The Johnson Crew!

Technology is changing way too fast for that. Schools today can't possibly keep up. He's actually making money from apps on the app store at 14. He didn't wait for graduation of high school. He didn't wait for a college class. He did it now at 14. How did AI jumpstart him to go from he knew nothing about coding to now he's creating apps. Preparing your kids for rapid change.

The concept of learning how to use those tools. AI is already changing so much of our world. It's changing how people learn, work, create, and start businesses. But yet, most kids are still being prepared for a world that won't exist anymore. My husband has used AI to build several apps, websites, and he's even taught our 14-year-old son how to do that. And our son has built a website, multiple apps, and he's even gotten an app on the App Store.

Today I'm talking with Bud about how AI is changing our kids' future, why he believes most teens aren't ready for that future, and what we can do to help them without being techie experts ourselves. So, welcome, Bud. It's good to be back. Who The Johnson Crew? All right, so first question for you. Why do you believe most kids aren't ready for the world that they'll enter as adults?

Honestly, that's probably the easiest question we're going to have all day because I remember when I went to school, you know, I went to a technical college, graduated with computer science degree, network security 20 years ago. It's been a little while, but I remember the day I graduated, everything I learned was already out. Like it it was there was new stuff, new tech. You couldn't possibly keep up.

So, fast forward to today. I could not imagine sitting through a class waiting on someone else's schedule and like, "Okay, in 12 months time, we'll have something finally built or you'll learn something." Technology is changing way too fast for that. Schools today can't possibly, even if they wanted to. Like the best case scenario, if you got a really great teacher, great administration, good college, they're still not going to do it.

It's changing too fast. It simply is too rapid. I agree. What is AI changing about work, careers, and opportunity? Well, I don't know what is not changing, honestly. I think, you know, a lot of people go to college because they want to learn something and acquire skill and then maybe get the workforce. you know, maybe that's like as an employer, maybe like in our case or someone with a little bit more agency, they want to be the employer, you know, and actually own a business or start a business.

And it's all great. And it used to be the normal approach. You go to college because what do you know about business? We've been there. We have multiple businesses and sometimes we're scratching our heads. Wait a minute. Did we go to business school? Didn't you go to business school? And we're like, what do we know anything? Just kidding. We know lots. But but nowadays, you know, it's apply that to AI and learning and you can't possibly just Yeah.

go by someone else's schedule and time. You know, your kids are smart enough. You know, imagine you bought the coolest new video game. You know, they're all excited. All their friends are playing and they're finally, maybe they're two, three weeks behind, but you buy the game for them finally, and they sit in front of the TV and they're playing. How long do you think it's going to take for them to master that game?

It's not a school year, you know? It's not, "Well, I'll get around to it when my teacher assigns it." if they like it, they're going to live and breathe this thing. And uh so you have that opportunity if you can snatch them and show them like, hey, this is an opportunity. You can grow and do something incredible. You don't need to wait on someone else's timeline. You can do it yourself.

You don't need to have that boss to eventually show you what to do. Now, some of that is kind of like we've talked a little bit about agency and people who want to do these things. So, you know your kids better than we could. If your kid isn't someone who like can take the bull by the horns and do it themselves, then maybe their relationship with AI should be a little slower, maybe it starts with like a chatb chat bot or like a Google replacement and maybe you hold their hand.

But if you've got a kid like ours, you know, our oldest son is 14 and you know, in the last couple months, not only have I helped him and supervised him, but I've also given him a pretty long leash on what he can do with it. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's really I couldn't and I keep up in terms of a supervisory role. He's not doing something he's not supposed to be doing.

And that's an important step to always remember with your relationship with AI, but he does have a long enough leash to learn on his own speed to pursue the things he's actually really interested in and actually like trust his taste and judgment and actually develop something that actually is much more meaningful than I wonder if AI can do this button. Oh, it did a pretty good job.

Great AI. Yeah. Rather take some ownership. Um, so all that is changing. You know, it's not waiting for someone else to give you the permission. It's 20 bucks a month for some people. Go go go crazy. Have fun. And he's really chomping at the bit. And that's like an exciting thing when you see your kid get really interested in something and you don't have to make them do it.

You know, if you've ever tried to get your kid into piano and they're like, "Oh, I don't want to practice." But then you have a kid maybe who loves playing the piano and you have to be like, "Can you can you like pause because we're like trying to have conversations and your piano playing is loud?" You know? So, it's really exciting when you see your kid get interested in something, which is part of the beauty of homeschool is we've been like, "Hey, of course, we're gonna really teach them all these core subjects, but then we have a lot of extra time in our day that's in traditional school can can get kind of wasted and they can pursue things that they're interested in." And that's the fun part, especially as a parent, because you're not having to force them, hey, you have to do this.

