2158 - Mastering AI Literacy Essential Skills for the Modern Workforce with Bizzuka's John Munsell

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1:05With us right now, it's John Munsell. John, you are the founder of Bazooka, found on the web at B-I-Z-Z-U-K-A dot com, lest anyone misspell that. John, it's great to have you. Hey, Josh, it's great to be here. Appreciate it. Well, yeah, you know, I'm really excited to talk about because obviously you do a lot of work in training around AI, which I am a huge proponent of. It is mandatory. It is not an option today, certainly as of when we're recording this. But John, before we get into that, I'd love to know what you do for fun. If you're if you have any hobbies that you're passionate about or maybe anything you've been watching or listening to that you really enjoy.

1:45Yes. You know, my passion, strangely enough, is barbecue. I freaking love the barbecue. Now, here I am in the heart of Cajun country. But man, I live to barbecue. In fact, this weekend, my daughter who I got I got four kids. one of my daughters lives in Austin. Every year for Mardi Gras, we ride in a parade here. They have a huge Mardi Gras thing going on in Lafayette. But she brings about 15 or 20 of her friends, and we have this thing called Porkpalooza, where I barbecue pulled pork, ribs, sausage, boudin, what? Pork belly burn-ins. It was just a massive amount of food. It's such a blast. But yeah, I'm addicted to barbecue.

2:28That's my hobby. I wish I could say it was something athletic like golf, but no, I just like to eat. No, you and me both, my friend. I think we heard the collective grumble of everyone's tummies out there as you're listening off all those things. If you could share one tip, one hack that you're like, you know what? This is a tip I don't think gets talked about enough when it relates to anything barbecue related. What comes to mind? Oh, man. uh you know i wish i could tell you but see i use an offset smoker so i use wood yeah to cook with so i don't use a grill i don't use an egg it's a it's got a big old firebox over here the the biggest tip i could tell you is is get um thick steel for your pit and manage the the fire you know the the temperature control is the absolute key because you can let it spike and you know go while.

3:23But if you're cooking something like pork, you can let it fluctuate. But if you're cooking brisket, you got to hold that temp. And that's why a lot of people get these pellet smokers, because, you know, you set it and forget it and literally go to sleep. But if you're trying to manage a big old box like mine, you got to watch the fire management. But man, it makes such good flavored food. I bet. And, you know, with that thicker steel, that's going to just make sure that you've got that consistency that you're not, you know, have the up and down on the temperature and all that stuff. It's, you know, not hot spots, you know, that thick steel.

3:57Use less wood. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, right. You know, we just, it's kind of funny. We just saw, gosh, Good Eats, you know, that guy. Oh, yeah. Alton Brown. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I'm so embarrassed. But he just did a demonstration where he cooked a giant omelet on a one and a half or two inch thick steel. and he showed with a, with, uh, you know, thermo imaging, just how, what a huge difference thickness makes. And it was just solid one single color. I mean, it was just the exact temperature, no matter where you put it, you put the eggs on it, didn't budge a bit. Right. And it's just like, it didn't have to compete with that food.

4:43So no, I love this. Thank you so much. You have inspired me. I've, you know, since COVID, you know, cooking for me is just been, I've been getting into like baking now, making my own sourdough, my own sourdough starter. So I love geeking out on food, but this is not a food podcast. John, we're here to talk business. So let's talk about what you do with Bazooka. Sure. Well, I mean, you know, fast, fast backward and forward. We started off as a software company in 97 down there in Tampa. And we gradually grew into a digital marketing agency after building websites and web applications for people.

5:17And then three years ago, I sold off that part of the company to focus on AI and to help businesses understand how to use it more effectively and at scale, because most people are just using it, but they don't quite know how to use it at scale. And so that's what we've developed is from some frameworks and some training to teach businesses how to really ramp up and use it effectively across the board. Yeah. All right. So I am such a huge fan and you and I kind of talked before we started recording with our company. It is a requirement that every employee be working toward AI literacy at all times.

5:56So what I mean by that is they need to be able to know what the tools are. They need to know basic prompt engineering. They need to understand that natural language programming is a programming language. Just because we're using regular words doesn't mean that you can just type in anything and expect the perfect results every time. Can you talk maybe just a little bit about that concept of, you know, yeah, listen, you may be using ChatGPT, might be using Google's thing or whatever, Microsoft Copilot, whatever they're doing. Can you talk a little bit more about the art and science of engaging with AI tools?

6:36Sure. Yeah. So, so let's, let's take it from the bottom, which is co-pilot. Okay. No, no disrespect. No, no, no. Fairly placed. I've just, I've just. Really the bottom is Siri, but then we can move up to co-pilot. Oh, my God, truly. As much as I love Apple, come on, guys, you're killing me. Hey, me too. Everything I got is Apple. But look, so Copilot basically is what I would call push-button AI. It is AI, but behind every prompt you make is their own set of prompts that basically puts guardrails on what you can do. It's when you get into the chat GPTs, the Groks, the Geminis, et cetera, that you have the guardrails taken off.

