How to Use AI in Business | Tom Bilyeu

And I'm telling you, AI is the opportunity that you've been waiting for, but you have to make a move. Given how much AI has already altered our systems over the next few years, I'm expecting it to majorly accelerate our ability to test and learn, not just here in society. And whoever learns the fastest is going to win. This is all happening in plain sight. Everyone's talking about AI. I know this isn't the first time that you're hearing about it, but to take advantage of this moment, I need you to do 3 simple things. 1, read frame your thinking around AI. Don't see it as the enemy. See it as a tool. It really is a phenomenal tool. You're not going to be replaced by AI, at least not yet. You're going to be replaced by a human using AI. So please be that human that's replacing other people. To do that, you need to, 2, figure out how AI is going to disrupt you. Face it head on.

Don't run.

Don't hide. Identify your vulnerabilities. And 3, identify all of the AI tools that are relevant to you and master them. Learn absolutely everything you can.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because in my first business, I quit on my business partner. I struggled to keep going. I was making $300 a month and felt like a complete failure. And the thing that saved me, that pulled me up, was studying the stories of famous entrepreneurs. I got the motivation from them. I also got the strategies of what to do next so that I can go off and achieve my dreams. And quite honestly, I still need the stories today myself to continue my motivation to take it to the next level. So today, let's learn how you can use Use AI to get ahead while others panic. Enjoy.

Remember, this is the very beginning of a very aggressive and fast-moving revolution. Moving quickly gives you two advantages. Number one, you can rocket ahead of other people by mastering the tools. And if you master the tools, people are going to turn to you because you're able to more efficiently solve problems. Going back to the Elon Musk quote, if you can solve harder problems faster, you're going to get paid more. And in these these early days where most people are stuck in the deer-in-headlights mode, you have an unfair advantage. The second thing is, while others are caught between fascination and panic, you can be voraciously acquiring skills and growing more useful. So take action now. Start mastering the technology while everybody else is absently playing around with AI, dismissing AI, fighting against it, or running in fear. If you embrace it, you can create a skill set moat around you and leverage your knowledge to get paid more or to build something that wasn't even previously possible. The second advantage that AI gives you is an almost unimaginable amount of efficiency in certain tasks. It is insane the things you can do. If you've seen it in action, it is breathtaking how fast it will come up with answers. I had it recently for a holiday party. I had it generate a quiz based on the most popular movies and songs, and it did it literally in seconds. Gave me 100 different questions and answers. Now don't get me wrong, AI is not a panacea. There are plenty of problems that right now AI sucks at. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, the maker of the ubiquitous ChatGPT, has himself said that people are getting so hyped up that they're going to be disappointed. If you think that this is Terminator 2 already and ChatGPT is going to turn into liquid metal and save you from some space aliens, yes, you're going to be disappointed. But if, on the other hand, you look at AI as an efficiency tool that needs to be wielded by a very capable and well-trained human, you're going to dunk on everyone. AI can already write articles, create social posts, generate images, make videos, generate human speech, summarize books or emails, and everything in between, create transcripts of speech, allow you to edit speech by editing the text of the transcript. Yes, you heard that right. You could edit what I'm saying right now just by editing the transcript. I know because we're working on integrating that into our pipeline here as we speak. Speak. I had to create a verbal disclaimer acknowledging that I knew a replica of my voice was being generated. Just 3 months ago, this was something that was too expensive for us to do, and now it's readily available. That's how fast things are moving. Here's the thing about AI that most people are missing, which is why they're standing still right now and why I hope you won't. AI is about efficiency and rapid iteration. The whole way to get ahead in life is what I call the physics The Science of Progress, which is all about trying something and learning. And in fact, when I'm teaching people it, I often tell it, this is like learning like AI. And now you have AI at your fingertips to speed that up. Legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that this is all moving so fast that by the year 2045, we will reach what he calls the technological singularity. He defines that as the moment when technology advances is so fast that we can no longer predict where things are headed. Let me be clear, I can never guarantee that I'm seeing things correctly. I could be wrong. I don't have Ray's track record, but I do know that you've got nothing to lose by learning and you could have a whole lot to gain by implementing. So my advice is to prepare now and take massive action. I always tell people action cures all. For example, I think there are few people more worried about AI than Elon, but what was his response? The best way to control the future is to invent it. He invested $1 billion into OpenAI and is busy at work building AI systems to pilot both robots and cars. That, to me, is how you respond. Even if this is the bad kind of interesting time, don't just sit back. Take action. Learn, build, create, leverage AI, and see what you can do together. I think you'll be surprised.

Rule number 2 is leverage AI for your business with Alex Hormozi.

AI is going to be the biggest shift in our lifetime. It is the equivalent, in my opinion, of the moon landing, except the only difference is that it will actually change all of our lives rather than just being a picture to say that we won the Cold War. Different than the internet, phone systems, television, because what those did was they reshuffled the workforce. This has the ability to remove or eliminate the workforce altogether. Cryptocurrencies in general had the potential to overturn the financial institution. AI has the potential to overturn the human institution.

I try to convince people to slow down, slow down AI, to regulate AI. I tried for years.

I think you have to watch this clip because it will make everything I'm about to say make sense. So this is from Google and this is from 4 years ago, their personal assistant AI, and they haven't released this to the public, which is weird.

So happening out here.

Hi, I'm calling to book a women's haircut for a client.

