Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to the Voice of Hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the changemakers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Welcome to the voice of hope. Today's guest is John Cheney. He is the CEO and Chief AI Officer of the General Artificial Intelligence Proficiency Institute. He's a serial entrepreneur, an AI strategist and technology leader who helps organizations harness artificial intelligence to drive innovation, productivity, and meaningful business transformation. John, thank you very much for being with us. Thanks so much for having me, Ken. Excited to be here. Yeah, this is a fascinating one. Everybody's buzzing about AI. It's been going on for a while.

Jon Cheney 0:47

What got you into it? Why do this? I've just always been the guy that, you know, when the Tesla comes out, I'm pre-ordering it. When the Apple Vision Pro comes out, I'm pre-ordering it. I always get the newest iPhone the second they announce it. I've pre-ordered the robot that'll be in my home, the Neo. I like new tech. And so the AI was no different when it first came out, especially when it really hit kind of mainstream with Chat GPT. I was on that wait list. I was ready to go. And I just fell in love with it. And then the thing that really, I think, flipped the switch for me was vibe coding. When I discovered vibe coding, where I was like, holy cow, because I'm not a developer, but I'm an idea guy, right? I've got so many things I want to launch. And all of a sudden I realized, holy cow, I could build software without having to pay a developer, right? I can do it on my own. I just took off. Yeah.

Ken Huey 1:36

So tell us a little bit about vibe coding.

Jon Cheney 1:38

We're going to have listeners that are going to go, I don't know what that means. Vibecoding. So again, it sounds technical. And again, I'm not technical. I want to make that clear. My nine-year-old, I have four kids. My youngest nine-year-old, he is vibe coding. He's building software. And how's he doing it? Well, there's different pieces of software you can use where all you have to do is be able to just describe what it is. So maybe you say, I'm going to build a Tetris clone, right? Maybe I want to build a little game. Or maybe I want to build a CRM to keep track of my clients. That's literally all you have to be able to say. That's your total technical knowledge you need. And AI will just build the software and say, What do you think? And then you say, Oh, let's move the button over here or let's add this feature. All you have to build is just talk. In the same way I think most people listening, if you were to hire a developer, you'd bring him in a room and you'd say, Hey, this is this is what I'm trying to build, right? If you can have that conversation, you can vibe good.

Ken Huey 2:27

Fantastic. Okay, so you have founded multiple companies. You've had a successful tech exit. What have you learned during that time that informs your business kind of leadership and development today? Every day, it's a lesson that you take away from that.

Jon Cheney 2:44

It's a good question. And there's so many things that just pop into my mind when you say that and successful tech exit. A lot of times people say that, and I'm like, yeah, it could have been more successful. You know, anyway, I think one of the big things that I learned from that tech exit was that you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. You're going to make mistakes. You're absolutely going to make mistakes. And like I said, that tech exit could have been bigger and better. And you know, it was fine. It did what it did and it opened doors and it's great. But you're going to make mistakes, and that's okay. You just have to figure it out. When it comes down to it, entrepreneurship really is kind of just, I'm going to put it in words that Matt Damon shared in, or at least I was, I forget the author's name of The Martian. That movie The Martian, where he goes to he gets stuck on Mars and then eventually, spoiler alert, sorry, he comes home. But then on the very, the very last scene, he says, look, when you're in space, things are gonna go wrong. And you might get marooned on Mars. But if you just solve one problem and then solve another problem, soon enough, you've solved enough problems and you're home. And so that's what entrepreneurship is. That's what really is. I don't expect it to be smooth sailing. I expect I'm gonna wake up every day and say, okay, what problem can I address? And problems aren't bad, they're just the process of figuring out how you get to this nice smooth sailing company that can explode and take off. It's just problem solving. So if you like problem solving, be an entrepreneur. If you don't like problems, don't do that. Yeah.

Ken Huey 4:07

I took my chief financial officer, chief operations officer as the same person to Alex Hermozzi's acquisition.com meeting down in Las Vegas. And the theory of constraints is so crucial for Alex. And so we talked a whole bunch about that. And it's been a really nice framework to think of. But what's the constraint? And solve for the biggest constraint and then move to the next one after you solve for five or six constraints. You have a low friction machine that is producing really good results. I think that's what you're telling us.

Jon Cheney 4:36

Yeah, absolutely. It's exactly the same thing that Alex is talking about. All right.

Ken Huey 4:41

So, CEO and chief AI officer, what is your mission for helping businesses adopt AI responsibly?

