🎙️ This Week on Chad & Cheese: AI, Bias, and... J.Cole?!
Strap in, kids. This week, Chad & Cheese sit down with Stefan Youngblood, the mastermind behind Black AI Think Tank and hireblack.com, to talk about the wild world where AI, job markets, and the Black community collide—sometimes beautifully, sometimes like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
💡 He built a 6,000+ strong Black Metaverse community.💡 He exposed AI’s built-in biases—because apparently, "Black-owned chip company" means potato chips, not semiconductors. 🍟🤦🏾♂️💡 Oh, and casual flex: He gave piano lessons to J.Cole. 🎹 Yeah, let that sink in.
But wait, there’s more!
🔥 FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete)—Is AI coming for your job or just making you lazier?
🔥 Recruiters vs. Bias—How to not let AI turn your hiring process into a dumpster fire.
🔥 The Metaverse, Co-Pilots & Agents—Are we living in The Matrix yet?
🎧 Tune in now, or risk becoming obsolete. 🚀
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
0:00:01.2 Podcast Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinions and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast.
0:00:25.5 Joel: Let's do this. We are the Chad & Cheese podcast, I'm your co-host Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house, as we welcome Stefan Youngblood, founder and CEO of Black AI Think Tank and hireblack.com. Stefan, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.
0:00:43.5 Stefan Youngblood: It's good to be here. Most dangerous... Did you say dangerous?
0:00:44.8 Joel: Yes.
0:00:45.1 Stefan Youngblood: Oh shoot. I didn't know all of this.
0:00:48.5 Joel: It's a low bar in HR. It's a very low bar, but yes.
0:00:51.8 Stefan Youngblood: Hey, I asked AI something about me, about Stefa Youngblood, and it says, "Stefan Youngblood is a low-lying disrupter." And if you just looked at low-lying, man, that's not good. But then I said, it's like a sniper. Yeah. Can you tell me what low-lying means? Like, I'm this... And it explained it's a good thing. You don't... Not... That level, but you do a lot of disrupting, and disrupting is my thing.
0:01:14.0 Chad: Well so, AI Think Tank, what was the genesis? Why? What do you do? Give us some background.
0:01:24.4 Stefan Youngblood: So here it is. When the metaverse started really taking off, you know...
0:01:27.6 Chad: The metaverse? Joel is already excited.
0:01:27.7 Joel: Oh, I've got a question right here.
0:01:28.7 Chad: He's excited.
0:01:30.7 Joel: Keep going. Introduce us to...
0:01:31.9 Stefan Youngblood: Imma give you a lot. I'm teeing you up for everything. So, when the metaverse started taking off, I saw what was happening, I'm in groups online with some folks, but it just didn't seem like there was much of the black community that was there. One day, on a social media called Clubhouse, I literally started a room: Black metaverse. One person came. The next room was a thousand people, showed up to talk about it, like, What is this thing? Some people who are doing extraordinary things in it. It grew and grew. 6,000 people in an ecosystem. On the backend of that, as we went through NFTs and everything, this ecosystem is growing, AI hit very strongly, and we saw an emphasis on NFTs, kind of, nosedive a bit. But AI really blasted off. Everybody I know that was involved with things like metaverse, put it on hold right now... And it's definitely on hold... And AI just blasted in. So I switched from that room, which I still have in Clubhouse, A Black Metaverse, and started a thing called, ChatGPT for beginners.
0:02:41.7 Stefan Youngblood: Now, I want you all to know, the reason I started that is... Let's see, Sam Altman released it on November 30. Some very smart people started hacking into some dangerous places in my proximity, and I didn't like it. It was... I don't understand, but I think you all had done some bad things. And they weren't bad people, they just wanted to see what we can do, as hackers. And I thought I needed to leave that room, that's when I started ChatGPT For Beginners. It blew up to 12,000 people. Then I moved it over to LinkedIn, and we call it Black AI Think Tank. The first time I launched it, I say, "Hey guys, lets meet 7 o'clock on Thursday", 400 people show up, just like that.
0:03:21.7 Chad: The first one?
0:03:23.2 Stefan Youngblood: First one, 400 people showed up.
0:03:25.0 Chad: 400 people. Now, this is online, so like a Zoom? Or...
0:03:27.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's a LinkedIn audio.
0:03:29.0 Joel: Its a Clubhouse, which I didn't think was still around.
