Your AI Bullsh!t Detector

Friends, before I make half of the audience angry, I need to make my standard disclaimer: I am not a doom and gloom guy. I see opportunity everywhere. I believe AI is one of the most powerful tools we've had access to in our lifetimes. But I'm also a keen observer of patterns, which is one of the main roles of a good appraiser, by the way, and I've been watching professionals; appraisers, agents, business owners, coaches, get absolutely crushed by what is often called "shiny ball syndrome."

They're buying every AI subscription that pops up on their feed. They're falling for all the hype when the next AI marvel hits their feed, they're spending hours trying to get ChatGPT to write their LinkedIn and Facebook posts. They're tinkering with image generators and voice cloners and automation tools, and at the end of the month, their bank account is smaller, their calendar is fuller, they're more stressed than ever. And the best part is that they haven’t made any more money or created anything lasting or significant in the world while, at the same time, wasting hours on things they'll never get their time back on.

So, if you've been feeling like you're drowning in AI hype and you can't figure out what's actually worth your time, this episode is for you.

Here's what I'm seeing out there, and, as you hopefully know by now, I'm not pulling any punches on this one. The AI industry has become the Wild West. Every day there's a new "revolutionary" tool that promises to 10x your productivity, automate your business, and make you rich while you sleep. This one is going to be the one that revolutionizes everything you do and, oh by the way, make every job obsolete in the next 12 months.

And you know what? Ninety percent of them are complete garbage.

I don't say that lightly. I haven’t tested every tool out there, but I've tested a bunch of them and what I've found is that most AI tools fall into one of three categories:

Category One: The Time Waster. This is the tool that promises to save you time but actually creates more work. You spend three hours learning how to prompt it correctly, another two hours editing its output, and by the time you're done, you could have just done the work yourself in 45 minutes.

Category Two: The Solution Looking for a Problem. This is the tool that does something really cool and impressive, but it solves a problem you never actually had. It's like buying a $500 gadget that peels apples in a spiral when you hate apples.

Category Three: The Margin Thief. This is the tool that technically works, but it costs you more in time, money, or mental bandwidth than it gives back. You're paying $20, $50, or $100 per month for something that took you countless lost hours trying to figure out, more hours creating things that don’t help you in any way, and it maybe ends up saving you maybe 30 minutes a week on some task you didn’t really need help with…but the tool makes it easier so its cool!

Now, here's where it gets interesting. There's a fourth category: a small, elite group of tools that actually do what they promise. They eliminate drudgery. They free up your time for high-value work. They help you serve your clients better. They compound over time. And most importantly, they amplify what makes you human.

The question I've been asking myself over the last year or more is: How do you tell the difference?

Before I give you the framework, you need to understand the philosophy behind it. Because without the philosophy, you'll just be running tools through a checklist without really understanding what you're looking for.

Here's the unifying theory, and I want you to write this down:

AI should make you more human, not more mechanical.

Read that again. AI should make you MORE human, not less! In essence, we use the machine for the math to free up the man for a greater mission. Now, I get it, we can use AI for more than math problems, but the idea is that the machine makes the mechanical stuff exponentially easier so the mechanic can work on bigger and better things. A machine for the math to free up the man for a greater mission.

What does that mean? It means that the purpose of artificial intelligence isn't to turn you into a robot, which it's doing to a fair amount of people these days, it's to handle the robotic work so you can focus on the human work.

Robotic work is things like data entry, scheduling, formatting documents, routing your inspections and comps, drafting the same email for the tenth time, organizing photos, transcribing notes. It's the repetitive, soul-crushing, mechanical stuff that bogs so many of you down to such a degree that you never get around to the real work of increasing your lead flow, upgrading clients, building better systems, training your people, building multiple streams of income, and simply enjoying life more.

Human work is things like judgment, relationships, creative problem-solving, strategic thinking, holding a client's hand through a stressful transaction, giving a presentation that moves people, making a call that requires empathy and nuance, making some videos to boost your SEO and become a key person of influence in your market.

I say it all the time and it's never been more appropriate than now to reiterate here, people do business with people, not machines.

