Tired of marketing fluff, shady sales tactics, and overpriced agencies that sell fear instead of results? Over the Bull is a no-nonsense podcast where we share real stories from inside the agency world—the wins, the failures, and the clients we had to cut loose.
Join me each week as we break down the reality of running a business, expose the marketing BS that’s holding companies back, and talk about what actually works. No generic reports. No empty promises. Just real strategy from the trenches.
Fifteen years ago I got handed a diagnosis, a stack of prescriptions and a shrug about getting older. Six months later I’d reversed all of it, and not because I had better information than my doctors. I just wouldn’t accept that the question was closed.
In this episode I dig into the real danger behind a lot of bad decisions, which is manufactured certainty. That’s the confident answer that makes you stop looking, whether it comes from an exam room, a federal agency, Google’s own AI Max numbers or the AI tools everybody’s being told will outthink us. AI is incredible, and I use it every day, but it’s built from what we already believe, and it hands that back in a voice that sounds a lot more settled than the facts are. I get into where AI actually falls short, where it belongs in your business, and why the best results come from a human and a machine working side by side. I’ll also show you how this episode got built that way.
If you run a business, use the tools hard, just don’t let anybody sell you certainty they haven’t earned.
This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.
Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.
If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.
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SPEAKER_00
Health and anthropic on this episode of Over the Bull. Thanks so much for attending, and more importantly, thank you for your patience. We've been extremely busy here at Integris, and finding time to do the podcast has been a bit of a challenge, but stick with us. We're getting there and we're not planning on going anywhere. Okay, so let's jump right into this episode of Over the Bull. I was recently interviewed by Anthropic because they're trying to build a better product and felt that maybe I could contribute to the conversation. Now, this took me on a rabbit trail that I want to share with you today. About 15 years ago, I was sitting in a doctor's office and they handed me a list. Now, I don't know if you've been there, but I got the list, right? High blood pressure, cholesterol out of control, blood sugar, uh A1C way too high. I don't know if this is your story, but it was my story 15 years ago. And along with that came a plan to put me on a stack of medications. Now hang with me. This is going to make full circle to the anthropic conversation, I promise. And the explanation for it all was basically a shrug. You're getting older. This is what happens. And diabetes is not something you reverse. Six months later, I reversed every single bit of it. Okay. Now I didn't do it because I had better information than my doctors. Honestly, I had less. I did it because I didn't accept the idea that the question was closed. I went looking in places the popular answers had no interest in. And that's where my answer turned out to be. Now, I'm telling you this because it's the key to what I'm about to talk to you today, which is artificial intelligence and why I think most people have the wrong picture of what it is. Okay, so as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was invited to sit in on an interview with Anthropic. That's the company behind Claude, for those of you who don't know. And I really liked the questions they asked. How is AI helping you? Where is AI deficient? Where do you think it actually belongs in the world? Those questions stuck with me, and I've been chewing on them ever since. And this episode is basically me thinking out loud about the answers. And I want to be up front with you. This isn't an anti-AI episode. I use AI every single day. My business runs on it in a lot of ways now. Ways that I couldn't have foreseen a year ago. But I think the way it's being taught to people is off. And that matters for anybody running a business. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably running a business. Okay, so here's what I took away from the doctor's office. The doctors weren't evil and they weren't stupid. The problem was they handed me certainty. This was just aging. Nothing to be done here, guys. And the certainty was the dangerous part because a confident wrong answer is the one that makes you quit looking. If I believed it, I'd just given up and taken the pills, the shots, the whatever they were going to give me. So that was the enemy I want to name for this whole episode. Not doctors, not science, not the fringe, or the mainstream. Manufactured certainty was the enemy. Anybody who takes a question that's still open and presents it to you like it's a settled answer. Okay. Now I want to be careful here because I'm not saying the fringe is always right. By no means is the fringe always right. A lot of fringe ideas are fringe for a good reason. They're just wrong. Now, what saved me wasn't that I trusted the fringe over the mainstream. It's that I kept investigating when I was told there was nothing left to investigate. You see where I'm going with this. Now, this doesn't just happen in an exam room. This happens at scale. Now, during COVID, all right, let's let's let's get a little more controversial here. There was a group of scientists, credentialed people from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Those are the big boys, right? Who put out what they called the Great Barrington Declaration. They argued for a different approach than the lockdown strategy the institutions were pushing. The big boys were pushing. And we know now from emails that came out later that the head of NIH wrote to Dr. Fauci calling for a quick and devastating takedown of their premise. Now, you don't have to agree with everything those scientists said to see the problem. The question was still open. And the people with the most authority use that authority to slam it shut and discredit the people from asking the questions. And a lot of what that group argue has held up better than the official line admitted at the time. Same sin as my doctor's office. But a much bigger stage. A bet, a gamble, dressed up as a fact. Okay, now here's where AI comes into this. AI learns from what people have written. That's the whole body. Everything we've published, argued, and agreed upon. So it's incredibly good at telling you what's currently believed. But think about what that means. If you've had AI four or five hundred years ago, it would have made a beautiful, fluent, well-cited argument for spontaneous generation, that life just pops out of nowhere. The idea that maggots just appear out of rotting meat. Because that's what the smartest people believed, and that's what was published. It wouldn't have been malfunctioning. It would have been doing exactly what it was built to do. And would have been, you guessed it, completely wrong. Now, that's not really a flaw unique to artificial intelligence. Every