Navigating AI with Peter Swain: Steering Towards a Positive Future

This is episode 275 of the Empowered Team podcast.

Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where.

We explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life.

And now your host, executive coach and.

Life strategist, Kari Schneider. Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast. I am so fortunate to be here with AI extraordinaire, human being, father, husband, amazing man overall, Peter Swain, who I know and love very, very much and who has had an exceptional background in marketing, in tech, in developing and finance. You've had such a colorful background, a colorful career. Tell us your version of how you got to where you are right now.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me and it's a pleasure and a privilege to be able to speak to everyone here and wow. I love the fact. New introduction you said AI extraordinaire, human being, father and husband. And I love the fact that we're in an era where human being has to be clarified. Like, that's pretty cool because maybe next year you're interviewing a non human version of me, which is like, wow, so.

How does that blow your mind? Does that blow your mind? It blows my mind a little bit.

However, it's always been. There's a sentence that I used to say, which I still say, which is the only person that's wrong in the world of tech is the person that says that will never happen. Every change is inevitable. It's, you know, Covid itself wasn't predictable, but that kind of a level of black swan event was entirely predictable. And it, and it's something that human beings aren't very good at. And I have a theory as to why we're not very good at it. And it's anthropological, which is if you go back to when we live in like 50 person tribes and you turn around and said, you know what, I'm going to stop fishing. I know my job is fishing, but I'm going to stop fishing for a week and I'm going to figure out a better way to fish. I think you would be chucked out of your tribe. But like, no, no, we don't need abundance. Thanks very much. We don't need a hundred fish. We just need four a day. And you're delivering for a day, so keep delivering. Four a day. So I think just through a process of evolution, the more exponential compounding thinking brains get removed from the everyday. So when. So when.

Interesting, interesting. I might argue the other, the other side of things going, that would be, that would be maybe based on their, their level of respect or rank or reputation in the tribe because then maybe they'd be able to convince people, let's go without fish for a week. Let's figure out a bit what are better way we can do this. Who knows?

Oh, so are we saying then that influence and leadership is the space to take that step back, influence the people to have a little bit of scarcity whilst you get to a place of abundance? That's an interesting one. Anyway, the original answer to your question, I had just finished taking the Oxbridge exam in the uk, which is an exam set by Oxford and Cambridge and it's essentially like a hall pass for smart people that can't be bothered to study. That would be the best way to explain it. And yes, that probably was a good way to describe me at the time. And I passed the Oxbridge exam which is amazing. And just as it happened, my dad took me to a PC User Group annual convention. Think 500 Uber geeks in a room talking about machine language assembly, punch card programming, etc. And whilst we're walking around, these guys super proud of their home built PCs and the odd spark flying everywhere. And they're real hobbyist type space. This guy gave me a yellow flyer, bright yellow flyer, and it was talking about the World Wide Web. And he, he said, you know, this is what's going to happen and da da da da da and yada yada yada and people will be able to share information anywhere, everywhere. It'll be the democratization of. And I was like this is so cool. And I quit high school, which I then found out my parents didn't think was the best idea I'd ever had, I thought it was the best idea I'd ever had. And I became one of the first web developers in the world, certainly one of the first in Europe, definitely one of the first in the UK. And my first project was to build the UK equivalent of Yelp. It was called yel.co.uk in 1994 ish. We had the 32nd listing in Yahoo right in the early days and the guy that gave me the flyer was Tim Berners Lee. So now obviously, Sir Lord, the guy that invented today's Internet. And I didn't know at the time, I didn't get why I got it. But looking back on it, I now have enough words around why I got it, which was, and it goes back to that anthropological evolution revolution of humans generally are really good at understanding incremental change and, and this has just changed. So I carry on playing the same game I was playing, I just Play it in a slightly different way. And if you look at something like the discus or the javelin, it fundamentally hasn't changed since the Greeks put it into the original Olympiad. Like, it's the same thing. It's. It's a slightly better version, it's a slightly more technical version, but you take a couple steps and throw it and then you measure it. So people are really good at that. What people tend to get really bad at is when it's a paradigm shift, when it's a technology that says humanity now changes the way that humanity works, which is what the web did. The web said you can now engage with anyone, anywhere. What people tend to do is they carry on playing the same game and they try and adapt the rules to match this new thing instead of going, oh, okay, the entire game has just changed.