If an AI tool is making you spend more time managing a machine and less time doing the irreplaceable human work that only you can do, it's failed. It doesn't matter how "advanced" it is or how many features it has. If it's not freeing, you up to be more human it's making you worse.

Which brings us to the point of this episode, the point of the framework I've created around this, and one-sentence test that every AI tool must pass:

"Does this create and amplify my human advantage?"

That's it. That's the test. If a tool doesn't amplify your human advantage; your judgment, your relationships, your expertise, and your ability to create impact, then it's simply a distraction and likely a waste of your most valuable resource, your time.

Now, that's a great philosophical test, but it's a little abstract when you're staring at a sales page trying to decide if you should drop $20, $50, or $200 per month on some new software. Maybe the more important question, should I spend the 40 or more hours it's going to take to learn this tool, play around with it, maybe have to invest in some other tool just to run it safely, and so on. So I've developed a seven-filter test that makes this concrete and actionable.

And here's the beautiful part: I made the seven filters easy to remember by making them spell out the word AMPLIFY.

I'll give you the full list first, and then we'll dive deep into each one with examples:

• A – The AUTOPSY Test

• M – The MULTIPLIER Test

• P – The PAYCHECK Test

• L – The LOVE Test

• I – The INVESTMENT Test

• F – The FRICTION Test

• Y – The YES Test

Alright, let's break them down.

The first test is the 'Autopsy Test', which, I know, sounds a little morbid. But that's by design, not because AI might kill you, but because one of the main reasons to start utilizing AI is to kill something else, and preferably something that is taking away your life and profitability, not giving you more.

The question I want you to start asking when it comes to your AI tools and usage is: "What dies when this lives?"

This is the first and most important filter because it forces you to get specific. If you can't name what gets killed or eliminated when you adopt this tool, you're not replacing anything, you're just adding complexity and more cost. Even if the tool is free, it's costing you in time that could be used toward something more life giving instead of life sucking.

Here's what I mean. Let's say you're looking at an AI scheduling assistant. The AUTOPSY Test asks: What dies if/when this lives? A good answer might be: "The 7 back-and-forth emails and texts I exchange every week trying to schedule an inspection time with homeowners and agents dies. The 3 hours a week my assistant spends playing phone, text, and email tag dies."

It's specific and it's measurable. That's a corpse and a chalk outline that you can point to.

A bad answer might be: "It helps me be more organized." That's vague. That's not really killing anything. That's just adding a new system you now have to manage. By the way, you're going to hear that a lot in all of this. If any of these tools that you believe are making your life easier are tools that you have to constantly babysit and manage, are they really making your life easier?

Let me give you a real example from my own business. A few months ago, I was looking at a tool that promised to "help me brainstorm better content ideas." Sounds great, right? But when I ran it through the AUTOPSY Test, I realized: I wasn't doing systematic brainstorming before. This tool wasn't killing an existing problem; it was creating a new workflow I'd have to maintain. It was going to burn more cognitive calories than it was replacing with worse results.

So, I passed on it.

Compare that to when our office started using some AI tools to review documents, interior comps photos, and then draft narrative sections of the appraisal reports based on the data and voice notes. What died? The 90+ minutes used before AI to do all of those things manually. That's a funeral I was happy to attend.

And before you jump on your high-horse and complain that those actions are killing the appraisal profession or that we're not really being appraisers when we use tools like that, I'll simply tell you what you'll hear repeatedly from me going forward, AI is useful as a tool to amplify your humanness. If you think that your eyes and your brain are better at scanning 43 pages of densely packed black and white text than AI is, you simply haven’t used AI for that task yet.

Do that 5 times in a day and see how your eyes and brain stack up against the machine that can do it a matter of seconds to your hours of cognitive load. You get worse as the day goes on; it stays steady with no food required, no inspiring speeches, and no breaks needed. That kind of use frees you up to be a better appraiser at the appraiser things, not a worse one.

Here's the quick check for the AUTOPSY Test:

Can you name the funeral? If, after some use, can you point to the specific task, the specific pain point, and the specific time-suck that will be eliminated? If not, walk away.