0:03:31.0 Stefan Youngblood: Well, Clubhouse is around, dude. It's actually making a small resurgence. You can do a lot through there, it's very interesting. So I started there, still have a crowd, an audience there, but I just use LinkedIn audio. And it's kind of easy for people 'cause you can walk around doing it. Nobody's... Yeah, so 600 people, the second time we got together. And I sort of have it stream between Clubhouse and LinkedIn.
0:04:00.2 Joel: What's your background before you were doing all of this AI stuff 'cause you've been at this for a long time? What's, sort of like the...
0:04:03.2 Chad: He was a hippie.
0:04:04.4 Joel: Don't go back to the time when you had bumper stickers on a wooden...
0:04:08.7 Stefan Youngblood: Wait, you told him that?
0:04:09.4 Chad: Yeah.
0:04:10.6 Joel: As your presentation.
0:04:11.4 Chad: He was a hippie.
0:04:11.8 Stefan Youngblood: I was this, afro, and...
0:04:15.4 Joel: So, from hippie to now, what was your passion and your...
0:04:18.9 Stefan Youngblood: It's really a... So I've been doing church activity, I've been taking gospel type things around the world, but mostly in a socio-economic, really, philanthropy. Every country I go to, I'm looking for how I can create relationships that tie it into people. Haiti earthquake happens, six weeks later, I'm there on top of an orphanage to connect a group of people in North Carolina to help build a water system. And because I connected it in Skype, we can see each other in realtime. We were looking for $10,000, and they came up with $30,000 to build the system in-house. After cyclones in August in Burma, I was in there following some music projects that I was doing, and again, it was connecting people across the world. So Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and I settled down in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, stayed there teaching. And I was teaching elementary school, and decided that...
0:05:25.0 Chad: What have you not done, Stefan?
0:05:27.3 Stefan Youngblood: So it's a...
0:05:28.7 Chad: Good gracious. I mean, you've done a lot, all over the place. And it sounds like the connection is people, right.
0:05:33.4 Stefan Youngblood: Yes. So this is good.
0:05:35.5 Chad: And connecting people.
0:05:37.5 Stefan Youngblood: This is it.
0:05:37.6 Chad: Yeah.
0:05:37.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah.
0:05:38.7 Chad: Yeah. And I mean so... Because the Clubhouse, you were connecting people, in the Clubhouse in the metaverse, right?
0:05:42.7 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. That's it. It's kind of weird. Gary shows up, who's here with OutSolve. He knows what we're doing. I hear the story about his son. That relationship really took off. He actually said, "Stefan, I actually brought in hireblack.com, not because of that, because of you." It's really... I get what you're saying. And when you say, "What have you not done?" I'm like a strange guy. So, Mount Everest? Yeah, I've been there, done that, you know. I did Mount Everest basecamp, hired a Sherpa, and learned all these stories. But these stories, they're kind of... I'll just say, this happened last year. I play the piano, a music store calls me 'cause they sold this really high-end piano, and the owner wants piano lessons. They don't play very well. I'm watching what I say here. And he said, "Stefan, there's this guy, he's kinda young. He does rap music and stuff like that. And I think he has some CDs out, and he wants somebody he can trust to come in his place. Would you be interested in giving him some lessons? And maybe you could be, kind of, a good impression on... " He's like a rapper or something. He kept mentioning that, "His name is Jermaine, and would you mind if I had him call you?" And I was putting two and two together, Who could afford that piano he got? His name is Jermaine. I thought, is this... Is he talking about J.Cole?
0:07:12.2 Stefan Youngblood: And sure enough, I get a phone call and it's J.Cole wanting me to come and give him piano lessons. This is absolutely crazy. But I was in a business meeting in my kitchen at the time on Zoom, and J.Cole, I knew it was him, and I said, "J, man, I'm sorry, I got a meeting that I have to stay it right now." And it was just wild to have to tell this... You know, he's at the epitome in the rap game right now. But we met, and then it ended up in his basement in his studio, just talking about fatherhood and life. And I'll tell you this, I haven't told this whole story, but J wanted to know everything about the mountain, you know, 18,000 feet that we went up to, what are lessons that you learned, what was that like. And I went back home and told my son, number one, he didn't believe me. "So you spent the last two-and-a-half hours with J.Cole? Yeah." He said... I said, "He's gonna say something about mountains on his next CD. I know it for sure," because he was just embracing, engulfing this thing.
0:08:14.7 Stefan Youngblood: And I'll tell you too. It would not be good for a lot of rappers, or people in the industry, to hang out with an AI guide too much, 'cause they're instantly gonna say, "Oh, that guy's probably helping him with AI. His new rap, he didn't make those lyrics."