I'm looking for something on May 3rd.

Sure, give me one second.

Mm-hmm.

First name is Lisa.

Okay, perfect. So I will see Lisa at 10 o'clock on May 3rd. Okay, great.

Thanks.

Great. Have a great day.

Bye.

That's the baseline. That was 4 years ago. Now imagine it was a sales call and we have sales AI. That's listened to 10 million sales calls. This is the types of things that these people say in these situations. I will say the same thing. And then it iterates and learns over and over again. The AI can live a million lifetimes in terms of the amount of volume it can churn through and process and learn from compared to a human. So the best sales guy is going to have this much experience compared to the best AI sales guy. And so if it can have those calls 24 hours a day in real time to whatever prospect you want, you may even imagine a world where you ask the phone teller, hey, are you a human? And when they say, no, I'm AI, you're relieved because you're like, thank God I'm talking to the best version of this who can handle my problem right now. So if you were to have asked people, what jobs do you think AI will replace first? Most people said first it'll replace the low-skilled jobs, the physical labor, and then it'll be the low-skilled white-collar jobs, and then it'll be the high-skilled white-collar jobs like programmers and coders. And then finally, maybe it'll replace the creative jobs. But what's interesting is that it actually happened in the reverse order. If you're a copywriter, this has serious implications for you. A logo designer, this has serious implications for you. Customer service, 24 hours a day, in real time, immediate feedback. What happens to all the physicians? It becomes immediate and more accurate for us to have access to a medical AI from our homes. And it can see us because it can interpret data visually too. If you're in finance, it will be able to take all of the raw data and realign it and put it into beautiful Excel sheets. A friend of mine has a father who's a medical malpractice attorney. He asked it to write an argument for why malpractice should not be capped in terms of how much a lawyer can make on a malpractice suit. And then it outlined an entire argument for why it should be uncapped. It happened to be almost identical to the argument that he had after 40 years of experience. You see videos like this, you see all these people on YouTube, you see Instagram posts. Well, what if the AI reads every single Instagram post of all time and ranks them by highest performing and then merge that with video and deepfakes? We will have pundits and influencers that don't exist. Imagine you could create the perfect celebrity or the perfect spokesperson or the perfect porn star. And with deepfakes, they can work 24 hours a day, say exactly what you want, and what they say has the perfect tone and me to just stimulate the shit out of our dopamine centers. And we're just going to be plugged in because it knows what we like better than we do. If you don't believe me, go to thispersondoesnotexist.com and just keep refreshing it and it will show you new people. Now, if you remember earlier, a video is made of multiple images put together back to back to back. If it can make an image of a real person, it can make many images of real people. If it can make many images of real people, it can make a video of a real person. And then we'll have questions of verification. Did President Biden say that? Did President Trump say that? Or is it a deepfake? The blue checkmark will take on an entirely new meaning in the very near future. Now, those are just a few, few use cases. But anywhere humans are, it will disrupt. If you are connected to the AI, you can input faster and you can get information back faster because you're not limited by your digits. This will be the next order of magnitude in terms of output and value that individuals will be able to create in the economy.

Rule number 3 is use AI smartly and safely with Jordan Peterson.

Can you comment on your thoughts about artificial intelligence and what it means for humanity? The bigger the toy, the smarter you better be to use it. So that's— and that's worth thinking about because we're coming up with some pretty damn big toys. And what did my friend Jonathan Pageau said again? He said, Recently, he's— I told you about him, this deep, deep religious thinker. He's something. He said we're gonna see giants walk the earth again. And you think, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, we're already androids, you know. Already. When you're on Twitter, you're an android.

Well, why?

