Adapting to AI: The Future of Work & Business with Buddy Rushing - Part 1 #967
In Part 1 of Joey Romero’s conversation with Buddy Rushing, they take a closer look at how artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping business, the workforce, and the way people prepare for the future. Buddy shares his perspective on the fears surrounding AI, the opportunities many businesses are still overlooking, and why learning how to work alongside AI could become increasingly important. They also explore job disruption, workforce retraining, responsible AI adoption, safety, regulation, and the growing global competition surrounding AI development.
Buddy Rushing is a former Marine Officer and a 2004 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, where he earned a degree in Aerospace Engineering. During his 16 years in the Marine Corps, he served around the world and completed multiple deployments, including service in Afghanistan.
His journey into real estate investing began while deployed, eventually leading him to become the Founder and CEO of White Feather Investments and the founder of Veterans for Financial Freedom, a network created to help military veterans build wealth and achieve financial independence through real estate.
Today, Buddy is also the Founder and CEO of White Feather AI, where he focuses on helping real estate professionals, entrepreneurs, and veterans understand and use artificial intelligence to grow their businesses, improve efficiency, and create greater leverage. He is also the co-founder of AI or Die and co-author of The Science of Getting Rich in the Age of AI.
In this episode:
Why fears of an AI-driven “Terminator” scenario may distract from the risks of humans misusing AI.
Why businesses are still underusing AI despite its potential to improve productivity and create new opportunities.
Which types of jobs are most exposed to AI—and why learning to use AI could help workers adapt.
How retraining and reskilling could help employees transition as automation changes existing roles.
Why employers should be transparent about whether AI is being used to replace employees or empower them.
How businesses can combine AI capabilities with the skills and value that humans uniquely provide.
Why AI safety, responsible use, and appropriate guardrails deserve serious attention.
The challenge of balancing AI regulation and safety with continued technological development
How U.S.–China competition, computing power, cost, and AI model development factor into the global AI race.
Why Buddy hopes global leaders can find common ground around AI safety as the technology becomes increasingly powerful.
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Episode:
Narrator
Welcome to the Norris Group real estate podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever changing real estate market, continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends, and success strategies.
Welcome everybody to the Norris Group real estate podcast. Once again is our good friend and longtime supporter of the Norris Group and all things Norris Group, and CEO and co-founder of White Feather AI, Buddy Rushing. Buddy, good to have you again.
Isn't that funny to hear, White Feather AI, right? No, it's going to be a household name. It's not going to be funny. Household name, yeah.
Three years ago, it was like, oh, this chat GPT is kind of cute, you know, like, isn't this funny? Look at this little email it wrote for me. And now our entire business, I don't know if you know this, but we have nine different businesses within the umbrella of White Feather, like four major verticals and then a bunch of ancillary businesses. And now the entire thing has been up in it and infused with AI.
Like literally there's no stone unturned. And so it's kind of funny to be introduced as the CEO and co-founder of White Feather AI, but it is very much true. All right.
So AI is in the news every day, everything from jobs to regulation, USB China, data centers, all kinds of stuff. So what's the most overhyped thing about AI right now? Oh, what a great question. I do think that the AI is going to kill us all narrative is overhyped.
And you can understand why, right? Because it makes great headlines and it's also, you know, there's a non-zero chance that it could kill us all. If I'm being completely honest, it is not outside the realm of possibility. And that may shock some people to hear that.
I think that there's a far greater likelihood that a evil human using AI will do much more harm than the AI itself, which is not naturally evil. It doesn't like an AI is just a tool. So it'll do what you program it to do or what its parameters are inside its particular operating system.
But it doesn't automatically just randomly be like, Hey, let me be evil. But humans can, we've seen humans do some pretty evil stuff in throughout history. And so, you know, one of the, I think that the biggest concern should be some bad group or person uses AI to manufacture a super virus or something like that.