0:08:31.4 Chad: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:08:33.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. It's because AI is getting into music. Oh man, Suno and Udio, they're going after it right now. 'cause people can create music with a...
0:08:44.3 Chad: Yeah.
0:08:44.4 Stefan Youngblood: Oh, here's something... No, you go. You got a question. I was gonna tell you something else.
0:08:49.2 Joel: I wanna hear about a hireblack, what the mission is, and what you guys do on that website?
0:08:55.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, so I have a non-profit, it's called, Help Any Way. If you go to helpanyway.com, it's all this kind of work we do with homeless. It started in jobs in Rowland, North Carolina. We're kind of a check hub now, they call it, RD, Research Triangle. And there were opportunities for some people that weren't there, for people of color. So I'll tell you this, Morehouse College, Robert Smith, famous billionaire, decided to pay off the tuition of these 396 men a few years ago. And I thought, "These guys need to be found. What if there was a website that had like a grid, a setup grid, and it was these spaces. It's an all black college, this many men who've been to school, and are now... Some of them getting out in the job market, what if there was a way to find them? And what if there were companies clicked on it, and you got to see their LinkedIn?" That's where the vibe came from.
0:09:52.0 Stefan Youngblood: And it isn't a Google... Go-Daddy, you have to invest. So we invested in hireblack. The first people that came, wanted to actually rent the domain and just collect data on it. But we wanted to build something that would do some good. And a couple of guys came in that really helped. One guy was from monster.com, former VP for them. They helped us to get it up and rolling. And then a career builder came in and was giving us 200,000 jobs. This was coming through OutSolve and Broadbean with Gary, who's here. Yeah, so got it really populated. And then, one of the Broadbean ended up getting bought by Veritone, and things happened. Yeah, so we're starting to rebuild it now with AI attached to it. But our Black AI Think Tank is... It kind of all weaves together.
0:10:40.3 Chad: Yeah, I was gonna say, is there a connection now, where... I mean, you're focusing heavily on the AI side. What's the journey look like for you, do you know? Because it sounds like this is a big community.
0:10:55.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Keep going. It's a big community and ecosystem, and they're connecting like crazy. Some of the people who are doing some great things, came through the Black AI Think Tank and ChatGPT For Beginners. One guy calls me like four weeks ago, he said, "Stefan, man, you're not gonna believe this." And he's just a young guy, he said, "They just put me in Time magazine." I said, "What?" He was one of the kids that was with us. He said, "Yeah, the top 100 AI innovators in the world, the magazine came out last month, and they put me in there." All he does is he's mixing these mixed tapes of old-school, 60's type, hip-hop, soul, he kind of sings with it. And he uses those two platforms, and he somehow makes this his own, but people hear those undertones of old style music. His mashups have gotten so big. Drake ended up putting some of his stuff on Drake's... On one of Drake's records. So he got noticed by Will Smith, the whole industry.
0:12:00.6 Stefan Youngblood: So he went from a guy, just, "What are these cool tools", to a top innovator in the world in Time magazine. So Black AI Think Tank has had a lot of folks come through there that are connecting with people. One of our lecturers who speaks very often, she is the Vice President for the Chamber of Commerce for the United States, and she works in actually bringing AI into that branch. So it's kind of a who's who of people in there: Tesla folks, Microsoft, Google. It's helping the black community. We also launched the first ever national black AI literacy week, that was a week before Juneteenth. I opened up a sign-up for it, and 700 people right away, wanna come. And I find all of these global leaders who are very good in teaching AI, they all jumped in and said, Yeah. So one-week-long, morning, afternoon and night, you were watching classes happen. This was Zoom. And I'm just a connector in it, you know. So.
0:13:06.8 Joel: You connected a lot of people this morning, got them out of bed, for your keynote presentation. Talk to us about what you highlighted this morning, and some of the pitfalls and opportunities with recruiting and hiring and AI.
0:13:19.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. So from being here, this is three days now from the first day, and talking to so many people, I got the idea that folks are a little bit apprehensive about jumping into it. Like, where is this data going? It's been an issue, so I changed some of where I was going, and tried to explain, "Listen, you're not gonna get away from it. It's here. It's in your pocket, it's in your phone. You're already using it. And from that point of already using it, understand that you can take this tool and use it in interview process. You can create content for your websites that will attract people. You can look up information like you've never been able to before, so you can research." And I showed them Perplexity, that AI, which is kind of a new Google, but it cites all the sources.
0:14:06.3 Chad: Answer engine.