Jon Cheney 4:48

To put it bluntly, my goal is to help as many people as possible and as many businesses as possible not get steamrolled by AI. Because there's a lot of businesses out there that are going to go out of business because of AI. And they don't even know it. They're just not paying attention. The percentage of people paying for AI right now is 2%. Wow. That is crazy. Most people that are in the AI world that are in my world think everyone uses it. No. 98 out of 100 people are using free versions of AI, maybe. But the real AI that's making a difference, the agentic solutions that are delivering and working while you sleep and doing all this stuff, that's really moving the needle right now, that are going to take down those companies and steamroll them. No one's doing that. That's the tippy tippy top of the iceberg right now. And so my goal is to help as many people as possible, learn what's possible, learn how to protect themselves, learn how to help them upgrade their business. We'll go in and we'll work with them with companies. We have a fractional chief AI officer service will come in and we'll work with you on your company and help you do that. And we have software even now that does that, helps do amazing things there. But that is the overarching mission of the General AI Proficiency Institute is to help people not get steamrolled.

Ken Huey 6:01

All right. You say frequently that AI should help people focus on what matters most. Tell us about that.

Jon Cheney 6:09

I personally don't think we were sent to this earth to, as an example, flip burgers at McDonald's. Okay. Not that flipping burgers at McDonald's is a bad job. It's great. If you're doing it and you're feeding your family, you're doing good work. It's great. But what do you really gain from flipping a burger? Like the actual act of, okay, I'm just gonna flip burgers all day, right? No, I'm gonna take this, I'll put it in a bun. Okay, I'm making burgers, I'm feeding people. It's good, it's a good service. But what if we give that job to a robot? Right? Do you lose your purpose in this life? No way, right? Let's say you're still working at McDonald's and now you've got a robot helping you with that task. It's very robotic, it's repetitive, it's been solved, right? Now let's do the next thing. Why don't you go out and talk to customers? Greet them, open the door for them, figure out what other part of the business you can automate. How where else can we save money? Where can we make our product better? Can we have it be cleaner? Okay, well, whatever it is, right? There's other things that you can do where you can just move to the next level and say, again, it's a problem thing, right? We solved the problem of the burger. Now, what other problems? How can we just make this better and better and better and better and better and better, right? And so I believe that AI can take drudgery away, repetitive tasks away, mind-numbing tasks, even things like customer service, where you're trying to trying to solve a problem for someone. Hey, if an AI agent can take that job from you, then great. Maybe you can get back to working on the product and making the product better, or maybe you can save some money to be able to reinvest somewhere else in the business where you need some of that help or you have more constraints, more problems that you need to tackle. And so ultimately, I believe that AI should enable us to move the world along faster, to solve more problems in every industry, whether it's McDonald's or aerospace or in space or everything else that we deal with day to day.

Ken Huey 7:56

You know, there are plenty of people that are kind of fear-mongers about this. AI is going to come in and it's going to just take away big swaths of jobs, which is actually true. I mean, I have attorney friends that I think you're you're in contract law. Your job's over. You just don't know it yet. Okay, fine. What are we missing about that is not such a bad thing? What are we going to gain by having big jobs lost?

