#42 - The Rise of Transhuman Business: AI Without the Bull

Artificial intelligence is moving fast. Faster than most businesses are ready for.

In this episode of Over the Bull, Ken Carroll digs into what it really means to operate in a transhuman business world—where AI tools and human judgment now overlap. Sparked by a frustrating spam-style outreach email, this conversation cuts through the noise around automation, “AI marketing,” and shortcut tactics that erode trust instead of building it.

We talk about:
•The right vs. wrong ways to use AI in sales and marketing
•Why EEAT principles (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) matter more than ever
•How automation can support human connection—not replace it
•The growing gap between tools that scale work and practices that destroy credibility
•What ethical, transparent AI use should actually look like for small businesses

AI isn’t the problem. How we use it is.

If you’re tired of spam, faceless automation, and marketing that feels disconnected from reality, this episode is about choosing a better path—one where technology enhances humanity instead of stripping it away.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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The transhumanization of the internet on this episode of Over the Bull. I want to talk to you this week about the puzzle pieces that we're presented with and have been presented with since 2025, early on. And then what I want to do is I'll you know what? Before we get going on that, I've just got a vent. You know, one thing I've always said is if you get a cold email asking you if you want anything, delete it. Because that shows you what that company is just by virtue of sending you a cold email. It shows you that they're they're trying every scammy way to get a hold of you, take a little bit of your time. And as we've discussed historically, if you spend 10 minutes on 10 pieces of spam, you've lost a lot of time wasting. Now, if you click on them and start going through it and schedule meetings and all that, you've probably lost half a day that you could use in your business. So I'm very sensitive to this. And as such, I also look for things to use on the podcast. And a lot of times I use these spammy uh emails as content to kind of warn you as to things going on. But this week there was something that happened that just absolutely burned me. And I don't know why. I think maybe I'm just getting to a point where I'm tired of all the scammy stuff that goes on in the world. Like, I know you know what I'm talking about. It's like, you know, you pay for insurance, and when you need to use it, then all of a sudden everything becomes a hassle. The people that claim they're your friends and you're when you're paying them, all is fine and good. But when you need them, they disappear. They create roadblocks, they slow things down, they don't fulfill what they're supposed to do, at least in the way that it should be done ethically and honestly. And I know you know what I'm talking about. These are subscriptions across the board. Some of them were required to carry, some of them were not. You know what I'm talking about. And I think that this just hit me at the wrong time. So what happened was, and I'll give you the uh the scam of the week, uh, this person, uh, first name Nigel, uh, shared a Loom with me, and so it came from Loom's website. So you can't block it because otherwise you're blocking everything from Loom. So you see what he's doing here, he's bypassing uh any standard or any practice or any assemblance of uh of doing things ethically, and he's bypassing it and using spam uh spammy techniques through Loom to get out to people. So I should tell you the quality of this person right out of the gate. But of course, I'm morbidly curious, and I run over the bull, so I thought let's take a look. So I'm already kind of steaming by the time I get there, and I click on it, and his face is in the bottom right hand uh corner of the page. I assume it's him, I don't know. I didn't bother turning the volume up, but then it showed our trademark graphics and it showed him rambling and rambling. And by then I'm like, I just want to know what his website is. I just want to know where it's at. So I uh fast forwarded past it, and I'm just looking for the uh URL, and I'm not bothering with the audio. The way I go is if it's in the audio, I'm I'm not even gonna mess with it. And at the very end of the video, it shoots me over to a calendarly invite, and it's the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my life. He's sending me some spammy email. He's using Loom to send me a spammy email, and the invite at the end says, This is exclusively for agencies that spent that you know uh have at least$5,000 a month in revenue or something, just ridiculous stuff. And anyway, so I saw that on the uh the text, and at the end it was like a calendarly invite, and the calendarly invite did not show his business either. So then I'm like, who is desperate enough to engage with this individual? Is it possible that there are businesses out there that look at that, listen to his sales pitch through spamming loom and actually engage with this person? My goodness, I hope that does