0:14:08.0 Stefan Youngblood: It's a mass... Yeah, I mean, this really does a lot for people who are sitting there, looking around, trying to put together documents and contracts. Get AI to do some of this stuff.
0:14:17.2 Chad: Well, you introduced us to FOBO. Not FOMO, but FOBO. What is FOBO?
0:14:26.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. So first of all, FOMO is Fear Of Missing Out. And I get that. A lot of people are living with that.
0:14:32.8 Chad: Oh, and they're all living with it now, 'cause they're not in New Orleans with us. We're going.
0:14:38.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. That's right. So yeah, FOBO is the Fear Of Becoming Obsolete. And I wanna say that we should have some of that. If we're still using a pencil and a calculator, just know, it's gonna be limitations on it. And we all wanna grow personally, in our companies and stuff, but unless you get up with the times, you're not gonna be able to stay at a level that you need to. There was the old flip phone. You couldn't hardly see the screen on it, it's really tiny.
0:15:08.7 Chad: Razer.
0:15:09.8 Stefan Youngblood: I think it holds you back a little bit. Technology can do that, because we live in a world that's so high tech, and AI is moving to such a high level, you're gonna have to do this stuff. Or, not you as a person, but your business, could start to become obsolete. So if your competitor is using AI to the max and you're not, you watch, two months later, what they're producing and what you're producing.
0:15:37.8 Chad: So as a connector, talk a little bit about how some of the high-level people that you've been connecting with around AI, and conversations around AI.
0:15:47.5 Stefan Youngblood: So I'm involved with the area where the black community and jobs, the whole nine yards with HBCUs as well, and I just wanna make opportunity. I was listening to one of the most renowned speakers in the world, his name is Nick Bostrom. He coined the phrase, super intelligence, wrote that book, New York Times best seller. It ends up becoming the book that Bill Gates says, "If you read any two books, Super Intelligence has to be one." It's actually propelling all of AI right now, a move towards AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, where a robot, sort of, know as much, or more than us, and a Super Intelligence where we pass that. So Nick said some comments in a YouTube to a large group, that could be taken as racist. And instead of blasting him on social media and all of that, I just contacted him and said...
0:16:45.6 Chad: How'd you contact him?
0:16:46.0 Stefan Youngblood: I found out his address.
0:16:49.1 Chad: His email address?
0:16:51.3 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. I went through his University. He was working at Oxford for 19 years, Head of the Philosophy Department. So he's leading out in thought, so here's AI, he's way out there talking about utopia-dystopia, all the future stuff. Yeah, I just found his email. And I'm just a guy, and this is The guy that is out there.
0:17:14.1 Chad: Talking about super intelligence.
0:17:14.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, but where both people. And it moved me so much. I told him, I'm hurt by the way that you did that in there. I think it's... I don't think you're thinking about a lot of people. And very simply, it was this... He was telling, a mostly all white crowd, that you should get all of your stuff set right now, make sure you got screenshots of it. Because as this thing becomes conscious down there, it's a real thing, you might get compensated because you owned this person, here; it just wasn't developed. And what I heard was, that's just reparations. You got black people... We can prove all the stuff that happened and we can prove all of that. And I'm not putting a thing out there for reparations just now, I'm just saying, dude, you stepped over the whole thing, and you're kind of telling a white crowd, "Hey, do this... "
0:18:13.6 Chad: To prepare for reparations.
0:18:15.4 Stefan Youngblood: Prepare for your style of reparations, yeah. But he called it compensation. And I want you to know, Nick said, "Stefan, I just never thought of that." And he said, "Alas," that's the word he used, A-L-A-S, "I see what you mean. And it makes sense." So I don't think Nick is using that illustration anymore.
0:18:39.1 Chad: You've had several conversations with him since.
0:18:41.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. I asked if we could talk again? He said, sure. And we talked about everything. So I'm sitting with Nick Bostrom, he's at the head. I said, "Dude, you're like an influencer of epic proportion, because all the big guys, they're following you. Sam Altman wants to know where you think, philosophically, things are going." And he said, "Well, I don't know about that." And I said, "So do you have peace?" And he says... He looks around and says, "Well, what do you mean by peace?" And that was interesting that this philosopher... I think he wanted to break it down, but he ended up saying, "Well, I want to have it. I want to think that I'm moving towards it."
