This episode explores AI’s trajectory toward replacing entire job categories rather than just augmenting them, using examples like Cody Sanchez replacing $450K in data analysts with a $200/month Perplexity subscription, while arguing that AI fluency and documented IP frameworks will separate who survives versus who gets displaced.
Key Takeaways:
- $450K Analysts Replaced by $200/Month Tool Cody Sanchez eliminated three full-time data analysts earning $150K each and replaced them entirely with Perplexity’s research capabilities—already happening at scale.
- AI Gets 16x Smarter Annually On average, AI capabilities increase 16-fold every 12 months, meaning five years from now it will be roughly one million times more capable than today’s models.
- IP and Frameworks Become Currency Documented playbooks and proven methodologies (like Ajay Sharma’s seller scripts) will become the most valuable assets for training custom AI that outperforms generic models.
Listen to the full discussion on the massive workforce transformation already underway.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious. I am so pleased to have my close friend and AI coach, Callan Faulkner on this podcast. You know, obviously I’ve been doing this pod now for a while and you’ve just been hearing me chat here the whole time. So, you know, I’m honored to be, you know, kind of expanding our repertoire here, bringing on, you know, occasional guests and, you know, those of you who’ve been listening.
to this for a while, you’ve heard me mention a lot of learnings that I’ve had from Callan and being in her Accelerate to Automate course and then the follow on Uncommon Leaders, Mastermind. So, we’re gonna be diving into a lot today and then some various opportunities for you to potentially take the next step in your own AI journey.
So, Callan, think a lot of my audience is familiar with you, but if you want to add a few extra words on who you are and what you’re doing right now. Yeah, yeah, you’re the first one. They’ve just been hearing me the whole time.
Callan Faulkner
Yeah. Am I your first guest?
God, Chris.
Wow. Okay. Well, I’m very honored. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited. I know a lot of you have probably heard of me or of my former company REI Optimize. But last February, 2024, the story goes I was at a mastermind in the Canadian Rockies with a group of women and we did a breathwork session. It was a pretty intense breathwork session and I came out of it with this deep
seated knowing that I needed to go all in on teaching businesses how to use AI and teaching non-technical humans how to be activated to their full potential using AI more clearly. And that felt really big. I was running my land business at the time. I was running REI Optimize, helping land investors learn how to automate their business, build systems. But it was so clear. was like that voice that’s just deep inside you that you’re like, God, I don’t, that just feels like a lot. It feels like a lot.
But I did end up doing that. I ended up pivoting away out of the land business. I still have a few land deals I’m wrapping up. And just had a lot of conversations with myself of, land investing will always be here. But we are in an age right now where this is the gold rush. This is the time. This is the time to jump into AI training. So I spun up our new company called The Uncommon Business.
And in the last 18 months, we’ve gone from zero to 4 million in revenue as one of the top fastest growing AI education businesses in the world, which is absolutely insane to say. And it’s been a pleasure to work with you, Chris. It’s been fun to see like the evolution of our relationship from the moment we met, I don’t know, maybe two years ago to now. It’s been so much fun.
Chris Duff
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was almost two years ago exactly. you know, just one of the folks that I feel like we almost had like an instant kinship and, you know, hoping to have kind of parallel tracks, you know, over the coming decades for really the rest of our careers here. So, you know, very excited that we’re really just at the start and no surprise that you’re having so much success here.
Callan Faulkner
Absolutely. So good.
Chris Duff
You know, been a big inspiration for what we’re trying to do as well. So, that intro. And, you know, I’d really like to just kind of kick things off in a more unique direction. Like we’ll get into some more of these like practical elements, you know, how to, you know, apply AI within your own business here. But, you know, I have just been at some recent meetings and like paying attention to a lot of the scuttlebutt within the AI industry. like,
You know, as much as we say, like every month that, you know, there’s just so much coming down the pike. Like, I don’t think a lot of people realize like what, you know, the kind of cost that humanity is on here. So I thought we could just like popcorn back and forth, you know, a few of the things that we’ve really been hearing just to give people an idea of just like how crazy things are and where they’re going. So maybe you could share, you know, like the biggest thing or maybe,
Callan Faulkner
Yeah.
Chris Duff
you know, something that might go a little against the mainstream narrative or, know, from some of your deep connections within the AI space. Like what is something that’s just wild that people aren’t paying enough attention to like over the next three, six months, even a little bit longer than that, just to kind of like work up some of that excitement about where we’re heading.