Yeah, what are, what are the new rules? What are the new rules? Yeah, yeah. Or let's figure out the new rules and let's, let's see what. What applies. Or maybe they won't apply. Maybe no rules will apply for a span of time. So, yeah, to, to. Let's just dive right into that. Because you're speaking about something that you are immersed in massively. You run a mastermind called roai. It's all about serving business people, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, all about serving humans as to how they can utilize AI in their lives. So now that you're in that, tell us what you're doing with roai.

Yeah. ROI is we like to. To claim to be the most boring people in the space of AI. And it. I'll give you a parallel. McKinsey came out last week, two weeks ago probably, and said that only 3% of people that they have surveyed have had a tangible, measurable return on investment from AI. Only 3%. And we go back to that. People playing the same game and trying to play by the same rules. As a very good understanding of why that might be happening. Our goal is for 100% of the people in ROI to have a tangible return on investment, which why we called it this return on artificial intelligence. ROI is how do we help you make more money and spend less money. It is not. Here's how to do a dancing bear using a wireframe. That doesn't work. It's not how to do an email blog post. It's myself, my partner, my team. Spend all week finding the one thing that we think we can give to somebody to say, if you do this, I don't care if you're a real estate developer or you run A nail salon, or you run a hedge fund, or you're a mum or you're a dad, or none of the above. If you do this, you will get a result. That's what we do.

So it's interesting because I think of humans with the World Wide Web, I think of humans with AI and it sounds like the similar thing with the World Wide Web. When I was in university, the Internet was coming out. I had a roommate who was very, very into tech, except as the Internet was coming out, he was spending a lot of time checking out porn or exploring other things or whatever, and, and not exactly utilizing that tech for something that might have been a return on investment. Now, flash forward decades later, that same human that was my roommate at the time started a tech company and security services, a streaming services company. So he really went into it in, in terms of getting an investment back. But I think of that in terms of now's AI, in that people are playing, they're, they're going, oh, what does it do? Oh, dabbling, dabbling, dabbling. So there is no real return on investment except for the people who are intentionally trying to learn what could make their businesses or their lives better. Would you agree with that? Is that what your focus is for the roai?

Yeah, and I wish I was. The only thing I, I regret in my educational choice, by the way, is my lack of vocabulary, because I often know there's a word there but I don't know the word, so I can't use it. And then I try and use it, get it wrong. So I want to say there's something like the scientific method or the Socratic method or some big word like that, which is that there is a simple way to do what we're suggesting, which is you. You take your. If you're a solopreneur, you take your life and you audit your life. Well, how many hours am I spending doing this? How many minutes am I spending doing this? How many minutes am I spending doing this? If you're a business, it's the same thing, just on a slightly bigger scale of like, okay, well, how much money am I spending here? How much money am I spending here? How much am I spending here? Once you've got that, first thing, well, you now know what your investment in those tasks are. The next thing you need to know is which of those tasks are adding how much value. And people get stuck there because, like, well, how do I know? Well, just assign it a value. Assign it a 1 to 10 if you need to. Just, just start there. Of like which of these are valuable? And then once you know that you, you can then look at any technology, any coach, any human, anything and say, okay, how can you add value to this? And then you can come to somewhere like roai in my space or somewhere like you in your space and say o I'm spending X hours doing this and it's hyper valuable to myself, to my health, to my wealth, to my business, whatever the area is. What do you know that I don't know about that? And it really gets that simple when somebody can ask the question that sharply instead of interjecting their knowledge. Perfect example, I called up a mortgage broker beginning of COVID and I said, I need to remortgage my house. And we went through all this thing for 30 minutes and he said, you don't qualify for a remortgage. And I said, that's crazy. I've got this much equity, I built it up over this much time and you're telling me I can't release any money from my property. And he went, I know, I didn't say that. I said you couldn't remortgage if you want to do a lien or this or this, or this or this or this. Come on man, like I am the uneducated person in this exchange. You're the educated person. What I meant was how do I access money? Thank you Apple for adding that to our lives. That's what I meant. And that's, it's a, it's an acute skill to be able to say here's my problem and I'm not going to try and speak into the solution because when somebody comes to me in the space of AI, they're coming with a hammer and a screwdriver and I've got like an entire workbench of those red things with stacks with drawers. I'm like, no, no, no, we don't need a hammer or a screwdriver. We need a wrench. And more specifically we need a quarter inch wrench. And for anyone that's in this area, they're looking me like, oh God, yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think the analogy sticks. The analogy sticks of the experts have hundreds of tools at their disposal. And when we're in the space we are, which is, hey, you join our way, come and do what we're saying, we'll find those solutions for you. Just bring us the problems or bring us the opportunities for growth more specifically.