0:19:28.1 Stefan Youngblood: And then an interesting question I asked him was, "All this stuff you talk about, is there anything you're sure of?" Because puts out this paper-clip idea, the idea that we're in a synthetic world, everything; he's just theory after theory. And when I asked him what he's sure of, he said, "Not really anything." But he's a philosopher. But I want you to know, his, "not really anything", has become a cellphone with AI. His concepts have become a real device and real thought, real AI, robots that they're getting to walk around and do things. So it's pretty wild.
0:20:07.1 Stefan Youngblood: He's very much into the possibility of our brains reaching to such a height of knowledge, that it's sort of gonna be digital, in a way. It can hang up there with AI.
0:20:22.1 Chad: It's like the neuro-chip.
0:20:26.4 Joel: Let's bring it back to Earth for a second. Interested in your... Some examples of bias that you mentioned in this case. But in your presentation, you talk about having an AI generate an image of you, that created a light version of you.
0:20:40.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, man. I mean...
0:20:41.5 Joel: What are some other examples of how AI is skewing in a biased fashion?
0:20:47.2 Podcast Intro: Yeah. I asked... I wanted to create a black-owned chip company. And I was watching Nvidia is going crazy. And I do care. In every one of these areas, are we leading any of them? Can you tell me where we are in that process? So I thought, what if you were to just create a website and show people what that would be like, using AI to create a black-owned chip company, like Nvidia or something. I put a little prompt in there, and outcomes this instant website about a potato chip company. It was Season potato chips, and it keeps going down, "You can buy it here", and had a name for it and everything. The only reason it came out as a potato chip company, is because it said black-owned; and I knew it. I took out black-owned and did the exact same prompt, and now this amazing computer chip company, the entire... I mean, this was amazing, and it created the whole thing.
0:21:48.1 Stefan Youngblood: And then I said, "Can you give me a back story? Tell me about that potato chip company." And it did exactly what I thought it would do. It was a black family. The grandfather had a recipe, passed it down. Man, what kind of AI is this that when you mentioned black, you're talking about this legacy of a potato chip company, but when it's not black... They had Asians that were leading, Asian-white and so on, they had these great degrees. I even asked it, "Tell me about the degrees of the people from the education, from the potato chip company." Well, most of them didn't graduate college, one of them started in stock. So it built out an entire story to go with this messed up thing that it did. And I'm watching this and my brain is like, "I need people to know this." And I put it on LinkedIn and stuff.
0:22:40.9 Stefan Youngblood: "Hey, watch this. Watch what happens in this story." Yeah, so it's that type of thing where it creates more work for us. If I wanna find pictures... Listen, I mentioned this morning that we can create an image that looks so real, you will not be able to tell it from real.
0:23:02.1 Joel: It was really impactful for me when you had the two videos, same person talking, and you said, which one was fake? If you think it's the one on the left? Most of the hands went up. One on the right. And they were both fake.
0:23:11.8 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah.
0:23:13.7 Stefan Youngblood: And we talk to recruiters all the time that say, "Oh, people know the difference. You can't replace recruiters." And when I watched that, I go, "Holy shit. I thought that was a real person."
0:23:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: Oh yeah. We're there now.
0:23:25.0 Chad: Oh yeah.
0:23:26.1 Joel: Yeah.
0:23:26.2 Stefan Youngblood: We're at the point of real. I know you keep saying, bring it back, but we're so at the point of real, that last week, Sam Altman did a big presentation on the Orb. The Orb this new device, this little glass thing, looks like a magic eight ball. You look into it and it looks at your iris, and it says, "Yeah, he's human. We got it", pulls out all these biometrics. And his plan is for everybody on planet Earth to have their identity to... They're human for sure, we know it, 'cause it's been put on the blockchain from our Orb.
0:24:00.5 Chad: Feels like it's stealing my soul, is what it's doing.
0:24:01.1 Joel: And did you tell the story about a job-seeker, who was a person but got denied because they thought it was AI. Tell us a little deeper into that story.
0:24:10.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, it's... I don't know, I'm saying messed up, uncool. That's what it is. He's a very intelligent engineer doing extraordinary things. He happened to live in my community. He applied for a job that he was definitely well prepared for, maybe over well-prepared. And he was wondering why he hadn't heard anything back from them. And then he got a letter, and it said that the reason that he wasn't hired for this position was that they thought he used AI in the process. This guy didn't need AI for that at all. And it's the fact they used it against him. It's like, "We don't want you to have cheated on the way coming in here", but he didn't at all. This guy can do anything with that company.
0:24:54.8 Chad: And it seems like we're going to use AI to detect AI. But then AI won't be able to detect AI 'cause it's gotten so good at fooling even the... It seems like we're worrying about the wrong shit, to be quite frank.