Callan Faulkner
Yeah, so I think what comes up is I know I’ve even said this before like AI isn’t gonna replace your job. A person using AI is gonna replace your job. And I’ve kind of backtracked on saying that because the truth is AI will 100 % be replacing a lot of people’s jobs. they’re, it’s not gonna replace the human. So I want to, I wanna go at this one to start. I know we’re talking to a lot of land investors here, but.
What does this mean for you guys? Let’s just, I’m to go broad. And then of course we can go tactical in the land investing in a minute. So let’s give an example. So Cody Sanchez, she’s one of my mentors. She’s a absolute bad blank. You know what I mean? She’s amazing. She scaled a $48 million media company in three years. She’s worked for Goldman Sachs. incredible, incredible individual. So she was on a panel the other day. She was explaining that she used to have full-time data analysts in her company, 150 K a year.
And what she does is she teaches people how to buy boring businesses. So she is constantly analyzing different markets, different business types, all of it, full time, three to four, three to four of them full time. So 150K a year. She has let go all of them and she has replaced it with the $200 a month perplexity subscription. the superb perplexity subscription and perplexity is a competitor to Chachi BT. It’s amazing for deep research. It’s my favorite deep research tool.
And what I want people to feel when I say that is this person, this data analyst, it is an incredible human being. have intuition, they have critical thinking, they have a connection to a higher power. If you believe that I personally do. The problem is that they didn’t have AI fluency. They didn’t have the ability to think in AI systems. They didn’t have the ability to clone their genius into, into AI, which now making their genius infinite. So yeah, they were let go.
But my battle, and I know a lot about her business and a little bit of kind of how she navigates things is if that person had actually done the work and become an AI architect, really become obsessed with this. And she says even now as the founder of a business, she’s the most busy, one of the most busy people on the planet. She herself spends 20 minutes a day obsessing over AI and learning something new. If those people had done that.
I think they would have a shot at keeping their not only keeping their job, but increasing the amount of money that they’re making because of the value they’re bringing into their organization. So this is already happening. These big players, Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot are laying off a lot of people. And I don’t think it’s because they don’t, they don’t need that human. That human just has not leveled up yet to be worthy of staying inside the organization.
Chris Duff
Yeah, no, that’s a incredible insight there. yeah, definitely agree. I mean, you kind of see it, even some of these latest job statistics here. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons for, you why a hiring might be slowing down a bit too, but you know, it’s unlikely that AI is not at least part of the variable set to consider there. So yeah, just a transformational time from that standpoint. I think I would…
You also add that, you know, not just, you know, the exact person working in a particular role that really needs to familiarize themselves with AI, but just business models as a whole, maybe facing this time of transition where a lot of businesses, like their window of opportunity is just shrinking so much more and like the moat to defend yourself. It’s just becoming smaller and smaller. And I would look at a lot of.
SaaS products at the moment too. was learning from some, folks who’ve sold some very large businesses within that space and know it very well. And, um, like, I’m just even kind of considering, you know, we were, uh, you know, having some demos with, um, you know, like the Claude MCP connectors, uh, a few weeks ago. And just for those of you folks listening, this is just, um, uh, a way for Claude to connect to different applications and kind of, um,
You know, link into and kind of control outputs on, on the backend. So for instance, it can connect to like notion, which is like a note taking or CRM type software, database for, for teams. And when I was seeing some of those outputs that, you know, like your, team member Carter was, was putting on and, and so forth and just like, you know, clearly he’s a very talented guy. but you know, within a night able to get some of these just.
beautiful, like, just outputs it like, know, fully outlay data. what I’m getting at here is that I think that some of these, know, LLM models, like they’re clearly collecting a lot of this data and figuring out, you know, all the various connector sets here and that even big SAS products, like a notion, like a Salesforce.
There’s no way that, that, know, anthropic or open AI is not considering trying to vertically integrate some of these tools so that they won’t even need to do these connectors here because it’s like, what, why not? So to me, that that’s just like showing if you can just, you know, use these LLM models to, kind of get any type of output that you want all of a sudden, like, what does it even mean to have like a SAS?
product anymore. I just think like we’re in for. Yeah.
Callan Faulkner
I don’t think fast will exist.
don’t think it’s going to be needed because it’s just going to be, you’re going to log into your ChatchiPT dashboard and you’re going to have real-time integration into your QuickBooks and real-time integration into your CRM and real-time integration into your note-taking tool and your transcripts from every meeting and your phone transcripts and your emails and your calendar. It’s like, can…
It’s like Play-Doh now. Like I can do whatever I need to do from this interface, dashboard. This is not here right now. So don’t listen to this podcast and say, my God, I’m missing out. This is, but on average AI is getting 16 times smarter every 12 months. So in five years, it’s going to be a million times smarter than it is today, which is you can’t even wrap your mind around, around where we’re going to be, but that’s five years. mean, five years ago was 2020. I mean, snap your fingers and we’re there.