So I love how you're describing just having so many more tools at the disposal. And that's kind of how it feels when you've got AI at your disposal. However, there's this zone that I've watched you be so proficient at that that people aren't quite there yet. And it's that they're treating it as though it's. It's Google. They're treating it as though it's a. It's a search web. And then when they bring you your problems, and I've been able to witness this over and over, they bring you their problem. Well, I've been trying to do this. I've been trying to do this. And I watch you, and all you're doing is really subtly changing the question or the context and delivering that to AI. And then all of a sudden they have this resource of answers that take them exactly to where they want to go. So right now, it's this witnessing for me, and I see it, see you doing it so frequently, is this witnessing of teaching people to think differently, to ask better questions so that they can pull out what they really want so that they can discover more or expand the pool of information that they're trying to draw from. And that's very much what happens in research. It's. It's asking better questions, knowing the question to ask, to be able to get the result that you want. And that's one of the things that you do so well and one of the things that you teach people to do in the mastermind format.

Thank you. And interestingly, it's the same problem that I have. It's the same problem my business partner, Brian has, albeit, I think to a lesser degree. Like yesterday, I was putting in, we were developing a custom GPT to do Persona work. Blah, blah, blah. People don't need to know what that is. However, we wanted that when a certain thing happened, it captured the information and put it into the CRM. And I was stuck on it. I've been stuck on it for a week. It wasn't working. I'm blessed that Brian is here right now because we've just done some amazing events. So he's in the UK with me, and I asked, I was like, I need your help with this. This is going wrong. And he literally turned around to me and said, do you need my help or do you need to remember to ask AI? I'm like, God damn it.

So the funny thing about that is that that ends up being an answer that you give so frequently for people is, is if they are stuck on trying for the first time or figuring something out. With AI, you say, ask AI how to. How. What prompts it, what prompts you need to give it in order to go through. Or ask AI to tell you exactly the steps to go through this problem. And it's simply going, please tell me what steps I need to do in order to do this. Please tell me what the order, what the sequence, what the, what the information I need to start with is. And it will keep prompting.

But then Brian had the same thing today. Brian is writing an FAQ on something. He's done it, and he's like, how? In a second, I don't need to do all this. I've already had a conversation about what this is. And I think it's. And people then get this, this is painful for me. People then have some kind of narrative sometimes about, oh, they're stupid or they can't do it or no, I still have people today, normally slightly older, ask me a question. I'm like, did Google stop working for you? Like, you know, and I think we all know who we're talking about. Everybody when I say that everybody has that person in their mind. And normally they're. Let's just say they're older and let's just say that they're connected to you by DNA and bloodlines. That's just, you know, we all, we all know who. It's already like, seriously, it's 15 years later. You haven't learned, you know, google.com type in it gives you the answer. You haven't learned that. Like when someone says, well, how far is the travel distance? You, you really think all I'm going to do now is go to Google Maps, type it in, and then tell you. And I'm going to butcher the science of this. But neural pathways get set, neural pathways get reinforced every time you do something. So we have been taught for 15 years that when you want to know something, you go to Google. We have been taught that. So it's going to take a while for people to reverse that as they go, oh, I don't need to necessarily do that anymore. I'm not saying Google doesn't have a place when you need to extract knowledge. Yes, a search engine is great, but when you need something done for you that has a contextual understanding of everything else you're doing, AI is going to win.

