From Tech Founder to AI Daddy with Lucas Petty, the man behind AI Daddy

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're bringing you part one of our conversation with AI Daddy on Lucas's journey and the path to AI mastery. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:00:16) I was telling Josh about this last time. The fact that your seven-month-old son is named Atlas, just because that's the name I've always wanted to use for my son.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) You can use it.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:00:29) As long as I got your permission, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) I actually named my first son after a past guest.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:00:35) The power of a name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Yeah. It made our second episode kind of weird because I didn't tell him, and I told him on the show. I was like, oh, by the way, I know we talked two years ago. I named my son after you.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:00:47) Yeah. You know, that's funny. I think that's a good transition simply to how AI Daddy came about. Ironically, when I first shifted to the AI space, I brainstormed a lot of names. Having my fair share of experience in marketing and branding and all these things, I kept trying to figure out what was the right name to use.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:01:16) Because when you look at the space of artificial intelligence, people's reactions are kind of split right down the middle. It's either you are insanely excited and thrilled about this new tech that's going to automate, simplify, and accelerate your life, or you're terrified. You're literally just scared shitless. I've talked to both kinds of people on the spectrum, and realizing how there's more people who are scared of it, who are kind of putting off exploring it because they think it's going to steal their data, it's going to ruin, you know, rule and take over the world.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:02:00) I'm like, it's got to be something that causes some kind of positive emotion. That's kind of how I came up with AI Daddy. Brainstorming a bunch of names, shouted them all, sent them all to all my friends and family, and just saw which one they preferred. And regardless of which one they picked, they all instantly laughed and had a big smile on their face when they said AI Daddy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) Oh, yeah.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:02:25) That was the inception of choosing that name, then going into the AI field full time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) I love it. So were you in—you said you were in marketing before. How did you get involved in this at all?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:02:39) So my background has actually been over nine years of tech startup consulting, specifically more on the operations side. And more specifically, basically coming in and helping systematize and automate all of a startup's processes, creating the SOPs, figuring everything out so that you can actually scale. Right? Because usually when you first start a business, the bottleneck is you. You're trying to do everything.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:03:12) And as you bring in more employees, more people, you're having to teach them what you're doing, but you don't really know how to explain it. You're kind of running on autopilot and putting out fires every day. I kind of naturally just transitioned into the AI space because I was telling Josh, actually, I was in the middle of launching a new tech company, startuptemplates.com. Basically, a whole library of all the templates you need to go from idea to launch and then to scale every department.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:03:46) Had made this library of hundreds, thousands of templates, and the day I launched was like day five of ChatGPT being out, and when all the headlines came out that said it's been five days and they've gotten a million users. And I instantly opened it up.

(Intro Narrator at 00:04:09) Saw what it was capable of, fired my whole team.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:04:14) Pulled the plug on the startup, on the whole company, even though I'd invested thousands of dollars into it, and said, we're jumping into this. Because I could still be making money, hell, for the next three, five years selling these templates, doing these things, but I'm literally in a dying industry. Right? And I think that's what a lot of people really need to kind of think about right now with all this AI tech coming out. It's either, do you completely pivot?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:04:47) Or what I ended up learning afterwards is, well, that was a bit extreme of me. But what's also more than capable and, you know, actually really beneficial is simply, how do you integrate all that AI technology into your company to survive moving forward so it stays relevant? And, yeah, I just went all in to the AI game trying to absorb everything that I could. And I'll say this right now, I am not an expert.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:05:22) I will never claim to be an expert. And I think anyone who says they're an expert in AI is full of shit. And don't get me wrong, there's the people who are experts at machine learning, developing, coding, and programming, and essentially building these AI models. But once that AI technology is out in the wild, none of us have any clue what it's capable of.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:05:53) Because especially if it's generative AI, which just means it keeps learning from every input. It keeps learning from itself and everything that you share with it. That's moving and growing and advancing so rapidly that there's no way any of us can keep up. And, honestly, the whole space of artificial intelligence and all the influencers and all the experts, we are surviving—even the companies, the tech startups that are AI startups, we are literally going at everything week by week. That's how our business plans, our business models, everything's needing to be reassessed because new tech is coming so quick, so exponentially.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:06:45) We're all just trying to figure it out. And the people who are the experts or claim to be or that you can actually rely on are genuinely just the people who are two weeks ahead because they have, you know, like me, I have a little bit of an insider knowledge on a lot of these platforms and with a lot of these companies. Because now that I've established myself as an expert or influencer in the field, I mean, they're coming to me, giving me a chance to alpha beta test all these technologies and seeing what it's capable of, and that's where I kind of have a little bit of an edge. And it's also the willingness that I recognize I don't know what the hell I'm doing with AI, and none of the people around me do either. And the way you adjust to that is you get rid of your ego.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:07:40) And what I mean by that is, so I'm the expert in the—I was the expert for the last decade on operations and scaling systems. And when I first started using AI, I'd use it to solve math problems. I'd use it to write content for me, all these things that I wasn't an expert at. But the things that I was an expert at, my ego kept getting in the way and saying, no. I can do it better.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:08:12) This is surface level answers. I know, a lot of people, have you ever tried ChatGPT?