7:23And you can do a lot more. But what that means is you have to know how to use the words the right way. And the more, this is what we teach a process called scalable prompt engineering. I know that sounds like a mouthful and it might sound intimidating, but it's really not. What it means is if you do the traditional, what we would call word salad or word vomit prompts, where you're just writing massive amounts of paragraphs. Somebody can't come in behind you and look at that prompt and tell you where you're off the rails, or they can't come in behind you and say, oh, if I modify that prompt, I can use it for this over here.

8:05They can't do that. But when you use scalable prompt engineering, you're now breaking apart what you just talked about as natural language processing. So you're recognizing that the promise of NLP isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Because the more words you put in, then they're more likely you're going to have collision or what we call prompt conflict. So like, for instance, if you, you know, typically people say, oh, give the AI a role, right? So you say, you are such and such, you know, chemical engineer. All right. Embedded in those words, all LLMs have an understanding of how a chemical engineer would think, how a chemical engineer would write, et cetera, all right, just in that little inference.

8:53And then if you say, I want to write an email versus I want to write a press release, those words will also have a big influence on how it writes. And people don't understand that the more they give AI in terms of a prompt, the more likely you're going to have that prompt conflict where you've got a chemical engineer and you tell it to write an email with a little bit of humor. Well, a chemical engineer in the AI's mind might not have a whole lot of humor. So it may conflict. Like we had somebody in our group who, what we do is we teach people our methodology, right? As a capstone project at the end of our training, they have to produce a custom GPT or a clawed project or a Gemini gem that solves a business problem for them, right?

9:49So that's how they graduate. This gal created a chatbot for the ophthalmology clinic that she was in, and she used it to teach the new employees how to sell ophthalmology services. Well, in that chatbot, it started to talk like a pirate. and so she came to our group and she's like hey john i need your help i can't get my chat bot to stop talking like a pirate and i'm like like a legit pirate and she's like yeah it's like going ahoy matey and all this stuff and i'm like you've got to be kidding so i had her pull up the prompt and we looked at it and it said you're a helpful assistant all skilled in in ophthalmology but i I want you to use a little bit of humor, kind of like that funny uncle.

10:38All right. So funny uncle told the AI it was talking to a child. And then it decided, uncle, child, funny, somehow, that's a pirate. Don't ask me how, but it was. So the darn thing literally was talking like a pirate. So I was like, okay, you started to go word salad on us. Let's break it apart. And instead of that, we're just going to use what we would call a prompt stack. We're going to use variables. So we're going to say humor equals 2 out of 10. I can calibrate that now. So if it starts to get really silly on me, you know, I can dial it back. You know, if I want it to be more humorous, I can go, okay, let's try a 4 out of 10.

11:25Let's try a 6 out of 10, right? And so I can calibrate accordingly. And that's kind of the principles that we teach. So we teach people how to break their prompts into what we would call stacks. And these stacks and variables could be swapped out for something else so that anybody in the organization might be able to repurpose a prompt to execute something completely different. But the structure is the same. Does that make sense? Yeah, my goodness. You know, and John, it's really important, I think, that we have this conversation. You shared something about the which is recently the Thomson Reuters case.

12:01Do you mind talking about that and the implications that this has? Because this is absolutely something that I think that every business leader should be aware of. And that is violating copyright, which is entirely possible to do if you are not careful. and this could be just someone, you know, you're outsourcing to, you know, someone paying$10 an hour, they're using AI. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about this? I don't want to get too much in the weeds. I'll let you discuss it. Yeah. I mean, that gets, that gets fairly technical because really what they're referring to is, are you using a copyrighted material to, to train your AI without permission?

12:45And then having that AI turn around and write stuff that doesn't, that, that sounds exactly like it without attributing it back to them. And so it, it doesn't necessarily apply to a typical business because a typical business isn't going to be building their own LLM, but it would apply if you're let's say that you were let's say that you were an agency and you're trying to write blog posts about something and you have pulled in a couple of books on this thing and you've literally ripped the entire book off and pushed it into a custom GPT and then you're having it write blog posts about that. Well, you might be treading on thin water there, right, thin ice, okay.

13:36So you're talking about, like, for example, again, programming your own GPT and you just dump a bunch of copyrighted materials into that to train with. Yeah, yeah. And then it's writing stuff based on that. And it's pretty clear it's some other material. Like, for instance, I just finished writing my book and publishing it, and it should be in Amazon next week. But I had a waiting list of several hundred people, and I distributed to them over the last couple of weeks. So I'm trying to get feedback to fine-tune it. In that book, I quote other books, but I ask other people for permission. you don't necessarily need to, but each one of them, when I quoted the other book, I reference it back at the bibliography at the end.

14:19In context, I'm saying, hey, this author said this. I'm very, very careful. Now, I could have gone in, I could have ripped that book, shoved it into chat GPT or Claude and just basically write another version of that book. That is a clear violation. But, you know, just using it to to quote is is not. But if I were to steal the entire thought leadership of that, right, that's another animal, you know. So it's going to be it's going to be really interesting and challenging. It's not like, you know, you probably gotten hit by these drive by lawsuits where, hey, you're using some Getty images on your website.