One more thing on this: Be honest with yourself. Don't convince yourself that something is dying just because you want the tool to work. I see this all the time. Someone will say, "This tool will help me post more consistently on social media." But they weren't posting consistently before, so nothing is dying. They're just adding a new obligation.

The next filter in the AMPLIFY is the "M", which stands for "Multiply", as in; does this tool multiply my time and efforts or just take them? We're compelled to ask, "Does this give me more life, or steal it?"

This is where we separate the tools from the toys. Real tools multiply your time, money, and our mental and emotional space. Toys drain your time while promising eventual returns that never come.

I call this the 2-for-1 Rule: If a tool doesn't automate at least 2 hours of drudgery to give you back 2 hours for meaningful mission type work like networking, business strategy, client relationship time, creative thinking time, or personal time, then it's a net loss.

Here's the trap: A lot of AI tools technically save you time, but they fill that time with more screen time. You save an hour on data entry, but now you spend that hour managing your AI prompts, tweaking outputs, and feeding the machine. You haven't gained anything. You've just traded one form of drudgery for another.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it if tinkering with things is a hobby for you. If you love buying Mac minis and learning how to set up fairly complex relationships and software connections to make a thing work, I'm all for it. I classify that in the same realm as the person who loves to build their own gaming computer. They get immense joy from researching what kind cpu, gpu, ram, fans, and processors will make that thing scream and I respect that. Just don’t try to fool yourself or anyone else that it's somehow saving you time and resources. That is a hobby and a passion project…full stop.

Let me share a personal failure on this one. Last year, I got excited about an AI tool that would automatically generate social media posts from my podcast episodes. Sounds perfect, right? I could save hours every week!

Except here's what actually happened: I'd get the AI-generated posts, but they were always just slightly off-brand and no in the way I would say something. So, I'd edit them. Then I'd second guess my edits. Then I'd regenerate them with different prompts. Then I'd edit those. Before I knew it, I was spending more time managing the AI than I ever spent just writing the posts myself.

That tool failed the MULTIPLIER Test. It stole my life instead of giving me more of it so I got rid of it.

Compare that to a tool I use now that automatically transcribes coaching calls, podcasts, and client calls and pulls out action items. That tool passes with flying colors. I record the call, the AI does its thing, and I get a clean summary with next steps. I don't touch it. I don't edit it. It just works. And it gives me back 30 minutes after every call that I used to spend taking notes and trying to remember what we talked about and agreed to.

Here's the quick check for the MULTIPLIER Test:

After using this tool for 30 days, do you have MORE energy and time, or are you exhausted from managing it? If you're tired, it failed. Get rid of it.

The next filter in AMPLIFY is the "P", which is what I call the 'Paycheck Test'.

This test basically says, "Show me the money in 90 days or less." This one's brutal, but it's necessary. Math doesn't care about your excitement. Math doesn't care about potential. Math cares about one thing: Does this tool make you more money than it costs you?

And I'm not just talking about the subscription fee. I'm talking about the total cost: subscription + setup time + learning curve + maintenance + opportunity cost.

Let me break that down with a real example. Let's say you're looking at an AI tool that costs $50 a month and promises to automate your order entry process. Sounds cheap, right?

But here's the real cost:

• $50/month subscription = $600/year

• 8 hours to set it up initially (at $100/hour, that's $800 of your time)

• 2 hours per month to maintain and troubleshoot ($200/month = $2,400/year)

• Total first-year cost: $3,800

Now, what does it give you back? Let's say it saves you 5 hours a month. If those 5 hours don't convert into billable work or cost reduction, you've just spent $3,800 to feel more organized. That's a hobby, not an investment.

But let's say those 5 hours allow you to take on two more appraisal assignments per month at $500 each. That's $1,000/month, $12,000/year. Now you've got a 3-to-1 return. That passes the multiplication test.

Here's my standard and I recommend you adopt it as well: For something you're going to call a tool, you need positive ROI in 90 days. For strategic decisions, you get 12 months. If it takes longer than that, you're not investing, you're simply gambling.