(Intro Narrator at 00:08:19) Me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:20) Yeah. Oh, man. Yes. Yeah. We use it in our business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:25) It saved us about 100 grand a year already.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:08:27) Yep. It's incredible. But I'm sure you've noticed how at face value, when you first put in a couple prompts, the answers feel generic. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:37) Yeah. Prompting's the skill. That's going to be the new skill is how to prompt. I mean, to your point earlier of the different groups of people and how they respond, I've stopped doing anything other than just kind of smiling in my head because there is a whole group of people that have their head in the ground, and they're like, oh, it'll never be as creative as this. My favorite one was this: Oh, all it does is just take its past knowledge and sort of mix it together to create something new. It can't do what a human can do. It can't be creative. I'm like, you literally just described what humans do.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:09:18) Yep. It's ridiculous. What I was trying to get at with the ego thing is simply, I've noticed and I've talked to a lot of people who say, hey, I'm an expert writer. I'm using it for everything else but writing. But the moment they get rid of that ego part and they actually dive into it, that's where you unlock such a crazy capability with AI.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:09:43) Because I've had access to over 600 AI tools, and I've been testing them and playing with all of them. And I can say maybe half of them on their website, the first banner you see is it will 10x your marketing, 10x your emails, 10x your sales, 10x whatever it is that they're focused and niched on. That's the case if you're a complete beginner. When you're an expert in something, that's going to 100x your output and your results. And so whenever you—but most people don't get there because their ego is saying, hey.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:10:25) I'm the expert at this thing. AI is not capable enough, or I don't want to feel like the years of experience of my life that I put into mastering this thing are all for nothing. Right? It's terrifying to think that. But, ironically, when you get past that and you actually lean on it on the things that you are a master at, holy—the things that get done. It's night and day compared to a beginner. That's why I'm literally going around to the companies that hire me to consult and to help them and just saying integrate this with all of your experts. All of your best people need to, one, figure out how to replace themselves with this AI tech.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:11:21) Whatever it is, we'll find it together, and then you don't replace them. All of a sudden, you've freed up their eight-hour workday to where now it's maybe an hour of supervising the AI, of running through certain inputs. But now they get to think at such a higher level that what you accomplished—like you just said, you've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars using ChatGPT alone. I can tell you easily the last three companies that I helped integrate some AI tools into, they've saved millions on a monthly basis. And it's because this technology is changing the game that much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) And so is that what you're mostly doing to make money? Do you get money from TikTok, or you just get money from consulting with companies on how to use AI?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:12:15) So I started not monetizing any of the TikTok. Ironically, why I went to TikTok was because I just wanted to accelerate my own rate of learning about this tech, and the easiest way for us to learn anything and the quickest way is to teach things, to talk about it, to explain it. And so I didn't monetize my TikTok account until this past month. I wasn't caring about that part.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:12:47) And, ironically, the moment I started saying yes to brand deals, now I'm working with Adobe. I'm working with all these Fortune 500 companies to help promote and push out their content, but that's a small portion of what I'm doing. What I've actually been focused on primarily is just coming in, integrating AI technologies into entire teams, and doing that because it's what I've been doing for the last decade, integrating those systems. Now it's coming in and adding the AI piece as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) So my background, I wrote code for 17 years. I've built teams and teams of teams, and so that's where I came from, the programming world. And when I get to do all these conversations and when I saw ChatGPT, I literally went through the seven stages of grief or whatever. Right? Denial.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:13:46) Did a wheel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:47) Yeah. Because I thought to myself, oh, no. The moment they—you can teach ChatGPT all of my recorded audio transcripts, and you have all this high quality video of me from every different angle. Well, I was trying to gauge the time in which the AI Joel would be able to exist and run an interview without someone being able to tell. I currently today put it at three years, but that's just my off the cuff guessing.