not happen. So luckily, Loom does have a way where you can report people like that, and it's through abhorrent at uh I think loom.com. So basically I reported him with the URL. I didn't engage, I didn't say anything negative to him directly, although I was tempted. But what I did do was I reported him along with what had happened because that's not fair to Loom. So let's look at what could have happened if you didn't look at all the bases. Number one, you could have blocked Loom. Now, what would that have done for other people who are sending you legitimate Loom videos? Um, that would have hurt you. So if they spam through your forms on your website and you block it that way, then you block those forms. You don't block the bad guy. And so that's the first thing that he did. The second thing is he never announced his businesses, and there are best practices when you do reach out to people, but you have to be transparent as to who you are. This individual did none of that. And so the point is that you want to be careful, not just with who you engage with in terms of like new services and new whatever, because let's face it, everything that we get into from whatever subscriptions to anything, everybody wants to sell us subscriptions and no one wants to follow through. They just want to make that money every month, get you signed up, and hope you forget about it. Let's be honest, that's what a lot of the world is today. And let's be honest, this guy here is a contributing factor to the problem, not the solution. And so as we as we move forward in looking at exactly where we should where we should go, you also want to be careful about who you choose to help market your business. Because if you're using someone, and I'm gonna tell you something, it's it's the majority of these agencies. The majority, the majority of these agencies are drunk on creating AI content. They are drunk on it. And I mean they are using it in the most malicious, crazy ways I have ever seen in my life. Now, AI is beneficial, but here's the thing: the reason I titled this podcast, the uh transhumanization of the internet, is because there is a right way to do it, but you have to introduce the best of what AI has, but you've got to humanize it. I mean, think about this. You don't want to engage with AI. I know when I go to a website, if I'm pushed to a uh forum on a website or I'm having to engage with an artificial intelligence when I want to talk to a real person, I feel like I'm not of any value to that company. And so if you could imagine, if you would have hired this guy or someone like it, which again is the majority of agencies today, they're going to use these same techniques to promote your business. So, what does that say to people about your business if these same people are going to use these same tactics to do that? It's going to hurt your business. It's not going to help your business. And recovering from your reputation is going to be very difficult. Um, we have a great new client that we signed up, and just going through what another agency out of Atlanta was doing with this group blew my mind. Well, not blow my mind. I'm kind of expecting it now, to be honest with you. Um when you look at it, they were they were supposedly in quotes doing SEO. And when they're doing SEO, and I know you know what I'm talking about, they were building uh links to their website that had zero quality to them. So you know what they were doing. They're charging a premium and they're outsourcing the SEO work to people that are less than reputable and they don't even know how to gauge the quality of the work that's being done. Guys, this is the reality. If you have a business on the web today, this is the reality. And if you don't stay on your game with the way that this is evolving, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. But here's the thing there are great things that can be done with artificial intelligence to help your business. We use it every single day. But it's kind of like that quote from the uh, I forget the uh superhero movie, with great power comes great responsibility. And in order to properly use artificial intelligence, you can't use it in a shortcut fashion. These agencies are doing everything they can to make it look like they are doing a ton of work, and in reality they're not. They're creating blog articles using artificial intelligence. And these blog articles are posting on, you know, every other day or every week or whatever, taking 15 or 20 minutes, throwing them up on a website, adding a little bit of meta information, and you know what that's doing? Devaluing the client's websites. Now I know this personally because now I've got data. I've got data to show that when you create spammy blog articles and spammy content and you throw it on your website, the algorithms are picking up on it and they are devaluing these websites. I've seen it because as we do reviews and we see where a client was versus where they are, we actually I'll tell you how bad it is. Uh we have one client, and there was a local agency that was creating the spammy bloggy content and putting it on their website. And as we're reworking everything, we went through and just turned off all those pages and did redirects. So