So it’s just going to be, you know, that the land investor is going to be, it’s going to be so, it’s so exciting for a land investor because I think part of the issue with the business is how many people it takes and in VAs it takes to execute and operate the business. And it’s going to be a reality that AI is going to, it’s already there. mean, obviously you’re building the comping piece, but they’re going to be able to do.
you know, 80 % of this business. So now the land investor has to elevate and say, well, what am I good for? I don’t know. What are you good for? What do you know about? What do you know about the other people don’t know about? What research are you doing? What network do you have? What skills do you have? How are you investing in yourself? What are you building inside your business that an investor would say, my God, I’ve never seen that inside of a land investing business. It’s just gone are the days where you can just spin this thing up and act like everyone else. You really have to level yourself up to to be relevant.
Chris Duff
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s something, you know, obviously within the land investing space, like think about, I mean, so, uh, you know, applicable to so many different parts of the business. I, I just continue to ask myself too is like, you know, along these sides of, know, these SAS products just being integrated and they’ll probably just be wiped off the map by, you know, the bigger, uh, players within the space here. Um, but like, is there really anything off the table as far as just a general business function that can’t
be done by AI within, you know, even a handful of years or potentially even less than that, based on the speed things are going. Like we’ve seen some, you know, folks who have been implementing, you know, kind of like front end intake, maybe just some basic sales. you know, these voice agents that, you know, we saw some of the data where, you know, 80 plus percent of respondents on the phone, like they didn’t even realize they were talking to, AI at this point.
Callan Faulkner
I know. Well, think about it two years from now. mean, if you already aren’t seeing, know,
right now it’s land investors like, I can tell. I’m like, just, okay, fine. Don’t use it now. Give it another year. You won’t be able to tell. You won’t be able to tell.
Chris Duff
Right.
Yeah. And, but, and that’s the thing too is like, okay, that’s a little bit more on the simple function, but yeah, again, what is really off the table here can like, have, you know, like, you know, our, our mutual friend, like an Ajay Sharma type, like with his level of scripts of like the back and forth and developing rapport with sellers.
Callan Faulkner
Well, that’s so
this is a great point, Chris. And we talk about this a lot in our training. What, what AI is, is just fancy automation. That’s what it is at its core. And to build an AI that creates incredible results, whether it’s a simple prompt that takes your raw data and makes it into a report, or it’s a full blown AI agent that is running acquisitions in your business.
It is built on a set of inputs. You have to train it. It is not going to know what to do. Now you can give it the end goal and you can give it the starting goal, but the middle part is either left up to its discretion, which it’s gonna go search the internet and it might pull, you know, it might pull, Zig Ziglar’s a good salesperson. Maybe I’ll talk like him. Maybe that would be good. What Ajay has is a set,
of data and knowledge that is proven to work to close land deals. So what he has is he has the knowledge, the training, the IP, the data, and what we are gonna wanna do is we’re gonna wanna train our AI on his proven frameworks. It has never been more important than it is today to document and…
trademark and have IP around your models, your framework. Because my AI that I trained internally is way better at building a prompt than if you asked ChatGPT to build a prompt. Because I have spent the last two years and thousands of hours figuring out exactly how to build a prompt and I have magic around that and I’ve trained my AI on that. where I think we’re going with this is what can’t AI do? I think the
The proven frameworks and the proven knowledge and the data around, I this is where Ajay’s, it’s never gonna be more important for him to say, you know, I’ve ran this through a hundred different land investing businesses and this is the result. If you would like this data and the ability to train your models on it, it costs blank. I think that’s gonna be his, Ajay, if you’re listening, call me. I only want 10 % to help you set up your new business, but that’s gonna be.
where the human intuition, you know, and it’s, think getting a little woo woo here, but I think we have to, that humans have a frequency. They have, you know, we can feel the frequency up to eight meters from human humans. By someone walks in a room and you’re like, they feel a little, they feel a little weird. That’s a real scientific biological situation. There’s a frequency coming off of that human being. The human being, when you’re,
When we’re working day to day, there are things that we do that light us up and there’s things that shut us down. It’s alignment. I call it soul alignment. So when I was thinking about shutting down my land business, I give this example a lot. If I went into ChatGBT and I just said, Hey, here’s all my goals. Here’s my life goals. Here’s the data. Here’s the financials. Do you think I should shut down my land business? What would ChatGBT have said? my God.
