Ruben Hassid: Why Taste Is the Only Skill Left

So for those of you that are joining us, welcome. This is our show, Sacred Business Stories, and this is really just our weekly Substack Live where we have an honest conversation about what it looks like to build a business that aligns with truth. And yeah, we're super excited and honored that Ruben— and is it Hassid or Hassid? I want to make sure. I meant to ask you that before we— how do we say this right?

Everyone's saying it wrong, and it's okay. I just got used to it now. Hassid. In English, it's Hassid. In Hebrew, you say Hassid. French say it differently. I'm from everywhere, so everyone do it wrong, and that's okay. It's Hassid.

Hassid. Yeah. So Reuben Hassid, and I feel like in many ways, probably here at Substack, you don't really need any introduction at this point, but for those of you that aren't familiar with his work, he's really what I would consider one of the most trusted voices that's helping everyday people kind of understand and use AI. And we're going to let him tell a story about how he got here. But yeah, he's— yeah, he's brought— I'm a member actually of your paid subscription here on Substack, and I just feel like you just bring this, yeah, just beautiful lens of simplicity to the way you teach and even the way that you've shared your prompts. I'm not sure, but I feel like maybe you were one of the first to share in that way. And so a lot of people since then have kind of taken on that style. But yeah, you've grown impressively. I know you started on LinkedIn. You have something like, yes, 700,000 followers there, 230-something over here. And so, yeah, it's just really, really impressive. And, uh, you know, his tagline is, master AI before it masters you. And so, yeah, we have some interesting questions we'd like to explore just based on kind of the space that we, uh, we talk about in this intersection of business and spirituality and meaning. And so, yeah, we're really happy to have you here. And, and, um, yeah, thank you for being here.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Excited.

Yes.

Excited about the question. Excited about the—

Yeah, I'm very excited to have you as well. And I just want to like remind people like why we do the Sacred Business Stories and it's, uh, for pure inspiration, right? Like people see where you are, but they don't know the path that took you here. And we like to explore like a little bit of like the behind the scenes and, you know, like we call like a sacred business, like a combination of all of who you are. So you have your certifications, you have your diplomas, or you have your learning life. You have experiences and failures or victories and challenges. And then when you bring this all together and find a way like to serve people, you know, like that's what we call like a sacred business. So thank you so much for being here. I'm curious to explore this AI world more. I'm not as passionate about it as you and Phil, but you know, I'm learning and getting there, but I follow your content and it's very, very helpful for me and just your approach. Uh, so thanks for being here. And I just want to invite people, like, with this new desktop way, it's easier to read questions. So if you guys are listening and if you want to participate and ask questions, we're going to do our best to read them and get, uh, Revan to, to respond that. So yeah, like, yeah, just to, yeah, there we go. You can see it.

Perfect. Yeah, yeah, I can see it. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty cool. About what you said, it's funny because I, I have this controversial take on how you, someone should handle his personal brand because my brand is kind of me, uh, where you should not be personal. And then everyone's like, ah, but everyone needs to know your story and everything and what you eat for breakfast. So actually very few people know like where I'm from or, or, or what was my path until now because I don't find it relevant. For my everyday content and I'm totally okay with that. I don't want to change that. It works and I'm happy with it and this is my philosophy of content. But in those moments, like now, it's usually a moment where I can actually share a little bit more about the path, as you said.

Yeah. Well, that's extra cool if you're willing to go there with us because it might be very— people might be quite curious if you haven't taken them there too much in the past. So yeah, I mean, if you're willing, I mean, it's pretty open-ended, but just we'd I'd love to kind of hear, you know, beyond what you've shared in your about page, and we can talk about that too, but just like how you got from A to Z, where you started and, you know, whatever feels relevant to you.

So, wow, that was a broad question. It feels like it's funny if you ask my brothers and sister, I'm the fourth one of four siblings. None of them know what I do for a living, really. It's been 3 years.

They're like, welcome to the club. Me too.