we just basically got rid, dumped a bunch of content. Okay, we didn't create more, we just dumped it and redirected it. That's all we did. Did you know that their domain rating increased by getting rid of that junk? You see, you can't shortcut it, but what the agencies are doing is they're using AI to make it look like they're doing so much more than what they're doing. And this cheating, this undercutting, this thing that they're doing with all these goofy tools that are uh supposedly going to save the day with uh artificial intelligence, it's not there. Okay, it's just simply not there. You know why? Because humans want human content. They want real content, they don't want bladder that's been optimized for search engines. The search engines now know that, and they've been correcting ever since because that destroys their product. So if you're getting a bunch of articles and you're not contributing your input into those articles, you're not giving direction. Those are AI articles. And if you have an electrical business or a plumbing business or whatever kind of business, and you're letting a marketing person create that content and they don't fully understand your business and you're not reviewing it, that's AI garbage. You hear me? AI garbage. I'm not even going to call it uh like even an effort. It's just not an effort. Uh so in 2026, in order for us to kind of, you know, make sure that we're not playing the game of being marketing magicians, you know, one thing I I referred to in the last two podcasts is it's almost like we are we're living in a modern day mythology, you know, where the internet is this mythical beast. Every, every seems like every uh you know generation has their mythologies. And just like uh at one point they believed in these Roman and Greek gods, now there is this whole other thing where we have this mythos that somehow the the AI thing is this sentient being and that AI knows everything, and that you can harness the power of AI if you're the a good enough magician or or a priest or whatever. And then you can harness AI and then bring business. And businesses believe this is how it works. They believe website plus ad budget equals phone calls. They think it's that easy. It's not that easy. There's a lot of work that goes into it. That's the myth that you're buying into. So you need to understand that. You need to inoculate yourself to that because whenever you hear AI, greatest tool, this is going to change everything. It doesn't. Okay, so we're getting ready to launch a new product on our end, and it's really interesting because these guys are on the cutting edge of some really interesting AI stuff that we're incorporating into our system. And as we talk behind the scenes with the ethical guys, and you got to qualify to find out if they're ethical or unethical, it's not a matter of do they say the right words. Um, but what you find out as you work with the ethical people is they go, hey, look, AI by itself is not it. AI is a tool. It's got to be used in a proper way. Just like using a hammer to fix a window is probably not a very good idea. The people who know know. Now, of course, there are trends. Of course, we have guys like Elon Musk who are out there talking about the end of you know apps. I heard that the other day through a third party that he's saying that uh everything's gonna be unified under um AI models and all that, and you'll build these little add-ons and plugins to be a one source for uh for everyone, which I don't know what that's gonna look like. And frankly, no one does. It's just an interesting thought experiment at the as of now. Now uh things are changing so fast in three months there may not be any more. Uh, but here's what you do. You actually, if you're in business, you got to hedge your bet. Because just like you're looking at Chat GPT's uh browser, you've got you know the Titans, uh Google, you've got uh all these guys that are out there as well. And then you've got these competing AI models. And yes, Google's got theirs too. I realize that. And what you're seeing is a war going on. You're not seeing a a group of people trying to make a unified experiment. You see them uh competing and fighting it. So this is what business is. You're you're in competition with other kingdoms, essentially, and you're seeing the war. You're not seeing the unification, you're seeing strategic um uh kind of market share gains and things like that. And things like ChatGPT are doing a great job, uh, just like Walmart did a great job overcoming Kmart. Now, I'm not saying they're going to do it, I'm just saying it's an interesting observation. So, what do I mean? So let's dive into this real quick. What do I mean by creating a transhuman environment for your business? As we're working through, what we found out is we we've we've changed everything with our business from the ground up because of artificial intelligence. It doesn't mean we go put a bunch of blather on people's websites or with AI or overthink AI. What we do is we try to harness those tools and we inject human intelligence into those tools. Now, human intelligence doesn't mean I'm a human, create me an article about fixing a faucet and let me put it on a blog. Um, that that's not that kind