That's a very real threat. The AI is going to kill us all and Terminators are going to come and take us. Like that's just not, if you look at the actual, you know, models themselves and you look at the training and you look at the internal algorithmic sort of framing, that's not a very realistic scenario.
So I think that, but that is, it's easier to digest that. It's easier to just be like, AI is going to kill us all. So I do think that's really overhyped.
There's a couple of points that I'll mention. One, if it's all trained on human behavior, then couldn't it realistically learn some bad things? It's not inherently. It's a great point.
And yes, yes. In fact, what you've seen is they have something called training time and then inference time, right? So imagine training, like your kid goes to school and they learn a bunch of stuff. Then they come home and they talk about it.
That is inference time. So talking about it is what they actually say. And some, and there are large language models that have spit out racism.
They've spit out like some, you know, like eugenics, they spit out some, like some of the most terrible things that, and where did they, when they traced it back to where they found it, it was Reddit posts and Reddit like garbage and slop. And so, yeah, for sure, for sure. That, that was a big wake-up call for, you know, these frontier labs.
And they were like, well, we can't just train it on all humans because there's some pretty gnarly, bad humans out there. So we need to train it and then post-train it. Well, that's, that's what, that's what the human supervising started at.
And now it's the AI supervising the AI because they could do it at a much faster and bigger, much faster space and a, and with a bigger scope. Right. So the other, the other thing I was going to say about this is it, it could happen, but there has to be a long series of things that have to happen for that to, to actually come to fruition.
Right. Cause it's not just all of a sudden, you know, Hey, I found the internet. I'm Ultron now, you know, for a lot of people that don't know who Ultron is, he's the, the character in the Avengers movie that, you know, basically Tony Stark's AI uploaded itself and just, you know, commanded the evil side of, of that movie.
So we're a long way from Ultron. We're a long way from Ultron. And unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, we're a long way from the good or, or the bad aspects of, of Skynet and, and, and of Terminator and, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So we're robots. If you, if you look out there you know, the, the, what T-1000 or T-2000 or whatever it was, the one where it was like liquid and like, yeah, that's, if you look at that and then you take a look at the cutting edge robotic demonstrations right now, we're a little bit off of that. Yeah.
So, all right. So what's the other side of this question that I just asked you is like, what do you think that deserves more attention that just simply isn't getting it right now? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, I think the, the awesome business implications of AI, people just, they are not using the tools that are available to their maximum effectiveness in their own lives.
We have seen this across the board and you have certain people in certain instances, and we've got examples inside Whitefeather of people that have harnessed the power of AI and quadrupled their business in a matter of months. You know, we've had people that have used it to out cycle, quite honestly, people that should have been more qualified for them and land contracts, land jobs that, that without AI, there's no way they would have landed those contracts or jobs. And so their life is measurably better because of AI and they're using it, you know, moderately a decent amount.
But when you go and interview businesses and we have many times and you look at how they're integrated, even large businesses, and you look at how they're integrating what is available for either free or low cost, it's chronically underused. And so I think that there is, there's a lot of hype that concern that that's around AI, and there's a lot of unnoticed promise and capability that's just not being integrated at a rate anywhere near what I would have anticipated. Now, that was actually what I was going to ask right now, because a June Pew survey in June of 2026 said that 71% of US adults expect there to be massive job losses, you know, over the next two decades.
So it was very, but that just measures sentiment. So now that you that the question I was gonna ask you, you're actually talking to businesses and helping them integrate AI. The truth is that a lot of them are still kind of just tinkering and not really adopting 100% where they could.
So there's a massive potential there that isn't realized, kind of the same way as like when people are like, well, what else can I do with chat GPT, the businesses really don't know how to really go full AI native, right? It is consistently shocking how, how easy it is to blow somebody's mind with just chat GPT. And I say just chat GPT. But that's, I only say that because that's the one everyone knows.
But on the flip side, jet chat GPT Astra, which is the most recent version of the model just came out is unbelievably powerful. We're going to show stuff at the tsunami event that my wife made while like babysitting the kids and it will blow your mind. It's like better than any type of graphic designer could do if you paid them thousands of dollars.