We don't know really. I mean, they have easy jobs. Easy, they're impressive, way more than me. Uh, way more than me. The first one is a quantitative trader. Uh, hard to explain as well. The, my sister is a gastroenterologist, uh, doctor, and my brother is a dentist. So straightforward, you know, you have problem with your stomach, your teeth. Uh, you want to do trading? Okay. What? What am I doing really? So they don't really know, but how I got there, I guess, is, um, I, I, the, the, you know, that, that Steve Jobs speech that everyone knows, uh, where he's in Stanford. And if you didn't, if you didn't watch it, you should really watch it. I watch it every year. He's the, it's the commencement speech, you know, every year they bring someone and they do the speech in front of everyone. And one of the One part of his speech is you can connect the dots, but only backwards. So once you're somewhere, something makes sense 10, 15, 20 years ago. I'm 28 today, about to be 29, uh, in like a few weeks. And 20 years ago, I, before Facebook, before Reddit, I was on a video game forum because I was obsessed as a 9-year-old, uh, about a video game called Guild Wars. And basically you can make recipes of how your character should behave before going to war. Let's call it that way. Okay. It was an open-ended world with monsters and quests and everything you can imagine. And a small part of the game was before going to war, you need to select, you need to make a choice on how you want your character to behave. Um, once you go to war, but the thing is. The devs 20 years ago were crazy. So you had almost an infinite amount of options, but you had to select only 8 competencies. Okay. Infinite, but only 8 before starting. And kids, Ruben was like, I need to figure out the best way to do it. I actually, this is the game now. Like the game is no longer eating monsters. I don't care about the quest and everything. I want to know what's the best way to do it. That was before Excel file and everything. I had sticker notes. On my family computer making crazy noise. And I had, I could play 30 minutes and then my brother could play 30 minutes. But the 30 minutes I was playing, I was not playing the game. I was just testing what I was doing. And then I was writing blogs in French, 9-year-old French, on what I was doing. But the thing is, I had an audience of like 2 people in that forum. And the English forum had so many people. I was like, yo. Maybe I should learn English, you know, as a Frenchy, maybe I should learn English. So I started learning English and I listened to the Arctic Monkeys, watched some comedy clubs, and I was writing blogs on this video game for 5 years, like way too long. My brother thought I was crazy not to play the game, but writing blogs on playing the game instead of playing the game. Um, I loved it. I really loved it. And I think when you connect the dots, it makes so much sense today. Um, even in the music industry, I started a music label when I was 18, did this for 7 years. Most of my job was really curating and sharing what I liked, kind of like a tastemaker. And I liked it. I did this for 7 years. And today I feel like this is also what I'm doing. Uh, I still have the hat of a scientist-ish, as in I'm like testing potion and most of it doesn't work. And I don't show it to you, but as soon as it works, I'm like, hey, that would make a good article. And then I'm sharing it and hopefully you can create the recipe at home.

I love it how it's just, um, like your path was very playful, right? You were just following like what brings you joy in a way, like with the video game. And then you're just like, yeah, now I'm going to just share this. And, um, there's, um, like a sense of lightness to it that I really appreciate.

Yeah.

When you, when you, uh, when, so you, when you started doing this AI thing, um, did you have the kind of intention from day one that you wanted to kind of create this, or was it you were just experimenting similar to the video game? Like, what was the genesis of—