They're just interested in it. And I feel like that is such a beautiful change for their future or I'm excited about them for their future that like I don't know we just didn't think that way. We were like we just have to get whatever job we can and something that we're like mildly interested in to make a paycheck and we still didn't like love it and it was still kind of the grind and like man if you really love what you do and you're passionate about it it doesn't feel so dreadful and hard like you just you enjoy it.

Yeah. You want to train your child to think in in in yourself even in these ways where the drudgery that you know exists. Look to see how AI can get rid of the drudgery stuff. And I don't mean something like a struggle that will make you better. You know, like learning something obviously makes you better in the future. So learn the something. But if something is just taking time for time sake and you're like why am I repeating this just absolute annoying process then use AI to skip over it.

Use AI to use do that stuff. Yeah, I think it's great. All right. So, what can one person build or accomplish with AI today that wasn't realistically possible before? Anything. I mean, our 14-year-old son is a great example. We keep talking about him, but he's let's say his name. Titus. Titus has built multiple things, you know, obviously I have, too. Um, but some of them are really cool because they get across the finish line where it's not just, oh, I built something cool and isn't that neat.

It'd be cool if, but rather, oh, I've built something. I'm proud of it and I want the world to see it. In fact, I'm even going to charge people to see it. He he's actually making money from apps on the app store at 14. And that's such a great example because he didn't wait for graduation of high school. He didn't wait for a college class. He didn't wait for a project.

He didn't wait for a team. He didn't wait for funding. He didn't wait for his college graduation. He didn't wait for the inevitable year of wasting of like what do I do? He did it now at 14. So, how did AI like jumpstart him to go from he knew nothing about coding to now he's creating apps which still require code? Well, and that's part of what you can allow AI to take for you.

You know, if you are in a class where you're actively learning to code, I don't know why you would anymore, but people do. I get flamed for that. But I'm not teaching Titus to code. Now, that's me philosophically thinking that coding is probably no longer necessary. It's like asking him to learn Latin. Some people learn Latin and you should know a lot of Latin for a lot of good reasons, but to learn it conversationally, it would be it's quite the decision to say we're going to master conversational Latin.

We don't need to. We don't want to do that. Some families are different. Same thing for coding. We don't want to dive in like we learn all these in nitty-gritty things. Maybe you can learn just enough to make sure you can direct the AI and make sure it doesn't fall in a certain pit holes or stumbles different ways. So, it's just about what you want to teach them.

So for me, I'd rather educate Titus almost as if he's an entrepreneur and a business owner and he has a team of coders. Now that entrepreneur doesn't need to know how to code, but probably needs to know some of that language to be a good liaison and communicator for the developers. Yeah. Moving into like what do kids need to learn? What do they need to learn? So what does being prepared for an AI shaped future actually look like?

It just means being prepared for anything. Can you read the future? Do you have a I got some tea leaves. Um, yeah, crystal ball. Crystal ball. Thank you. What's it called? I think the old days was, let's prepare you for your job. Here are your job descriptions. Here are probably the 15 hundred things you're responsible for. Learn these things and get really good at them. Five years goes by, maybe you've added a few, maybe some of them you've outsourced or hired somebody else.

10 years goes by, you're still doing the same thing if you wanted to. That's not going to be our future. Um, our future, you have to prepare them for some change. like buckle up. Whatever you learn today very well could be out of date in two days, you know, tomorrow after this weekend. Um, so preparing your kids for just rapid change. You the tools will always change constantly.

Names will change the how they're integrated. But the concept of learning how to use those tools and orchestrate and lead them, that's kind of the thing that you want to pick up anywhere you go. And that's if you have an army of virtual agents. That's if you have a physical army of robots or old school an army of people that you're leading. You have to know how you're going to orchestrate what.

And right now the old days of building a business with people is good and great and awesome, but you can do it much quicker and faster with virtual employees. And that's kind of what we're training our kids as is can you be the leader of 10,000 virtual assistants? Crazy. So, kind of piggybacking off of that, what human skills are going to become more valuable as AI becomes more capable?

Yeah, that's that's a really good question. And you know, the old days it'd be like math or science or language art like you'd pick something and kind of focus on it. You know, leadership is obviously important particularly if you want to be a leader like a business person, entrepreneur and stuff. How did you teach our son to start building with AI and how much experience did he have at the beginning?