Well, you know, there are lots of trolls on Twitter. Sometimes I'm one of them, by the way. But I'm not an anonymous troll, so I take my lumps, let's say. Well, I started calling the trolls troll demons, and I had a reason for that. And the reason is, you know, maybe you're some resentful character who's a coward, and you're Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic and sadistic, because that's actually the hallmarks of Anonymous trolls, and that's been studied very well by people who study the so-called dark tetrad of personality traits. I interviewed this guy, Del Paulus, who's the head researcher among the dark, dark tetrad research group, and that'll be coming out right away. And it's clearly the case that the anonymous denigrating trolls are psychopathic Machiavellian narcissistic sadists. And maybe not right to the clinical point, but enough so that you can detect it using the proper psychometric measurement instruments. And so you think you got this resentful, you know, underground character who's carping away on Twitter, trying to do nothing but cause trouble, who's also anonymous, and he's bitter, and he wants to hurt people, and he likes to hurt people, which is what "lulz" means, right? "I'm doing it for the lulz" means I'm doing it Because I positively delight in the production of human misery. And you think, if you just met that guy, you wouldn't give him half a second of your time. In fact, you wouldn't even meet him because he's cowering in his mother's basement covered with Cheeto dust under the covers, you know. And he's just— he's just— there's nothing to him at all except bitterness and spite. But now you multiply him 10 million times and you make him electronic, and that's an android. And that's what happens every time he posts something on Twitter. He's already a human-machine hybrid, and he's a human super-intelligent connected machine hybrid. And so that means all his pathology is multiplied immensely by our technological might. And I've thought recently that virtualization enables psychopathy. So in normal social situations, if you're a narcissistic Machiavellian, and you push it too hard, someone will absolutely hit you, and that will be the end of it. And most of the time, it's cowards who take that route, and it doesn't take much intimidation to stop them. Just the hint of appropriate, just retaliation will keep them silent. But online, especially if you're anonymous, that's all stripped away. And so the psychopaths can have free rein. And part of the reason that our culture is being torn apart at the moment is because virtualization enables psychopathy. And so that's a big problem. And so that all pertains to this question of, well, you know, when you have bigger toys, you better be a bigger boy. And that's something Carl Jung commented on in detail in his writing. He thought that— he studied alchemy, you know, thousands of years of alchemical writing. The alchemists were motivated by the idea that there was a substance that was material. And if we could investigate material and discover that substance, we would live forever, we wouldn't be ill, and we could transmute base metals into gold, which would mean we'd be infinitely wealthy. And Jung's notion was that the promise of matter was what impelled alchemy, and out of that grew science. And science is motivated by the notion that if we study matter deeply enough, we'll prolong life, we'll increase health, and we'll make ourselves wealthy. And of course, that's exactly what happened. And we took this technological route there. So out of alchemy, this weird dreamlike mythology, emerged science and just blew up and made us into technological giants. But there was an ethic in alchemy too that was allied in part complexly with the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. There was an ethic, and it didn't expand at the same rate. And so now we're You know, we're primitive children on the ethical front with the tools of gods, and that's very, very dangerous. In fact, it might be fatally dangerous. And so one of the things that Jung attempted to do in his work was to help people understand that it was necessary for us to take on an ethical responsibility that was commensurate with our technological power, and that that would require something like a Something like the deepest of all possible religious revaluations, right? The revaluation of good and evil, to use the Nietzschean phrase, as a— as a what? Medication for the death of God. A very serious set of ideas. And you think we're powerful now, man? You wait till the AI giant starts to stroll around the Earth, and that's coming. Like, you will absolutely see that in your lifetime. You'll probably see it in the next 2 or 3 years. Because that technology is moving so quickly that even those who are on top of it can't keep up. So, and I would say we better get our act together because we could make this world quite the heavenly place, but there's a lot more pathways to hell than there are to heaven.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 4 is solve real-world problems with Elon Musk.

It feels like at some point in the last year, seeing the progress on understanding that the AI, the Tesla AI, understanding the world around it led to a kind of an aha moment at Tesla because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at Tesla this year is this robot Optimus.

Yes.

Many companies out there have tried to put out these robots, have been working on them for years, and so far no one has really cracked it. There's no mass adoption robot in people's homes. There are some in, in manufacturing, but it— like, I would say no one's kind of really cracked it. What is it something that happened in the development of full self-driving that gave you the confidence to say, you know what, we could do something special here?

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it took me a while to sort of realize that in order to solve self-driving, you really needed to solve real-world AI. And at the point at which you solve real-world AI for a car, which is really a robot on four wheels, you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well. The two hard parts, I think, like, it's not— obviously companies like Boston Dynamics have shown that it's possible to make quite compelling, sometimes alarming robots.

Right.

You know, so from a sensors and actuator standpoint, it's certainly been demonstrated by many that it's possible to make a humanoid robot. The things that are currently missing are enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed. So the missing things are are basically real-world intelligence and scaling up manufacturing. Those are two things that Tesla is very good at. And so then we basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a humanoid robot. People have no idea. This is going to be bigger than the car.

So let's dig into exactly that. I mean, in one way, it's actually an easier problem than full self-driving because you, instead of an object going along at 60 miles an hour, which if it gets it wrong, someone will die, this is an object that's engineered to only go at what, 3 or 4 or 5 miles an hour?

Yeah, walking speed basically.

And so a mistake isn't, there aren't lives at stake, there might be embarrassment at stake.

As long as the AI doesn't take it over and, uh, uh, right, and murder us in our sleep or something.

Rule number 5 is see AI as a tool with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

A lot of people's concern is it's going to replace jobs for copywriters.

A lot of Silicon Valley people are like, for example, the story that came out with New York Times, type in New York Times GPT and I put code red. New York Times GPT code red. Okay, so this is a recent article right there. A new chatbot is a code red for Google search business. Okay. A lot of people are talking about how this new wave of chatbot like ChatGPT using AI could reinvent or even replace traditional internet search engines.

Okay, so what's your point?

I'm excited.

Okay.

That's what they're saying. I think it's exciting.

I would say, by the way, and one time I tweeted this, I said, um, people who cheat on exams do so because the system values your grade more than the student values learning. Okay, so if we're worried that people will create a paper in whatever— whatever— oh, there it is. Thank you.

You found it.

2013.

Yeah, yeah, no, I've been at this.

Thank you. About to be the 10-year anniversary of that thought.

Because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

That's such a powerful tweet.

Yeah, so the point is, why would you cheat at all, right? If it's only to get a grade so that the school system thinks more highly of you, when being in school is about learning. Yeah. And so if you have the AI bot create your papers, you didn't learn a thing, but you got the grade. This is, this is the problem we began with here in this conversation. The, the value we put on a grade is out of proportion with who and what you actually are and become in life. So So, yeah, you can submit papers like that, fine. But you'll be an idiot at the end of your school. You'll get a degree because you fooled the system, but did you fool yourself? Did you fool your life? No, you don't. You didn't. And here's another point. Guessing on an exam, okay, yeah, that works sometimes, okay, because you might be right. But guessing in real life just shows your ignorance. I see AI as a helpful tool when you can't otherwise get something done as well as you could.