And she did it like whisper flowing into, into June or her, you know, and using Astra and runway. And we'll talk about that. Like, and those, these are by the way, very low cost platforms that are available for anybody on their smartphone.
So this isn't some, you don't need coding, you don't need some crazy degree or anything. This is normal people doing this kind of stuff. So, but, but like I, when I show people stuff that they can do literally in 15 seconds using something that's on their smartphone, they're just like, Oh my God, this is a good, like new spark is a perfect example of this.
I don't know if you've played around with it yet. It's only a couple of weeks old. It is unbelievably powerful and fun to use.
It's super fun. It's like, it's like you're texting with a friend who that friend just happens to be the most helpful and most fun engaging person. And it's like, Hey, by the way, if you want me to scroll through all of your emails and then unsubscribe from all the crap you don't want it.
Yeah. I'd love for you to do that. And then he goes and does it.
It's like, what? And that's a, you know, there's so many cool things that you can do and people just, they're not, they don't know about it. So, you know, we talked about this a little bit at Bruce's event and then we touched upon it again at Tsunami One. So now that there's been new data coming out about jobs, more realistic data, cause now they have a little bit more, what fears about AI taking jobs do you still think are justified? What initially, if you remember when Bruce, the data Bruce had at the time and the data we all had at the time suggested massive job loss on the horizon.
Now we see that that is not the case for the overall sort of population. There's not going to be massive. I mean, you can see the data is very clear.
There's not massive job loss across every sector in certain sectors though there is. And so what I see is, and you can do this by the way, just go on your chat GPT and say, list me the top 10 jobs that are going to be safe for the next 10 years. And the top 10 jobs that are going to be most at risk in the next 10 years.
And it'll give you, by the way, in like six seconds, it'll give you the list of top 10, top 10. So when you look at the top 10 jobs that are most at risk, it is typically entry level digital data entry jobs. So it's like paralegals, right? Cause what's a paralegals job? To go research a bunch of stuff and then deliver a comprehensive like reports on all the stuff they were supposed to research.
That is directly in the wheelhouse of what any large language model can do. I don't care if it's chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, it can all go do that. And so the question is, what does a paralegal do? More importantly is in that law office, and I know many attorneys, they're paying that paralegal X amount of dollars, like after their internship or whatever, they're paying them, let's just say, I don't know, five grand a month or whatever.
And they can do that for $20 a month faster with their job is like their job as it, as it is listed. There's not a law office in the world that is going to justify a $60,000 a year overhead when it's slower as well. And you also have to have insurance and you also have to have all these different like, you know, parts of it.
And also that, that paralegal doesn't work after hours or on the weekends, or when they're sick, or, you know what I'm saying? So, so there's things that are quite obvious that will go away. And I'm not saying the paralegal profession will go away. What I'm saying is, if you're not fully AI enabled, like the paralegals that know how to really use AI well, will, will thrive.
In fact, they'll probably get paid more because they'll then be able to serve many, many more partners in the firm because they're so much more capable than the other paralegals. Now the bad paralegals that don't embrace AI will, will, will get fired, right? And then you got the other side of the equation of like physical jobs, like truck drivers. I do think that truck drivers that don't adapt and retrain to become fleet managers will absolutely lose their jobs.
It's just, when you look at, they have very, very, very capable electric autonomous semi-trucks now. And you've got multiple industries, multiple companies that from, you know, Tesla and on that are creating these things that are able to drive five, 600 miles without stopping for a bathroom break, without stopping for, and they've already run millions of miles of accident-free on highways. And so when a truck is less expensive, it uses no gas and you don't have to pay a human and it can get there faster and more efficiently.
And you can track it every step of the way because it's plugged into a database that tracks the movement of every single truck. Why would you ever pay 50 truck drivers instead of having a fleet of 50 autonomous vehicles? The answer is you wouldn't. However, for the truck drivers that are paying attention, instead of being a truck driver, which they may or may not even like, they could manage a fleet of trucks from their homes, spend more time with their family and do it all through an iPad and make more money doing so.