Here's the quick check for the PAYCHECK Test:

Can you write out the math? Actual numbers? If you can't, or if the numbers don't work, it fails. Again, maybe that doesn’t matter to you, just don’t try to lie to yourself or anyone else that you've got a killer AI tool that is saving you a bunch of money OR making you a bunch of money.

In full transparency, this is the filter where I tend to fail the most because I enjoy playing with things to some degree and I have the resources to do so. I get excited about cool new technology, and I convince myself that "eventually" it'll pay off. The reality is that it rarely does. The tools that have made me the most money or saved me the most time are the ones where the ROI was obvious from day one.

The next filter in the AMPLIFY test is what I call the 'Love Test'.

This is one where you ask yourself, "Will my customers and my people thank me for this?" This is the filter that separates internal vanity projects from actual competitive advantages. If your clients and your staff don't notice or experience the improvement, it might be nice for you, but it's not going to grow your business.

Here's another way to think about it: would this improvement generate a genuine thank-you note from a client or one of your employees? If not, it might make your life easier, but it's not a competitive advantage or strategic differentiator.

Here's the quick check for the LOVE Test:

Can your customers or employees SEE or FEEL the difference? If they can't, you're optimizing for yourself, not for them. That's not necessarily a bad thing; these are all just part of an honesty and reality filter. If it's for you, just say it's for you and stop trying to bullshit the world that it’s the greatest thing ever and it's going to revolutionize your life and business.

The next filter in AMPLIFY is the 'I", which is the Investment Test.

This one asks, "Does this build equity or am I simply renting an employee?" This is where we separate the assets from the rentals. Assets compound over time while rentals disappear the moment you stop paying. One builds equity and creates something real while the other doesn’t.

Here's what I mean. Let's say you use an AI tool to build a library of templated emails, checklists, and SOPs that are specific to your business and your voice. Over time, that library gets better. It becomes proprietary. It's an asset you own. If you stop paying for the AI tool, assuming you have those assets saved outside of the AI tool, you still have the library. That's building equity.

Now let's say you use an AI tool that generates content for you every time you need it, but it doesn't save anything. Every blog post, every email, every social media caption has to be generated fresh. If you stop paying, you're back to zero or on to the next tool. That's renting a trick.

Here's another example from my world. I use AI to help me create training materials for my coaching students. But I don't just use it and throw it away. I save the best outputs, I refine them, I build them into a knowledge base that gets better every single month. That knowledge base is now worth more than the AI tool itself. That's the INVESTMENT Test in action.

The question to be asking with this one is twofold:

1. Does this get MORE valuable the longer I use it?

If the answer is yes, you're building equity. If the answer is no, you're renting.

2. If I stop paying tomorrow, do I keep any value? If the answer is no, be very skeptical.

The next filter in AMPLIFY is the 'F', which stands for 'Friction’.

Essentially asking, "Can I launch this today with very little friction?" This one's simple but brutal: If you can't implement a tool and see results within one focused work session, let's call it four to six hours, the friction cost might be too high.

For solo operators and small teams especially, adoption friction kills 90% of good ideas. You've got a business to run, you've got a family to feed and care for, and you have things you want to do with your life. You don't have time to become a software engineer just to use a tool that's supposed to make your life easier.

Here's the standard: If it requires weeks of setup, extensive training, or workflow overhauls, the cure is often worse than the disease. I know many of you that have newer software sitting on your computer this very moment that you’re not utilizing, or not utilizing to its fullest, because, after the shininess and newness of it wore off and business had to continue, you gave up on utilizing it.

If there is too much friction to learn it, customize it, train on it, teach it to others, and then micromanage it, the friction cost will simply be too high and it will become that never used piece of exercise equipment you bought off of the infomercial and now just collects dust and doubles as a clothing repository.

The Quick Check for the FRICTION Test is: Can I implement and see results within one focused afternoon with very little friction. If not, be very, very careful. That doesn’t mean it's completely useless, it's just one filter on the last that I'm recommending you consider when looking at an AI tool being implemented.