If—

but not as a replacement for your own learning. I don't see that.

You don't think—

you think AI will ever replace you?

Some tasks of mine, for sure.

What will it not replace?

What will it not replace?

What will it not replace? No, no, specific to you. I'm specifically talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. What can you do that AI in the future won't be able to replace?

I don't know.

Okay.

It's possible that AI will replace everything about me. That's entirely possible.

Yeah.

However, however, tomorrow I might go to the Bahamas and meet someone new. The AI didn't do that. That person might give me new insights in my life. That didn't happen to the AI. I will have new thoughts because of that experience. Than the AI had. So the AI will be frozen with whatever was my last published searchable content on the internet. If I have thoughts that I write down by hand and they're not on the internet, and I have enlightened ideas, the AI will not be able to track that unless I post it online, which I might then do. Then it'll catch up with me. Fine.

Do you think everything under the sun has been thought of and written about online?

No, of course not. Oh my gosh, of course not.

Okay.

New ideas are not yet online. So I'd like to see AI invent new understandings of the laws of physics. I haven't seen that yet.

Okay.

You know what? That's a good way of thinking about it. That makes sense because meaning human beings working together in a collaborative way invent things. AI hasn't had hasn't independently yet invented something big.

But people who claim that general AI will one day arrive there. And okay, fine. But here's something else I'll say. Sure. On the back of my phone is a section of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. Okay. You could tell AI to paint something in the style of Van Gogh of this scene. And they'll do it. But you can't tell AI to be Van Gogh in the first place.

Does it need to?

Yes.

Why?

Because that's the style that Van Gogh pioneered. So, did you get my point? So, it's not gonna be Van Gogh. It can ape the style of Van Gogh because it has data on that. It doesn't have data on something that hasn't happened yet. This painting had not happened before he painted it, and his entire style of painting had not really happened. Yes, it's impressionist, but his is distinct. Is the AI going to give me something distinct that no one has happened yet, that isn't aping anybody else's style? Maybe that day will come, and maybe we'll praise it, but that we're not there yet.

And rule number 6, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is improve humanity with Stephen Hawking.

Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence. We cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is amplified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, It might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, for example, world militaries are considering starting an arms race in autonomous weapon systems that can choose and eliminate their own targets, while the UN is debating a treaty banning such weapons. Autonomous weapons proponents usually forget to ask the most important Question: What is the likely endpoint of an arms race, and is that desirable for the human race? Do we really want cheap AI weapons to become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow, sold to criminals and terrorists on the black market? Given concerns about long-term controllability of ever more advanced AI systems, should we arm them and turn over our defense to them? In 2010, Computerized trading systems created the stock market flash crash. What would a computer-triggered crash look like? In the defense arena, the best time to stop the autonomous weapons arms race is now. In the medium term, AI may automate our jobs to bring both great prosperity and equality. Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved. There is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movies. As Irving Good realized in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vint called a singularity. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, The long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all. In short, the advent of superintelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so we should plan ahead. If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, "We'll arrive in a few decades," would we just reply, Okay, call us when you get here, we'll leave the lights on. Probably not. But this is more or less what has happened with AI. Little serious research has been devoted to these issues outside a few small nonprofit institutes. Fortunately, this is now changing. Technology pioneers Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak have echoed my concerns. And a healthy culture of risk assessment and awareness of societal implications is beginning to take root in the AI community. Many of the world's leading AI researchers recently signed an open letter calling for the goal of AI to be redefined from simply creating raw undirected intelligence to creating intelligence directed at benefiting humanity. The Future of Life Institute where I serve on the scientific advisory board, has just launched a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead An aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. I'm an optimist and don't believe in boundaries, neither for what we can do in our personal lives, nor for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. This means that the brief history of intelligence that I have told you about is not the end of the story. But just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins.

In fact, right now we're all going to make a promise to ourselves. You can do it silently. We don't have to have everybody shouting it out. But you're gonna make a promise to yourself right now, because if you follow through with what we're about to say, everything will be different. If you fail to do this, you'll come back a year from now and you're gonna write the same shit on the wall, I promise, because this is the part that you have to break out of. Make yourself a promise right now that you will disengage your sense of self, your sense of self-worth, from achievement. And you're gonna marry that motherfucker. To pursuit. Once you are wholly focused on sincere pursuit, everything changes. When you're focused on outcome, when you're saying to yourself, I want to get rich, I want to win the Academy Award, ah, those are my dreams, it's an end state, right? It doesn't work. Like, here's one of those things, things become trite because they're so fucking true. So please, for the love of God, don't make people repeat the most obvious ever. Like, money can't buy happiness, okay? Money can't buy happiness. It can buy a lot of cool shit. It bought me a really fucking nice house. In fact, baby, show the photo. Yeah, we actually own part of that jet company. I'm not fucking joking. How crazy is that? We know the fucking CEO. There was one time where I was trying to get on the flight and they were giving me shit. I can't remember why. And I called the CEO up and I was like, yo, you need to talk to your gate agent. Like, that's fucking money. It's fucking bananas. Money is better than you think. It is more powerful than you think, but it is not at all what you've been told. Money solves fucking money problems, and that's awesome. And there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with money. There's no joke. So we run Impact Theory out of our house. Our house is like 10,000 square feet. Swimming pool, balconies, all that crazy shit. One of our rooms is actually called— like, actually, when we bought the house, they called it this. It's called the Great Room. And that fucking thing is big. I'm not joking. We once played Nerf with Nerf guns. We did like a whole hide-and-seek, capture-the-flag thing in the fucking house. It was crazy. So money does really extraordinary things. People will chase money forever because money actually has utility. So I am not the guy that's saying, oh, money doesn't matter, or money's not a thing, or money's not worth a pursuit. What I am saying, though, money really can't buy happiness. The very thing that you're pursuing in your life is very simple. It is fulfillment. That's it. Now, I sum up fulfillment very simply. How do you feel about yourself when you're by yourself? Do you feel good? Do you feel like you're making the most of your life? Are you tapping into what the Greeks call technē? Are you working your ass off? And that's a key component. Is it hard? Are you working your ass off? Sad but true. Are you working your ass off for a set of skills?