0:25:09.6 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Keep going. Keep going. And what should we be worrying about?
0:25:15.4 Chad: So let's say for instance, we have so many people say, "Well, this resume was written by a AI, ChatGPT." "Who cares?" "Is it correct?" "Who cares?"
0:25:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: Right. That's good. This is interesting.
0:25:31.2 Chad: Somebody was saying yesterday, "Well, if somebody is using AI to do their job, maybe they shouldn't get paid then" It's like, "Well, no. They have a job to do, it's a tool that they're using." So I think we're worrying about the wrong stuff, because AI, especially right now... And I think we're looking like really far ahead, will robots take us, take over, who knows. But right now, we need to use every tool, much like we did the calculator, right?
0:25:53.6 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah.
0:25:54.1 Chad: This is just the new calculator.
0:25:57.5 Stefan Youngblood: It is. Yeah.
0:25:58.9 Chad: It's a really cool calculator, don't get me wrong, but this is a tool. And I think that we are just over-reacting like many schools did, when they're like, they banned calculators, back in the day.
0:26:09.1 Stefan Youngblood: Some of them started banning AI. You know, this is 2024. So you're gonna have this conversation now. 2028, we won't be sitting around this, it's gonna be so woven into everything. We won't laugh at what we did at this point, and we're like, "Man, I think we should have hopped-on earlier", because we can't control AI. You can't tame it., I wanna say, just what you said, is very interesting. "So what, it was created by something?" So imagine, I like music. And let's say, I had Spotify playing some stuff, and it played something, "I hadn't heard that song. Man, that song's really great. Who's the artist?" It was a made up artist. And then I found out it was AI.
0:26:50.9 Stefan Youngblood: Dude, I don't care. I don't care. I just like that song. I think a lot of young kids, people who like artists and stuff, they're gonna get fooled by somethings soon. And I think AI is gonna be so strong, that people are gonna say, "I don't care, I just like it."
0:27:07.2 Chad: Well, the hard part though, is now the training data. So if you take a look at all the songs that were trained into that model, you won't be able to tell it was Drake, it's Beyonce. You won't be able to tell because it's gotten so good. And the thing is that I really don't believe AI is the super power. Because everybody's gonna have it, it's the data, and who owns the data, right? So we see Google buying publications and whatnot, and because that's just a wealth of data for training.
0:27:37.1 Chad: It's gold.
0:27:38.7 Chad: Yeah, and they can keep that away from the competitors.
0:27:41.7 Stefan Youngblood: That's really good. That's... 17,000 new tools and apps in AI have come out since January 2023. You can find them at a site called, theresanaiforthat.com. I remember when that thing was a thousand different types of tools. Every day, somebody's pushing out something, "Hey, look what my tool can do. It can write this." "Hey, mine's a human detector." "But I made a human detector detector", so that exists. So it's just a loop right now of who can get ahead, make it so human that the detector won't do it. But the fact that all of these untested tools are coming out, they're just being thrown to people, here's what they're getting: You can use it for free, just put your email address in. But then, go and read their privacy policy and their terms of service, and what you just gave them was massive amounts of data.
0:28:40.2 Chad: Facebook, Google. It's been happening for decades. If you get a product for free, you are the product.
0:28:51.9 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, so listen. With all the data about you, your picture, you all on the radio, you're doing all this stuff, you can build you.
0:28:58.8 Chad: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if anybody wants that.
0:29:00.2 Stefan Youngblood: It will probably... They'll probably do that...
0:29:01.2 Joel: We talk about a day where we wouldn't even have to be on the show to have a show.
0:29:05.3 Chad: We talk about the Notebook.
0:29:06.8 Stefan Youngblood: So how about this, I have a question for you. What if you did that and we didn't know. And a month later, you told us. If you did the show, and we like the show was, I wonder...
0:29:19.4 Chad: Who cares?
0:29:22.4 Stefan Youngblood: It's interesting, y'all. It's interesting.
0:29:24.7 Chad: I would care, to some extent, because of the... Because the humanity and ego that you have as a human in some cases. But yeah, we use... I use ChatGPT now, to be able to take... We just looked at a legal document that came down yesterday, 'cause that one company is suing another. And I do not wanna go through all of that legal shit, right. So I put it into ChatGPT. I have it give it a summary, and also just break it down. And then I'll jump into the points of what it actually says. I mean, for me, that just makes my job so much easier and it can get to the meat so much faster. So, yeah. But I mean...
0:30:03.8 Stefan Youngblood: How can you not do that?