No, you’re chasing all these goals. You want to build a house in Costa Rica. You’re doing great. The business is going great. Can you find someone to run it for you? But my soul knew like deep in the heart of my chest, I could feel it in my body. That is that’s going to be the delineation.
Sorry, dogs here. That’s gonna be this thing, the humans, it’s never, this is why people are like, I this was an AI podcast. It’s like, it is, but to compete in this world of AI, like you have to be so dead aligned with your soul’s mission on this planet and so lit up by the work that you’re doing. And then now we can train AI on the things that we’ve learned, the knowledge we’ve procured, the magic we’ve created. And that’s how.
I mean, that’s how amazing AI systems I think are going to get built internally.
Chris Duff
Yep. Couldn’t agree more on that. And first I have to comment on the frequency of, know, it kind of made me feeling like a weird energy to me. I mean, as entrepreneurs, like I want the weird, like that’s, that’s what’s attracted to me. Like if people are too normal around, okay. That’s not probably not my room. But yeah. On, on the point of just, okay, where
Callan Faulkner
Thank
I don’t like it. I need some… yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Chris Duff
you know, where do we fit in within this world here too? And so I was at this master and I remarked to my audience, um, uh, recently over this last weekend and it’s from one of my old business mentors did just incredible work within the internet marketing space. You know, the eight figure plus exits. and, uh, you know, he started this new brand that’s just, um, called return to real. And he moved out to this, you know, crazy large farm in, in Vermont and
Um, you know, the folks that he had out there in, myself, um, you know, it was a little bit of an older cohort, you know, I’m in the mid thirties and I was the youngest one there, but, um, like there was such a kind of emotional undertone. Like it was unlike any other mastermind I had been to there where I think. Oh, so many people in, in today’s world, like where it’s just so much digital overwhelm and AI, like you were living in front of our computers. Like even if people are.
Admitting it. I think there’s just such a gap where they’re trying to like find what where do I even fit in anymore? Like what is even like again like feeling real here and and I had to connect that too to where it was like a little bit of an older cohort Going to this mastermind because you you and I too like even though like we’re you know tech whizzes Etc like we did grow up in a time Even before cell phones like there was you sometimes you had to call a landline or knock on somebody’s door
Callan Faulkner
Yeah.
Chris Duff
Um, to, uh, um, still like meet up with, with friends and so forth, but I’m not sure some of this younger generation. Like really appreciates that when, you know, they’re just like inundated within this digital infrastructure. know, they can just find an AI girlfriend, boyfriend, what did take your pick, whatever you want, um, for, you know, just easy connections. And like that, that’s what I wonder, like there could be a bit of a bifurcation there where.
Callan Faulkner
you
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris Duff
There’s those of us who want this more real attachment to the world, which I think is the only way to get real fulfillment in life. But I wonder if some of this younger generation is even going to know what they’re missing.
Callan Faulkner
I think that’s the job of our generation is to remind them and bring, actually feel like this next decade will have a resurgence in more spirituality, more connection. It’s like, it’s going to be, you fall so deep into a virtual reality or you, I mean, I feel like I live a hybrid, you know, I’m like in my business living in this.
virtual world and I get you know last night having a birthday party with no cell phones and we’re like so in a portal talking about our wildest dreams and you know the you know our anxieties and our struggles and it’s like I I feel actually so much more connected to a higher power than I ever have because it’s it’s non-negotiable like I can’t not you have to it’s like now you have to force time for it it’s before it was like sure you know you’re with your friends and there’s
no cell phones and you’re like very present and it’s just like now it’s like we have to meditate. Why the hell do we have to meditate? Because we’re so inundated with inputs 24 seven and if you don’t block them, you will never have times of silence versus you and I growing up. We probably, maybe we got a Game Boy when we were like 10 but like there was a lot of dead time and like outside time and there was no social and even for our parents generation, they’re like, they don’t get it. So yeah, like I think this is
I people are like, I thought we talking about agents. But again, it’s like agents don’t matter if you are not fulfilled in your own life and you’re not feeling intuitive and connected with your body and connected with your mind and your heart and your your community and you’re not breaking bread with the people that you love regularly. None of this stuff matters.
Chris Duff
Yep, that’s a hundred percent. And to even echo on that point too, I mean, even just to do kind of routine retroactive check-ins with yourself, you know, oftentimes people save it till the end of the year, holiday time, what have you, but you can really do it anytime you want for this. know, I’ll oftentimes just like look back even on the past several months, what have been like my most memorable weekends or memories that I keep returning to or things that, you know, impacted my life?
