Overcoming Fear of AI: A Faith-Based Perspective with Jonathan Mast

Jim Burgoon: 00:00:00

Welcome to Grace in the Grind, the podcast where we dive deep into the journeys of heart centered and purpose driven leaders and entrepreneurs. We're here to equip and encourage you on your journey. So let's get started and find the grace within the grind. This is Grace in the Grind.

And now your host, Jim Burgoon.

: 00:00:22

Welcome to Grace in the Grind where we're here to empower, to encourage and to equip the Christian entrepreneur to do all that God has called them to. And today I have my friend Jonathan Mast here. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Mast: 00:00:33

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and looking forward to the conversation.

: 00:00:38

Same. And give us a quick overview of what you do, who you are, so that the audience becomes very acquainted with you.

Jonathan Mast: 00:00:44

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that.

I'm a nut for AI Other than being a Christian businessman, I love AI and so I spend most of my time teaching people how to communicate with it effectively. My real focus is on how to act, ask IT questions to get the best possible responses.

And I do a lot of coaching and consulting around that to help both businesses, nonprofits, but even more importantly, Jim, to help out their teams.

Because we found that AI can really help them save time that impacts the bottom line positively and in addition to that, it lets them provide more value to their clients.

: 00:01:17

So the first thing I guess I got to ask you here because there are so many people trying to get into AI. How did you get into AI really?

Jonathan Mast: 00:01:24

More or less by happenstance. I just decided it really was impactful to me when I started using it. And I'm a probably the quintessential ADD entrepreneur.

I've got more ideas than I've got time, I've got more tasks than I've got time, and I'm always looking to get more done. And AI really helped me amplify my skill and experience to get more done.

Now, sometimes that meant I failed really fast, but that's okay because then I could move on. Other times it meant I was able to get a lot more done in, in a much shorter period of time. And I just wanted to share that with everybody.

I've been in the digital marketing and sales space for over a decade and said it's time for me to, I want to really help people just understand what an impact this can have.

I saw people that were talking about all the fear mongering about, oh my gosh, AI is going to take all our jobs and was, this is a Terminator revisited. And I wanted to add a voice of reason into that And a voice of clarity, hopefully to say there's.

It's a tool and like any other tool, it can be used for good or bad. But I believe part of our responsibility, especially as Christians, is to embrace tools like this and demonstrate how we can use them for good.

: 00:02:31

So there are three lines of questions that you just really hit me with here. And I want to. First, because it's. Because there's so much my mind just went. Let's start with the ADHD management stuff because I too have some adhd.

I know many of the listeners probably struggle with some level of it. So how do you manage your time with AI?

Jonathan Mast: 00:02:49

Poorly.

But I get a lot more, I get a lot more done than I used to because one of the things I found out being add and I got diagnosed late in life, I got diagnosed at 43, I'm now 55. And so I'd learned a lot of coping skills to deal with it. It never even come up in my life before that.

And one of the things that I've learned AI helps me do is to get things done faster. So I'm really good at hyper focusing for a few minutes, maybe if things are going well for 15 or 20 minutes. But.

But after that bright shiny object squirrel, and I'm off, I'm onto something different. And that can be just as simple as switching tabs in my browser.

I see something and I'm like, oh, I gotta do that and I gotta do that and I gotta do that. And then 20 minutes later I'm back. Oh, I forgot I was working on that in the first place. Happens to me all day long.

But AI helps me get more done faster.

It helps me again leverage that skill and experience that I've got, Jim, so that I can get more done in that 5 to 20 minute window that, that my brain has the capacity to focus. And then I can be a squirrel for five minutes and I can do something else.

So almost in a Pomodoro type task management way, I get to be able to focus really quickly and get things done. The key for me, and where AIs really added the value, Jim, has been to allow me to actually complete tasks in that time.

So I don't just work on a task for 20 or 25 minutes, then take a five minute break. I actually complete tasks, sometimes multiple tasks in that 25 minute period. And, and that has just been a total game changer for me.

And yes, I do say that word. I know AI does too, but that's one of the phrases I use. And it really has changed my life for the better and allowed me to get a lot more done.

: 00:04:28

So what's your favorite tool for the task completion?

Jonathan Mast: 00:04:30

I'm a big proponent of using the basic tools. I Recommend Tools like ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity. On the image side, I recommend tools like Mid Journey and Flux.

I am not one of these guys that's buying every new, latest and greatest AI tool that comes out. I bought a lot of them and I've tested a lot of them because I've got a large community and I share that information out with them.

But the vast majority of the tools out there are based on either ChatGPT or Claude anyway.