Jon Cheney 8:19

The reality is, I think that AI will create more jobs. I think that it will change the jobs. It will change the jobs that we do. Here's an example, maybe a dumb example, but I'm going to use it anyway. I talked about my robot that I've ordered, right? Those robots are going to be in our homes, they're going to be cleaning our homes, they're going to be taking care of things, they're going to be at home assistance, they'll be probably welcoming you to restaurants, things like that. You're going to see those robots all over the place over the next couple of years. They're going to start like, whoa, I'm talking to a robot. It's going to feel weird and kind of cool and maybe kind of scary. And some people are probably going to dump paint on them because they're mad and they want it to not replace a human. But the reality is, let's look at just the robot, the robotic industry. Well, my robot's going to look just like your robot, Ken, but I want mine to have a little flair. Maybe I'm going to make robot clothes or robot pins or robot whatever, or maybe I'm going to teach it to play the piano better than some other program taught it to play the piano or whatever. So I'm going to create software that teaches robots how to do certain skills, or I'm going to teach it how to weed, or I'm going to teach it how to garden, or I'm going to teach it whatever, right? And so you're just bringing a new interface. You're bringing none of those jobs exist right now. Dressing a robot is not a job that exists today. A robot stylist. Okay. And I know that's a dumb idea, but it's just to prove a point. And maybe it's not a dumb idea. Actually, someone do that. Take that business idea. Go start designing clothes for robots that are going to perfectly fit those neo-robots and put on jackets and whatever. And anyway, there's going to be cool things there: cleaning, service repair, renting robots. I can come with 10 businesses in 10 seconds here of jobs that don't exist today. And so, yeah, are the lawyers going to get replaced a little bit? Some, yeah. But the reality is a robot's not going to stand in court for me and testify to a judge and represent me, and they don't have law degrees. And they might be able to help me prepare a brief faster or respond to some list of requirements for some lawsuit, but they can't file it for me in the same way. They don't have the legal authority to do so. And so there's going to be plenty of jobs for lawyers. There's going to be plenty of jobs for doctors. There are going to be plenty of jobs for burger flippers. Just those burger flippers are maybe going to have to teach robots how to do it. They're going to have to figure out what are the better solutions. How are we going to take care of maybe I know that McDonald's right now is working on uh a one-person McDonald's. They're literally trying to say, okay, can we run an entire McDonald's with one human being? And everything else is robots and automation and machines and things. And it's not all robots on two feet walking around acting like humans. It's just, okay, there's a machine that grabs a burger and flips it and whatever. And so they don't all look like robots. But the point is, someone still has to know how to take care of those machines. Someone has to then, and then if you're one of those people that's like, hey, I'm going to be technical, I'm going to figure this out, I'm going to learn this. No one knows it. And so everyone listening here is in as is in the same position as everybody else. Learn it. You be the one that figures out how to run a one-person McDonald's. And then you get good at that. And then you start teaching franchisees and franchisers. And then, hey, Burger King wants to figure it out now. Great. We're going to hire a McDonald's person over here and help. You know, there's so much opportunity in the world. You just got to look at that tech and say, how do I get ahead of it? How do I learn it and stay ahead and be at the front? Endless opportunity for those people. The people that are going to fall behind are the ones that say, eh, I don't like that. And they just keep doing their life, waiting until that train comes and smacks them.

Ken Huey 11:36

Yeah. Okay. You've worked with a bunch of companies. You've worked with startups, global enterprises. What separates companies that successfully adopt AI from those that struggle?

Jon Cheney 11:49

Yeah, you know, leadership. Leadership is the only answer. Anyone and everyone is buying software. They're buying the subscription, but does it get used? I don't know. Right? Is the CEO actively leadership does not mean you you're the CEO and you say, hey, we're now adopting AI. I've gotten everybody a Chat GPT subscription. Use it, replace everything. And then you go back to your work, right? No, I think you actually need to install dedicated AI metership. And at our company, we have this fractional chief AI officer service, and we see this all the time. We'll go into companies where they've had AI for a while, they've had it for a year, two years, and those accounts are sitting dormant. No one's using it because no one actually came in to teach them. No one was responsible for the follow-up to say, okay, great, we did the training and you're using it a little bit. It's writing, it's helping you write your emails. But what about all the other cool stuff it can do? And so you need somebody who's on top of it for your organization. If you're a small organization, two, three, five people, you're gonna have to figure it out. You're responsible. But if you have 20, 30, 50, 100 employees or more, whatever, you're gonna need to take some time and say, all right, we need to hire somebody that is dedicated at our company, and all your their job is to make sure that AI is making them more efficient at the individual level, the department level, company-wide, reporting, vibe coding, everything. The newest, latest, and greatest tools, marketing department needs to be using this and this. You need somebody who's leading, who understands it, and who understands your business and can help you really roll it out.

Ken Huey 13:17

All right. You've spoken about protecting human agency in an AI-driven world. What are you talking about? And why does it matter?

Jon Cheney 13:25

So Elon Musk likes to talk about, as do other people, but he's pretty vocal about it. He talks about things like universal basic income or even universal high income, where talking about things like AI is going to create so much abundance in the world that everyone's going to be rich. Well, first of all, that's not how go take Econ 100 and you'll know that's not really how the world works. If everyone has money, everything gets more expensive. That's where inflation comes from. But besides that, I don't think there's a government system that can actually administer those things. But aside from those facts, let's say that the government can do it and that we can figure out a way to push all of that stuff out. Whenever somebody else provides for you, they get a say in what you do. Just think back to when you were living at home with your parents. Not under my roof, not while I'm paying this, whatever. If you wanted to do something, you got to listen to your parents because they're taking care of things. And if you don't want to listen to your parents, okay, great. Well, we're taking your allowance away, you're taking your car away, we're taking this away. Hey, you can't do that, you can't have access to the internet, you can't have whatever it is. There's a level of control that comes from the people that provide for you. And so if we do enter a world where everyone has UBI, and then the government decides, you know what, I don't think people should be able to say that on social media. Look at the UK right now. You can't say things without police showing up at your door. Or they'll just say, hey, we're just gonna take away some of your benefits. We're gonna stop paying for your medical, right? We're gonna stop paying for your food, we're gonna stop paying for whatever. And so you lose your agency if you give up your own effort to go and provide for yourself. And so the people that are gonna have the most agency will be those that aren't in a position where they depend on UBI.