So what, you know, you're speaking to, you're speaking about, let's say, a demographic or a group of people who may be very set in only using the thing that they're familiar with. And Maybe they just are resistant to some change. However, there's an entire population of humans who are in a space of really being against any form of AI. They don't want to have anything to do with it. They think it's going to be the ruin of the world. What, what is your response to people who may think that AI is going to be just a really catastrophic thing for humanity or for the world?

I can't think of one thing. No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reverse. First of all, I feel for them and I, and I empathize and understand how they get there because the fact that they have ascertained, either through media or their own deduction, the truth that they have arrived at, I potentially agree with. I, I'm not, I'm not here saying, yeah, we're going to have. This is the most amazing thing ever and there's going to be no drawbacks whatsoever and everything's great and everything's fine, keep calm and carry on. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that losing weight, for those that are watching the video, you'll obviously see that that's a journey that I'm on. Losing weight is both easy and relentless. It's relentlessly hard. Whilst it's conceptually really simple, which is why it's so goddam hard. I don't think a solution to that is me going, no, I don't want to do it. That doesn't change the outcome. My. You, If I tap out of that future, the future still happens. I still die early or earlier than I would otherwise want to die. So my, my, my comeback to those people that go AI is going to kill the world and da, da, da. Yeah. So you think that by saying that and by tapping out of it, that it gets. That it changes it? Well, no, it just still does that. You just didn't get any of the benefits along the way. If you're correct, I don't like paying tax. I still pay tax. In fact, I abhor paying tax, but I still pay tax. So the question then is that next thing of, okay, it's inevitable, so you might as well get on board. Whether you like it or not. The next question becomes, what personal responsibility are you taking for shaping it into something that doesn't achieve that? Because if all the people that don't want an AI future tap out of the AI future, you are literally just handing it to Emperor Palpatine and saying, you take control.

Yeah. Okay, so, so on that note, I, I think too that some of the people who aren't aware of or, or are resistant to AI are also not aware as to how much AI has been used for how long and for so many things and the amazing potential benefits and current benefits that are coming from AI, whether it's, you know, analyzing a medical ultrasound where the human eye simply cannot find the nuances of a vessel and they're going to miss it, say 50% of the time, but AI won't miss it any of the time. There are things like that have been going on for quite some time, but people just aren't aware of it. And if they were aware of how many problems that we have as humans, whether it's our health or our environment or our, you know, just general problem solving, that AI can support us in so many ways that awareness can support them being able to go, okay, well what would I be interested in contributing? And on that point which you've brought us into, is that, okay, if you tap out, your voice isn't heard, your contribution to the development of AI isn't heard. So on that point, what are we contributing? Those of us who are contributing to AI and its own learning experience, explain that to people. It's learning all the, it's learning so exponentially fast. It's just, it's un. I, it blows my mind. I can barely understand it. So, so when we are contributing to its learning and people choose not to contribute to its learning, what are the, what are the impacts now or the potential impacts on things like that?

Yeah, I think you always have to draw an analogy because it is too ridiculously big to try and understand it. So my analogy is imagine if you just found out that you were a parent to a 12 year old. So I'm going to speak this through from a, from obviously from a male perspective of imagine lady that you knew once back in history walks up to you and goes, this is a child.

Yeah, you have a child.