Yeah, yeah. I know that it's so cliché, people being like, oh, I just stumbled upon tires and all of a sudden I'm the biggest sellers of tires in the Midwest. Like, what? But in my case, I can explain. I was in Berlin in 2022. I was a ghostwriter for a financial analyst. Uh, so I was writing content all day. Um, and I partnered up with Nicolas Chéron. And the problem is I needed to hire people if I wanted to do more stuff. But I was 25. I was like, I don't want to hire people. It's annoying. Uh, I don't want to deal with people. So, um, so I started using Jasper and it sucked. Then I saw GPT-1 in February 2019 before, and it sucked. It was bad. Okay. It was like very slow and just some nerds were making poems with it. I was like, oh, look, it's an AI making poems. It wasn't good. But November 30th, 2022. I'm at Motion Lab, which is a coworking space in Berlin. Okay. 25-year-old ghostwriter, just writing briefs to designers and writing stuff and trying to do as good as you can. And then I'm testing that thing that goes on Twitter and got a million users in a day. And I'm like, that GPT thing, I remember using it 2 years. It wasn't that crazy. It was fine. 3 years ago. So I started using it and I was like, whoa, that. It's weird because I prompted it badly, it was bad, and then I prompted it a little better and it got a little better. Okay. So then let's find out how to get better at it. So I just searched for it and I realized that there was nothing like, no, there was a lot of things on how to get better on GPT. Everything was technical. Python, JSON. NLP, machine learning. Do you have a PhD in XYZ? No. Uh, read those papers on chain of thought, tree of thought, few-shot prompting, one-shot prompting. And then you read the paper and you're like, oh, they just used weird words for something that is very simple. One-shot prompting sounds crazy, huh? It's just, can you give one example before asking the things you want? And few-shot prompting is, can you give a few examples before getting the stuff you want? Wasn't crazy science, right? So I was reading crazy papers, which were crazy. And then I was just extracting the, like, like the essence of like, okay, chain of thoughts is just give it steps. It works better. Step 1, 2, 3. Instead of saying, write an article, say step 1, let's map out the outline. Step 2, let's write the heading. Step 3, let's write the article. And you'll get better results. So I put everything together for myself because I was trying to make sense of this thing for myself. And on December 7th, so a week after, I made a post on LinkedIn and I was like, hey, I played with that thing. This is what I discovered. And I went to sleep. and I woke up, a million views. I was like, okay, all right. So I guess I helped a lot of people on that one. And then I just could have made a course or stuff like that. I had a job. I didn't want to do anything. I was like, hey, in the comment section, I was like, hey, what do you guys need? Because I'm trying to help myself, but maybe you guys have even better ideas. And then people started asking me, like, help me with this, this, this, and that. So I just made the content. And, uh, 3 months after, I grew very fast to 100,000 followers. And then I was like, okay, maybe I should go full-time this time. I moved from Berlin to Tel Aviv. Um, and here we are today with like 500 million views on LinkedIn, or I don't remember now because it's been 3 years. Probably a bit more having a lot of fun doing it. But in the end, it's kind of like the same, as in I'm still testing stuff to help myself. And as soon as it is very useful and not obvious, something I can actually teach you that is new, then it's worth an article or a post.

I love that. Yeah. And yeah, I remember Jasper. I was probably using Jasper around the same time you were, and it was, it was pretty bad. I don't think I made the jump over to, uh, ChatGPT quite as early, but I was playing with all those like early copywriting tools and it was, it was an interesting time. And then all of a sudden it just blew up and yeah, it's been, it's been wild.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it feels like to me that, yeah, I mean, so pretty quick, pretty quick shift to recognizing you had something that was worth something and that you should make the shift to do this full time. But it feels that you're really oriented from that place of of service and kind of, and that's one of the, you know, the beauties of probably having the job. You weren't like feeling any sort of pressure to show up or perform or be anything other than you were not. You were just kind of aligning your own creative exploration and passion with what people were asking for. And—

Amen to all of that. When someone's like, I'm going to make a personal brand, but I need to make money fast, I'm like, ooh. It's like, it's going to be tough. You're going to make decisions that won't make it good. Um, it's like, there's this article on Twitter that I made my entire team, I made them read it. I'm like, you have, you guys have to read it. Just forget about the money. And the too long didn't read is the more you forget about making money, the more money you make. Uh, because when you're focused on making the money, then you just make decisions that hopefully makes a bit of money, but usually when you try to escape velocity, doesn't happen when you focus on the money. It happens when you focus on something else that you try to do exceptionally well. Um, so it's very true for personal branding as well. And I know it's easy to say it once you reached a certain point, but I'm not even the only one saying that. Justin Welsh also explained it very well. If you want to be a solopreneur, Uh, kudos to you. That's awesome. You're right. Um, but if you want to quit your job right now and do it, you're going to have so much pressure. I'm not even talking about, do you have husband or wife and kids? I'm even putting this to the side. Um, it, it, it, the amount of pressure you're going to have is too much to bear to then try to do something that you don't know when it's going to work because you need to, you know, figure it out. And the easier way, or at least, I know it's not easy. It's, it's the more obvious way to do it. The better way to me is you have a job and you do it on top of it. And if you cannot handle it, then you could probably not handle it just that and trying to make money anyway. So do the two of them and eventually you'll feel like the second one just makes more sense.