So there's opportunities to retrain and level up for people in those industries. It's unfortunately, the ones that don't adopt this mentality are the ones that will absolutely lose their jobs. Do you think we'll get to a place where, like in China, when AI replaces a job, that employer is now tasked with basically training them for another job? I sincerely hope so.
I think that's the answer, is you put the onus on the employers and then you actually, and this is my personal opinion, you have these frontier labs that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, set aside a fund, and some of them are already doing this, but set aside a fund to pay for retraining. For jobs that they're primarily duplicating and getting rid of, you have a fund, like a little college fund or whatever, that can retrain that person instead of just being like, see you later, good luck. No, you don't do that.
If you do that en masse, all of a sudden you have civil unrest and war. Nobody wants that. Sam Altman's already been the recipient of multiple death threats, but two death attempts.
They threw a Molotov cocktail at his house. You realize that this is real. Normal people do not want to be laid off en masse and then with no sort of help.
I think the large language, the model, the labs themselves need to pitch in there. I think we probably will move to some hybrid where the government has a universal basic training program, the employers themselves are responsible for helping to retrain and retool. Then the frontier labs that are the ones that are creating all of this should chip in as well.
I think that that's the way to do it. One of the jobs that we thought that middle management was going to go away, but we're finding out that the skill set that the middle management has applies to the management of agents. They're not going to be on.
Not the good ones. I honestly think that this is where we come out with White Feather AI because I do honestly believe that AI is for everyone. I mean that in a way of not just, oh, it can help everyone.
I think everybody, assuming that you're not somebody who says, I'm retired from the world and I'm just going to sit on my porch for the rest of my life. If that's you, then God bless. You're fine.
You don't have to learn anything new ever again. You can just sit on your porch. For the rest of us that want our lives to be more involved, I would recommend or I would suggest that if you don't learn AI, you're going to feel pain from multiple angles.
You're going to feel the pain of a loss of purpose. You're going to feel the pain of potentially a loss of customers and a loss of employment. You're also going to feel lost.
You're just going to feel lost because you're going to feel like the world is spinning around you so fast that you don't know what's going on. That's going to happen. When people ask me, why should I learn about AI? I hear about it every day.
Why should I come to Tsunami? Why should I join White Feather AI? But more importantly than those, even if you don't do any of those, why should I go learn and get involved in AI? The answer is brutally simple. If you don't, you'll feel the pain that will come. This is not like being slow to adopt the internet.
It's far more profound than that. That's what we're trying to help people. But the ones that do embrace it are going to have a lot.
We're already having a great time. I can go over specific examples of that if you'd like. To kind of wrap this up, because there's been stories about companies introducing AI and workers saying, well, why the hell am I going to train my AI to replace me? What do you think employers, so as you're dealing with business owners, what are you telling them as far as how do you implement AI and not make everybody quit, fire everybody? How do you introduce it without making the employees feel threatened? I think you have to be honest.
One, honest with yourself. Do you want to fire your employees? Because if you're wanting to fire your employees, then that's you. I'm not saying do or don't.
I'm saying be honest with yourself. Are you actually wanting to empower them and help them grow with AI, or are you wanting to replace them with AI? If the answer is you want to replace them with AI, you can do that. There's a way to do that.
That's on you. If you're actually wanting to empower them, then be honest about that and say, listen, I've had this discussion with people that work with me recently. I'm like, Maverick can do what Maverick's my AI, my personally trained AI.
When you hear Maverick from me, think every platform you can think of, from YouSpark, to ChatGT, to Hermes, to whatever. They're all named Maverick, and it's all just different versions of my own. I have an army of bots.
When I say Maverick, and I go to them and I say, Maverick can do 99% of what you're doing for me. However, I love you. I will always prefer humans over AI and robots.
Let's get you plugged into a different part of the ecosystem and power you with AI. Let's help you level up and help you provide value in a way that uniquely humans can do. If that's what you're wanting to do, then that's the conversation you have with them.