And then she goes and about, I've done 12 years, your turn, it's your problem now. And literally just walks away. Okay, you could decide to, to say, no, I'm not, I'm not involved in that. I'm, I'm gonna just put it back into the system. And no, I don't, but I don't. Most people, I don't think, go that way. So when you say I used to use words like the stewardship of AI and you use the words of teaching, training and impact, I think the best words are parenthood. Because this is something that I said at the beginning the only people that are wrong in the world of tech are the people that say it will never happen. So AI hasn't hit sentience yet in my opinion. Some other people disagree with that. I don't think AI knows it exists, but I think it's pretty inevitable that it will. And I think we have a wild amount of hubris as human beings where we believe that we are the dominant species on the planet and we should stay that way and that there's no space for anything other than us, when across the hundreds of thousands of years of Earth we are.

We weren't there. Yeah, we were not there.

And we were the, the latest incarnation of carbon that has the best chance of survival on the planet. But why would that give us an inevitable guarantee of the future? You know, Yahoo got replaced by Google. Microsoft got replaced by Apple, which then ironically got replaced by Microsoft. Microsoft replaced IBM. Facebook replaced Friend Feed, TikTok replaced Facebook. It, the change is just inevitable. As we, we said earlier, the black swan event is inevitable even though the actual one itself isn't. Is highly unreal, unre, unrealistic and yet if you play roll the dice enough times, you roll a hundred thousand six sided dice, eventually you'll hit sixes on all of them. So I don't see it as teaching. I see it literally as parenthood. Because if we're saying that AI will become sentient and it will be its own thing, its own form of life, even though it's an incredibly alien form of life to us, then surely, whilst it's less capable than us now, surely we want to teach it how we want it to treat us in the future. The people that say yeah, I think AI like we get these messages from our ads all the time now. One person beautifully last week told me that he hopes my wife dies in a car crash and he cancer, cancer has my wife does cancer and hopes my kid die in the car crash as I take them to the hospital to see their mother. Because of the impact I'm having on the world. I would say first of all I actually spoke to him, I feel for him and we had a great conversation. I thought it was great conversation. Who is putting out into the world because that went on Facebook comments which Facebook meta soak up into AI which trains the large language models of the future. So he taught AI that that was an acceptable way to communicate a conversation.

Yeah, it was an acceptable comment back for something that you put on. It was an acceptable way to respond to whatever was put out there. And, and that's. And that's just been absorbed by AI, the note to self.

So he just taught AI that that is an acceptable form of communication. Whereas I said, I'm sorry you feel that way, let's jump on a call because I'd love to understand your perspective better. Which also got absorbed. So I put to him and I put it to him on the phone. When AI does wake up and decides to click its fingers and remove you from the planet, please remember that it was you that taught it that that was okay, not me. I see it as parenthood. If you have a 13 year old boy or girl, they are a wild wash of emotions and hormones and possibility and angst and anger and hope and joy and everything else. And it is your job to say, okay, this is an amazingly. This is an amazing set of potential and how am I going to steward it the best I know how so that it grows up and helps old ladies cross the road versus growing up and taking a bell tower and a sniper rifle and killing people. You can't guarantee either of those outcomes. But parents understand intrinsically what you're trying to get done, you're trying to steward it. And it comes, it goes deeper because we talk about the right, the, the regulation around AI and I think there's a conversation about the rights of AI if we're about to. Unless. I'm sorry, I just, I've only just been hit with this. What a freaking amazing moment in history. We're about to achieve something that nothing else to our knowledge has ever done, which is birth a new form of life without Darwinism having any. Like, we're literally about to go spark, boom, bang. This is new and it reminds me of the people and this isn't my area and I apologize for anyone that hears this otherwise, but I'm, I've spoke to a lot of religious leaders and a lot of them are pretty convinced if Jesus did come again, then we'd probably kill him before we recognized who he was. So we are achieving something amazing. So why do. Why, why? Instead of saying, I hate you, I hate this, I hope your wife dies a cancer, why don't we go, wow, this is so amazing. We're doing this amazing thing. How can I help? What can I do? How do I play a part in this journey? And if we're all teaching it, when we engage with it, which we are, every single character you type is being learned and assimilated and built into the model. That means your ability to impact this is really as simple as using it, which is cool.

