"No One Is Ready for What's Coming" - Tony Robbins on the Brutal Truth of AI

There's no guarantee of this being a smooth transition. I'd say three to 10 years is my guess. But, you know, I don't think all business will be gone or changed at that time period. But the question really is, you know, how do you provide certainty for people? Right? People ask me all the time, how do you provide certainty for people when the external world no longer offers certainty? And I would argue that you don't have to deal with it at all because it's already true. What I mean is there is no external certainty. You know, external certainty is a total illusion. You have a rented certainty because you have a certain business or you have a certain category of a certain income. You have certain relationships. But, you know, a Covid, for example, instantly changed all of that overnight for people. You walk across the street and get hit by a car and, you know, things like this have always been a part of our lives. So I think it's really dispelling the illusion of certainty and finding people and the ability to get that internal certainty. Look, neuroscience is teaching us that, same as AI, our brains are predictive machines. It's constantly trying to predict what's gonna happen and close the gap between what it predicts and what reality is. And when it doesn't match up, that's when that craziness, that anger, that fear shows up. So it's gonna show up on a large scale. So if we're gonna make the transition, I think we have to anticipate what's coming. So when those jobs are disrupted, what will people hang on to? The answer is we have to give them two things first, help them develop an identity as a creator. Here's what I mean by that. Most people that you talk to in daily life are. But we think it's more stressful because we're managers today. We try to manage so much. We were not made to manage our circumstances. We're made to create. When you're managing circumstances, you don't feel any sense of agency. You don't feel like you're in charge. And most human stress comes from the fact that you feel events are controlling you versus you're controlling events. When you become a creator of life on your terms, it doesn't matter what changes in the outside world. Now, there's one other piece you might say practically, like, what skills would somebody need to be able to do well? Because I think about my grandkids and my younger kids and I say, how do I arm them? Not just with money or resources, how to arm them to have self esteem to know they can play the game. And the answer is develop an identity that says, I'm the kind of person that always finds the way. I'm the person that can find meaning, anything and empowering meaning. I know how to use my body to produce certainty, not try to get it from the outside world, which is an illusion. I have an identity on the person that makes it happen. Then there's the skill. There's three skills. If you master these three skills, it doesn't matter. What happens with AI doesn't matter. You'll still be a part of what wins, because in the end, you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone else that uses AI. The skill number one is pattern recognition. When you recognize a pattern, it eliminates fear. But the second skill is pattern utilization. Once you recognize financial patterns, business patterns, patterns of technology, you're not fearful. Once you start to use those patterns, you become powerful. But the third target that I, all my kids, I want them to move towards and constantly reinforcing is pattern creation. You're bringing something to table that's never been there before. And if I study these three skill sets, I'll always be able to learn. And as I learn, I'll be able to master anything life brings me, including AI technology, robotics, nanotechnology, et cetera. I've heard a lot of people say this before. Like, you know, they say for 4,000 years, our identity's been tied to work. What happens when I don't have to work anymore? And it's just not true. For 4,000 years before the Aggregarian transformation of our society. As you said, we're into survival, but really what we were tied to was a tribe. We were tied to connection and contribution. Those are two human needs that have never gone away and are not going to go away. If there's no, quote, work now, I don't know if I buy, there'll be no work for human beings. Personally, I could be dead wrong. But I just. I don't buy that necessary future. Certainly not in the next three, five years of you describing what are the drives that aren't just motivational? What are the drives that are built into all human beings? And I finally discovered what I consider to be the six human needs that drive everything. In other words, whatever people do, they have a reason. There's a million reasons. There's six needs that drive those reasons or those stories, right? The first basic human need is certainty. The need to be able to be comfortable, to avoid pain. Some People get certainty by lowering their expectations. Some people get certainty by trusting in God and saying, there's a higher purpose. I'm going to be guided. Some people get certainty by working out and feeling that certainty in their body. You can get certainty by eating a lot of food. You're all stressed out, eat a lot of food and your stomach fills up and you start to breathe better, right? Because you're full, or you smoke a cigarette, take a breath in and blow it out nice and slow and you feel better. You're killing yourself, but you feel comfortable while you're doing it, right? It's just provide certainty. You can find certainty in positive ways, neutral ways, or negative ways. So we all have different rules, a different map about how to meet that need. But if you were certain every moment of your life, you