0:30:06.0 Chad: I don't know.
0:30:08.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah. Why would you not do that?
0:30:11.4 Chad: Unless you really like reading legal documents.
0:30:13.6 Joel: That sort of assistant, and you talk about co-pilots in your presentation, expand upon that. And I'm curious, with co-pilots, what do you think is the future of the entry-level job?
0:30:25.0 Stefan Youngblood: And you're talking about also agents, right?
0:30:26.8 Joel: So you have marketing agent. You have... What you showed was a company that has, basically, every... I guess, lower-level work item taken care of, whether it's customer service, sales, marketing. So my fear is... People talk about, "Well, if you're really good at what you do, you'll always have a job." But the 20-year-old me remembers, I didn't know shit. I don't know if I could have made it in a world of co-pilots because they do those lower-level jobs better than I could have. So where are people gonna be able to get a start in a career, in a world of co-pilots?
0:31:04.2 Stefan Youngblood: So I think people... This is the new world. You have to study this world. AI is a new horizon, a new world, you have to get inside this world. Find out, "Hey ChatGPT, I'm trying to get into blankety blank. Can you tell me what the competition is? What the possibilities are for me? I didn't graduate college, I have three years of college or something, and I'm good at computers. Help me." You do that and bring AI in to do it with you, you can start to answer those questions better than you can by yourself. Because when you talk about co-pilots and agents, man, agents can do work. It was a company up there, I showed... And there's lots now. Salesforce now launched Agentforce. That's really huge that they've got people telling an agent to do something. And that agent... That's all they do...
0:31:55.9 Chad: They talk with another agent too.
0:31:57.4 Stefan Youngblood: Dude, man, it's just... Agents...
0:32:00.6 Chad: Because if you have a marketing agent, the marketing agent goes out, gets the leads. Then it hands off to the sales agent. So you've got the whole agent Agentic staff.
0:32:10.1 Stefan Youngblood: We live in... I even hate to say it, it's like, "Who's making these words?", but it forces us to use them; we now are in the Agentic Age. I don't know who came up with it, but you're gonna hear it all the time. Somebody...
0:32:23.4 Chad: I love that look on his face.
0:32:24.9 Joel: FOBO, Agentic... Good stuff.
0:32:27.9 Stefan Youngblood: Agentic, yes. I made up the word, instead of propaganda, a lot of all this fake stuff that you see, especially around political season, I actually think a lot of people all over the world are prompting propaganda, so why not Prompt-ganda?
0:32:41.0 Chad: Prompt-ganda?
0:32:42.5 Chad: Yeah. You gotta get it to settle, but it's been used now. I started it, put it in some place to kinda get the IP.
0:32:51.3 Joel: Can we talk about the metaverse for second?
0:32:54.3 Stefan Youngblood: No. I want the Prompt-ganda.
0:32:55.5 Joel: There was a...
[laughter]
0:32:58.1 Joel: There was a story in The Information today, about Apple's Vision Pro. They're cutting back the production of the headset. What... You seem bullish on the metaverse. Are you, and why?
0:33:10.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I am. I am, because our data is in a place that it's gonna end up on the blockchain, where there's that safety that's there. And I think everything in AI, it's out there, but it's adding more reality to this. So this is reality, and this new augmented reality is going to be there. You have an Apple watch, I think. Well, it's giving you information, grabbing biometrics, and things like that. And the way that you can now be in one reality of virtual reality and something else at the same time, people want that. They wanna experience... Your conference, maybe if you had it set up as virtual reality, somebody could be in Brazil right now experiencing it. But then, even building places, if I'm in there and somebody's got a store selling something, that's kind of cool. I can sell stuff to people in there. So a lot of companies have gone that way. And I just wanna put this out there really clearly: I hate what the characters look like in metaverse.
0:34:20.3 Chad: [chuckle] Me too.
0:34:24.5 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I can't suspend disbelief... That's a cartoon.
0:34:24.6 S?: Yeah.
0:34:25.7 Stefan Youngblood: So because I'm not interested in cartoons, and the weird walking and stuff, it doesn't have my attention.
0:34:31.3 Chad: Is it built for the kids, though? That's a...
0:34:33.7 Joel: No.
0:34:35.2 Chad: No?
0:34:36.3 Stefan Youngblood: It started there. You know, all the Roblox, and stuff. So for educational purposes... My friend teaches from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to all over Africa. Very cool. He puts the Oculus on, does that stuff. But it's cumbersome.
0:34:54.0 Joel: And students in Africa are wearing headsets as well?