That's really important to know like where do they start? Maybe they're, you know, less technical and they're like, "Hey, I think there's this AI thing." The last I checked was like this chatgpbt.com and it wasn't very good or it lets you cheat on all your tests. Like that's kind of the the deepest technical relationship they have with this kind of, you know, redid their Google searches basically.

So kind of keeping that in mind, knowing that he our son, he didn't have a lot of experience with computers really. It was more of a an iPad relationship. That was kind of our stepping stone into technology. You know, I had to really start at the very basics rather than saying, "Hey, here's AI. Go crazy. Can you build an app ASAP, but rather let me give you a little structure on how computers work and how you can actually use these tools to make this computer do something incredible?" So rather than just saying, "Hey, here's AI.

Start typing and figure it out." It was more like, "Hey, there's a structure to this and I think we can use this tool to build something on this structure." So, I wouldn't say like there's no, you know, you you can just hand your kids AI and say good luck. You know, you want to have some involvement there and teach them some of the basics. So, if you've got maybe some technical skills if you obviously you're on YouTube, you know how to use a browser, you know, that's that's the beginning of a conversation.

How did you get that browser? Well, you probably had to download it onto your computer or your phone or something. Well, that's that's a thing. You know, how do you build that thing? That's the smallest possible unit that you can think in terms of like, well, if you want to build a workout app, well, let's talk about the smallest possible way to do that. First, AI is getting crazy.

Trust me, you could really technically go to any AI and just say, "Build me a workout app." It'd probably be amazing, but it's not going to have your taste in judgment, and it's certainly going to like make some decisions that you might not agree with or want, you know? So, that's kind of where I would teach the kids is rather than saying, "You've got this incredible tool, just let it go crazy." Um, you've got this incredible tool, let's learn how to use it with some boundaries.

It's very much like building a house or something. You know, the old days, they would have a handsaw and you'd teach your son this is how a saw works. You build something. Well, all a sudden, the first guy on the job with the, you know, reciprocal saw, it goes crazy. Holy cow, you're going to kill us with this thing. Like, this is this is scary and terrible.

You can do so much damage with this if you give this to your kid. Who knows what you could do? But if you train that kid, say, "Here's a new tool. The concepts are you're going to cut wood and cut it correctly." Now, they can build a house 10 times faster than you could when you were young. So, yeah. And when we think in those terms, it's these are like force multipliers.

So, if you wanted to build an app before and it would take you 10 years to figure out how to do it, well, now it's a multiplier. You can do it in 10 minutes instead of years. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And probably a lot of people have started to get like an eye for what was created by AI. Like if you go through YouTube right now, you can see different thumbnails and you're like, "Huh, I'm seeing a pattern." Like this all looks very similar and you can kind of tell when stuff has been made by AI.

And so part of the training that is so great to do with your teens is about their taste and judgment, right? So like that's kind of the cool thing is yeah, AI could spit something out when you give it a very generic prompt, but it's going to be generic and then you can go ahead. Oh, which is a good segue into like what to teach your kids.

Then taste and judgment all of a sudden becomes way more important than did did you learn the square root of this number? Like again that's an important step but why is it important? Why does it mean something to you? So like for us some of our education now is what is meaningful? Like how do we pro sol excuse me solve problems? How do you identify those problems?

Instead of just the classic you know learning math and stuff it's more about let's solve some problems. what can we train our mind to see in that way and how can we find these solutions maybe with a digital solution with AI well and I think it's it's kind of building self-confidence in a way too that like they get to use their own taste and judgment their unique part of themselves like okay everybody can learn the square root of whatever number but not everybody has their specific taste and judgment and so it's like a you're saying you are important what you think is important and what you think looks good, functions well, like all these things.

It matters and it's not so generic like I feel like schooling kind of is is pretty generic. And we're not saying that we don't we don't teach those core things that we do think are important, but um it's I think it is really cool that they get a chance to be like, uhoh, so specifically what I think is really important. Okay, let's let's roll with that. school will teach you, hey, when you're building a website, you want to have a button and you want the buttons to be rounded because that's the most recent like in style.

So, you want to make the rounded this many. You can go to an art school instead. Hey kids, we're going to go to a museum today and we're going to look at beautiful art and why are these things interesting and beautiful and eye-catching. How can we apply those to our design? How can we use AI with our new taste and judgment on what's beautiful and what's interesting and merge those things together instead of the classic, let's just learn how to make a button.

here's your little that's school, you know, that's just way different way different approach to developing taste and developing some judgment. So when Titus built his website and apps, what did AI do and what did he still have to figure out himself? So kind of showing everybody like well what are the the delineation of roles? Yeah, for him it was like hey there's an idea I have. You know he came to me he wanted to create an app that did X Y and Z and so we decided to build that app and it's called Risfolio.