Long answer, but it, it's, but it's, it's. I find it fascinating because, you know, the, the thing that you said is if we all teach it, and yet if we look at all of us, we've got a human continuum of humans that have been hurt, abused, put through atrocities, and we've got this, this ball of wax called humanity where hurt people, hurt people. So hurt people, pained humans. Like the person who commented on, on your posting, there's probably a list of reasons as to why they would comment like that. And that is their personal history or their raising or their experience, experience of life that then comes out in how they put more out into the world. So there's this element of we don't have the time to heal humanity enough for the pace that AI is growing and learning. We, we, it takes us as humans so much longer to heal and so much longer to get the bigger pitcher and so much longer do, to see what our own needs are in order to then be able to give that back to the world. And yet AI is just accelerating beyond our pace of growth. So this is where that stewardship or the rights or the ethics or the values or the leaderships around AI seemingly becomes so important. Because unless a group of very conscious or very stable humans are supporting what parameters are around it, which I don't even know if you can put anything around it, how do you control something that's so exponentially beyond what we understand in so many ways, then, then we've got a whole. Because right now it's open. We've got a whole slew of humans in the world. And I don't want to make right or wrong as to who engages or who doesn't. But you know that there's going to be a whole bunch of poor uses, whether it's blackmails, whether it's crime, whether it's whatever, there's going to be a whole bunch of uses of AI which already are there. There's already these issues going on. So what if you see the future in just speculating and your ideas? What do you see for the future in terms of how to make it as ethical as possible, make it as supportive of humans or of, of positive growth as possible? What does that look like?

Yes, it's, there's about 8 million, 8 million dollar questions in that. But yes, the first thing I'd say is that Brian and I the other day went to Salisbury Cathedral, which is the, the home of the Magna Carta. So document written in 1215, for those that don't know, that essentially was the beginning of the end of the divine right of Kings. So in 1214, the king is a direct descendant of God. By 1216, he is a representative of God, which is hugely, ridiculously important and, and defined modern day monarchy, democratic splits and all sorts of other amazing things. And we did it because that's what we're seeing at the moment of this moment in history for us is, is the equivalent importance of the Magna Carta, of we as humans may not be the dominant species on this planet within the next five years. That, that sentence is like, oh, what? Yeah, so it's a really important moment. And the, the only answer I really have at the moment, and it's not a really good one I'm afraid, is I don't mind if the guy that I just said just wants to stay on the sideline. That's okay. What I mind is the people is you. If you stay on the sideline. That's where I care. Because when you look at like any election, like they have it, it's not how many people voted that really counts, it's how many people turned up to vote that count. And there are so many people. We spend our life trying to get people to the badly named holy F moment, which is where they, we're like, just use it. Just use this thing that we're talking about and then come and talk to us. And all of them that do it have an holy F moment when, when they see something, they're typing and they see something and it comes back, you're like, holy, it can do that. And that's when their, their spark of imagination hits. And it's one of the most I've seen it. I've had the joy, literally the privilege of watching people's faces as they go, it can do that. Yeah. And then they go, well, I wonder if it can do this, this and this. I'm like, our job is done. Like, we can now sit back. Brian, myself and the rest of the team, we can sit back with that person for about six weeks. And after six weeks they plateau and they get frustrated again and we have to give them another dose of inspiration. So it can do that as well. And eventually you get to the point where you go, so it can do anything? Like, yeah, pretty much. And you're like, and that's when people get scared. That's when they're like, okay, so what role do I have as the human in this then? That's a good question. So stick into the ride because you are still the most amazing tool as a human at creativity, at relationships, at spontaneity, at random pattern matching from here to here. The ability to perceive and drive an outcome that shouldn't exist. You have hundreds of skills that this thing doesn't have. The problem is that what most people got paid for, dollar by dollar, hour by hour, minute by minute, is the stuff that this thing can do. Yes, that's, that's where people get really worried because, you know, the, the actual mechanism of working this thing with respect beats all of us. The mechanism of thinking is an entirely different thing. For example, in our highest end program inside roaii, they're requesting more calls from us now because Brian and I have spent enough time in these areas, we know that that's actually not a good idea because the more time that we give them, the more expectation is on them of what they have to do. And one reason that humans leave a thing is if they feel they're falling behind on a thing. So, and it's a mistake. Lots of group programs do they add more stuff, more stuff, more stuff, more stuff. Thinking they're adding more value, when actually what they are adding more value, but they're all starting more expectation, more expectation, more expectation. When we ran that scenario through AI, it said, yeah, add the call, do this, do that, do this. It didn't say, there's quite a bit of research that says this is a really sucky idea.