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:14:15) I'd say sooner.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) Yep. Most likely sooner. And then so I got through my whole stages of grief, and then I started asking some of my guests and friends and people that I know that run—like, they have 10,000 engineers or 2,000 engineers, huge engineering organizations. And I started sending them DMs and stuff, and I was like, hey, real quick, and I'll keep your information private. I won't say who you are, but can you just tell me about what percentage of your developers are using tools like GitHub Copilot?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) Tools that help you—they're assistive writing. Have you seen GitHub Copilot?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:14:50) I've played with it. It's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) I think it was sub 15% across the board. It was a really, really low amount.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:14:59) You could come in as a consultant to any of those companies and literally just introduce Copilot, which for the listeners that don't know is basically an AI to help you with writing your code, almost does all of it entirely, and then you, as the human with all the experience, just come in and supervise it, double check some of those lines. Bringing that into any of those companies, like you just said, it'll accelerate the rate of everything for those companies. You could save hundreds of thousands with that alone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:34) It's like I own a tree service company, and I'm trying to chop the tree down with a handheld saw, and this person comes over with a chainsaw. Right?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:15:45) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) It's like, why aren't you using the chainsaw? Well, because it's a craft. It's an art. It's the way I do the blade. It's like, that's exactly the conversations you'll have with these people. They'll get so frustrated because it's their craft, and it can't be replicated. And I just don't get that because I'm not on that level. I'm on the level of let's just push things forward as fast as we can, and let's adopt the stuff that will allow us to gain an advantage.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:16:07) That's the mindset needed to survive in the AI age. Literally, that's tying back to what I said earlier of it's people's egos that are stopping them from implementing this AI tech in whatever industry they're in. That literally could be the difference between, you know, $100 made or a million bucks made or saved, either or. Just like that from you. The most interesting thing that I've come to realize, because I've done a whole course, I've spoken about prompt engineering. I've gone in deep dives into many different aspects of all this AI tech. And in the world of the prompt engineering, I kind of just summarize it as this is changing from—it was just fundamentally changing the way we think to now you have to both think of yourself as the teacher and the student when doing prompt engineering. You have to think of yourself as a teacher in the sense of setting up the AI to succeed by giving it context, by referencing the textbook, the material, the things that you're trying to get help with. But then the output that it creates for you is where you come in as a student and learn from that.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:17:32) It's such a crazy thought that now we have to guide our own learning. That is all that AI is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) And so I do want to jump in the conversation a little bit to tell people that you're one of the most popular AI people on TikTok, and your videos are crazy cool. I like them. The first thing I noticed was that you kind of look like the Her guy with the mustache. So I was like, that's brilliant as far as marketing goes. I didn't know anything about your background, so I have a ton of respect for you after learning about it here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) But I was curious when I was scanning through some of your videos, it was funny to me how I'll see one of your videos that has 500,000 views, and it's literally telling someone how to make a bookmark on an iPhone. That's fascinating.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:18:22) I mean, you're a CTO. The CTO is the Modern CTO. Right? You should know firsthand how incompetent people are with technology. And the thing is, you know, it's not that all this technology is that complicated.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:18:44) In fact, the trademark of an amazing piece of tech is its user interface and its ability to be understood by humans effortlessly. And so you bring that in, and it's still overwhelming because with every new piece of technology, every new AI tool that we learn how to use, we are starting from scratch. We are the beginner once again. No longer the expert, no longer the sage, and we feel completely clueless. Most people don't like that.