Yeah, I really, really appreciate you saying that and being so honest because there's so much noise out there and so much of this marketing mythology around kind of the opposite of that. And it's something I'm actually very passionate about. And if someone comes to us for support, I'm always like stress testing kind of like where their mindset and their expectations are around this. And, you know, I always say like, hey, if you can't go 12 to 18 months minimum before you start seeing the signs of something, that might even be short. I, you know, I have another mentor who likes to talk about the 1,000-day rule, which I really like. And to me, these are much more realistic expectations. And I never want to be the person that stands in front of someone's dream and says, hey, maybe you're not going to be the next Ruben that puts the first post out there, gets a million views in one night.

But it's still, this is not the, I mean, one night is not the normal. If you think about it, I started a label when I was 18. So was it one night?

Yeah, the hidden competency, right? Of like a lot of other things that probably stacked up to give you a certain skill set.

And, and, and obviously people don't like to hear that because they feel so unique, which is fine. Uh, and, and, and as you said, I want them to feel unique. Um, and it's true. I do believe that people have the potential always. I've never met someone like you could never do it. Um, but mathematically, very few are going to make it. So, um, it's like, yeah. I just wish, I wonder if there is any case of someone doing the two at the same time and doing it well and then not succeeding. You see, like, then you should just go for that. It's just the obvious choice. And even before I started being a ghostwriter for the Financial Analyst, Nicholas, I had a job before that. And that's the only job I had because when I was 18, I had a label, music label until I was 24. Then I had a music label and at the same time a job at Trade Republic. It's a fintech in Berlin. And then I transitioned to having the job at Trade Republic and being a ghostwriter to only being a ghostwriter and then writing for myself to, I think this is working, we should just do that now. So that was a long transition and Everyone who's like, no, I, if I don't, if I don't go all in, it's not gonna work out for me. I'm like, if you're already thinking that way, maybe it's not gonna work out. Yeah.

I, I really like the way you said it because like you said something like, if you can't do both, like probably you won't be able to do the other one alone. And sometimes I, like, we need to ask the question, like, how much do we truly want that other thing? Right? Because. Sometimes like it requires sacrifice. Like if you're doing both, you probably don't have as much time to whatever, watch TV or spend doing other stuff. But then how much do you want that other thing is actually what's going to keep you like with both. And then eventually like having all the energy to carry that other one forward in a powerful way. But if you can't do sacrifice with like the minimal stuff that you're doing right now, maybe, you know, um, it's, it's not for you or there's something else that you're not seeing it. So I, I really appreciate that. Yeah, I'm curious because I really like your, how would I say, like your motto, like, uh, master AI before it masters you. Yeah. And, um, I think it could trigger a little bit of like anxiety if I'm connected to like, oh, like how AI is going to master me and then, you know, triggering anxiety.

I know I trigger anxiety.

So what is like, what is the What?