This is— oh, you—

this is the angry face. This is about tapping into rage. We talked about that, Elizabeth. Not at rage yet. We'll get there. But there we go. You really have to work hard for a set of skills that matter to you. Now, the skills have to matter. That's a key part of the equation. Once the skills matter to you and they allow you to serve not only yourself but other people, and then you actually go and serve those people, it becomes this really potent cocktail of neurochemistry. But I want to make sure that everybody understands the game that you're playing is a game of neurochemistry, right? In the last year, at least 2 billionaires committed suicide. So, I mean, like, it's heartbreaking when anybody commits suicide, but when billionaires start committing suicide, like, if the answer is not just self-evident beyond all imagining that money is not going to solve the problems that exist between your ears, like, there's nothing more anyone can tell you. A fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. On this one, I'm fucking begging you, be wise. I'm not telling you not to chase money. I'm just saying it's not going to feed you emotionally the way you think it is. So you've got to completely divorce yourself from this notion of outcome and become completely obsessed with the idea of sincere pursuit. Now, why sincere pursuit? The reason to tie your sense of self, your self-esteem, your pride, your ego, your identity, all of that, the reason to tie that to sincere pursuit is it's the only part you can control. I cannot promise you that you'll ever be successful. You cannot promise you that you will be successful. But you can promise and know if you actually did it to show up every day and really pursue it. You control your mindset. You control how you feel about yourself. Nobody can actually get you to feel some kind of way about yourself. You allow that shit in, right? That's like the cheesiest self-help shit you're ever going to hear. But it got cheesy because it's so true. So people repeated it a lot. And if you lose sight of that, if you lose sight of what you allow yourself to think is going to control you at a neurochemical level, and at the neurochemical level, that's going to influence then again how you feel and how you think, and then you get into this death spiral where you're thinking negative shit, you believe in the negative shit, which makes you feel badly about yourself, and then you get stuck in that and you can't get out. And you see a lot of that on the hopes and fears. People afraid they're never going to be able to break free. People in this room that took the time to write it down that they were never going to get out of that negative loop. And that negative loop is really real, but here's the thing, the negative loop is based in biology. And once you begin to understand what the biology is exactly, then you can begin to take control of your life. And step 1 in the biological train is to break the tie that you have between outcome and worth. Once you begin to break that down, then you can step to shit naked and raw and say, all right, this is just practice. And once you're in that mode of practicing, you're in skill acquisition mode. And the name of the game is fucking skill acquisition. Like, it really is sort of that dull and boring. It's just about getting so good at something that you can't be denied. And that's one of those things, like, I'm gonna say that phrase so much that I worry that's gonna become trite, but that is one of the most awe-inspiring notions on the planet. The thought that you could become so good at something that you leave people in awe, and when you can leave people in awe, you can do just about anything you want with your life.

Speaking of this idea of distribution and free-flowing, we're seeing the rise of gig economy, freelance work, apps like Uber that are having big effects in the world, including effects on labor and how work works. Any thoughts on what this might mean moving into the future and freelance economy?

Well, a key element is education. And it is interesting in a certain way how now that we have all courses about almost everything, you still have to pay a little bit for the learning company to get the very best. But in math and science, even the free stuff is extremely good that's out there. And yet, and for early-level math, we have Khan Academy and lots of things. That has had a truly modest effect on actual skill levels. And so the motivational aspects of why do you learn, many people learn just to get a degree because that is how you get a job. But how do you make things interesting? That's kind of an unsolved problem. So I do view retraining and education that in order to deal with the dynamism of this fast-paced innovation, that you also wanna make equivalent breakthroughs not just in automating things, but improving education. And if you could have one wish to improve one thing in an economy, education is kind of the master switch of your capability. There's a few things like energy and stability and trust that are important too. But education would be right up there. And yet, you know, if I say to you, oh, the best math teacher lived 50 years ago, he was better than any math teacher since then, you couldn't disprove that that was right. That is, our understanding of how you draw kids in and how you understand their misconceptions is, it's very ad hoc. The average math teacher today is probably about the same as 20 years ago. And yet, if we can do agents, we're talking about the general issue of being able to read and form knowledge. The idea of being as good as a one-on-one math tutor and seeing what types of conceptual mistakes people make and even more importantly, understanding how you motivate them that you keep it at the right level or you create the right sort of problem domain that they might be interested in or some sort of contest or draw a social aspect into it. That motivational piece is where you see most of the variance. It's not domain knowledge that makes differences, we see, because it's online and yet we don't see much change. So I am enthused about that. Whether that means that your learning will be more episodic and you continue to do it in adulthood, you know, that would be ideal so that even if the job market is switching, you're qualified.