You say, listen, you got to be real. At your current job description, AI can do most of what you can do, and it's a fraction of the cost. Why don't we help grow what you can do and just power it with AI so we can all grow because of it? The automated teller machine didn't result in fewer tellers.
It resulted in more tellers because it resulted in an explosion of bank branches, because it was an explosion of the economy. Now there's more human tellers than there ever were before the ATM, which they thought the ATM was going to put the human teller out of business. I think that's going to happen here as well.
Let's talk about safety a little bit. OpenAI called for federal safeguards and democratic oversight. Dario Amadei actually published a paper and he named it, We Must Pace the Frontier, where he's proposing that independent evaluators come and be inside the frontier labs to give them open access to everything that's coming out.
If some of the strongest warnings are coming from the people who are building the AI, how seriously should the AI safety be taken by the public? I think AI safety should be something that everyone takes extremely seriously. Obviously, we're not in charge of establishing guardrails inside the frontier labs, but you are in charge of deciding what information you give your AI and what you use it for. And so I think that everyone should be just at least conscious of protecting themselves and just being really clear on the power of AI.
It's like a lawnmower. Technically, a lawnmower is something that can hurt you, right? If it's a gas lawnmower, it could potentially explode if you pour the gas in the wrong way. One time my brother was pouring gas in and my dad was smoking next to him and that kind of went the way you think it's going to go.
And so lawnmowers can be dangerous, but does that mean that we don't mow our lawn with them? No, of course not. Fire can be dangerous. It could fire, burn down the entire palisades, but does that mean we don't have fireplaces and we don't have stoves? Of course not.
So it's not about whether or not something is dangerous and you decide, oh, it's dangerous, so I'm not going to use it. It's about using it properly within its proper guardrails. And so for the average person, it's just be careful not to use AI to hurt people.
And you can. You can use it to spam people. You can use it to go down rabbit holes and all that kind of stuff.
But from the perspective of what I think you're really asking is what should the frontier labs and governments and all of the people that are in power that actually control these, we have literally as of this recording, Xi Jinping and the rest of basically all the power brokers in the AI world are all in DC right now. What should they be talking about and what should they be doing? For sure, we now have the ability to create a runaway self-recursive improvement type of frontier that could result in, in my opinion, digital superintelligence that can cause massive harm. So yes, we for sure, for sure should, I don't think slow down is the right thing because there's a lot of negative potential implications of one sector slowing down and everyone else getting the lead now.
Right. So that's part of the problem. That just leads my question is like, how do you, so how do you pace, right? How do you pace this? And, you know, still because for a couple of years now, you know, we've been talking about US versus China, US versus China, US versus China.
Okay. So how do you do all these things and still don't fall behind, you know, while mitigating these risks? So it's a very nuanced question. So I'm going to do my best not to get too complicated.
Okay. Because there's parts of it. I'll tell you the three sides that I see.
One is the cynical side and it bears reality because I'm not a cynic by nature, but the cynical side is saying there's something called regulation capture, which is basically where people in the lead say, government should regulate this. And what they're really saying is we're already in the lead. So if you put regulation in place, nobody can catch up.
That's reg capture. That is a way to, and by the way, Anthropic, Dario Amadei, the guy that put out this paper, they're right about to IPO, which means they're about to go public and they're about to make a ton of money. And so this is potentially a way for them to create a moat around their company to where people will invest in them and they'll make more money.
Okay. So that, that, do I think that's a part of it? Yes, I do. And I'm not a cynic.
That's just good business. If I'm being quite honest, like, you know, his shareholders eventually will probably want him to do that. Do I think he also believes that we need to be responsible in the way that we build these things? Yes, of course.
Everybody who knows Dario personally, nobody says this guy is just out there trying to make a buck. They're all saying, yes, he truly believes this. And so, so I don't know him personally.