Like I said, it's, I pled guilty in my about section. I'm like, I know I'm, I'm, I, it's, it's triggering the, I'm going to be replaced. Uh, which, which I don't like that debate who will be replaced. Uh, it's, it's, it's fine to have it and I don't want to be delusional neither. It's okay to have it, but why master AI before it masters you? Actually, when I wrote it, which was 3 years ago, and my philosophy today didn't change, still the same. Master AI before it masters you. Why? AI isn't good. It is average. So why is it average? Let me give you an example. Okay. We are pre-ChatGPT era. Okay. You guys have a wonderful Substack, but you're going on a holiday. So you need to pay for someone to write an article, something you would never do, but it's pre-ChatGPT era. No one knows, and I'm the best somehow. So you call me, you say, Ruben, can we pay you for 2,000 words? That was the job of many people. Like so many people, just like copywriting, you know, and you would give me brand guidelines and everything, SEO words that I have to put if you want. Um, and then I would write something and, and, and maybe I was pretty okay at it. It was pre-ChatGPT era and with the high quality and you pay me $1,000 for the article. Thank you very much. Post-ChatGPT era, it's the same article. Your vision on it is completely different. You'd be like, this is just some, this is just some words. Like, why is it so special? Is it any good? All of a sudden, the same work doesn't have any of the same weights. So, but is the ChatGPT article any good if I just prompt it like very broadly? Not so much. It's actually average. but the average is so commoditized that it's much better than the one I made before ChatGPT. So all of a sudden I actually have to be an exceptional writer with taste. And the fact that I use or not AI, you won't really care. I use AI for my newsletter. I don't think people care. They don't care. I'm even super honest about how I'm doing it. I literally have screen recording on how I'm doing it. The only difference is that when I'm screen recording it and sharing it, people are like, oh, but you take so long when you use it. I'm like, yes, I use it to do much more to actually, I spend so much time giving my taste to AI. I give so much time to edit and shape the direction where I'm going with AI, just like, you know, the CEO that is super annoying and keeps pivoting. Uh, but the thing with AI is that I can keep pivoting on an article, for example. No one's gonna complain. I don't have to convince anyone. I'm like, you know what? Fuck this. We go, we, I, I said left, we go right now. So, um, what I'm trying to say, master AI before it masters you, I really mean master AI before you, you, you are just average, if not below average. Not because you're gonna be replaced, but because Why should I pay for your copywriting skill if this is so easy to generate any article? You really need to ask yourself, what is so unique about my vision on doing something? Could be accounting, it could be as a lawyer, it could be, um, um, as a content writer. Um, if, for example, if I was a lawyer, uh, there are some stuff that you cannot automate. My lawyer is having lunch with me. You know, my lawyer can, uh, hire people that uses an AI that makes them super fast at replying at any one of my questions or my problems. And all of a sudden the service is really high. So the quality of service, the humanity of the service, having lunch and stuff like this, maybe is the defining taste. But if the lawyer keeps working pre-ChatGPT era, and thinks I'm going to pay $10,000 for a contract that can just prompt in a few, a few lines, maybe it should master AI before it masters him, because that's pretty simple. It's just contract templates. So this is really the point. And it's funny because an hour ago, I'm not making this up, an hour ago I published an article and the title is, um, on, on Substack. I am just a text file. Uh, the reason why is because I spent 2 hours, uh, answering questions to Claude, which is an AI, after like a pretty good prompt on ask me all of those questions. And we created something that is like a genie in a bottle of most of my opinion, most of my tastes, uh, boundaries, how I write, what I would never say. Like I go very deep. It's not even a prompt. It's like the Bible of Ruben's content and opinion on most of the AI tools as of today, January 2026. And that file, if you upload it on any AI in their project, it's a markdown. So it's pretty light. It's just, uh, 800 or 1,000 lines of text. It's pretty light. All of a sudden they behave kind of like me. I have to say, uh, they reply kind of like me, sometimes even blunt and direct as I am with my little brackets, with the little jokes inside, because I like to do that. Um, so it's a Master AI Before It Masters You is also a quest on, wow, I need to shape my taste even more and I need to steer the wheel of AI because I want to be ahead of it. And I do think. That human, some humans will be ahead of it.

Yeah, I love this because I feel like it's just calling us all forward into higher levels of creativity and expression. And, you know, whereas maybe there was a pathway forward where that was optional, I'm not so sure that that's the case going forward. And so, so yeah, I'm totally with you with, with all of that. I had a question. It's, it's related but, but not, you know, something I've been seeing with our clients, which is very interesting to see as it evolves. And I'm curious your thoughts on this is like now with AI and like infinite potential in a sense, like I can sit down and it's like I could do almost do anything and I can point my attention or my consciousness at anything and start to kind of create. But then I, I'm seeing more and more clients that come to us that they're just like in this infinite spiral of like decision power ability. And so, so I feel like, yeah, this is like the number one skill now, which is like once you have some level of baseline mastery over how to work with the tools, it's like actually how to start to train yourself to discern where to point your attention. And, you know, pre-AI, I feel like attention and focus with the internet was already a massive problem. So I feel like this is actually even exacerbated. And so yeah, I'm just curious like what you see around this.