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:19:24) And I think the reason why those videos go viral—where half of my videos on TikTok are me either making memes and being funny about artificial intelligence—where you just referenced the Her movie, I had a friend point out that I had to make a video showing the similarities, and it's literally just me wearing the exact same red outfit that Joaquin Phoenix is wearing in the movie. And for those of you that don't know the movie Her, it's pretty much about a guy who falls in love with artificial intelligence and how quickly that tech moves. And eventually, well, I don't want to spoil the ending if you haven't seen it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) Yeah, it's beautiful.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:20:12) But that piece of the entertainment aspect, again, tying it back to why AI Daddy, it's because people don't want to be terrified of this tech. Right? We have a gut feeling that it's slowly taking over the world and that it's slowly going to integrate into every part of our lives, our businesses, and everything that there is. Just how our cell phones did, just how the internet did, it's going to be a very natural thing. But we're just in that new stage where it's all uncertain. And so having that be fun and easy and carefree is the easiest way to transition to it.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:20:57) And so usually I'll go and do something silly or show the easiest integration of, hey, this is how you do a widget for your phone to bookmark ChatGPT. And I think the reason that goes so viral is because a lot of people in the space are trying to make money off of something that's free. ChatGPT is 100% free if you haven't tried it out. You can upgrade to the plus version for $20 a month.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:21:31) And I'm not sponsored to say this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) No, I've said it a bunch. I upgraded because I needed availability all the time. Because we started using it in our business immediately. We use it just to give you background—we use it for our show when we want questions, ideas for questions. We'll paste your bio to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, we're having a podcast today with Lucas. He's AI Daddy," and then we'll paste your LinkedIn bio, and we'll say we want 15 questions that are genuine and authentic, and it'll come back with stuff. And you can say things like, "Oh, make it more like Joe Rogan." And so we have a Slack channel where we share these prompts for the producers because we make our show, but we also make 20 other shows for brands. IBM will be like, "Hey, can you make us a show?" So we have all of these producers across the company that are doing all of these episodes with these vast guests, and immediately we cut their prep time down 80%.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:22:32) That's brilliant to me. It's that simple. And the reason I do so many of the simple little hints and tips about AI tools is because most of us don't really know what it's capable of. But since you've actually tried it here, a pro tip would be leaning on ChatGPT even further where you have to recognize AI knows how AI works better than a human does. And so letting machines talk to machines is probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give when you're doing prompt engineering.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:23:10) Meaning, give it that context and then ask ChatGPT to make you the best prompt possible for ChatGPT. I can tell you that the answers you'll get are going to be night and day compared to if you just put in that bio and said, "Hey, write me something from this," or if you put in whatever your gut feeling is of what you want help for. And then the next level after that is you get that prompt and you say, "Hey, write me 10, 20 variations on this prompt for the industry, for the subject, the matter at hand." And then it starts creating the prompts for you for exactly every piece that you need, and then that accelerates it. Right? Having ChatGPT turn one prompt into 100.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) Yeah, we should take all the content in that channel and be like, "This is what we've come up with so far. Make it better, or give us more prompts." Josh, you taking notes, buddy? We've got to talk to Jesse after this. So do you use ChatGPT to help you make videos?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:24:21) Absolutely. I was using it this morning. So I'll give you an example of literally how I used it this morning. It's going to be a TikTok that I put out tomorrow. Nice. I decided the new thing that I'm going to be doing is sharing exactly how I'm using ChatGPT because there's something more human and relevant about showing how a person does it versus simply saying, "Hey, go and do this. Hey, check out these tools." It doesn't land the same way.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:24:52) But the way I was using it this morning was I said, "Make me a list of the top 100 hooks for TikTok." Gave me this list. Amazing. And I just said, "I feel overwhelmed because I don't know where to start." So now I took that list, and I just entered as the next prompt, "Rephrase or filter down and cut the list down for the ones that are relevant for my industry, an AI tech influencer."

