No One Is Prepared for What's Coming with AI | Tony Robbins x DOAC

What is the most consequential thing we should be talking about right now?

I think it's AI, the rapid change in technology. And you see the displacement, you know, you got friends just like I do, they let go of like 5,000 customer service agents and now it's done with AI now. And there's certainly no focus on what's happening with these jobs right now. High school students are getting jobs more than college students for the first time in 50 years. We have to look at what this means to our society. We have to anticipate what this means and we've got to retool not just The jobs, but the psychology. If you don't believe it's gonna destroy humanity, then it's gonna liberate us from a lot of labor if you believe that, the ones that promote that concept. If that does happen and we displace this many jobs in this short a period of time, jobs are not just money, jobs are meaning. I'm not trying to be overly dramatic, but if anybody thinks this transition is just gonna be smooth by us doing nothing— I was visiting with President Obama 10 years ago, and it was towards the end of his term there, and I was saying, "Hey, I just—" I said, I gotta talk to you. You know, you inherited a pretty tough economy from the original 2008 explosion breakdown. We lost 8 million jobs. So I said, there's technology coming right now that we can predict is gonna displace more than those 8 million jobs. And I talked to him at that time just about, I said, just take one, like self-driving cars. They're just starting to come out. I said, in the next 10, 12, 13, 14 years, they're gonna become ubiquitous. And I said, there's 8 million truck drivers, Uber drivers, and taxi drivers. Are you doing anything to retool them? I said, because just in the US, just in the US, I said, because if you don't think about this, I'm a business person and I can hire a person to drive a truck only 8 hours a day. I have to pay for the healthcare, which gets more expensive every year, and I can buy a truck that can drive 24 hours a day. My insurance is cheaper because it doesn't make mistakes, and I can depreciate the asset. Am I going to hire anybody? I said, so those jobs going away, that's 8 million, that's one sector. We could look at farming. There's so many industries affected. So it's like you talk about, well, we'll do give people UBI. And okay, I think you might have to because the change is going to happen so rapidly. Like I said, you know, farming— 80% of us were farmers 150 years ago. Now it's 3% and we feed the world. That's a long transition. But you know, the reason it's going to explode even faster is because we're moving from LLMs to now actually studying visually what's happening in the real world. And when robots do that, then the game changes. And just think about this. You and I are having a conversation. I picked up one of your books here and I'm reading through your books. I want to get a feel for who you are and everything else before I came here. I've seen some of your videos, but and then like I really enjoyed it, but I had to go get that. I had to take a couple hours to dig through that. You and I have a conversation. If either one of us learns something, we're a machine. Every machine knows it instantly. You push one button and they have all of that knowledge. There's none of this word transfer. It's just, it's now. So people don't realize what this really means. And when you're learning from the real world, not just LLMs, right now you and I are, our brains are predictive devices. They're predicting what was going to happen next to the best of our ability, and we're trying to close that gap as much as we can, or we get jolted. Well, think how predictively that's going to do to people's heads when all of a sudden their labor is not needed and it's no longer blue-collar labor, which is what people thought it would be. I get to take a look at some of the things that are happening so fast, and I look at all those jobs and I see people in those industries, and quantum is taking— it took over maybe 5 years ago. I've seen the shrink in these Offices from staffs, the guys who were making $5 million, $10 million a year, they're now unemployed. Right? It's not just the blue-collar worker, it's everyone. We've gotta retool those people now, or there's 10 years to gear them up, because these are not people that are gonna do it on their own, and they're gonna be shocked. The shock to their system, the loss of dignity, of being in control, agency of their own life, of their own job, of their own direction, is huge. And if you go back to like the Luddites, you know, you're from the UK, right? You must know your history there. 1800s, you know, mercantile. They come up with these machines, and how do people react? And by the way, this story is the same across history. We have a radical change like this, all these people are displaced, and what do they do? They rioted. They took hammers and they destroyed those machines. They threatened to kill the owners of those companies, and some were shot and killed. They blew up and firebombed places. And what did the UK, uh, you know, do about this? They passed a law in the first year of this, these Luddites, saying You destroy machine, it's capital punishment. They hung people because they couldn't have them destroy the growth of the economy, right? And guess what? 15 years later, the same thing happened again with the thrashers, thrasher machines that were used for wheat, and they lost all the jobs and the people and the government overreacted. And the problem is, as I mentioned to you before, I think the leverage is not in favor of us taking care of society. The leverage is the carrot and the stick. The carrot is I can make a trillion dollars if I have the right LLM, or, you know, they get to artificial general intelligence, who knows. And if we don't do it, China's gonna do it. That's the stick. And then they're gonna run the world. So there's no focus on safety virtually, as you well know. And there's certainly no focus on what's happening with these jobs. So we have to look at what this means to our society. We have to anticipate what this means, and we've gotta retool not just the jobs, but the psychology. Because people talk about a post-work world. You hear people talk about this all the time, Elon, people like that. They— labor's gonna like electricity. You just take it for granted. It's so cheap. It's so easy. Well, if that's true, and he's talking 3 to 5 years, and a lot of people say Elon's early. He usually is, uh, in his predictions. But Ray Kurzweil is a good friend of mine. He's the most accurate predictor of technology in history, and he's been saying 2029 for almost 20 years. Is when you have artificial general intelligence. If you go to Hinton, I think you've interviewed Hinton, haven't you? Right? So he's the longest, he's saying 2030 to 2040. He's given us a little more room. In the next 3 to 10 years, this is going to happen. How are we prepared for this? And so this is the questions I'm trying to bring up to people that have influence to say, if you're in business, you got to take a look at this. If you're in government, you can take a look at this. And so I just got selected to be on the federal advisory committee for the president and for Health and Human Services. I'm on the mental health side, and I'm hoping to use that position to bring more of government's focus into this category as well, because it's got to be addressed. So we're living in a crazy world where the opportunity is greater than any time in history for us to be creators. We were created, we're meant to create, and we've got tools to create like never before. But we're going to have to make sure that as we're doing that, we've got some parameters around safety and some parameters about what does it do to society. And I don't have the perfect answers for it, but I do know one thing. Retooling is the answer. And I don't believe most people will be replaced by an AI. They'll be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI.