14:59Not only was I, I was hit with that back in the day. I had someone update a PowerPoint presentation. They assured me it was all royalty free. Apparently two of the images were not, this was a long time ago and yeah, no recourse. I mean, I'd bam. I was out$1 ,200, you know, and yeah, we bunch of times. Oh, it's awful. Can you tell me a little bit more about exactly how Bazooka works with your clients? Sure. Sure. So what typically happens is a client will come to us, having heard me on a podcast like you, you know, or something like that. And here's their problem. They may have somewhere between, I don't know, 10 and 10 ,000 employees.

15:42But they're like, hey, it's usually a senior exec. They're like, OK, we really need to get our heads wrapped around AI so we can use it better. They're going to have a problem where like everybody in here is self-taught. Everybody's doing it a different way. We have no way to scale or share our knowledge. And we've heard about your framework, so can you teach us? And so we either put them through our training, two of our frameworks. One's called the AI Strategy Canvas, and that just shows you all the different things that need to go into a scalable prompt or into an AI strategy. And then we have Scalable Prompt Engineering, which shows you how to construct a prompt.

16:23It literally takes 90 % fewer words and it's far more effective in its output. So that's what they come to us for. And so we have this other thing that is called the AI skills builder. So think of it like this. It's like, you know what Coursera is, right? Yes. Okay. So it's like Coursera, except for it's just AI training and it's built for an organization. So the first three modules that we put people through, everybody in the organization has to go through it. Safety, security, and ethics, the AI strategy canvas, and scalable prompt engineering. And then after that, we have skills tracks for every, well, for 10 different departments.

17:03So you've got a skill track for legal, a skill track for customer service, one for sales, one for marketing, one for HR. In each of those skill tracks, we teach them practical AI applications culminating with their own capstone project. so you you don't have somebody in hr sitting through a thing that the attorney should be the in-house counsel should go through right we don't want somebody sitting through a robotics course when they're just trying to write a blog post so that's that's how we work with people and then if the organization organization is bigger then we teach their leadership team how to do this and we teach do what we call a train the trainer program and then what we're also doing is we're creating a team of certified, we call, the book's called In-Grain AI, but we call them certified In-Grain AI implementers because we have such a demand to go train some of these really large corporations that we need other people that know our processes.

18:01So that, I don't know whether that over answers the question, but that's how we work with our clients. And so you work with small businesses, you work with enterprise, and at your website, folks can learn more about that. For a friend that's listening, where do they begin? Like if they're like, okay, I'm interested. I know you've got some resources at bazooka.com as well. Yeah, yeah, bazooka.com, B-I-Z-Z-U-K-A.com. Or you can go to ingrain.ai, I-N-G-R-A-I-N.ai. There, you know, we have an online community. You can join the community inside of that community. Well, for those who get the book, there's also the tools, and you can access those tools inside the community.

18:49But that's a free community. And we just work with people on, you know, AI, and we talk about new things that are coming down the pike. We talk about some of the new upgrades. And then if they want, they can go through some of our training. We also have a paid mastermind as well. But the community is free to join. You know, John, I've heard it said that 60 % of all current labor being produced right now is going to be impacted by AI. So as leaders, if we listen, it doesn't matter if you like it or don't like it. It just is the way that it is. You are going to have to keep up or guess what? You know, the market is going to move on without you.

19:33So it just is what it is. So that's why we are so adamant. I'll tell you, as parents, too, Here's just a little bit of an editorial aside. I think one of the best things that we can do is encourage our children, and hopefully they are, but we got to encourage them to keep their AI skills sharp as well. Because otherwise, they're going to step into jobs and roles that are going to be quickly disappearing on them. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the things I was really passionate about. The provost of LSU came over here last year because he heard what I was doing. and I showed him and he's like, oh, wow, would you teach our honors students next semester?

20:10And I said, you know, I think we would have a better impact on the community and the country as a whole if we went straight to businesses. Because I said, look, as a university, you're teaching how to build LLMs. A thousand times more people are going to be using LLMs and nobody's teaching them that. And I think that's what we should teach them, those skills. So they get to retain their jobs. And you'd be better off as a university teaching a course in how to use these so that people have immediately employable skills when they graduate. That's the key. I know, like when we're trying to hire people, that's what I'm looking for.

20:47Hey, how well do you know this? How schooled are you? I just want to make sure that you at least understand it. And then I can zero them in to focus on the way we want it done. But, you know, look, when I was young, I graduated. I'm so old. I graduated. We all are. Yeah. When the, when IBM came out with the first PC, right? So when I went through school, we had to program with punch cards. And then the year I graduated, they came out with a PC. I'm like, where were you four years ago? Right. But, but I had to learn a whole new paradigm. Well, my kids, my youngest graduated last year and I have four of them.

21:25And so now I'm on them. I'm like, look, you graduated, when AI wasn't out there, you need to learn this and that you'll be far more valuable to your employer. So I've been hyping on that too. And I love working with professors. We just finished training about nine LSU professors. So they're all really into it too. Yeah, bazooka.com, B-I-Z-Z-U-K-A.com or ingrain.ai. John Munsell, thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks, Josh. It was great. Have a good one.

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