I went skydiving in Dubai, right? And skydiving, skydiving is a really interesting confront with fear, right? So, so I got a I gotta stand up. I'm sorry, I gotta stand up. I gotta stand up. All right, so all your friends, what happens? You go out, how you— Oh, sorry.

Oh, I dropped my thing.

So what happens is you go out the night before and you take a drink with your friends and somebody says, "Yeah, we should go skydiving tomorrow." And you go, "Yeah, we'll go skydiving tomorrow. Yeah, yeah." And you go, "Yeah." And everybody goes, "Yeah," right? And you go home and you buy yourself You're like, "Mm." Right? You're like, "Well, I mean, they was drunk, too." Right? So maybe they not— maybe— I mean, we don't have to go. We don't have to do it. So then that night, you're laying in your bed, and you just keep— And you're terrified. You keep imagining over and over again jumping out of an airplane, and you can't figure out why you would do that.

Right?

And you're laying there and you have the worst night's sleep of your life, but you still have the hope that your friends were drunk, right? So you wake up the next day and you go down and you say where you were gonna meet and everybody's there. You're like, "Oh, shit. All right, all right, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool." Right? So you get in the van and you don't know that your friends had the same night that you had 'cause they're pretending like they didn't. They're like, "Yeah, man, my uncle was drunk." Uncle's a Navy SEAL, and you know, this is gonna be great. I've been looking forward to this. You're like, oh my God, oh my God. And your stomach is terrible. You can't eat and everything, but you don't want to be the only punk who doesn't jump out of this airplane. So you get there, and then you have this safety brief, and you're standing there, and the guys will tell you, well, if the chute doesn't open, what's going to happen is you're doing— you— well, why the hell— what could happen that the chute— the wouldn't open, right? So you do a thing. And what you do is your first jump, you're attached to a guy who is going to walk you out. So you go, and you get there, and there's an airplane. And nobody's stopping. Everybody's still going. So you get onto the airplane, and you're sitting there. And it's extra because you're sitting on some dude's lap, some stranger. You're sitting on his lap. And it's like you're trying to make small talk. Yeah, man. So you'd be jumping with people all the time, huh? Right? You know. And then you just want to make sure— you got kids, right? You got people you need to see, right? You just want to make sure he's serious, right? So you get in there. So everything's normal. So you fly, and you go up, you go up, you go up, and you go up to 14,000 feet. And you notice there's a light. It's red, and it's yellow, and green. Right? So right now the light's red. So then you start thinking at some point the light's going to go green, but you don't know what's going to happen, right? And you wait, and it goes yellow, and the light goes green, and somebody opens the door. And in that moment, you realize you've never been in a freaking airplane with the door open, right? Terror. Oh, sorry.

I'm spitting.

I'm sorry.

Oh, sorry. Terror, terror, terror, terror, right? So you go and then, you know, if you were smart, you sat in the back so you don't go first, right? And then people start going out of the airplane. And you go and the guy walks you up to the end of the thing and you're standing and your toes are on the edge and you're looking out down to death. And they say, on 3. And they say, 1, 2. And he pushes you on 2 because people grab on 3, right?

Right?

And you go, and you fall out of the airplane. And in 1 second, you realize that it's the most blissful experience of your life. You're flying, right? It doesn't feel like falling, right? It's like you actually are kind of held a little bit by the wind, and then you start, and you, you start falling, you falling, and you— there's zero fear. You realize that the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear. It's bliss, it's bliss, and you're flying. Right? And you're doing that. And then 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have enough time to just kind of be like, oh, shit, that's that building I saw like that one. Oh, you can see the ocean. Right? You start doing all of that. And the lesson for me was, why were you scared in your bed the night before? Why did you— what do you need that fear for? Just don't go. Why are you scared in your bed 16 hours before you jump? Why are you scared in the car? Why could you not enjoy breakfast? What did you need that? The fear is, fear of what? You're nowhere even near the airplane. Everything up to the stepping out, there's actually no reason to be scared. It only just ruins your day. You don't have to jump. And then in that moment, all of a sudden, where you should be terrified is the most blissful experience of your life. And God placed the best things in life on the other side of terror. On the other side of your maximum fear are all of the best things in life.

Amazon, one of the things we try to do is have multiple paths to yes. And so here's a little thought experiment for you. If you are a junior executive at Amazon, and if Amazon did this in the typical kind of corporate hierarchy way, you had an idea, you need to get your boss to greenlight that idea, and then your boss's boss needs to greenlight that idea, And then your boss's boss's boss needs to greenlight that idea. There are probably 5 levels or more before that idea gets the go-ahead. Assume instead that you're an entrepreneur with a startup company idea and you need venture capital. You go to Sand Hill Road and you go to the first venture capitalist and they tell you no. And you go to the second one and they tell you no.

No.