of human intelligence. The the perfect mixture when you're trying to create a business, and now get me on this. The reason this is not sold to you is because it's hard. It requires constant research, and it requires engaging you as the owner of a business. That equals time. AI equals creating a bunch of junk, throwing it on a website, telling you they did a lot, having a lot less overtime or overhead. That that's what that is. Okay, let's be real. Let's not let's not dance around. That's what's going on here. Now, what really works is when you take someone who knows what they're talking about with creative and strategy and uh consultation and all this stuff, and they know how to implement it across the web, but you have to engage to make sure that your business is being represented appropriately on the web. Your intelligence about your business is a key ingredient. You can't bypass it, you can't offshore that, you can't send it to someone who specializes in your business, like plumbing websites, and then let them create content on your behalf and you just chuck it up on the website. Not how it works. It's got to be human-based content, human-engaged content is uh uh, in other words, human-touched. Now, touch makes you think you barely touch it, and that's really not accurate. You really want to take the best of AI, let it do strategically and analytically what needs to be in a blog article, for example, the length of it, the number of times words are used, what the competitive articles look like, is it in your area? Uh, just all the factors that go into a blog article that are technical, that would take forever to come up with. And then you take that and then you blend in what you have with that information, and then you create a hybrid, a hybrid, a transhuman version of that blog article. So you use it for the technical homework, but you don't use it for the other stuff. Okay, so to show you how um in tune people are getting with it, I'll I'll tell you how in tuned I am. I had someone send me an email earlier this week and I knew it was from ChatGPT. It was obvious. I even I even joked back with this person. They're they're a really cool person, but uh, I joke back and said, Did you just Chat GPT me? Back back in the 80s, we'd call that uh you know disrespecting or dissing. It was uh I never used that word. I don't, I'm not cool enough to use words like that, but uh that's what we would call things like that. So as we're working through what we did, we we decided to take clients to the next level and say we need more engagement, not less engagement. And we need to be strategic about the AI tools that we use, and we need to make sure that the content that we're posting is original. We need to make sure that it's good content and that it helps a customer considering the uniqueness of a business. So get this I'm in markets, and you would think it's the exact same thing you replicate in different geographics. Areas like certain trades. And I'm gonna tell you something it varies from town to town, city to city, zip code to zip code, that's how different it is. And I mean, you would think these businesses could not be easier to market. Not true. So if you think just by hiring a company that specializes in whatever business you have is going to overcome that goal, and that's going to be their sales pitch in that, you're missing the mark. You've got to be involved, or you've got to have somebody in your business that understands it, that is involved, that looks at it, refines it, submits it back, and makes sure that it is fitting the tone and all the other things that make your business unique. So here's the take-home today. Have you, or when you're working with your marketing agency, are they involving you in content? Do you just see blog articles popping up on your website? Have they engaged you enough to where they thoroughly understand your business and they're competent enough to do that? I mean, if you've not engaged them, that's like just walking into a department store finding somebody who specializes in department stores and asking them to write about your business. You're you're not doing anything any different when you're letting the marketing people run rampant and just creating junk on your behalf. If you don't understand how they're marketing your business, you may be in more danger than you realize. Your business may be marketed through cold emails. And they may have given you a pitch to make you think that's the greatest thing on the planet. Credibility is huge. Being a credible business is very important. And by you sending out cold spammy emails, even if you're getting a which you're not going to get big return, let's say you get something back, the damage that you've done to your branding far exceeds anything. You see, you want to be reputable and credible. That's the currency of the internet. And if you have the attitude of just getting the phone ring or getting forms filled out and you go job done, boy, are you going to be upside down. There are so many businesses right now who are still dependent on paying people to run Google Ads, building low-ranking, cheap web pages that have no authority or even tied to their business. They put those in the Google Business profiles, they