and efficient when they know how to do this.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And then just okay, it can help a small mom and pop, small franchise owner, whatnot? Also, when you said it helps out huge corporations and can cross over different departments and just be specific, it'll help the sales staff, it'll help the engineers, it'll help it narrow focus, because you know it's broader for, you know, a company that only has like 10 employees.
Speaker 2:there could be narrow focus for a company that has you know, 50, 60 more employees yeah, but it you know, if you only have 10 employees, two of those employees can take on the job of four people or five people by using AI. And that's the crazy thing. The biggest thing that I want people to understand is that you don't have a whole lot of time to figure this out because your competitors are going to figure it out. And if I can take an employee and I can take a task like we've done it multiple times in our training where somebody would take a three-week process and reduce it to about three to five hours, think about what that does over and over and over again in an organization hours. Think about what that does over and over and over again in an organization.
Speaker 2:If we do that with one company, that one company now can compete really well against some pretty larger, large competitors who don't have that capacity yet. Eventually they will the. To me, the one, the, the company that learns to get everybody in the organization thinking ai first, the fastest, is the one that wins. They're going to have the ability to leapfrog their competitors and and create traction that uh, others will will end up collapsing under, and that's, that's the important thing that the faster you get there, the better, you don't want to be the last in this race. You know you don't want to be the last farmer to to to get a tractor when everybody else was using horses, you know to draw.
Speaker 1:You don't want to be in the horse drawn carriage while everybody's passing buying cars.
Speaker 2:Pretty much, pretty much, you know know so.
Speaker 1:So how often are these courses?
Speaker 2:so they, uh, they're, it's, it's kind of um, open enrollment the ones that we offer and, um, if it's for a corporation we'll do, uh, cohort based stuff, um. But if you as an individual wanted to go through, you literally could sign up. And the one that most people go through is AI Mastery for Business Leaders. But we have for sales, we have it for marketing, hr, et cetera, and you can sign up online or you can just have a call with me or one of our other associates and we can walk you through what that looks like and what you can expect out of it. But there's no way we haven't had anybody yet that hasn't gotten an ROI in the first week, because that's the goal of the whole course. You have to come inside of the first week or two. We want you to identify a process that you're going to automate with AI and then we're going to coach you through that whole thing and then, when you're finished, you'll have reduced some process by 80-90%, and that process usually is something that you do every week, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, when you have a goal in mind, lo and behold, you know, instead of just going blindly and saying, and John, well, this is what I want to do. I don't know. I just heard it's a great tool. I just heard it's a great tool and it would be great for my company. Sign me up. So are these like modules, like recorded modules, or is this through Zoom?
Speaker 2:It's both All right. So we call it a hybrid approach. So they're recorded modules. That's what allows you to go at it in real time, but every twice a week. We're probably going to ratchet it up to three times. Eventually we'll go to five times a week, but twice a week. We're probably going to ratchet it up to three times. Eventually we'll go to five times a week, but twice a week. Right now we have what we call office hours, so we have it at 5 pm on Central Time, 5 pm on Tuesdays, and that's usually when the people from Australia and other parts of the world attend. And then we have 10 am on Fridays where we usually have the US and England and such attend those sessions. So you basically go through some training, you have some questions, you show up at office hours and we'll help you work through those things and help you build that GPT.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:John, here's a question to you. It's a good one, it's a lot of fun. John, here's. Here's a question to you. It's a good one. It's my final question to you, all right, what would you have to tell me? I'm checked out, john. I'm an old timer going to business for 30 plus years. Man, I'm a dinosaur, nothing. Why am I going to need to learn chat, gpt or ai or whatever you? You know, I've watched the Terminator movies, I've heard you know about Cyberdyne and you know what. I'm still profitable. What's the point?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, what do you tell that?
Speaker 1:person.
Speaker 2:I tell that person how long do you want to remain profitable? You know, are you planning on selling the business? Are you planning on selling out to the business? In other words, your business won't last very long if you don't learn how to use AI in the business. But if you're at an age where you be your retirement because you're going to sell it to somebody, you need to figure this out and you need to get everybody in your employ to figure it out, because everything is going to change for you when that happens and it's not hard, I mean, this is not I hate to use the phrase, it's not rocket science, but it really isn't. It is really just a paradigm shift in how you operate and how you think. And when you see what it can do and how rapidly you can do it, then the light bulbs turn back on and you go oh wow, I see now, and as a business owner, you wouldn't have gotten into the position of being a business owner if you didn't have ideas on how you could address a market.
Speaker 2:Typically, most business owners start a business because they had a problem that was bugging them and they said you know what, if I can solve it for me, I can solve it for others, and so then they build a business. So they have the ideas for others, and so then they build a business. So they have the ideas, and once you start playing around with AI, new ideas start coming to you and you'll be surprised how energized you actually become by using these tools. It's not exhausting. It literally is invigorating. It's a hell of a lot of fun when you see what it'll do.
Speaker 1:Amen, john. Thank you for your time. People go visit John Munsell's website bizukacom, b-i-z-z-u-k-acom. Buy the book, take the course, become profitable, make more money and you know what John's from where Stately Oaks and Broad, magnolia, shade, inspiring Halls, the school, the flagship school, louisiana.
Speaker 2:There you go. Go Tigers. Hey Omar, look man, thanks for having me on, it was a blast. Go Tigers, hope your daughter does well.
Speaker 1:I learned a lot, thank you.
Speaker 2:Good deal. Yeah, where are you living now? Are you living in Baton Rouge, or are you living in?
Speaker 1:No, no, I wish I stayed a year after I graduated Miami. Oh, okay, I'm from South Florida.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Okay. Yeah, I spent 15 years in Tampa before we moved back um back in 2003. And now I live in Lafayette, the heart of Cajun country.
Speaker 1:Listen to that negative voice no more. The hardest prison to escape is our own mind. I was trapped inside that prison all for a long time. To make it happen, you gotta take action. Just imagine what if it did work.