The Right Philosophy with AI

I wanted to talk about the right philosophy with AI. Usually when we talk about AI, it might be like, oh, how many calories does my cookie have? I'll take a picture of this, right? And it'll tell me how many calories. Like, for example, I ate 6 tacos the other day.

Wait, do you really do that?

Yeah. No, seriously, I do. Point is, I do a lot of stupid things with AI, right? And a lot of people search for random things. Or when I argue with my mom or I need to explain something to her, I'll argue with her and she doesn't understand what I'm saying in Chinese, so I'll have it translated to Mandarin. That's base level stuff, guys. The way to think about AI, in my opinion, and I'm curious to hear yours, the right philosophy is you actually have a second brain that is probably smarter than your own brain, and you should be using it as a thought partner more than anything. So the deep research stuff we do, whatever, I'm not saying it's gospel, but you should at least look at it and challenge how you think about things. And so if I work for you, if I come to you with an idea and it's not 90% there with me using AI, I shouldn't be bringing you that idea, right? People are just lazy. Oh yeah, I just have these ideas over here. We should just say, well, okay, how much resources are going to— how long is it going to take? What does success look like? All those things. Now you should be workshopping that with AI. You should be thinking about these things and you'll be way better than other people. That's my philosophy.

Dude, my main use case for ChatGPT is pretty much deep research and I don't really use ChatGPT for anything else. Really? I know it can do a lot of other stuff, but I mainly use it for research.

And that makes sense. I mean, Neil's very data-driven. He's a very detail-oriented person. So the deep research feature is perfect for Neil.

But most other things I can do with Google.

Yeah.

And it's a quick user experience and it's great for it.

Yeah.

For research, typically what I do is I type something into ChatGPT.

Yeah.

I wait for it to ask me questions. I then respond and then I go.

Yeah.

Because you can just come back and you'll get your answer. Because like even right now I'm waiting for it. I don't want to wait 10, 20, whatever minutes it takes or 30 minutes. I'd rather just go and then move on with my day. But AI for research is amazing. Like people talk about, oh, ChatGPT is going to change search and everyone's going to use it for search. I haven't seen the data on people really using it for traditional search like you would use for Google to buy a product. I just don't see it there yet. I see more people using Instagram and TikTok to find and discover and buy products than I do them seeing using AI.

I would say general consumers, I don't think we're seeing enough of a shift yet, but people like you and me, and you and I know a lot of tech people, And plus when you see people like Tobi from Shopify tweeting this, like for me at least, I'm using AI quite a bit more than Google Search, but I'm, we're at the early adopters.

For research though. But what do you mainly use Google Research— Google Search for? You were using it for research now and you shifted it to AI.

Yeah. What do I use Google for now? Maybe to find restaurants I might want to eat at.

Restaurants, products, simple questions. It gives a quick answer. It gives one of the quickest answers out there on the web.

Yeah, to be fair. Yeah, I, when I, if I'm looking to transact, I just go to Amazon. I'm searching on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. So I, you still use a lot of the same things, but when it comes to workflows around—

Whoa, whoa, whoa. How'd you find out about this bottle, this Yeti?

Amazon.com.

But where'd you first learn about it?

I didn't. Amazon.

Okay.

I typed it on Amazon.

Have you bought products from seeing something on Instagram or TikTok? Honestly, like have you ever saw a product on TikTok and Instagram?

Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Have you ever bought products from doing a search on ChatGPT?

Let me think about this. Yes, I have. I have. So my eye problem. So now after LASIK, I didn't know this. After 10 years, you're you're I have issues with lipids, and if the lipids aren't working correctly with my tears, they evaporate quickly, and my eyes start hurting like hell if I use my screen. But then it recommended me the right product, and I was like, "Hey, tell me where I can buy this product near me." And it's like there are three CVSs near you. I immediately went to Uber Eats, and I bought it, and it shifted. And then, yeah, and my eyes feel great when I use this now.

Yeah, ChatGPT did not find any single ad agency that's grown to $1 billion without acquisition. But going back to your eye thing, if you look at your eye, you did research probably on ChatGPT to figure out what's the problem, and then it recommended solutions to you. That's a more rare circumstance for you to buy something. Other than that, did you, do you usually use ChatGPT to search to go buy stuff? It doesn't go in your flow.

No. If I'm, if I'm doing, if I'm usually buying stuff, 99% of the time I'm on Amazon.

Yes. Or you're discovering it from social media.

Yeah. So on X, or like, I share a lot of stuff with you about microplastics and things like that, right? Or like loose leaf tea. Like you're not supposed to drink the, the tea bags because there's, there's millions of microplastics in there, right? So now I bought a bunch of loose leaf tea from Japan and I went to Google for that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh no, no, no, no, no. I went to Kettle because Kettle has this amazing tea. And where did I get that recommendation? When I ate sushi in New York and the tea was amazing. I was like, where'd you get this from? And then I spent, it was like a, it was an expensive order, but yeah.

Yeah.

It's good stuff. But I think behaviors are slowly changing over time. But I think we can agree that the philosophy on AI is it's a second brain for you. And if you work for somebody, don't be lazy. Yes.

It's not a place to go to go find products. It's a place to go figure out how to solve problems and do research. And it can help you with things. It's like an assistant as well that can help you with tasks. There's a lot of useful cases for it, but a lot of people I talk to, they're like, oh yeah, everyone's just going to go to ChatGPT and go find products and buy them from them. I'm like, I don't see that as use case. I see more people going to Instagram and discovering products and buying them than using ChatGPT and then buying a product.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So I think the final thing we can talk about, and I used this use case last time, but we didn't go over it that much. And I think you would like this because you're very numbers-driven. But I like using Grok to give me a deep, deep search on Omnicom or any of these holding companies, right? I'll say, okay, analyze the 10-K, tell me the good parts and the bad parts about this company. Then 99.99% sure, Neil, you've never done a discounted cash flow forecast in your life, correct?

Correct.

Okay, nor have I. But when I watch videos on YouTube and I see people doing a discounted cash flow forecast, just so everyone knows, that's, you're mapping out the cash flows for the next 5 to 10 years maybe, and trying to figure out the intrinsic value of a stock, what Warren Buffett would say. So you're trying to figure out if a stock is overvalued or undervalued, right? Complicated. Okay, takes a lot of time. You haven't done it. I haven't done it. But now I take that 10K. I'm using Grok. Deep search is on the left side. Boom, deep search is done. Then I switch it to thinking mode because it's much better at math on thinking mode. So okay, now do me discounted cash flow forecast for Tesla, for example. It's like it did all the discounted cash. It did all these equations, right? And then the final summary is, okay, Tesla is trading on what, $400 a share right now?

You got to look at market cap.

Okay. But it's just valuing on a share per share basis, right? So it's like the intrinsic value right now is $52. So Tesla is overvalued right now. That's— I'm oversimplifying, but it gave me all the breakdowns, all the math and everything. And if I wanted to get a sense for how a stock is doing, if I wanted to invest in a stock, this is the thing at least that's been missing for me. I've always wanted that. And I think you would use it too.

Yeah, I would use that. I think Grok is, I still prefer ChatGPT over Grok, but Grok is improving at a very rapid rate.

Dude, look at what he's done in 18 months.

Yeah. Give it another year. I think Grok will be amazing. Um, at least from a research standpoint, ChatGPT produces more accurate, thorough results for me than Grok, but Grok is also faster at doing the research from what I tested.

Yeah. Yeah. This, I mean, I got mine done pretty quickly. Yours took like 10 minutes.

Uh-huh. Came to the same conclusion.

Yep. Alright guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow. Goodbye.