And so why not just use those and do that instead of trying to chase all these specialty tools that often are just really lipstick on top of that that it's a better user interface and oftentimes at a lot more money.

: 00:05:08

Okay, so then let's switch our thoughts for a second because this has been really good and it really brings up something you said earlier about being Christian, helping Christians with the tools and stuff like that. One of the things that I've seen in the Christian conversations has been, oh, this is of the devil, or this is this, or this is this.

And there's a lot of fear around Christians using AI. What would you say to that?

Jonathan Mast: 00:05:29

A hammer can be used to build a building, can be used to tear one down, it can be used to kill someone. The hammer itself is not evil, it's the way it's used. And I believe that exact same thing applies to AI.

AI isn't inherently good or bad, it just exists. It's a tool that exists. I think those people that are afraid that AI is from the devil really don't understand what it is. AI is.

It's really not even the right name for what we have right now. What we really have is predictive intelligence. We don't have artificial intelligence.

Literally, it's predicting the next word that we're trying to do in most cases or on an image generation.

It's looking at its vast repository and trying to match the words that we used with the things in its that is understands in its library and create something unique based on that. It is not capable of doing anything on its own entirely.

If I fire my computer up in the morning and I go, okay, let's see what ChatGPT is going to do today at 5:00 or 9:00 or whenever my day's done, it's not going to have done a single thing if I didn't ask it to.

: 00:06:31

So then, with that being said, so how do you think the Christian entrepreneur should be involved in either shaping the ethics or the development of AI?

Jonathan Mast: 00:06:39

It's a good question. I talk a lot about ethics, but probably not from a perspective that you may be thinking. And that's it.

I think there's a lot of people talking about AI ethics, and I think that's misplaced. And the reason I think it's misplaced is as a Christian business person, I need to have ethics in the way in which I conduct my life and my business.

AI doesn't change that. AI doesn't necessarily have to have any impact on my ethics. It's another area of my business that I need to apply my ethics to.

But AI in and of itself, if it's what's driving us to have that ethical conversation, Jim, then I'm going to challenge any business leader out there that they're too late to the game. In other words, you should have been having this conversation about ethics prior to AI.

AI is just other ways for us to again implement our ethical practices and our ethical standards. So to me, that's a big part of it. On the implementation side, what should we be doing?

As business owners, I really believe, and one of my goals is we need to be helping our teams be more effective, not just using it ourselves, not trying to shortcut and find a way to take advantage of somebody. And certainly AI provides a lot of shortcuts in different areas. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. It's like anything else in life.

But I think as Christian business people, we need to be looking at it as how can we leverage AI and how can we implement it within our teams in a way to provide more value? Because if we can help our teams. You and I were talking about pre call, none of us have more time than we do tasks to do.

It just doesn't exist in today's world. But if we can help, if we can help our teams find a little more time, maybe 30 minutes a day using AI, that's two and a half hours a week.

That's going to be 10 hours every month. That means that's actually three extra work weeks every year.

Now, if we run, assuming my math is right, and it may or may not be totally right, but it's about how it boils down. And that means that we can really do things to help make our employees and our team members lives better.

We can deliver more value to our clients, which we want to do. And along the way, we may actually be able to make a little more money as well. And again, that's okay.

What's so cool about is we can do all three of those with AI at the same time.

: 00:08:52

So then this brings up another question for me.

veloped at such a rapid pace,: 5000

Jonathan Mast: 00:09:10

That's another great question. Literally, as we're recording this right now, OpenAI has a major announcement coming out of a bunch of new products that they're releasing.

I'm not that worried that I'm missing it because most of it probably won't be quite ready to go anyway. But from a team perspective, focus on the basics.

Don't get caught up, as I do as an ad entrepreneur with every late, latest, greatest, bright, shiny object, because most of those don't matter today. They may matter down the road, but they don't matter today.

Focus and look at your business and identify the areas in your business that can be automated, or I shouldn't say automated, that can be replicated. So if you've got a process that your team is doing and every day where they do that same thing, maybe AI can help them do that better.

Maybe AI can help them do that in less time. Maybe we can add some automations into literally help reduce that workload.

Now, I know immediately people are probably thinking, oh, you're talking about getting rid of employees. No, I'm really not. Because I don't believe most businesses are overstaffed. I believe most businesses are understaffed.

And I believe AI can help them increase again that level of both employee satisfaction as well as value they're delivering to their clients.

By focusing on the basics, don't worry if you're a business owner out there, don't worry about doing everything with AI that you can do because you're going to fail. It's anything else. If I go on a diet, and I should always be on a diet of some sort because that's one thing I need to work on.