Alright friends, we’ve arrived at the last test in the AMPLIFY set of filters and it’s called THE YES TEST.

This is one where you simply ask yourself, "Can I say YES to this with full integrity?"

This is the ethics filter, and it works on three levels. It's personal, it's relational, and it's universal.

Level One: Personal YES: Can you look in the mirror and feel good about this choice? If you're hesitating, if you're rationalizing, if you're working hard to convince yourself that it's okay, that's your answer. It's not okay.

Level Two: Legacy YES: Would your children, your employees, or your clients be proud of how you built your business? This one cuts deep, and it should. If you wouldn't want your kids, your staff, or your community of customers to know you use a particular tool or tactic, you shouldn't be using it.

Level Three: Universal YES: If everyone in your industry said yes to this tool, would the industry be better or worse? Would we be serving people better, or would we just be racing to the bottom?

Let me give you a real example. There are AI tools out there right now that will help you generate fake reviews, fabricate testimonials, or create content that mimics someone else's style so closely that it's basically plagiarism. There are tools that can exactly mimic your voice, as well as make videos that look and sound exactly like you.

Those tools might pass some of the earlier filters. They might save you time. They might even make you money in the short term.

But they fail the YES Test spectacularly.

Can you say yes to that with full integrity? Would your kids be proud? Would the world be better if everyone did it? I’ll leave the answers to those questions for you to answer.

Now here's the thing about the YES Test: If you're working hard to justify how something passes, it doesn't. Good tools make this answer obvious and don’t need you to bend yourself into a pretzel ethically to justify their use.

When we use AI to draft the boring parts of our appraisal narratives so we can spend more time on the complex analysis and client communication, I can say yes to that all day long. It's making us better. It's making the work better. It's making the world better. I’ll go as far as to say that, if the whole industry used it that way, appraisals would likely get considerably better. I’ve seen lots of reports from lots of appraisers over the years can confidently say that many of you could us AI to help you write better reports.

When I use AI to help me ideate content that I then edit to make sure it's in my voice and reflects my actual thinking, I can say yes to that. I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. I'm using a tool to communicate more efficiently, more effectively, and with more impact.

But if I ever crossed the line into using AI to fake expertise I don't have, to claim credentials I haven't earned, or to manipulate people into thinking I'm something I'm not, that's when I'd fail the YES Test.

The Quick Check for the YES Test is: Ask all three questions; the personal question, the legacy question, and the universal question. If any of them makes you uncomfortable, stop.

Alright, so now you've got the seven filters. Let me tell you how to actually use them in real life.

For small decisions like basic tools, apps, subscriptions under $100 a month, they need to pass A, M, P, and F. The first four filters. The Autopsy test, multiplication test, the paycheck test, and the friction test. What drudgery does the tool eliminate, does it multiply my time and will I get a 2 to 1 payback, and will the friction of setting it up and using it keep me from implementing it?

If a tool can't tell you what dies, doesn't multiply your time, doesn't pay for itself in 90 days, or takes weeks to implement, don't buy it. I don't care how cool it looks.

For big decisions like strategic investments, new platform commitments, and major changes to how you run your business, I think they need to pass all seven filters. And here's the rule: You go in order. If it fails the AUTOPSY Test, you don't even look at the rest. If it passes A, M, P, and F but fails the LOVE Test, you stop. Don't waste time evaluating something that's already failed.

If something passes the first four filters but you're not sure about the last three, you can experiment with it. Set a 30 to 60 day trial. Test it. See if it passes the LOVE, INVESTMENT, and YES tests in practice. But if something passes all seven filters confidently, you commit. You learn it, train it, and integrate it into your business and then you stick with it.

Let me walk you through a few real-world examples so you can see this framework in action.

Example 1: AI Appraisal Narrative Tool

• AUTOPSY Test: The minutes you spend every report staring at a blank page trying to explain your adjustments, the neighborhood, the comp choices, and your rationale dies. Pass!

• MULTIPLIER Test: You get back those minutes or hours per report to do more inspections or follow up with clients. Pass!