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:25:26) And all of a sudden, it didn't just cut the list from 100 to 25, but it altered all 25 of them to then give me a little bit of a nudge as to, "Am I referencing AI tools? Am I referencing people of a certain age for this hook? What would be the follow-up for the hook?" So the standard level of how people would approach it is, "Give me the best of something." But then the next level is, "Give me the best for exactly what I need, my niche, my industry, whatever."

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:26:03) And then the level after that is then actually taking that and integrating with some kind of tech that can completely automate it. So I'll have ChatGPT make me a list of 100 blog posts. Then I'll batch download that and upload it into Canva. And with their AI tool that they just came out with, what, two weeks ago or a week and a half ago, I then upload it. And without doing anything, all 100 posts or words of content get turned into a post. Beautiful. It takes five minutes to make 100 pieces of content, and four of those minutes are just you moving from one platform to the other. That's what some of this tech is capable of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) Before, we only had humans—well, mostly. We had humans creating content on social media. Now we have this exponential gain of robots. What do you think is going to happen to the browsing experience? Is nothing going to change? Are the algorithms just still going to filter the best stuff to the top and that's what we're going to experience, or will things change drastically?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:27:24) You know, the scary thing—I mean, there's a lot of scary things about artificial intelligence—but the scary thing about artificial intelligence in the marketing world, in the social media world, is that by the end of this year, all social media platforms are going to be so saturated and filled with AI-generated content that none of us—who knows if we're going to be wanting to use social media at all because of what it's going to turn into. But the flip side of that is it's hard to tell because this content won't just be average. It'll be some of the best content that we'll ever want to watch. Because the way you can have this AI tech when you integrate it with the right tools—VidIQ, for example, I don't know if you've used it, it's a common one for YouTube creators—it basically takes all the data that it gathers from YouTube and uses that to search out keywords and auto-generate a list of the most, basically, the titles of your videos that'll go the most viral. It's able to then create a formula for virality. And when every post that it's creating for you is a viral hit, it means it's damn good. It means people are going to watch it.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:29:00) And when everyone and their mother is integrating these AI tech tools and then creating this, how do the people who don't use AI compete?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) We're the biological bootloader.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:29:18) Yeah. Well, right? Here's the thing. I think—because I've been thinking about this a lot, I've been debating it with a lot of different people—the only kind of influencer that's going to matter moving forward is going to be human beings. It's going to be the Joel Beasley show. It's going to be Lucas Petty. It's going to be a personal connection to a human being who isn't trying to be anything else. Because the machines are going to be ruling over 90% of the world, and we're going to be sick and tired of all this perfect viral content. We're going to go back to just wanting to listen to people rant and complain and be human and be ugly and be truthful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) I agree. The personal connections. I told my wife that one of the reasons why I've been able to go through those grief stages and be kind of chill about it is because I spent the past six or seven years developing relationships with people.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:30:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:28) And I don't know if you know this, but when I was going to start the podcast, I chose between an AI startup—because that was my background, software engineering, and I had sold some interests, I had a financial software company—and I said, "I'm going to put that either into AI startup or podcast." And then I thought, well, it'd probably be more fun to have the relationships from the podcast, and so let's go do that. And it worked.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:30:53) What people forget is that AI was made by humans for humans. At the end of the day, it's literally just a tool to help us connect with each other. Right? If you've integrated any of these tools, it's to send your emails quicker. Why are you sending your emails quicker? So you can keep your word to the person you promised you'd do something. So that you could build and maintain your relationships better. I think it's whenever you get past that, and then you go into the world of deepfakes, you go into the world of basically inauthenticity with artificial intelligence, that's where none of that's going to survive in the long run, in my opinion. Because what does that do? It destroys trust. And human connection and human relationships are built on trust.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:52) I think there will be a rise in in-person events. I think we're going to put more emphasis on our relationships and gathering together. Because in a world where there's an infinite amount of AI personalities that know everything, what are we going to do? Well, we're probably still going to want to have community with each other, and that'll likely mean more in-person stuff or human-only experiences, things like that.