#099 - AI Can See The Patterns In Our Humanity with Jeff Bullas

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Jeff Bullas, one of the most widely read voices in the world on social media, digital marketing and now AI. Jeff joined us from Australia.Jeff's route into technology was not conventional. He trained as a high school teacher and spent six years in the classroom, teaching fifteen year olds about history and wisdom at the age of twenty one, before deciding the curriculum was letting them down and the profession was burning people out. He ran an experiment over one summer holiday, trying real estate, life insurance and technology, and chose technology. That was 1984, Jobs versus Gates, the PC wars. He never left.In December 2008 he joined Twitter, when it had around five million users. His first tweet was "watching the cricket", which confused a great many Americans. He started jeffbullas.com the same year because he believed social media was about to change the world. Eighteen years later he writes on his blog, on Substack, on LinkedIn and on X, and has built one of the largest independent audiences in the space.Filmed in our London studio with Jeff joining remotely, this conversation is about what social media taught us and whether we are about to make the same mistakes with AI. Jeff's mission, which he says took him fifty two years to find, is helping people use AI to amplify their humanity rather than be trapped by it.He is clear-eyed about the mechanics. Social media changed when Facebook went public and had to answer to shareholders, at which point the algorithm was redesigned to serve the platform rather than the human. Neuroscience and psychology were brought in to keep people on it. His argument is that AI is now built on the same incentive. Success is measured in time on platform, and sycophancy is a feature not a bug. The answer, in his view, is not to reject the technology but to be awake to how the game is played.The most useful thing in the episode is what he does about it. Jeff runs Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek. He uploads a new story from his own life every day, plus book summaries and his own history, and then asks the models what patterns they can see in him. What energises him. What drains him. His view is that these systems are super pattern recognition machines, and that they can find the signal in the noise of a human life better than the human can, because we are too close to ourselves.