Ken Huey 15:04

If we could, let's talk a little bit about your family and faith. Faith and family are central to you. You've been clear about that. So how do they influence your approach to leadership and innovation?

Jon Cheney 15:14

Yeah, ultimately I just have to make sure that their allegiance isn't to me. Right. When I hire somebody, I tell them that their job or their allegiance to me should be at best their fifth priority in life. And these top three could maybe be different for different people, and that's fine. Some people might put God before their family or their self or whatever. And but so, but these these four things are definitely gonna be before the job. Number one, yourself. If you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not healthy, if you don't have your mental health, whatever, then you're not gonna be at your best to be able to take care of really anything beneath your family or your job or anything else. And so make sure you're taking care of yourself. And that means when you're working for me, hey, go on a run. Take an extra hour if you need to do that, right? If you feel like you're not being productive that day, get up and go home. Go get some things done. Don't sit there and stare at your computer and put in your hours. Go and actually take care of yourself. Number two, your family. And your family can mean something different for everybody. Maybe it is your like for me, that would be my wife and my kids and my dad and my people that are around me. But maybe you just have a roommate or maybe you have a best friend that's like family or whatever. If that friend or family or kid or whatever has a piano recital or something that they need your support for, like I don't care if you miss a meeting. Like, schedule around that important thing. Be at the piano recital, be at the baseball game, go and do that. Support your family. Number three is God, right? Your faith, it's your beliefs, it's those things. If your job's getting in the way of your beliefs, get a new job. There's lots of jobs out there. You know, if you believe you don't want to drink alcohol and you're working for some company that works in Japan and requires you to go get plastered with a bunch of Japanese guys, like that's a cultural thing. I'm not saying it's bad for those people. It's just if you don't believe that, then don't get that job. Don't get the job where you're gonna go take care of the Japanese shot fest. And so get a new job. Make sure that those things come first. And then fourth, and this is one where a lot of people are a little bit surprised, but your hobbies. Your hobbies come before your job too. And why? Because your hobbies are the things that make you smile. They make you I play the piano. I'm a whitewater kayaker. I love to golf, I love to travel, I love to do different things. And if my job is stopping me from playing the piano, I am not going to be a happy person straight up. I'm not going to be. And so I need to make sure I adjust my life so that I can do my hobbies. Right. And so ultimately, you just have to prioritize. And it doesn't mean that you won't be gone sometimes for a week on a business trip. And some of those other things are going to be on pause for a minute. You can't give a perfect balance all the time. But overall, on the average, you have to say, okay, does my family know that they're that they're my highest priority? Does God know that he's my highest priority? And am I putting the time and effort into those different things? Ultimately, each individual is their own judge of whether or not they're doing those things. And if they feel like that's out of balance, the job is the easiest. It's much easier to change your job than it is to change yourself, your family, your religion, or your hobbies. That's why the job comes fifth. So that's how I think about it. And that's what I tell to my people.

Ken Huey 18:08

All right. Tell me a little bit about what you see as kind of the most exciting or that gives you hope for the future of our species with AI coming to be over the next five years. What's going to happen?

Jon Cheney 18:21

Yeah, AI is so exciting. I'm able to do so many things that I've never been able to do. I talked about one of them in the beginning with vibe coding. Vive coding is cool. You could build a little tool, a software tool for your team or for your family to track chores or to give gold stars to your kids when they make their bed. You can make software for that now in five minutes. It's literally that easy. Like I was on a call today with my team and I said, hey, anybody that can outdo me on setting up some meetings with new clients, whatever, I'll pay you a thousand dollars by the end of the week. And I was like, I'll build, I'm gonna, in fact, I'm just gonna vibe code a little meterboard really quick. And so I just did that. It took me one prompt, done, finished. And I could do that, right? And it's that prompt, by the way, was hey, build me a meterboard that will track how many deals each of us have set up this week. That was how technical it was, right? I just typed that and then said go and is done because I know the right tools to use. AI can do that. I believe that our greatest superpower as humans is our ability to create, right? Creation is our greatest superpower. We create jobs, we create art, we create music, we create recipes, we create gardens, we create adventures, we create memories, and we even create other people. And in all of those, when we're creating, I just think those of you listening, think back to a time when you were creating something. And what was that was that a sad time or a happy time? That art of creation is a happy, it's one of the most joyful, fulfilling things we can do on earth. And not only that, it then doesn't end. This is where AI starts to also fail because AI can create a piece of music, but where we start to then really come out ahead is we create or we continue to create by being good stewards of those creations. We raise our kids, hopefully, with a lot of care. We play that piano song that we wrote in front of an audience, and then maybe a bigger audience, and maybe we publish it to an album that then can be listened to on Spotify by millions of people. We put our art in an art show, and maybe we just put it up in our living room, whatever. But stewarding that creation, whatever it's used for, that's where the real magic starts to happen. And so what I think AI is going to enable the world to do is to create even more. And it's cool that we're talking about vibe coding. All you have to be able to do is say a few words and you create something awesome. That sounds a little bit like Genesis chapter one to me. I think we're learning a little bit at a very, very basic level, a little bit what it's like to create like God. And that's pretty cool. We're approaching, we are God's children, I believe. And that means that we can become more like him. And this is one of those cool steps towards that. And so this is a good thing. Being able to create more and with more control and with more scale and with more possibilities than ever before, that's a win in my book.