Yeah. One of the things you said that really blew my mind when I watched a video from Boston Dynamics this week where they, the guy explained how these robots are gonna learn and he goes, there's two ways. One way is we're gonna get our factory workers to wear a suit and every time the factory worker does something, the, the, all the robots are gonna learn that thing. And the other thing is, he said, is if one of our robots learns something, whether it's how to pick up a book or how to make an omelette, every robot learns it instantaneously. And my mind was like, wow. That is— I personally don't know where this leaves us. So that's kind of—

Well, neither do I, but there's certain things you know it's leading us towards. You know it's gonna lead us to a great deal of violence because there are gonna be people, like have always happened when technology displaces them, only this is gonna be a global event across multiple areas. It's not just drivers of Ubers and truck drivers, if we don't get our act together and have a plan, there's gonna be violence for some period of time. There'll be, there's that grief period of loss that people go through when something jars them that much. And some people don't return from that grief. And some people are gonna take this technology and they're gonna go off. It's already happening now even without AI. There are more males at home, 25 to 35, living at home with their family, not working, than any time in human history, including the Depression, right? There are, I think it's 25%, or I think it was 30%, I forgot the number, just saw it recently, of young men have never approached a woman to ask her out for a date. They play video games all day long, their mom does their laundry, and they order Uber Eats. This is a mass number of people. That's just the technology of getting somebody gamified. Imagine with AI. So some people are going to go live there, and some people are going to go the Star Trek route and say, I'm going to figure out what makes human existence be here? But it's not hard to figure out the majority are not going to go the Star Trek route. And so we've got to have a bridge because of the time compression. If this was 100 years to do it, we could adjust. There will be more jobs, there'll be new jobs, there'll be new time. But it's the time frame that I'm most concerned about. So when you ask me what I'm concerned about, that's what I'm concerned about, because it creates suffering, and it's something that we can predict is going to create suffering. And yet I see very few people in positions of influence and power doing much about it.

So on an individual level, if you were an 18-year-old Tony Robbins, what would you be doing at this moment? What would you be focusing on work-wise? How would you be designing your life for such a world?

I have 5 kids and 5 grandkids, right? So I have a 52-year-old daughter and I have a— thanks to COVID— a 4-year-old daughter. So COVID was good to me, I was home. So, um, I look at my I look at my, especially my grandkids and my daughter, and I say they're entering a world that none of us have known before. And so how do I arm them for it? And the answer is a couple of things. Number one, I have to teach them not to do what most people in the world do. Most people you talk to of any, even quote successful people and whatever that means, they're stressed all the time. Stress. I'm so stressed. You hear people talk about stress all the time. It's like they argue about who's more stressed. And I look at that and go, why are they stressed? And the answer is because they're managing their life. We're not made to manage circumstances. We're made to create. We were created by something. Call it your creator, call it the universe, call it God, whatever you want to call it. And we were made to create. And when we create, we're alive. When we just try to maintain or manage or hold on to something, if we're just caught up in making a living instead of designing a life, life is a bitch. And that's why so many people have so many challenges. So I'm teaching my kids to be creators, and I teach them the second piece, the most important thing I believe that's made me successful, and anyone I've ever interviewed. You interviewed a million people, see if you agree or disagree with me. The most important skills in life now are the ones that allow you to learn more rapidly. If you learn rapidly, you can win no matter what happens with the technology. And what are those 3 skills? Number 1, the skill of pattern recognition. When you can recognize patterns, you eliminate fear. Fear comes from, this has never happened before, I don't know what this is, chaos. Like I hear people all the time talk about how we've never been this place politically, we're here in America, we're the most, we're gonna have a civil war. They don't do any history whatsoever. I have these two placards that I have, 'cause back then they didn't have ads, right? They had placards. And one is from Thomas Jefferson talking about Adams and one from Adams about Jefferson. And they said stuff that made Republicans and Democrats look like they're nice to each other. I mean, it's just unbelievable the stuff they said. This is a cycle. And so when you recognize a pattern, it gives you power, potential power at least. The first power is, you know, not afraid anymore. You go, no, this is not something that's never happened. This is not something that's gonna— I can see this. I can see how this has been dealt with. What took us from living in fear, from being hunter-gatherers or trying to survive every day, didn't know if we're gonna survive every day, to being able to stay in one place? What pattern recognition?

I was gonna say the seasons, but—

You got it! Really? That's it, the seasons. I figured you'd get it. The seasons, because before that, you could do the right thing at the wrong time and you get pain. And 3 of the 4 seasons are the wrong time. So once we figured out, oh my God, if I plant in the spring and I take care of it through the hot summer, I get this big reaping. And if I hang on to some of it to make it through the winter, I can live here. I don't have to worry. All my fear disappears. There's one more. There's seasons of history, and your season of history shapes how you shape your life.