know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, what someone's going to do, what they're going to say. In the beginning, that feel great. But after a while, you'd be bored out of your mind. Which is why the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, gave us a second need, which is uncertainty. We have a need for uncertainty. We have a need for surprise. So is the goal to be the lukewarm middle? No. The goal is you can meet multiple. Through multiple beliefs or actions or emotions, you can meet multiple needs. The third need is the need for significance. The need to feel unique, to feel special, to feel important. You can get significance by working harder than anybody else, being more generous. You can get significance by beating up on somebody, right? Verbally tearing somebody down, you have the illusion if they go down, you go up. Right? There's so many ways to do it that are positive, negative. The reason we have violence. It's one of the fastest ways to feel significant and certain and have variety. It also meets the fourth need, unfortunately, which is connection and love. Not the love part, but the connection part. Everyone needs connection and love. So the first four needs are the needs of the personality. But the ultimate needs are our spiritual needs. Not religious, but spiritual. And that is everything in life has to grow. Everything grows or it dies. That's not my law. It's the law of the universe. That and everything in the universe. If it doesn't contribute, it's eventually eliminated, right? So we have to contribute. We have to give something. When we contribute of something to give. And that's when you have a spiritual high. That's when people feel fulfilled as opposed to for survival. So I say this because to talk about someone losing their job or their sense of identity or their self worth because they're not doing it through their work anymore. I would be concerned about that if I thought the only way we could meet our needs for significance and certainty would be through work. But look, we've already lived a post work world to some extent. If you go back in our history as humans, right? So there are many ways to meet our needs right now. We have been driven to think of it only in one predictive way for the last couple hundred years. But we've done it before and we can do it again. But the answer to your question is will we as a society do that quick enough? Will everybody make that happen quick enough? I'm afraid to say the answer is no. In my opinion. My biggest concern is if you don't have any work, how do you find meaning? I know you can do it. There's many ways to do it. But we have to educate people and we've got to retool them. There is a way to meet all of our needs. It's going to be a call. And I think what AI is doing is it's a spiritual call. I know that's my view of it. We're going from survival values to spiritual values, from external focus to more internal focus that we're able to share and make the world better. That's the upside of this. But the transition time is going to be painful. And if you look at history, most of those transitions are a five year period, roughly. If you look at every type of major disruption that's happened with technology in the past. I hope it's not like that. I hope we can. Conversations like this like we're having could be stimulative and other people have them at a high level and that people like you and I can try to create as much influence with those who have influence to make that shift. So the way to prep for the future is prep society by giving the ability to have a different psychology about change and figuring out the ways in which we're going to create that transport. What are the most successful people on earth have in common? And my first response in the early days was extraordinary intelligence. But I found there are brilliantly smart people that can't fight their way out of a paper bag in real life. So the number one factor is hunger. The hunger to be more, do more, create more, give more. A hunger that never goes away. As long as that hunger is alive, the world is going to be something that's going to be a beautiful place for you. And all these tools are tools you will use with your agency to create something extraordinary. If you can think of your life in terms of the hero's journey story, it's been taught a million times. It's in every, every culture in the world, and we all know of Joseph Campbell. But I just want to remind people, whatever you're dealing with, technology change, job change, career change, like, everyone is going to experience what the first step is in that hero's journey. Your life seems to be okay, and then something happens. They call it the call to adventure. It doesn't feel like adventure when you lose your job or the government shut you down with COVID And so we experience that extreme stress that people experience. We're all going to experience it. But what happens is most people try to not go on the call. Like, just ignore it. And it only gets worse. As, you know, if you push through those moments, the people that do, they get three things out of it. Number one, they realize how strong they are. And all these other things you're worried about go away because you start realizing, I am so much more than I thought I was. Second, you learn who your real friends are. Not your Facebook friends or whoever you call them. Right? The ones that are there when it's not going well. And third, you get almost an immunity to future challenges. When you go through that cycle, you become more. And you have now something to give. You come home a new person. And as soon as you think it's all over, it happens again. So AI is the call. New technology is the call for us to become more again, to move from survival to spirit, to move from settling to something greater.