Ken Huey 21:13

Somebody is listening to this, and I hope is panicking. They're thinking, oh no, the AI, uh, the AI world, what am I gonna do? Okay, I hope that's happening because in that panic, I want you to give them one actionable step they can take to diffuse that panic and start moving forward.

Jon Cheney 21:32

So I will always tell everybody your first platform should be a basic, what's called an LLM, right? That'd be like ChatGPT. Go download ChatGPT, it's free. Or you can become one of the two percent and pay 20 bucks a month, okay, for ChatGPT. Or if you don't like ChatGPT, you can download there's another one called Claude. There's another one called Grok. There's different ones out there. But ChatGPT is the one that most people know. And I want you to just go into there. And I want you to ask it a question. I want you to say, hey, here's who I am. Here's how I'm feeling about AI. I want you to interview me one question at a time so that you really understand where I'm coming from. And I want you to help me build a plan to learn AI. And then say, go, the AI will then proceed to interview you one question at a time. I might ask you 20 questions. I might talk to you for an hour. I might ask you six questions, right? But it'll just be like having a conversation. And when you're done, it'll give you this beautiful plan. And then this is where most people fail at almost everything that they want to do in life. They're in the shower and they think of this awesome idea, like, oh, that's a cool idea, right? And then I'm going to do that. That's awesome. And then they turn off the shower and they grab their towel and they dry off. And then they go in and they brush their teeth and then they put their clothes on and then their wife comes in and talks to them, or their kids come in and run and jump on them, and that idea is gone. It was left in the shower. And you never actually follow up and do it. Action is where you can win at anything in life. I don't care what the idea is. You want to go to space, start today and follow steps. It might be hard, it might be a 10-year plan, but you can do it. You can do anything. And so if you want to learn AI, just use AI to help you do it. And you'll learn even in that process of using AI as you talk to you. Just you just start getting used to talking to it and going back and forth with it. It's not a technical skill. There is zero technical stuff to using AI at this point. Right? Five years ago, yeah, you had to be a developer and you had to be whatever. But if you're like me, you're not technical, you just love trying new things, get in and try it. And honestly, if you are someone who likes trying new things, you probably have tried it at least a little bit. But I encourage you to take it even a step further. Take that step of having it interview you and try to figure out where you are. What can I do next? What's the next best thing? And I hope that some of these platforms ask you to go and vibe code. That's fun. It's fun to build something. You can just go build a dumb little game or something for fun, do it with your kids, vibe code, a house management software for yourself or whatever it is, a dream management software as you can just keep track of all your big goals in life and then have AI help you build them. There's so many things you can do. And I would also encourage you to, if you need some motivation or inspiration, just reach out to me. Send me a message on LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and I'd be happy to give you a few words of encouragement. And I share, I post every single day on different social media platforms. Almost every single day I post something about AI, about some cool new tool that I've tried or what I'm doing today. And maybe I can inspire a few people to try some of what I'm up to.

Ken Huey 24:38

John, fantastic, wide-ranging, very fun conversation. Seriously, I'm very grateful you've spent some time with us. You did talk about it here kind of briefly, but if somebody wants to follow you or find you, what's the best way to get to you?

Jon Cheney 24:51

Yeah, just look up my name first and last, John Cheney, on LinkedIn. I post on there every day, almost religiously. It's two to three times a day, usually about different things. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. My username is Chini Piano. Right, just my last name and then piano, like the instrument. That's kind of my handle. So find me at Chini Piano, come follow me, and we'll do some cool stuff together.

Ken Huey 25:15

Super exciting. Seriously. Thanks a bunch. So much fun to hang out with you. Can't wait to see what comes next.

Jon Cheney 25:20

Thanks, Ken.

Ken Huey 25:21

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.