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:32:15) There's a reason why some of my most viral pieces of content, I mispronounce words, I misspell things in the bio, and I'm not doing it on purpose. I'm just going through the motions of making content. And after you've made your tenth version of a video and you're tired of saying the same things over and over again, you realize, fuck it, let's just post the raw version. And all of a sudden, that's half of my most viral pieces of content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) I love it. I love it. It was so interesting. Now just so you know, I don't do TikTok. So when I heard about you from our friend Aaron, I went and looked at your—you can use TikTok through the web, I found out. So I went and watched your stuff, and I was like, "This is great." It was actually very interesting. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I learned stuff from it. And you made one video where you showed that you went and collected this group of AI resources and communities in case TikTok gets banned. And you asked people to go follow you on Instagram to get that list and send you the message, I think, "community." I don't know. Is that right?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:33:30) Yeah. Sending me the word "community" on TikTok or on Instagram would basically get you a list of all the AI communities that are out there. And if you want a list of 600 AI tools, I can send that to you as well. Just send me a DM. And actually, that tool—I just updated it yesterday—is now 2,600 AI tools that are in existence. When I—in December, there were only 200 AI tools out there. The space is going so, so fast. And yeah, part of my job has turned into essentially filtering out all the noise and all the junk because a lot of people are kind of just saying, "Hey, here's the new tech. Here's the new gizmo. Here's the new gadget," and you go try it out. And the way—I mean, we've all built—you and me have built businesses before—and the way you build out your funnel, the way you try and hook people, so you make them put in their credit card in order to get that free week or the free subscription. But at the moment that trial runs out, you're kind of screwed.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:34:53) And that's part of the reason why I always encourage people to first use ChatGPT, the free version, or some of the other alternatives that are out there to make using AI a part of their daily habit. And then once you go into it deeper and you realize, "Oh, I need it. I need this to help me code and do a better job at it," that's when you go to GitHub and you use Copilot AI. Right? That's when you start paying for things. But I've seen too many people in the space pay for stuff that isn't that good. And at the end of the day, if you just take a minute to learn a little bit of prompt engineering, which is going to be a foundational skill for the future—oh, for the present—that's going to set you up for success whenever you go to any other more expensive, more complex AI tool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:48) What would happen if TikTok got banned in the US as far as your brand goes?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:35:54) To me, honestly, not much. So I've only recently started building out the brand on YouTube, on Instagram, and I've gotten a few thousand people. But to me, I guess I'm just not worried about it because it's about the human connection, and it's about being real. And I think the trust that I've built with a lot of my audience and a lot of people that I'm helping out and building with, it's just a matter of time. Whether it goes fast or whether it goes slow, there's no difference to me because I'm in the AI space long-term.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:36:40) I kind of told Josh about it the other day, but, you know, at first it was this excitement of I could use AI for my consulting, for my work, for all these things. And then two, three months into it, I realized, "Holy shit, this tech is moving so quick that the people, you know, the haves and the have-nots, the 1% and the rest of the world, that divide between people is going to increase so exponentially with AI." The people who use AI and the people who don't use it. And my gut feeling instantly turned from, "Okay, it's not about making the money because the money is going to be there as long as you have your head in the right place. It's about making sure people don't fall behind." Because to me, the most terrifying thing is seeing what the companies that are leveraging this technology are capable of doing, and then seeing the guy down the street who is still doing their booking and their accounting with pencil and paper. You think—we think that that is, you know, especially as tech guys, we think that that's not a common practice. But I'd say at least 50% of small businesses still do things by the book. And that to me is crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:13) My parents, they own a medical clinic. Right? I think they have about 10 doctors. And I used their services when I was in Florida. I moved, but when I was in Florida, I'd use their services and interact with them. And the thing that frustrated me most about it was at the time, my primary care had this auto-scheduling interaction chat deal on the website where I could book my appointment and then go to my primary care. And then I was asking them. I said, "Hey, why don't you guys have this?" "Well, we can't. It gets real complicated. There's this. There's that. The other." But it's so important to be able to provide a good experience with the tools that are available because, you know, I came into this a lot when I was using software or building software, is we are always, as software developers for the enterprise or whatever, competing with the experience that Apple can provide.