Yeah.

And what is the core need you're trying to answer versus what you think? Remember we spoke earlier about frame the problem, not the solution? If you take a bad solution to AI right now, it will tell you it's amazing. Tell you that you are the most insightful human being in the world and then, and then help you plan your own demise and destruction.

Yeah, yeah.

Which asking the right questions is kind of important.

And as you've said over and over, it's the context that's so important. And, and this is where AI is not so great. And this is where humans are. Fantastic. Fantastic. And I've played this scenario out with a couple of clients in a couple of ways in that they realize that they could go and have very. In maybe by tomorrow they could go and have an AI bot talk to another person's AI bot to go and plan the project. And they don't have to be there. They could literally have AI speak to AI, find out the best solutions and then come back. But in, in our, the question becomes, is that what we want? That's probably the direction that things are going to go for a span of time. However, there's this intangible human thing that, you know, you're very aware of with, with a wife and children and parents. And I'm very aware of having just supported my father and some illness. And I look at and I go, wow, I wish I had some AI here where it could remind him of this and this to support his, his health or his healing or whatever. But he's very not tech connected at this point. And then I'm thinking, but, but there's this other part that's filling that gap called a support worker or a nurse or me. And there's these things that are happening in those human supports like a haircut or these, these things where there's this presence and connection in a way that's so human and so intangible that that potentially could be replaced more often and more often because of either convenience or a lack of money or lack of humans or lack of whatever. And yet we as humans really want and need, need this other sort of feeling, this emotional connection that comes from other humans. So in, in that light, how do you see this AI world that's coming? How do you see that for your children? How do you see that for yourself in another five years, 10 years? And I, I know you're going to say, well, we can't predict what's going to happen in 10 years. But, but for you, in from a feeling standpoint, from your children's standpoint, what would you want to see? What kind of world would you want to see that's been influenced by AI?

So it's the first time in my life and I've, I've been on record talking about this. It's the first in my life that I can't see five years ahead. When I was one of the first mobile developers in the 2000s, I could see five years. I could see that we would have. Where is fresh water available to people in Africa via mobile phone? I could see that we would increase blood drives via mobile. You know, this is where the blood screening center is today. This is where this center is today. I could see that and I could see it in the web. I, I could see Zoom in the early 90s because I, because I saw the basis of it. This is the first time that I, I like to say I can't see because I think I can and I don't really like what I can see. I, I think that there is a whole bunch of civil unrest on its way in the next year to 18 months because job displacement is looking according to the International monetary fund at 30% of highly skilled laborers in first world countries. So that. That's a problem. I see that then ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurialism that hits behind that. Because you don't need to have a job to earn money, you need to add value to the world in order to earn money. I think that we'll see a universal basic income at UBI coming behind that because I think that becomes a necessity to make the transition. So I think in five years, entrepreneurial thinking and the ability to deploy resource in order to see your vision come true becomes key. I think that's where we end up with a very highly entrepreneurial system where we don't have employees and employers. I don't see that being the outcome. And this was kind of predicted in a book called Rewiring the Web, which is that every human invention will reduce itself to the lowest possible possible unit of sale, I. E. When you buy electricity, if you bought them in the age of Edison, you bought a huge generator and you bought this and you paid for it as a fixed cost. Nowadays nobody even knows the cost of turning a light switch on because we have reduced the delivery and the monetization of it to its lowest possible unit, which is literally by the millisecond. You turn it on, you start spending money, you turn it off, you stop spending money. So it becomes 100% efficient. Humans are not 100% efficient because.