• PAYCHECK Test: 30-60 minutes × 20 reports/month = 10 to 20 hours saved. That's 2-5 more reports at $500 each or $1000 to $2,500/month. Tool costs $50/month. 20-to-1 or better ROI. Pass!

• FRICTION Test: Took you 2 hours to set up, teach it your writing style and voice, and start implementing. Pass!

• LOVE Test: Clients don't see this directly, but the time you save allows you to respond faster, accept more orders, and communicate better. Indirect pass.

• INVESTMENT Test: You're building a library of your best narrative explanations that get better over time. Pass!

• YES Test: You’re using it to articulate your own understanding analysis better, not to fake expertise. Pass!

Verdict: COMMIT. This tool passes all seven filters.

Example 2: AI Social Media "Guru" Bot

• AUTOPSY Test: What dies? You weren’t posting consistently before and probably wont post after week two once the friction hits, so nothing actually dies. This creates new work and more friction. Fail!

Verdict: REJECT. Failed the first filter, as well as the friction filter. Don't even look at the rest.

Alright friends, we're almost done, but I want to leave you with one deeper truth that goes beyond just AI tools. The reason the AMPLIFY Framework works is because it's really a framework for life. It's not just about AI. It's about how you spend your time, how you invest your money, how you build your business, and how you build your legacy.

Every choice you make either amplifies your human advantage or diminishes it. Every tool you adopt either frees you to do more of what only you can do, or it traps you into managing more complexity. Every dollar you spend either compounds into more freedom and impact, or it evaporates into the ether, which is a nice way to refer to 'somebody else's pocket'. And every action you take either makes the world a little bit better, or it makes it a little bit worse.

There is no neutral ground.

So, when you're evaluating an AI tool, you're not just asking, "Will this save me time?" You're asking a much bigger question: "Will this help me become the person I want to be? Will this help me build the business I want to build? Will this help me create the impact I want to create? And will this help me be more human?"

If the answer is yes, you already know what to do. If the answer is no, you also already know what to do. The framework just makes it impossible to lie to yourself because it helps create clarity, which, if you know me or in one of our coaching programs, you know how much I talk about clarity.

Here's the truth: The best AI tool in the world can't replace you showing up as a human being and doing the work that only you can do. AI tools can definitely help you be more creative. They can automate some of the drudgery that takes the fun out of some of your work. They can definitely speed up some of the things that have been slowing you down.

AI tools are getting better each week it seems and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for how far it can go as far as work is concerned, and that's not the good news as far as I'm concerned. There does come a point where the AI strips away all of things that make us human and give us a reason to be. If it's not amplifying the things that make you human, it's something to think long and hard about lest we lose all of our humanity to the machine.

Please don’t get me wrong, I'm not anti-technology. I'm not anti-AI. I'm simply pro-human. I'm for automating and eliminating the things that the human doesn’t need to be doing, but so that the human can be, do, and have more of the things that make her a human.

I believe that AI is one of the most powerful tools we've ever had access to. But like any tool, it can be used well or poorly. It can free you, or it can enslave you.

The AMPLIFY Framework is your bullshit detector. It's the lens you look through to separate the tools that will make you more capable, more human, and more impactful from the toys that will just waste your time and money.

So memorize it. Teach it. Use it.

A – AUTOPSY: What dies?
M – MULTIPLIER: Does this give me life or steal it?
P – PAYCHECK: Show me the money in 90 days.
L – LOVE: Will customers thank me?
I – INVESTMENT: Am I building equity or renting a magic trick?
F – FRICTION: Can I launch today with very little friction?
Y – YES: Can I say yes with full integrity?

For small decisions, pass the first four. For big decisions, pass all seven. And remember the one-sentence test: Does this amplify my human advantage?

If you want help implementing this framework, if you want to talk through your specific situation, or if you're trying to figure out which AI tools actually make sense for your business, reach out to me. I'd be happy to jump on a call.

Until next time my friends, stop chasing the shiny objects. Start building something real and use the machine for the math to free up the human for a greater mission.