If I say, all right, I'm going to eat perfectly today and I'm going to go to the gym today and I'm going to do this today and I'm going to. If I do too many things, guess what, I'm going to do it for three days and then I'm going to fail and I'm going to stop And I'm going to give up.

But if I say, all right, I'm going to change my eating habits and I'm going to eat more healthily by doing the following three things and I start implementing those and I doing those consistently, a year down the road, I'm going to be further ahead having focused on three or four basic items than if I tried to do everything up front. Because I'll likely continue to do those simple items on an ongoing basis and develop new habits.

And I want to encourage people to do the same thing with AI. I want them to use it to help develop new habits that make their lives easier, better, while providing more value to their clients.

: 00:11:25

So before we switch gears, because I want to ask some other questions. So for let's future cast so three to five years. What does AI look like for businesses in three to five years?

Jonathan Mast: 00:11:35

Let me reassure everybody it's not going to turn into our the AI from Terminator. If you're old enough to remember the movie. And you may not, but I know I am. Yeah, it's not Skynet. It's not going to be Skynet in three to five years.

I actually don't believe it's ever going to get there. That's just me, but I just don't believe it. We're certainly not going to be there in three to five years.

I think what we're going to see is we're going to continue to see the mass adaptation of AI in businesses.

And so as a business leader today, I think we owe it to ourselves and our teams and our communities, our clients to figure out how to use AI to do a better job. Because if we don't, our competitors will.

And I think three to five years down the road, you're going to see that from today, where best estimates say that about 15% of businesses are using AI on a regular and consistent basis, I think we'll be in three to five years, probably more at the 85 rate where about 85% of the businesses are using them on a regular, consistent and effective basis.

: 00:12:32

Well, thank you for that. And just as a side fun note, I may not look it, but I'm actually turning 47.

Jonathan Mast: 00:12:37

So no, I've still got you beat by a few years. So you probably remember Terminator then. I do.

: 00:12:42

I remember all of that coming out Skynet and everything. I remember loving that show.

And then there was a lot of other shows about the same time, which is what was that one where it was a kid and the computer was a trying to destroy the world I.

Jonathan Mast: 00:12:52

Think it was, oh, War Games, one of my favorite. Love that movie. Yeah.

: 00:12:56

And you get into these conversations because you've got iRobot, you've got by A Semenoff and Vader, Will Smith.

You got all these movies and cultural references of how AI is going to take over this planet and kill all of us because we're, according to AI, we're the plague on the planet. So it's understandable how the fear is there. And so what is one thing in that line of question?

What is one thing for people who are maybe not as informed informationally but maybe in more informed culturally, where the movies and the books and stuff, what would you say to them to help them get over their fear?

Jonathan Mast: 00:13:30

That's an excellent point. I think I would point to a couple of key things that have happened in the last century or so. One was the internal combustion engine.

When it came out, we had all kinds of people going, oh my gosh, it's going to ruin our economy and it's going to kill our jobs. And oh, this is going to be terrible. And it wasn't. Now, were there people that were displaced because of the internal combustion engine? Absolutely.

There were jobs that were replaced, but those people got new jobs and they got new training and they upscaled and that worked. The same thing happened when the PC came out.

And I remember I was just getting into the workforce when typewriters were getting removed from desks and PCs were getting put on. And I remember people going, I'm going to keep my adding machine. I'm not using Lotus 1, 2, 3. And I'm going to keep my typewriter.

I don't want to use that fancy word processor. And for a couple years that worked fine. But if you walk into the average office today, or the average home office, I would challenge that.

Less than one in a thousand would have a typewriter on their desk. They're going to have a computer because that's become standard place and it hasn't replaced all of us. It hasn't caused us all to lose our jobs.

In fact, it's allowed many of us to increase our standard of living by embracing that. And then the third one would be the Internet.

Right around the late 90s, the Internet came out and there were plenty of naysayers going, oh my gosh, this is going to ruin society. It's going to kill us all, we're all going to die.

And of course I'm exaggerating, but there were a lot of naysayers out there that thought this was the end There were even a lot of Christians that said the Internet was evil, it was from the devil because you could look at porn and things like that. And you can. Again, the Internet's not good or bad, it's a tool.

But again, in all three of those scenarios, I believe in human nature, we're going to adapt, we're going to figure it out. We're going to figure out how to use these technological shifts to benefit our lives. And I believe the exact same thing will happen with AI.

Will there be some scary moments? Possibly. Do we have to worry about AI taking over and us losing our jobs and being penniless on the street?

Not unless you want to stick your head in the sand and stop going to work.