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) Because the average everyday person goes about their life. They have their iPhone or their Android, and they have this expected level of quality of experience. And then they have to go interact with your tool, and it's an entirely different thing. So I really believe that you will be incredibly successful helping these companies adopt these tools simply because there are so many companies that are so far behind. At some point, they're gonna see it maybe in their finances or something. At some point, they're just gonna be really, really accepting of the idea of changing even though they're pretty hard right now.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:39:50) And actually, well, bringing it back to the social media thing really quick. I'd encourage people to go follow me on YouTube or Instagram instead because the content that I'm gonna be building out—because I've realized, so I've gone down in the rabbit hole of more tools than I know. But I've gotten each one of them to where I'd say I break it down into the beginner level, where it's just doing the basic kind of prompt engineering or leveraging it to create whatever you want. Then the pro level is where you get such amazing outputs that it just feels like you could never have come up with that on your own. But then, you know, I jokingly—it's what works on TikTok because it's all about that hook—but I call it the god level just because there's a point that you get to afterwards where you can actually use AI to completely automate everything.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:40:56) Where there's, like I said before, with the example of Canva, you can go from ChatGPT, do a Zapier integration. What that puts into instantly goes into Canva, and then Canva, based on its AI, instantly creates your dozens, hundreds of posts exactly how you want them because you build out the key pieces of digital infrastructure in between each thing and making all those different pieces of tech and AI communicate together. And so I'm starting to now create a series on going through each one of these. Copilot's gonna be one of them where I just run you from, hey, we're gonna start with a beginner level. Just so you know how it all starts, we're gonna show you how you as a pro and whatever your industry, whatever your thing is, this is how you actually level up. But then this is how you remove yourself completely from the equation. That, to me, is like the real power of it. And I think because I am sharing that kind of knowledge with people, I'm looking forward to moving to the other platforms because TikTok, it might be the best platform to grow an audience because virality is so easy. It's not the best place to actually educate people because what we want is a quick, you know, couple seconds of entertainment, a quick, hey, this is how you turn ChatGPT into a widget on your phone so you don't have to pay for any of these other competitors. And all they're really doing is using ChatGPT's API and then charging you for it. Like, that's 80% of the AI tools out there. They're using the API of these handful of tools and then charging you for the exact same thing that you wouldn't have to pay for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:56) There are some cases where you can fine tune the model. I don't know if they're able—I don't know how that works. I didn't look at the actual underlying API with OpenAI's GPT, but I do know the core model that you can just boot up on your own if you wanted to. You can fine tune it. Like, for example, back to what we were talking about with our show notes and our show prep. Like, we can feed it tons. We've got 650 shows that we've done. We can feed it all of those preps unstructured, just raw data, and then say, hey, now we want you to make a prep like this and like that. And we can train that in isolation from the rest of the OpenAI world, and then we can actually offer people to come in and use it. And I've actually seen a startup or two pop up where they're building a tool to help people create show prep and show notes and all of that. And I'm assuming that's what they're doing. I hope they're at least finding a way to fine tune the model.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:43:59) There's about five in the space. I was actually helping Aaron Baer, one of your previous podcast guests—well, the mutual connection between us—basically take all of his speaking gigs and then find a way to leverage AI to clone himself. But not really to completely replace himself from the video aspect because I really, I don't know. Out of all the AI tech out there, I'm really against deepfakes. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't serve us if we don't act with integrity. If we, no matter how we're doing it. Right? Like, if you don't keep your word, if you are not honest, doesn't matter how efficient you are, doesn't matter how great you are, whatever it is you wanna do, eventually, as human beings, we're gonna be—we're gonna feel burnt and exhausted and just like, we can't work together. So there's no point in leveraging that specific technology in my mind because even—I don't know. I don't know. I can go down that rabbit hole, but yeah, I don't wanna go down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:11) Let's talk a little bit about deepfake. So I think what's going to happen with the deepfake stuff is I think there will be a new technology emerging. I don't know exactly how it will look, but I know what it'll be able to do, and it'll be able to prove that this is authentically me as the human. I don't know how it's going to work and, you know, there's a million people to tell you all the reasons why it's not, but I see money flowing there. Specifically, DARPA has challenges. Government agencies have challenges to try to get people to create this technology, but there will be a time where there's some way if I'm watching an address from the president that I know it's an address from a president through technology.