send Google Ads to it, they create confusion. And you know what? That's hurting the business, but the business is sticking with it because it's always worked. So they have faith that this is going to continue to work. They have no idea of the undercurrent. They have no idea that that is hurting their potential to fully embrace what they're spending to gain traction with artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, to gain momentum on uh even organic traffic, gain momentum on their Google business. I mean, I don't know if you've done any homework on this, but if you care about your Google business profile, which you should, and you've got a lot more activity than the next guy, and you're wondering why you're not performing as well, it's because these little cheats are hurting you. It's not because of the other person has some magic. The cheats are hurting your business. But you see, they're going to keep going that way. So what I love about it is our models built around real work, real engagement, real everything. And we're winning. Now, we do have to continually inoculate our clients, especially new ones, about what they think the internet was, but we're winning. And it's because we're doing the real work. And so are you working with someone who's using the best practices? Do you know how they're marketing your business? How does their effort tie into the bigger picture and support AI citations? Have they talked to you about this? Or are they just running you Google Ads and telling you how many phone calls you got last month? Because it feels good today, but tomorrow it's not going to be that great. You see, the reason we change is because we know that everything is tied together now. We know that we need not only the best of what the business knows and be able to tie that into content and involve the client into it, which takes a lot of time. Then we have to understand the tools and the best tools to use and disqualify the bad tools and not do practices like our friend Nigel was doing. Uh, when I say friend, I mean sarcastic. Um, we want to make sure that we're we're doing all that, picking the right tools and building the right systems, and that wins. Okay. So get a feel for this. If you're not seeing this, when you're working with your marketing person, if you don't think that this is going on, if you're getting hit with big words, if you're getting hit with um, like for example, I'm still blown away by two months ago, we had someone coming here and they said that they were spending twelve hundred dollars a month for SEO. And I asked, well, what is SEO? Because that is a loaded term now. That is just like a goofy, nebulous term unless it's been uh qualified. And it's used in a lot of strange ways. He didn't know. He's spending$1,200 a month, and I went back and did homework and I showed him, I said, just cancel it. If you never come back to us, just cancel it. Now here's the weird thing. I've not heard back from the guy since, but I'm glad I told him the truth, because the truth is at least going to save the guy$1,200 a month. You see, this is what the agencies are doing. This is what they're doing. They're looking at it as getting you signing up for a subscription and doing nothing, or doing very little, or using AI to automate it, are fooling you just long enough to make a paycheck for six months or 12 months or whatever may have you. We have over a 95% customer retention rate because we don't play the games. I'd rather invest in the people that have invested in us rather than play the cheap games. These are the kind of marketing agencies you need to work with. So check them out. Ask a lot of questions. Don't be afraid of the big words that they use, and make sure that you're engaged in it. And if you're not and they're not willing to do that, and they're not willing to do the hard work, you need to find someone else yesterday. Not tomorrow, not next month, not when things slow down. You need to start now because your competitors are learning and they're going to find the ones and the ones who are going to embrace best practices. And by the way, everything I've told you is fully documented that this is the best practice. Everything. Just go to the internet and look up the acronym E E A T. Look at what that is and look at how that impacts. This is not a mythology. This is not trying to sell something. It's the old adage that the more work you do, the real work you do, the more you're going to stand out and the more you're going to grow, and the more everybody else uses spammy AI completely generated content, the more they're all going to blend together and the more you stand out. Remember, these search engines are not out there for no reason. Their product is to show the best results at the top. And who's going to be more reputable? Someone who's actually contributing to the content and making something unique, or someone who's just spitting out an article about how to fix a sink and then sticking up on the internet. Okay, guys, I know it's a little bit tough, but uh I was passionate about it. And you know what? If um you know, if uh it was a little bit hard today, we can we can thank our uh our little spammy guy at uh Loom who sent me the video uh last night