: 00:15:32

Fair. Fair points. So with that being said, I want to switch a little questions over to more personal, more dealing with some stuff.

Like, I know I've heard you talk on different conversations. I've been in several with you. First and foremost, what got you into AI because you were 10 plus years in digital marketing.

I'm sure that was a sweet gig. What made the shift to where now you're an AI influencer?

Jonathan Mast: 00:15:54

Me simply deciding that I wanted to become an expert in that. I, I remember clearly, and this will be a weird example, but I remember in high school we stopped. I went to a Christian high school.

It was about 30 miles away from my home. And so we would drive back and forth a lot, especially if you had extracurricular activities.

And one of the things we always did on the way back, we'd stop at a gas station and get a soda or a bag of chips or something like that. And I remember walking into one of the gas stations and going, I'm getting sick of soda. I wish I could get a bottle of water.

Now, mind you, this is in the late 80s when I was in high school, you couldn't buy bottled water. It didn't exist in the late 80s.

And I remember literally getting back in the car with my cousins and a couple friends at the time, went to the same school and going, man, I wish somebody'd figure out how to sell a bottle of water that wasn't just out of the tap or the hose on the side of the gas station because I'd really just like to have a bottle of water. And we laughed and oh yeah, who's going to pay for water? And blah, blah, blah. Look at it today, what an incredible business opportunity it is.

And that, of course, at 55, that's happened to me a number of times. And when AI came around I remember sitting there going, this time I'm going to jump in. I did. I'm self taught.

I have not taken any university courses or anything to learn AI. In fact, while I don't have any problem with universities, most of them are not in a position to train people on AI.

As you mentioned earlier, AI is changing so fast and so rapidly they can't keep up. They, I've, I just spoke to a group of universities last two weeks ago and, and they literally can't keep up.

They can't figure out because their systems are not designed to work that fast and a course that they designed today to teach next semester will be outdated before Christmas, before that course even starts. And that's just, they can't, I don't say they can't, they'll figure it out. But as this moment, that's not the place to learn it.

So I believed AI was a great tool. I dove in, I taught myself. I've created literally tens of thousands of prompts.

I've failed a gazillion times when it's come to AI, but I've also succeeded in a lot of areas by figuring out how to communicate with it, how to get it to do the things that I want and how to leverage it as a tool for my business and for my life and even for me to help communicate with my grandkids.

: 00:18:01

So what kind of fear were you facing when you jumped? Or was it just super excitement?

Jonathan Mast: 00:18:05

Oh yeah, I'm definitely fairly risk, risk tolerant so I didn't really have any fear at all. It was, I figured the worst thing that was going to happen is I was going to be wrong. But I just, that never even entered my mind at that point.

Not that I was trying to be arrogant, but I saw AI as this next major tectonic technological shift that we were going to go through. Much like the Industrial Revolution, much like when the Internet came on, when the PC was put on the desk, those same things that we talked about.

And I just wanted to add value. One of the things I've learned over my career is that I didn't want to sell. I just, I wanted to help people out. That's just my heart.

over a year ago in August of: 2024

No. Or: 2023

So let's see, September, October, November. We're 16 months later. And I'm just absolutely humbled to be able to say that.

Now I get people reaching out to me literally every day to talk about AI, to teach them, to work with them and things like that. And it's, I hope and believe it's because of that servant heart that I had to just say, let me teach you how to use it.

And the blessings that have come from that.

: 00:19:37

Yeah, absolutely.

And you've been a blessing because I've been, like I said, I've been part of your courses and some of them and just, man, I've been blown away because I want to learn the, the depths of AI as well.

And for the listener out there, just realize, and I'm going to put this all in the show notes, some of the things we, all the things we talked about, but like his Facebook group just went north of 250, 000. People like, my goodness, people want it. And this man, Jonathan, is amazing at it. The listener.

Jonathan Mast: 00:20:01

Thank you.

: 00:20:02

Check the show notes, click the links, go check them out. You'll have it all in there and we'll talk about it in a second.

I do want to ask a question which I find fascinating because when I was on a webinar, it was actually two or three webinars with you. Now you had mentioned an incarceration.

And one of the things that really just intrigued me and a question that really came from that is how is your thinking and your faith in what you do now shaped in that time?

Jonathan Mast: 00:20:30

It's a good question. For those that may not know, I call it my federally mandated sabbatical. Most people refer to it as prison.

And I spent three years there because I screwed up. My screw up was telling some lies and getting associating with a bunch of people that I shouldn't have. And that got me in a bunch of trouble.

And that was a real challenge at first because I had actually stepped up. I don't want to say stepped away. I hadn't stopped believing in God or anything like that, but I'd stepped away from the church.