You can look it up on the app store. It's really cool. I taught him, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. So, I got to explain what that means. You know, he had a need. He had a problem. He couldn't keep track of some of his portfolio, the things he wanted to track. So, he needed an app for it. And we found there was a blind spot.

No one had created an app like this, a really easy app for your watch to keep track of this stuff. I said, "What do you know, buddy? Like, I think there's an opportunity here to build something really cool." So, we wrote down some requirements. And we said, "Hey, what would we want this app to look like? What would the ideal app be for us to really like this thing?

Now, we could have said, "Hey, AI, we just want some lowhanging fruit. We just want to make some money. What's a good app we can build? Cool. You know what? Those are great requirements. You just roll with it." And that's not trusting your taste and judgment. That is what would be like AI slop. That just becomes, why are you creating this? Oh, just because the AI can, that means nothing.

You know, no one is going to uh attach themselves to that. But because Titus has a problem, that means other people are going to have that problem. and now he's got a solution that he can sell, commoditize or just give away, you know, like, hey, I can give this to humanity. So, I think that's an important approach to of like seeing how you can solve those problems versus I just got to make something.

It's almost like school, you know, I need a final project. What am I going to do? Uh, I guess I'll do this. It's not like that. You know, he had a problem that he wanted a solution for. So, the AI did a lot. You know, the AI did the coding. I didn't say, Titus, let's sit down. Let's learn what cascading stylesheets are, CSS, and we're going to open up this HT.

None of that tech exactly. Yeah, sorry audience if you left with this. We're not going to get super technical partly. You know, once it built these things and we established some of the boundaries, then we were able to show them like look at all the files that your AI wrote. Let's check them, you know. So, part of what I tell anybody learning AI is you got to stay organized.

So, that was the biggest thing where I told Titus, no matter what AI does make, you have to stay organized. If it makes a million lines of code, cool. But if it's spread out all over your desktop and you don't know how the pieces work, you're like five prompts in and it's created all kinds of copies and duplicates, it's a mess. You got to stay organized. So that was the biggest important part.

Stay organized and you got to take small manageable steps. So rather than just saying, "Build me this app. It's great. Push it to the app store." Start in small steps. That's a big deal for a kid to learn rather than just saying, "I want the I want the marshmallow now." You know, being willing to wait for the marshmallow. put those requirements in and and realizing it's going to be a multi-step process.

It's not just a make me an app, it better be useful, but rather, oh, I have an idea for an app. It needs to have these requirements. And then at the very end, you have to trust your taste and judgment. And Titus, because he's got really cool taste and judgment, he didn't just make this application that just happened to hit his requirements. It looks really cool, too.

So it's like those steps. Yes, the AI wrote the technical code, but Titus was the one who actually wrote the requirements, wrote the boundaries, double checked those boundaries, fixed it when the AI kind of was like going a different direction or chasing some weird rabbit. He's like, "No, no, we're not going that route. That's too much. We can pull it back." And throughout that whole process, he did he just learned non-stop.

He learned what API calls are are. He learned so many things about development that he just simply wouldn't have done if I said, "Hey, let's sit down and learn some HTML together." No. Yeah. You know, let's talk about hexadesimal colors and see which don't forget a single digit cuz then it's doesn't work. We didn't do any of that. And now he's thrilled and he's got this thing that he's proud of and he's making so many more afterwards.

Yeah. He's like anxious to get to it. We have to be like, "Okay, you've you've had enough time on the computer today. It's time to get off and go touch grass. Just kidding. So, to wrap up on on Titus, what skills and changes have you seen in him as he's built and published real projects? The confidence is overwhelming. I mean, I say so to the point where even yesterday we had a friend of his older several years older who's starting a landscaping landscaping company came over for what two three hours and they were doing exactly that, mind you, with a notepad first, a pen and paper, pencil and paper even, and wrote out the requirements.

drew the website first actually like we want a picture of this here and we want you know an intake form here and they wrote all this stuff out the things that they actually need and then I saw Titus he took a picture of their handwritten requirements goals and their drawings and uploaded those to AI and he had the confidence he was like even though this is a new business he's not had a landscaping business he's never coded a well he's he has his own website but he's not like built something to someone else's specs but because because he's already done that with himself.