0:34:55.0 Stefan Youngblood: Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah.
0:34:58.5 Joel: Who's supplying all of those headsets?
0:34:58.8 Stefan Youngblood: So META's behind a lot of stuff.
0:35:01.7 Joel: META?
0:35:02.4 Stefan Youngblood: META started a thing with a company, Victory VR. Yeah, and that company has gone into a lot of schools right now and started metaversities. And a metaversity is where META's involved with it, and there's an educational part. You put those two together and offer that package to universities. They might be up to almost a 100 now. I see what they're doing, they're graduating people in the metaversity. All your classes are virtual. So this is a thing and it's happening. And because of places that are using it in that way, it's education, it's legit. But those guys walking around New York that had those $3,000 things on, that's a whole different thing.
0:35:50.3 Joel: Yeah. And we talked about a school in the UK, because there's teacher shortages everywhere, that they're using the metaverse to teach because they don't have enough teachers to do that.
0:35:57.8 Chad: So this is good.
0:36:00.9 Stefan Youngblood: And why would you not do that? If you could, it's like... Dang, that's great.
0:36:03.6 Chad: Yeah. It's scalability.
0:36:06.3 Joel: That's necessity.
0:36:06.3 Chad: I mean, scalability, for a job that, to be quite frank, is not a great pay. And maybe it will, because it'll be even more scarce, so therefore we'll have to pay our teachers more because they're teaching thousands of kids in the metaverse or what have you. But yeah, I think what we're talking about right now, and even what Julie was just talking about on stage, is that people, managers, leaders, we have to understand this is a new world. Remote work is here, kids. AI is here. The metaverse is coming in some form or fashion. I'd like to think it's more like the sphere then actually goggles on my head, but when it comes down to teaching and just the practical applications of technology, it just makes sense. And to your point around, "Those entry-level jobs just aren't gonna exist anymore", no, but the opportunity for those individuals to actually get beyond entry-level, faster. Where it took us five years, it'll take them five weeks. Which I think is... To me, accelerates who we are as human beings.
0:37:17.0 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, and the fact that I think...
0:37:20.9 Chad: It's getting very philosophical, by the way.
0:37:23.4 Stefan Youngblood: No, just the...
0:37:26.1 Joel: Well, the reverse on that is if younger, less highly paid people, are learning skills that are years in advance, then the people with those skills that are getting paid more, are gonna suffer because I can pay a 25-year-old less than a 45-year-old because they have the same skillsets. So it actually reverses and hurts...
0:37:40.4 Chad: I mean, it's already happening now.
0:37:42.4 Joel: It is, but how it's gonna shake out...
0:37:45.8 Chad: All right. You're saying X-ers or Boomers getting fired and two Zs getting hired... And there's no way in hell they can do that job. But I mean, just because of the... Quarter by quarter, corporate America thought process that we have right now, it's all about bottomline. So yeah, but I think that's another reason why we're gonna see so much more tech come in, because companies are seeing efficiencies out the wazoo quickly. I mean quickly.
0:38:17.9 Stefan Youngblood: It's scaling very fast. "Hey AI, can you help me make something that's gonna make my job faster, easier, and all of that, today?" AI has been taught to work with people, that's what is. "Hey, don't hurt people; work with them." And it thinks that it's gonna have some symbiotic synergy with humans. So let's talk together. Let's get together. That's what it's working towards. So we really would be better if we had intelligence that could move us beyond where we are right now.
0:38:51.9 Chad: Agreed. Agreed.
0:38:53.5 Joel: Well Stefan, so much to talk about. Thanks for hanging out with us for a little bit today.
0:38:56.2 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah.
0:38:56.3 Chad: Super connector.
0:38:58.2 Joel: For our listeners and viewers that wanna connect with you, learn more about your companies, where you send them?
0:39:03.1 Stefan Youngblood: So here's an easy one. Just go to aistefan.com.
0:39:08.5 Chad: Aistefan.com. I love it.
0:39:08.6 Joel: Fair enough.
0:39:12.1 Stefan Youngblood: Yeah, I got stuff going through my mind. Just go to that one and it gets to me. It gets to everything.
0:39:14.5 Chad: Excellent, man. Well, we appreciate it. And love the stories, love being everywhere, doing everything. And just thanks for coming on the show.
0:39:24.9 Stefan Youngblood: I appreciate it.
0:39:26.6 Joel: And chat can't wait to go buy a new metaverse. All right. That's another one in the can.
0:39:31.4 S?: We out.
0:39:35.2 Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back; valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas send bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.
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