Callan Faulkner
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
Chris Duff
far more often and you know, there’s plenty of weekends that just like pests and they’re just like blank, blank spots that just. Right. Yeah. Just, just off there. Yeah. Right. Exactly. But more often than not, like it’s some of these smaller gatherings, you either with maybe sometimes my family or, know, some of these mastermind events and like, again, some of that real human connection that could even be like really short, know, just like a day or a day and a half with, you know, just like minded.
Callan Faulkner
⁓ yeah, what did you do two weekends ago? No idea. No idea.
Chris Duff
people in a particular atmosphere there. And like, I’ll return to some of those, you know, conversations or just, you know, the thought process or just like the way that I felt being there. and I think that if a lot of people like really consider, know, whether they’ve done those things or not, those are usually the type of events that are going to be more memorable for you and that you’re getting more value out of. So, you know, I would just encourage folks to try to try to do that kind of recollection.
more often.
Callan Faulkner
Yeah,
well, there’s a reason like we are a full-blown AI company every single human being working for me is fully AI fluent building AI systems building AI workflows There’s a reason why I’m putting my girlfriend Nicole on salary We have not decided her title yet But I want it to be chief soul officer because I think that’s super fun and it’s a reason why she is forcing us like we are meeting with her regularly
to make sure we are doing our morning pages and we are doing a weekend review and we’re identifying the areas where we found joy that week and when did we feel the most anxious and where do we think that came from? if you are not, I love accountability. Honestly, if you told me, yeah, sure, I know I need to do all those things. Am I gonna sit down and do that by myself? Absolutely not, absolutely not. I’m gonna go and I’m gonna build another AI system. I’m gonna go mess in N8N for an hour. Hell no, I’m not gonna sit down and.
write my weekend review, but our whole team does it together. Like we’re doing it now as a team. It’s non-negotiable. If you want to work here, this is a part of our culture. And there’s like one of our values in the company is inner work is the job. And it’s like, if you haven’t done that work and you’re not willing to do the work, you ain’t going to work here. And that’s, I think that’s the fun part. People think I’m like the tech girlie, which I am, but the reason why I’m obsessed with AI is because it activates people to their highest potential.
It is removing how many people listening to this call right now are going to get off this call. They’re to go back into an Excel doc and they’re going to go clean that list up. They’re going to go remove duplicates and they’re going to, I need to do this. I do this every time I have a no AI can do that for you. If you actually took the time to learn how to do this, that is not your highest potential, your highest potential and your soul’s potential. I’m not, I’m not sure what it is, but if you really are obsessed with land, I think about my friend Josiah Aronco. He’s like made for this business.
He should be networking and wheeling and dealing. he actually genuinely loves talking to sellers and he loves the nitty gritty title deals and solving things and building frameworks and teaching his team how to do like, he should be building strategy around how to do a hundred of those deals this year instead of messing in that Excel doc that AI could handle for him in 10 minutes, even though he knows how to do that because he’s an uncommon leader. But.
I rest my case. I’m like, this is the thing. This is why I’m obsessed. I’m not obsessed with AI because, it’s a fancy new automation tool. I’m, I’m obsessed because people are wasting their life away thinking that, I’m just going to do this one more thing, make a little more money and then everything’s going to be fine. No, money does not solve it. It’s actually this stuff that we’re talking about right now. I’m so sorry to burst your bubble, but I had to learn that the hard way.
Chris Duff
So I think that’s an excellent transition point into, okay, know, it’s kind of set the stage for just, know, where we’re at as humanity here. we really expanded. Yeah.
Callan Faulkner
you
Yeah, we went to the moon. We’ll bring us back down to Earth.
Chris
That ends part one of two for the interview with Callan Faulkner, again, CEO of the Uncommon Business. As that, you know, part one ended, you could see we were very expansive in the ideas about AI impacting us as humans and the workspace in general. We get a lot more tactical in part two. So look for that episode to drop in a few days here and
By the way, check the links below if you are interested in joining the upcoming AI bootcamp with Callan. It’s only $47. And she goes super deep into this. Again, I can’t recommend this highly enough. Like what do you have to lose? 50 bucks here. October 2nd, 7th and 9th. So it is coming up here shortly. You can find that link.
below. But really the meat and potatoes here is Callan’s 10 week automate to accelerate course starting in late October here, October 22nd. So you can also sign up for that below. To me, that is really the game changer here. I can’t overstate how much joining that program has impacted myself and my own
business here. So, um, and I continue to be part of Kellyn’s mastermind. I continued paying member of her community. I think that speaks louder than anything here. Um, hope to see you in this next, uh, group. So, you know, again, bootcamp below $47 and then you can also sign up for the upcoming automate to accelerate a 10 week course.
starting at the end of October. I will see you for part two in a few days.
