Transcript
Jaden Schaefer (0:00)
Welcome to the AI Chat podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer and today on the show we have a phenomenal guest, John Munsell. I want to tell you a little bit about him. He'll give you a little bit of his background. I was excited to do this show today because he is the co founder and CEO over at Bazooka, that's an AI consulting firm. So he helps a lot of businesses adopt and scale AI. This is something I know a lot of the listeners are interested in. So I got a lot of good questions queued up. Another cool thing about John is that he's been doing marketing, software development and sales for about 25 years and he is the adjunct instructor of artificial intelligence over at lsu. So this is an absolute legend. We're excited to have you on, John. Welcome to the show.
John Munsell (0:45)
A legend in his own mind, maybe. No, I appreciate it. Jayden. Hey, it's great to be on. Good to meet you. I like the work that you've done, like we talked about earlier. So I'm excited to be on. Hopefully I can add some value to your audience.
Jaden Schaefer (1:00)
100%. Yeah. So tell us a little bit though, because I'm curious. I'm sure others are. What got you into this space? How did you start, you know, how did you become the, the expert in AI that you are, you know, teaching at university? What got you interested and involved in all of this?
John Munsell (1:17)
Yeah, great question. Well, I, I started a software company back in 97. All right. So back then the web had just come out and I could see the writing on the wall. I was like, man, this is the industry to be in. And my idea was, I'll sell the picks and shovels to the guys entering the gold rush. So we started building websites for people and back then there was no WordPress. So we built our own web content management system. And that was the problem that we solved for people for years. And then WordPress came out and all of a sudden, you know, what became our competitive advantage became our albatross because everybody else had something free that they could use and we were supporting a cms. So by then we had gone from charging an average of $175,000 for a website down to about $18,000, you know, and then gradually, I, I guess it was what, 2020 when we started messing around with copy AI and Jasper, which I think was called Jarvis back then. And at the point I was like, okay, well this is kind of interesting. You know, it gives you a head start, but it still talks in Circles, you know. But I thought, okay, if this is the worst it'll ever be, you know, we could be in for some interesting stuff. So I had decided, you know, I was getting. My wife and I were getting close to being empty nesters as our kids were graduating from college. And I thought it would be cool to lean, clean out the company instead of having 40 employees shrink it. So I sold off the agency side. We gradually growed to be a digital marketing agency and a software development. So I sold that part off to figure out what problems the market wanted solved now. And we, you know, we started to use AI to help us have these round tables. We start off with a thing called the CXO Roundtable to just have meetings with various C suiters and talk about, you know, what problems they wanted solved. The idea was that I would help them solve marketing problems. But as time went on, I was like, this AI thing is getting kind of interesting because we were using it to write our copy and all that stuff. And then as you, you know, ChatGPT came out and hit the world. I think it was version three. And we were playing around with that. I'm like, oh, they took the, the gates off, right? So now we got, yeah, we got a. Without guardrails. This is, this is a whole lot more fun. So I changed the name of the group because everybody was interested in AI, and I changed it to CxO AI Roundtable. And so every Friday would meet and we'd teach them new stuff about AI. We would compare different tools that were out there. I would have vendors come in and talk about their tool. And, you know, again, the idea was, what problem does the market want solved? And eventually I figured out what the problem was. And we had gotten to be really good at that prompting to make it sound, you know, less robotic, less chat GPT is. And we developed a unique framework for doing that. And I would teach it in the round table. And then I thought, okay, well, I've been doing this for free for so long, I need to hurry up and monetize because there's only so long you can work for free. And so we did some training for people. And as we were doing the training, I realized people weren't getting a certain concept across. And. And the concept was what we now call scalable prompt engineering. And it's the idea that instead of the way you're traditionally taught to just, you know, type big giant questions or requests into AI to break them more into components or modules, if you will, so that you could swap those out and that way, it becomes scalable inside your organization. Right? So somebody could look at your prompt and go, oh, if I swap out the Persona for. For this, I can target a different audience. If I swap out the style of voice for here, I can write a press release instead of a sales letter. You know, those kinds of things. So as I was teaching people, I realized there. There was a. I don't know, some kind of void or something. They weren't quite getting it. And then it hit me that I needed to give them a visual diagram of how this worked.