because it inspired me to warn you and let you know exactly how bad things are. So I guess in the end, just think about how you'd want to be treated if you were engaging with your business. Would you want to be chucked over to some AI system, some forum, some cheap scammy thing that doesn't really work? Or would you want a legitimate engagement where you can really learn something? Come on, guys. Your time is valuable. You want to give people what they want, you want to serve it up in the quickest way possible to respect their time, effort, and energy. You want to give them easy ways to engage to learn more about your business. You want to give them easy ways to make purchases, and you want to make sure that you stand out among your competitors. This is old, been around forever. This has been around forever, and it's still just as relevant. The core concepts are the same. The tools have changed. What people are trying to convince you of is that somehow human nature, just with the advent of AI, has changed. No, it hasn't. I mean, when you look at health, I'm I'll by the way, I'm doing this really cool one-year, I'm I I do all these weird things. And one of them is I'm trying to look at the uh the human code and and just how we're doing things. I'm doing this big health journey uh going through it. And and what I'm figuring out is that, you know, when we started introducing, this is way off from all way off, but I think I can tie it back together, is if you look at the last hundred years and of what we've been putting in our systems versus what humans ate prior to the last hundred years. And then you look at the amount of effort that's put in to get you addicted to foods by making them salty and sweet. And then you look at the idea that when your body can't handle the salty, sweet, high carbohydrate junk we eat today, uh, you know, your macaroni and cheese boxes, the cheap food and all that other stuff that really has no nutritional value at all. And then we read crazy statistics like by 2050, one out of three people are probably going to be type two diabetics. Human bodies did not change. The food that's being consumed and that we're getting addicted to, drinking calories, that's what's changed. The human body's the same. And most people who would eat right and do those right things could completely reverse those things. That's just a fact. I mean, I've reversed a lot of things that I was told frankly that I couldn't. And it's just because of reading and understanding and doing things. And so that's what my book is about. So I it's it's a I'm on a uh a hiatus from it because of uh an injury that I've uh I can't go into right now. Uh but anyway, when it comes back to the human psychology and the way people purchase and engage and work, that's not changed. The human the human experience has not changed. The human experience is the same. What people expect is the same. What it now, of course, they've gotten a little more impatient. They've gotten a little bit more uh where they're just oversaturated with stimulation. Oh yeah, that's true. But it's not changed the core of the person. And if you forget that people on a core level want the same things and it's just the tools that have changed, then your business is going to miss the mark. Your business is not going to be successful as the guys who are putting real effort into it. And so, yeah, I can actually see times where the guy who's going through and building some crappy website, but it's all original content, and then you got another one who's using AI and thinking that they're going to replicate content is uh the the lower end site's going to outperform the big site. Now, that's a little bit hyperbole, but because that that website's not going to compete against legitimate ones, but but get the point, that one would be better than the crap site. So um, and yeah, oh uh okay, so now I am rambling, but you know, this is uh I get one ramble a year. How's that? And this podcast is a little bit of a ramble. I can tell you that there is a a large private equity group that we do not do business with, and I can tell you that I heard them talk last year about using AI systems to replicate their business model in every major city and create unique content strictly using artificial intelligence and optimizing it using AI. And uh asked a couple questions, watched them right off into the sunset, thinking they were holding like some uh some way to convert uh lead to gold, and I know that it's gonna blow up in their face. So it's not just the small guys that are making the mistakes, the big guys are making the mistakes. And by just finding someone to work with that follows best practices and engage you, you're going to come out on top. Okay, that's my rant. I'm sorry for rambling. Thank you so much for tuning in to Over the Bull this week. I really um appreciate you and I'm grateful for you tuning in. Please share. Is that what I'm supposed to say? Share it. Uh what's what's all that stuff they tell you on uh YouTube and other places? Anyway, if you find someone that you think this would help out, forward along, see what they can get out of it. Until next time, I'm Ken Carroll with Over the Bull.

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