scientist in 1650 would have told you the same thing. The difference is that AI is the consensus of the moment and hands back you a calm, polished, authoritative voice that sounds more settled than the consensus ever earned. It speaks in the same tone the institutions used. And the companies know it isn't infallible. Claude literally has a little line at the bottom of the screen that says AI can make mistakes. But that's not how it's being taught to the public. People are being told that's going to surpass the human mind by some date on a calendar. So they treat it like an oracle. Well, it's really just a mirror. Our knowledge, our blind spots, our biases, our biases, I don't know how you pronounce that for those more intellectual than me, and our certainty. All reflected back at us. Okay, so where is it actually deficient? That was one of Anthropic's questions. So here's my answer. There's something in human beings that live between what we currently know and our ability to reach past it. I don't know what we call this thing. Call it sentience, call it reason, call it whatever. And honestly, saying AI will become sentient is like shooting at a moving target because we can't even define what this sentience is. And if something got good enough at mimicking it, we couldn't tell the difference anyway. But I know what it does. It lets a person doubt the map from the inside. It's the guy who can't sleep because the answer he was given does not sit right and he goes looking anyway. That's what got me off those medications. Okay. So AI is built almost entirely out of the known. It doesn't have a stake in the game. It doesn't have a stubborn streak. It won't lie awake unconvinced at its own best answer. So it's deficit exactly where the people do their best work. So it's deficit. Think about this. It's exactly where people do their best work. Okay, so let me make this real because this is a marketing podcast, and I see this every day. When I build Google Ads campaigns, I use artificial intelligence to help build negative keyword lists. The searches you don't want your ads to show up for. And it's pretty incredible, to be honest with you. It does work in minutes that would take a person days to do. And a lot of it calls uh makes these calls that are really smart. I don't know how else to say that. But every time there are a handful of misses. And they're always the ones where you would have to basically understand the actual customer, what a person really means when they type something in a way the data just hasn't caught up to yet. Now, then we have Google pushing what they call AI Max, their artificial intelligence-driven campaign. Now, I just got through taking my annual renewal with Google, and they're pushing AI Max, and they tell you contextually that this thing can handle these kind of things. And they'll tell you that you get something about 14% more conversions. Conversions are meaningful actions if you use this tool, AI Max. Now that's Google's number measured in Google's way. Now, when I actually run it for clients without real boundaries on it, the contextual judgment is just not there. Now, yes, I did give it time. Well, let's put that in parentheses because that's usually the counter argument. And it'll happily spend a small business's money on traffic, on people or whatever that's never really going to buy the product. So this is the same pattern again. A confident number standing in for a question that is still open. Okay, you with me on this? Now, I watched one of those big AI documentaries recently, and I gotta be honest with you, it drove me nuts. Because it could only imagine two endings. Either AI saves the world, or on the other side, AI destroys the world. And the reality is really a lot more boring than that. It's neutral. Nuclear power can light a city or level one. And it comes down to who's holding it and how. Now, I do get why people are nervous. Okay, if you were in the 1800s, imagine going from a blacksmith shop to a full assembly line in a week. That's how fast this feels. But I don't think speed is the real threat here. The real threat is people handing over their judgment because the machine sounds so sure of itself. So, where does artificial intelligence belong? Not above us handing down answers. It's beside us. When you hear about a tech company saying they're going to build an AI god, they're going down their wrong track. Philosophically, they're going down their wrong track. Now the AI that I want to see, and frankly, I haven't seen it yet, is one that won't pretend a question is closed when it is not. One that says, here's a mainstream view, here's the serious dissent, here's what's on each side is betting on. Now you take it from there. That's not asking it to crown the fringe, okay? I'm not asking it to do that. It's asking it to be honest about what we actually know. Now here's the funny part. This episode is an example of what I mean. I worked through it with Claude. I brought the stories and convictions. It pushed back on me and helped me shape this podcast. And neither of us, and when I say us, I'll I'll include Claude in that just to stir the pot a little bit, could have done it on its own. It's like baking a cake. If I'm the flour and it's the eggs, you don't get a cake without both. Now, could I bake it alone? Sure. But I'd be walking to the mill, grinding my own flour, and it would take me ten times as long. So for you as a business owner, use the tools. Use them hard. But don't let anyone, a doctor, an agency, Google's dashboard, or even AI hand you certainty they haven't earned. Let me drop one more in there. Your agency. Because your design agency is falling into these same puddles. They may sound technical, they may sound like they know what they're doing. But I'm going to tell you, I see behind the scenes, I've walked through the sausage factory, and these guys are drunk on artificial intelligence and their perception. So you better be careful. The tools are getting more powerful, but the thing that saved me 15 years ago is still the most valuable thing that you've got. Refusing to stop asking when somebody tells you the question is closed. Guys, thank you so much for listening to over the bull. I really appreciate it. Now, um, I do want to let you know we got a lot going on. Uh we are uh getting ready. One of our team members and my son is getting married soon, and we're incredibly excited about that. And I will be officiating the wedding. And uh so it's a great honor, and I uh I'm humbled by that. But it's taken a lot of time to uh prepare and get everything going in that direction, and then plus, business has just been insanely busy. And uh so I'll do my best to uh keep the podcast going at a better pace. You may see a couple of recycled podcast episodes over the holiday season. I'll try not to do that to you because when I see that, I tend to not really care for it. And plus, with the how fast things are moving, frankly, some of the old stuff may not even be relevant, you know. So we got to be careful about that kind of stuff. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. God bless, and I really do hope you have a great holiday season and to your success. Until next time, this is Ken with Over the Ball.