So I just have to rely on the people that do know him personally that I trust. There's a third part of this. And that is if we slow down and China doesn't, will China leapfrog us? And there's, there's a couple of ways to look at this.
On one hand, that's something we for sure need to be concerned about only because China's our number one competitor. And they also are a totalitarian government. They are not a democracy.
And so, you know, in a democracy, we as Americans, we love our freedom, we love our ability to shape our destiny, and so on. As a Chinese citizen under the Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, they have much less freedoms than we do. And so the question is, you know, do we want to lose the race? Like, whenever we launched the Apollo program, it was about getting the high ground over Russia.
It was about landing on the moon first, so that we got into space first. And so because if you remember, or if you've read your history books, space was the ultimate high ground through which we could launch space based weapons and lasers and things like that. And that was a way potentially to win the Cold War.
That's what the space race was about. It was not about national pride. That was a part of it.
But it was really about the what I did a career in the Marine Corps and what you want to get in the military, you want to get the high ground. And so that's what that was about. This is the ultimate high ground.
Artificial superintelligence is the ultimate high ground, and it might be the last high ground that any nation ever needs to get. That's how powerful it is. So the question is, do you want China to get that high ground or not? That's one side of it.
Of course, the answer is no. Of course, the answer as an American is you don't want China to get the high ground. So that's a pretty simple thing.
The other part of it, though, is can China get the high ground without us? And if you understand what Chinese technological innovation looks like out of Huawei and all the different parts of China that are... It's always been ripping somebody else off and then making it through. That's exactly right. So what it is, it's copy and distill and make cheaper.
That's what China... And even China says this. There's a ton of papers out. You can read all about this.
Use your AI. So what they do is they take our models and they do what's called distilling them because our models are much far advanced in theirs in terms of algorithmic improvements, speed capability, and so on. So they take our models and then they reverse engineer them.
They literally prompt them tens of thousands of times and they reverse engineer the algorithms and then they make their own cheaper version of it like KimiK3. But the real threat is that... And I don't know how deep you want me to go on this, but the real threat is KimiK3 is a very good version of Claude, for instance. It's probably like an 85% version of Claude.
So it's not as good, but it's about 85% as good. And it's like a 10th as expensive. It's like 90% cheaper.
Yeah. It begs the question, how could they keep these valuations if it's being done- Oh, that's a big part of it as well. That's a big part of it as well because here's the question.
So we in the West, we have tons of money, just collectively, the Royal We. We have tons of money in the West. We're the wealthiest nation ever.
But most of the world doesn't have America kind of money. And so if China says, hey, we've got this thing that costs 10 cents for every dollar you spend in America and it's 85% as good, will you want to use ours? A lot of the world's going to say yes, which is going to bolster their ability. But back to the... And I know that we're want to keep this short, but the question is whether they can beat us to ASI.
And there's a lot of discussion and disagreement that they even can because they have to take our models and distill them and make them 85% as good, which means whatever our pace is, they are 15% behind regardless of what they do because they don't have the chips. They don't have near the capability in terms of the chips and the processing power. They have the actual electrical power because they're blanketing their country with solar panels and that's fine.
But as long as you're limited at the server rack layer and the chip layer, there's legitimate arguments that they cannot beat us to ASI. And there's also arguments that they don't even care about that, that they care far more about feeding their people with AI and robotics than they do about beating America. There's a big contingent of people out there that believe that America is way more focused on beating China than China is on beating America, which I'm okay with that.
As long as we win. Yeah. Anytime we get our, well, yeah, USA, and it's like, they're like, we've been around for 5,000 years.
Like, okay, go feel yourself. Like, chill youngster. You can win this race.
We're fine. Okay. Last question on the US-China thing is what do you hope will come out of this meeting? Yeah.
Hope and think are two different things for sure. What I hope will come out is a bilateral agreement for everyone to focus on safety because we're already powerful and capable enough to change the world in terms of we collectively, the world with AI. I mean, we're putting rockets up in space.
We're putting data centers in space. We're colonizing the moon. We're doing all of this stuff.