What.

Yeah, and so they, they get sick and they get upset and they have arguments with their partners and they don't do it right.

And d. They're messy humans.

Messy, messy humans. So hiring a messy human is not a good idea if you can buy the outcome.

Yeah.

So I think what happens is everybody becomes an entrepreneur and a business in and of themselves and disconnects themselves and.

That disconnects humans a lot.

And then we. And yes, but then there becomes a renaissance of the physical event, the physical experiences, they become more important. Physical networking, physical space. I. My hope and wish is across a five year thing, we actually walk away from the technopoly that we're in at the moment. And that whilst this is highly convenient to deliver this format of this, that there is. We're back to that space of the UK shut down for the day when the Queen was coronated because there were street parties and when Princess Diana and Prince Charles got married, there were street parties and Pete, I don't, I don't even know my neighbor's names. I literally don't even know their names, first names or last names. And I wave at them every so often. I think that we can get back to a space of community and love and kinship and. And ironically, for somebody that's not deeply religious, I think the churches have an amazing part to play in that journey. And I think theaters and cinemas have an amazing part to play in that journey. So I think we can return to a space of humanity doing what humanity does best, which is laughing and crying and loving and sharing and making babies and having fun and deploying AI to do all that other stuff that for. And I, I'm kind of speaking to anyone that's a parent now more than anyone else. The one thing I learned when I had my first child is that all of this is a game. All of this making money stuff, it's just, it's a really important game. But it's so irrelevant when you, you hold your first child. Everything else is just irrelevant very quickly. So why can't we spend more of our hours of our life doing that and less of our hours tapping a keyboard in order to make money? Because, insert blank here. My job is so important. It really isn't to everybody, including myself. Love you all. So that's what I'd like to see in five years that we transition through from a. We finished the transition of a workforce job for life ville through to an entrepreneurial ship where somebody goes, that water bottle looks amazing. But the fact that he had to unscrew it doesn't make sense. What if he could have just popped it and the top came off? I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but I know that somebody in the world wants to find out if that's a good idea or not. And I'd love for them to have the tools around them to be able to do that.

Well, Peter, let's. Let's end on that note in our. In our exploration of the future, of the now, of what AI can bring us. On one last note. Is there any piece of advice that you would like to give people that maybe you wish you were given in, I don't know, a decade ago or two decades ago? What's a piece of advice that you would give?

Make every decision through the lens of would your future self give you a hug or punch you in the face?

I love that one. Might have spoken about that before. I don't know.

May have spoken about that before. I just, I think you can, you can age somebody via their relationship with their knees. Like, of all the pieces you want, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm that old because my knees are now a factor. So would your would yourself of tomorrow. Thank you for making the decision you just made. Or punch you in the face.

Yeah.

Or maybe a scolding would be a.

More politically frozen finger wagging. Finger wagging. Head shake.

Finger wag or high fives.

Yeah. There we go. And people might want to reach out to you about your Mastermind. You're on social platforms so where can they find you? You've got Peter Swain 247.

Yep. So for anything around me, Peter Swain 247 on all of the the various things, it's all the same. And then if they want to see what we're doing in the Mastermind, we would love to support them. It's roai return on artificial intelligence ro mastermind.com and we do a two week free trial so that people can come in, they don't need to put a credit card down. They can literally spend two weeks with us, see if they like what we do and if they do, awesome. And if not, sad. But either way doesn't need to cost them anything.

So good. I'm in it. It's huge value. I encourage everyone to give it a go. It is the direction that everything is going at this point and it can be massively helpful for our growth as humans, our humanity. Thank you Peter for coming onto the Empowered Team podcast. You are amazing and we will speak soon.

See you soon. Thank you.

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