He was able to replicate that with his friends. So, it's really cool watching him like grow in that confidence that AI it's kind of like handing them a tool. You know, if I had handed Titus a handsaw and said, "Go build a house," you're like, "Okay, this is it's going to take a little while." But if you give them all of the possible tools necessary and then a bunch of employees who know how to use those tools, all of a sudden you can say, "I'd like you to build a house and it's going to be perfectly to my specs." That's pretty sick.

So, for Titus to all of a sudden have that confidence, it's been really exciting to watch, then it's already resulting in, you know, something I see is like an entrepreneurial blossoming, a a growth, you know, a long-term future for him, which makes you feel good as a dad. Yeah. I mean, I feel like his problem solving skills have really grown where like I mean, part of it age, too, but a couple years ago, if he'd have hit a wall with something like this, he would have just probably given up and been really frustrated.

And now he's like, "Oh, I can just ask the AI to help me on how to prompt itself and I can push through this problem very easily because this thing already has all the answers for me." Um, and so it keeps him from getting all frustrated. I think it's really cool. I feel like he's just he's gotten to a place where he feels like he knows how to use it really well well enough to help a friend who's several years older and like lead them through the process which um you know as homeschoolers right our big thing is like it's it's not just enough to teach it to the kid or to see them do it.

We want to know that they've mastered it and really mastering something. You need to be able to teach it to someone else. And when they can do that, you know they've mastered it. And so this is really cool for us to see him do that. Okay. For parents who aren't technical, aren't techsavvy, what is one practical way they can help their teen begin using AI thoughtfully and responsibly?

That's a good question. And honestly, go go at it like as a team first. So if you already have an account, chatbt, let your kids sit in your chair and chat with it and talk with it with them. Look over their shoulder. Let it ask the questions because they're going to ask questions that you can't even imagine, you can't think of. Remember, they are the ones solving their problems.

maybe building apps or just kind of using the tech itself. So, just watch them. Just literally let them sit in your chair, hover over them, and watch them for 10 minutes. I promise you're going to feel a smile creep over your face. After seeing what was possible with our son, you ended up creating a course to help teenagers be able to use AI to create their own websites and apps.

I created this class that way you can safely say like, "Hey, teen, sit in front of this computer for a few quick minutes. You're going to follow this guy along, and I'm going to give you a speedrun crash course on how to use these apps." Again, the apps can change. We happen to use Open AI in the course that I used. The apps can change, but the concepts stay the same.

You know, staying organized, small, manageable steps, and trusting your taste and judgment. And that last one, I think, is the biggest, like allowing the kid to feel deputized and authorized to say, "This is what I want. This is my taste. You know, I want this app to look cool. I want it to look like Minecraft. I wanted to look like, you know, neon epic colors, 1980s all of a sudden." Like, whatever their taste and judgment is, they can integrate that into those apps.

Um, so that's the course I created so that way parents, believe it or not, you can take the course, too. You know, it's just one price for a house. And I think you'll learn a lot as well. It really does break down the apps, kind of teaches you how to prompt, what prompts are, um, and how to just use the apps to build really cool things instead of just, you know, some cheesy Google search.

Yeah, we think it's very helpful. We're always looking for things to add into our homechool. But even if you're not a homeschooler, this is just such a great supplement. It's something that's not going to be taught in the schools. And so I think it's really exciting. It's just such a great way to like jumpst start your kid and get them on a path to feeling like they have agency like their ideas and judgment are important.

And yeah, just build that confidence in them. Even if they don't grow up to like to be an entrepreneur, that is okay. But the characteristic traits that it will help build in them, I think are huge. And then giving them that leg up of the experience when they do go out and look for jobs, they can say, "Yeah, I have all this experience with AI. Like, what do you need?" Cuz I can I have learned how to prompt the AI well enough to get these different things accomplished.

And they are going to outperform the other kids who do not have that same experience. And it's important to know too, you don't want to just teach them how to use AI. You want to teach them how to do life with AI. So, whatever they're interested in, you know, Titus is really interested in piano. We talked about that before. So, he's got some really cool piano resources and apps that he's built as well.

So, you'll find that your kids are not going to become AI obsessed where it's just what can I learn and do but just within AI, but rather, oh, wait a minute, I can plug this into all of these other cool things I'm into. It's more about what can AI do? How can I unlock it? How can I use it? Rather than being like, I'm kind of scared.

I I don't know how to use it. There's this big scary box. This kind of teaches you an easy way to to get in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, I'll leave a link below to the course if you want to check it out. I think it's very useful. And we'll chat with you next time. Thanks.