Maybe your 20th one tells you yes. You got 19 nos and 1 yes, and you're still good to go. So that venture capital model is— there's multiple paths to yes. There were 20 people who could give you a yes, and it didn't matter how many gave you a no. So if you want innovative thinking, you have to think about how can we get— you want a large number You want a number of high judgment people empowered to green light things. You want multiple paths to yes. You want a system where as a junior Air Force officer with a good idea, the first 5 people tell me no and somehow I can still go pursue that idea. So you gotta figure out, that's an organizational challenge that big organizations have to figure out a way to do. And by the way, I get, you know, the, what the, this happens all the time. I'll say, I don't think that's a good idea, but somebody else will green light it. And I'm fine with that because usually the cost of the experiments is pretty small. Things only get expensive when they work, right? Once something works, you're like, whoa, we need to double down on that. Now then the spending can get heavy and then those become big consequential decisions. And that's where the hierarchy and the, Using the judgment of the most senior people to me, this really helps. A lot of experts in AI don't share the same level of concern that you do about the dangers of AI.

Fools. Famous last words.

What specifically do you believe that they don't?

Well, the biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do. And they think they're smarter than they actually are. In general, we are all much smarter than we think we are. Much less smart, dumber than we think we are, by a lot. So this tends to plague smart people. They just can't, they define themselves by their of their intelligence and they don't like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea, which is fundamentally flawed. That's the wishful thinking situation. I'm really quite close to, I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me. It's capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows. And the rate of improvement is exponential. You can see this in things like AlphaGo, which went from, in the span of maybe 6 to 9 months, it went from being unable to beat even a reasonably good Go player to then beating the European world champion who was ranked 600, then beating Lee Sedol, 4.5, who'd been world champion for many years, then beating the current world champion, then beating everyone while playing simultaneously. Then, uh, then there was AlphaZero, uh, which crushed AlphaGo 100 to 0. And AlphaZero just learned by playing itself, and it can play basically any game that you put the rules in for. If you— whatever rules you give it, it literally read the rules, play the game, and be superhuman for any game. Nobody expected that rate of improvement. If you ask those same experts who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying, I think you will find that their predictions for things like Go and other AI advancements have— their batting average is quite weak. It's not good. We'll see this also with self-driving. I think probably by end of next year, self-driving will be— will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100 to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking maybe 18 months from now. NHTSA did a study on on Tesla's Autopilot version 1, which is relatively primitive, and found that it was a 45% reduction in highway accidents. And that's despite Autopilot 1 being just version 1. Version 2, I think, will be at least 2 or 3 times better. That's the current version that's running right now. So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital superintelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think that's the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.

And how do we do that?

I mean, if we take it that it's inevitable at this point that some version of AI is coming down the line, how do we steer through that?

Well, I'm not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight. I mean, I think one should generally err on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public. And therefore, there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. And nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane. And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes.

Far.

So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.

Well, it's a question you've been asking for a long time.

I think it's a question that's come to the forefront over the last year where you begin to realize that it doesn't necessarily—

I think we've all been focused in on the idea of artificial superintelligence, right? Which is clearly a danger, but maybe a little further out.

What's happened over the last year is you've seen artificial— what I've been calling artificial stupidity.

You're talking about algorithmic manipulation of social media.

We're in it now.

It's starting to happen. How do we— what's the intervention at this point?

I'm not really all that worried about the short-term stuff. Things that are— narrow AI is not a species-level risk. It will result in dislocation, in lost jobs, and, you know, sort of better weaponry and that kind of thing. But it is not a fundamental species-level risk, whereas digital superintelligence is. So it's really all about laying the groundwork to make sure that if humanity collectively decides that creating digital superintelligence is the right move, then we should do so very, very carefully. Very, very carefully. This is the most important thing that we could possibly do.

The Dallas Uber driver.

Oh.

So as somebody who has gotten into countless Ubers and some small percentage of them know who I am, and then of course they start asking questions.

Talk to me about chasing your dreams and this quote that you have that an aha moment does not necessarily lead to an aha life.

Um, yeah, the Uber driver in Dallas that's in this book. Um, I get choked up when I think about him. Uh, an aha moment—

choked up.