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:45:53) So it's so funny that you say that because I was talking to the CEO of Tavus, which is literally, hey, we'll let you make your own AI clone, and you have exclusive rights over it. And I was literally telling him, this is amazing. You're the first out of all the kind of clone yourself, deepfake kind of AI tools that are out there that actually says, you're the only one who'll have access to this. No one else. And people can't clone you. But I told him you need to put some kind of verification so that people know this was sent by you authentically, not by someone else because it's okay if it's AI, but it's not okay if it's someone scamming us. And I think that is one of the most prevalent things as you get into the business world. Everyone's trying to scam everyone. I think that's why I try to focus so hard on figuring out the ethical or the right ways to leverage these AI tech tools and why half the time, I tell people, oh, I know what tools you're talking about. I know what you need for your programming. Don't pay for those. Like, it's a waste of money at the stage that you're at. It might make you feel good paying for some of this exciting new tech, but at the end of the day, there's cheaper and more efficient solutions. We're just used to paying money for things, and it's not really gonna work out for in a lot of ways because a piece that a lot of people don't think about, it's not just about the amazing AI tool. It's about the human using it and your ability to turn that thing or that new software, that new tool into a part of your daily habit, into your routine. How many subscriptions have you paid for that you've never used?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Well, that's a really great topic conversation because I've got so many friends who are in the SaaS business, and I'll talk with some of them behind the scenes. And they'll share with me their active monthly users versus their paying. And it was often sub 20% in multimillion dollar companies. And my jaw hit the floor the first time I heard it. Then I heard it two or three, four, five, six times. I'm just like, woah. And I get it because people pay to have access to something. Like, I'm paying this to have access to it. And because I look at myself, right? Like, I go off and on with piano lessons. Right? So I pay for this $10 a month piano thing. And in the months that I'm not using it, I don't shut it off and stop paying for it because I want access to it. And so that's one of the things that we're you're paying for. And so I was looking—I like to look at myself on small things and then help figure out how human behavior from that. Because, I mean, I'm not perfect, and it's just easiest to run my science experiment with the monkey that is me. But, yeah, right? Finding that out is important, but it's fascinating. How are you going to handle this idea that you said it earlier, the divide is going to grow. Right? And so it's going to, I believe, grow pretty rapidly. What's gonna happen then? Is the government gonna step in with universal basic income? Is society gonna deteriorate because there's the haves and the have nots and it turns into, like, Hunger Games style where they're coming after the ivory tower? Like, how does this play out?

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:49:40) A slow turn package. Before we go into—I just wanna do or touch base on one little thing on the subscription thing, and it's you said that that percentage is about 20% are actually active users. Talking to a lot of AI founders right now, it's about 10%. So, like, 90% are inactive. It's because they're having to compete with these massive nonprofits, AKA ChatGPT, for example. But the thing on the subscriptions—and I get that identity and that desire to just have access to some of these tools to say, oh, yeah, I've used it. Or, oh, yeah, I have it on hand. What do we gotta do? I know it. Pro tip, cancel them the moment you're done, and you're guaranteed to then fall into their funnel, which is gonna just say, hey, we'll give you three months for 50% off. Hey, we'll give you whatever. Even when you do a free trial for some of these tools, don't wait for it to auto start. Literally, press cancel. And then 80% of the time, if these companies are setting up their funnels right, they're gonna prompt you with, hey, here's 50% off. Here's 30% off. Here's a few months for free on us. Right? Easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:16) And it's true. I heard that advice a couple years ago. Tried it for the first time. It works more than 80% of the time. I don't do it all the time, but when I actually go to cancel something that I am no longer going to use, more than 80% of the time, there's some offer like that.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:51:34) Yeah. I just have the habit of, I'll try a tool out. And once I'm done using it for the purpose that I intended, I cancel it. And if I come back to resubscribe because I need it, then that means it was actually worth investing in. Because how many times do we just, yeah, pay for stuff we never use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) And you're testing 2,600 tools. Yeah. So you definitely are on top of it. Yeah.

(Lucas Petty (AI Daddy) at 00:52:04) I have to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:05) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.