I wasn't attending church, I wasn't involved in anything. I was just definitely doing it's a me and God thing, and I'll be fine.

Until I met my wife, which was about a year prior to me getting in all this trouble. And then we rededicated our lives to Christ, got baptized again as adults and said, hey, we've screwed up majorly. I was in my early 30s.

It's time to go ahead. And by the way, this is before the incarceration. It was time for me to recommit my life to Christ. And so we did.

And as I think happens a lot of times with people, just when we recommit our lives to Christ, the devil gets involved and not to preach, but all of a sudden starts going, oh, crap, we're going to lose this guy. We got to cause some trouble in his life and mess things up. And that's what it seemed like.

I rededicated my life to Christ, and all of a sudden the FBI is knocking on my door and I've got problems. And again, legitimate stuff that I'd screwed up on.

I'm not trying to say I didn't deserve anything, but through that all, I really clung to the verse in James where it talks about, consider these trials pure joy. And I'm going to paraphrase, because God is turning you into the person he needs you to be.

And I realized at that time, somehow the Holy Spirit was able to help me realize that I wasn't who God needed me to serve him. And I'm still not there for the record, but I'm a lot closer today than I was then.

I probably just realized how much further away I am, because it seems like the closer I get to God, the further away I realize that I really am. And when I was. When I thought, hey, it's just me and God and we're good, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. I was.

Now that I look back and go, oh, my goodness, Jonathan, you were such an idiot.

But that incarceration really taught me to rely on God and events surrounding that and everything else really taught me just to have faith, to say, okay, God is in control. I need to do the things that I can do, and I need to be focused on doing what's right. A big part of that for me had been integrity.

I grew up in a family where integrity was. I'm not going to say we were ever encouraged to lie, but you played loose with the truth as long as you didn't feel it was going to hurt anybody.

And that was considered totally acceptable. And again, I take responsibility for my actions. I'm the one who told the lie. I'm the one that got in trouble.

But one of the things that being incarcerated really taught me was the power of integrity. And now I have something to prove because I ended up going to prison for telling lies. So now, and it's public, you can find it. It's out there.

So now I've got to.

I've got to be better than most people in that area, not a better person, but I've got to have more integrity, more honesty than most because I have to reprove all of the things that people may not expect about me.

And what I've seen through that is just by focusing on God and focusing on truth through that, whether that's in my faith or in my business or in my family, it has really just provided an incredible amount of blessings. Not everything's been great. We've had our ups and downs, like everybody. Overall, my life is so much better than it ever was prior to that.

: 00:23:44

Amen. I appreciate that. So with us landing this plane on the show for the day, I usually do a segment that's called hashtag wisdom bomb.

And for the listeners previously that I do that just about daily on my Facebook. So please follow that lead with Jim.

If you want daily wisdom from my life experience and what I've been through, I always ask the guest, give us a wisdom bomb that can take us out so somebody can say it's like a portable truth and somebody can go, okay, I love that. So what would be your wisdom bomb?

Jonathan Mast: 00:24:10

It's an old one, but I think it's one that I really try to live by every day. Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of what you make it. We have the choice to decide whether our life is good or bad.

And it's up to us to make that decision.

: 00:24:24

Perfect. And how does everybody find you? Jonathan?

Jonathan Mast: 00:24:27

Go to jonathan mast.com linktree I've got all my connections, every way to get a hold of me right there. So just my name slash linktree.

: 00:24:34

Thank you, sir.

And to the listener making it this far, just remember I'm going to put everything in the show notes to make it easy, make it clickable for you so you can go in there. I highly encourage you get connected because AI is the wave of the future.

And with a man of faith who is an expert and an influencer in AI and just a man of integrity, this is a guy you want to be connected with. So with that being said, Jonathan, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate your time.

Jonathan Mast: 00:24:59

Thank you, Jim. Love being here.

: 00:25:01

Yeah. And then for the you, the listener. Just remember we're here to encourage you, to equip you and to empower you.

We're here to help you do all that God's called you to in whatever area that he's called you to get over the fear and to actually take action. So thanks for listening to the show.

Remember to take a second to to hit a review down there for us if you really appreciated the show and then go ahead and on to the next episode or an episode you missed.

Jim Burgoon: 00:25:23

This has been Grace in the Grind. Whether you're a Christian leader looking for guidance or an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, it's Jim's passion to equip and encourage you.

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But in the meantime, find us on social media LeadWithJam and you can also hit the website at www.leadwithjim.com. take care of yourself and we'll see you next time on Grace in the Grind.