I get choked up because because what happens for me every single day is— and you hear from people every single day. You've got millions and millions of people that are inspired by, empowered by, impacted by your content. There are people out there that use your work as a lifeline, and it is humbling. And what I am I'm really present to in the work that I'm putting out, in the stuff that I'm sharing, whether it's my failures or the things that I'm using that are helping me in my own struggles, is just how much people are holding themselves back and how much pain people feel. Because most folks know what they dream about and what they want. And yet they're spending all of their time and energy arguing against what they want. And so you can have all these epiphanies. I hope that when somebody listens to our conversation and watches this, that they have a massive aha moment, but it's not gonna mean fucking shit if you don't take action and do something about it. The aha moment is the door that opens, but your new life does not begin unless you step through the door. And most people— and that's what was so kind of, you know, the simple idea of high-fiving yourself, of encouraging yourself, of supporting yourself. Most people, when you have an aha moment and the door to your new life opens up, Instead of going, I got this, let's go, and high-fiving yourself to step forward, most of us go, mm, I don't know if I'm worth it. I don't know if right now is the right time to do this. I don't think I'm good enough. I failed so many times, I can't go through that door. And that's the problem I want to attack right now, that there is somewhere in your life that you know what you want, You can feel it pulling you and you are actively arguing against it. You're bringing yourself down. You're beating yourself out. Like, people will cheer for you and me. They won't cheer for themselves. I'm the same way. And so this Uber driver, the story that you're talking about, I get into the car and we start driving and I'm on the phone as we're driving and I'm having a conversation with somebody about this date daytime talk show that I launched, which was a dream, with Sony Pictures Television, and then, uh, was promptly fired after season 1. It was a huge failure because we didn't make it to season 2. Huge failure in real-world terms, massive success when it comes to the timeline of my life. And so I'm talking to this person about the talk show, I hang up the phone, and this Uber driver comes alive. He's like, oh my gosh, I can't I can't believe you're in my cab. And I'm like, why? And he says, because I wanna talk to you about something. I think you can help me. And I'm like, great, how can I help you? And he says, I have a dream of being an Oscar-winning actor and creating opportunities for other Black and Latino men to do the same in acting. And I'm like, fricking fantastic. What the fuck are you doing in Dallas? Right? You know, the guy's 25. And so I go, you know, the game is in New York and LA. I mean, sure, you can act, you can write stuff, you can be here in Dallas, but why are you not in LA? Why are you not in New York? And he's like, you're right, you're right, you're right. I need to move to LA. Like, why not? And he says, I have $700 in my bank account. And I'm like, that's freaking fantastic. You have $700 and a car? Dude, drop me off and get driving. What are you waiting for? And so we have this whole conversation and I I write about it in this book, where I am actively arguing for his dream and he is actively arguing against his dream. And what is so sad is throughout this conversation, Tom, he's like, you're right, $700 could get me there. You're right, I am only 25. You're right, if I keep thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking about what I wanna be doing, I'm not only gonna drive in circles, my whole life is going to spin in circles as I think about what I want and I don't do shit about it. And then you are going to find yourself not at 25, but at 45 or 65, and you're gonna be so filled with regret that you never fucking put a bet on yourself. And so this conversation ends with him declaring that he's gonna go to California and me giving him a bunch of tools tools that I talk about in this book. And the point of the story is, does he move or not? I don't fucking know. The point of the story is it's so easy to see what somebody else should do. It's so easy to cheer for somebody else. We all do that, right? We cheer for our favorite sports teams. We follow our favorite influencers and authors. We plan birthday parties for our friends. We take on extra work from our colleagues. We to support everyone around us, we do not know how to do it for ourselves.

Your dream is possible. The business you want to build, the life that you want to lead, the impact that you want to make. It's possible. It really is. Even if nobody like you has done it before. There are a million reasons why your idea will not work and 8 why it will. Which side you choose to focus on will determine your life. So I'm an introvert. That may be hard to, to realize or hard to tell, cuz when I get on camera and when I'm talking entrepreneurs, I get excited, I get animated, uh, but I'm an introvert at heart. I don't talk to people on the airplane. I, I hate networking events. Being in big groups causes me anxiety. Uh, I'm super awkward and, you know, don't know what to say whenever I'm kind of put into a group. I'm not the life of a party. I'd rather I'd rather be by myself. And so I'm very introverted. And I used to believe that that would be a big roadblock for me. If you look back on the history of my helping entrepreneurs as my website and then my YouTube channel, I always hid behind the famous people. I always hid behind sharing my story because I didn't think it was relevant or as important or powerful. It's like, hey, you got this chance to learn from Elon Musk. Who cares about Evan Carmichael. And for the longest time on my channel, Evan Carmichael's top 10 rules of success was the number 1 request. And it always blew my mind, like, why? Who cares, right? I mean, all these great stories, why does it matter about me? And I was always reluctant to share my story, and I always felt like, because I'm an introvert, I don't know how this is going to work out. When I, when I look to people who've done it, when I look to other people who've built big YouTube channels or who are great communicators or fantastic on stage, they look like they have it all figured out. I love young Les Brown. He's my greatest motivational speaker of all time. When I look at someone like Les Brown, it's hard to imagine him being an introvert. He seems to be always happy, the life of a party, he's got stories to share, and if I want to be like that, I want to be a speaker, I always told myself I can't because I'm introverted and he's not, and so I don't know how to bridge the gap. And so that's where, you know, people like me haven't won before. People like me haven't done it before, at least the ones that I knew of. And so it's easy to say, well, because it hasn't been done before, now, now you can't do it as well. What I discovered was, you know what, I still care about serving. I still care about helping. I still want to make a big impact. Impact. I want to, I want to be able to touch people's lives even if I don't want to small talk and chat with them and be the life of a party. And that is possible. And once I shifted it to service, once I shifted it to recognizing that I'm not even here for me, I'm not on stage for me, I'm not in this room for me, I'm in this room to serve. And using your perceived weakness as a strength, thinking things like I'm an introvert, so I don't talk much, but I'm a great listener. I'm a fantastic listener. I can very quickly understand what you're going through and how you're feeling. And now I can use that to make better content and to help shift you and move you to where you need to get. And those things of understanding that, that I am service-built, and so are you, and that just because other people haven't done it doesn't mean that I can't. Really helped give me the confidence, belief, motivation, momentum to keep going. There are always going to be reasons why you can't win. There's going to be a million reasons, right? A million reasons why you can't win and 8 why you will. 5, 8, 10, but a smaller amount of reasons why you will. And if you start talking to your friends and talking to your family and compare yourself to other people, you're going to find the same thing of now there's 3 million reasons why you can't win. And it's really just that choice to figure out which are you going to focus on, the 3 million reasons why you can't win or the 8 why you can. Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it, but you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want to learn the money habits of the wealthy, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Something I encourage a lot of entrepreneurs to think about. I think a lot of people, they will go from their full-time job, quit, they have very meager savings, and suddenly they're like, this has to work. Well, now you've put yourself in a bad position. Either start it while you have a full-time job.