You know, you— if you guys didn't follow what's going on, like I'm not technical, and this is my strengths. I don't code, and this is why I can talk to people who don't code. But even if I don't code, I know very well what's going on in the coding ecosystem around it. Because everything that happens in the coding ecosystem usually happens a few months before us. And basically everyone knows that AI is pretty good at coding and every AI lab is trying to solve coding. Okay. And for the past 2 years, you had companies like Cursor, a 2-year company, 3-year company, $20 billion company, and then a bunch of other, uh, Cloud Code, uh, uh, Google Antigravity, uh, OpenAI Codex, basically trying to help devs to code better and faster. End of December 2025, Cloud Code has Opus 4.5 and Thinking inside their IDE. Long story short, they made a technology that is 10 years ahead everything that was helpful to code before. So since now a month, it's a little bit less than a month, you have hundreds of thousands of engineers having mental breakdown on Twitter, literally being like, I can code anything. but I don't know what to code. Yeah. Which is, and, and they realize, fuck, I used to be paid to code. Um, and now I realize like, because they thought, you know, uh, almost pretentiously, not all of them, some of them, and they were open about it, which I love. They were pretentious enough to be like, if only I could have the idea and code, but because coding takes so much time. I'm coding for someone else, right? Because coding takes months. Now coding doesn't take weeks, it takes hours. And all of a sudden they're like, okay, I actually need an idea. I, I, maybe I need to talk to customers and, and know their, like, their problem. And maybe I need to know a little bit about marketing. Um, some people even go as far as saying the future is just project manager, as in not today's project manager, but like the philosophy of project management, which is, uh, you know where you need to go. You have the vision of the goal and you have the steps to get there. And then you can orchestrate multiple AI to get there with your tastes. Again, because the AI is not gonna figure out how to make it $10,000, but a project manager that has a vision, that figured out pain points, and has a funnel and wants to, uh, dial down on a marketing channel, uh, then he could orchestrate multiple AIs to help him. Um, but yes, to your point, decision paralysis is hitting everyone. Engineers, marketers, they're like, whoa, I can do everything. What should I do? Um, in, in this case, um, I always say turn off the news. On AI, um, um, I mean, I made my newsletter around the fact that it's not about news. Um, um, I, I, I don't care about news. Like, I care about how to do something today. Like, how to do something today. You don't have to read my newsletter. This is not the point. My point is, pick something you want to do. Um, um, something easy enough. Pick one AI to do it. Maybe check for 15 minutes what is the best to do that. don't go into SEO articles, try to get some source of truth that will help you out. Um, and even if you're wrong, this is fine. And then play with it as a kid. And this is why in my newsletter, the hero you'll see on all of my, um, article, the COVID it's a kid because I think people need to get back to their kid self a little, just a little so that they can play with it. And then they realize, oh, there's this mechanism and actually I can do this. And then you go down the rabbit hole. You don't go down the rabbit hole of being a professional tennis player if you didn't hit the ball for 10 minutes with your friends, having a beer and having fun. You know what I mean? Don't drink alcohol, never. But, uh, but what I mean really is have some fun. Instead of like, I need to be the number one at tennis in the world right now. Otherwise I will die. No, it's no, you need to play with it. Have some satisfaction. We're monkeys. So we need some rewards.

Okay.

We need some carrots and then we get the carrots and then we want a bigger carrot. And then we're like, oh, maybe we can get like a whole pie. Yes. So pick one thing, do it as a kid, as a game, go down the rabbit hole. You don't have to master everything. This is fine. Mastering one thing is already good enough. Yeah.

I love this. There's so much wisdom and there's like so much wisdom in everything that is shared here. And I, it's kind of like a little bit of the, what I see for AI and I see as a huge opportunity. And sometimes I tend to think that's kind of like inviting us to go back and being human, right? Because being human is not about the repetition of like, going behind a machine, a computer or whatever it is, and just like pressing something. And right now, like all of those things can be replaceable. And then the only thing is like the curiosity of like, how can I solve a real problem in life? And I, now I need to go back and interact with people. Now I need to ask myself, like what you call like your taste, like what is in you that there's nowhere else to be found that now you need to be in touch, like I need to fascinating what you said about the engineers. Like, yeah, now you can create it all, but then what do you want to create? And we lost touch with our own creative power. And I think that era right now, like moving forward is like, either you step up as a creator in terms of like, whatever you want to create for yourself, like it doesn't need to be online only, or like the repetition, it's, it's just not there, but it's kind of like rescuing ourselves from not being human first. So long. Um, I would love to hear more about that, you know, your thoughts around that.

I, I, it's funny what exactly what you said, which was something that I said before that was controversial a little. I remember being on stage and, and there was a guy who was heckling me, uh, as a keynote speaker. I was in at VidCon in, in Los Angeles and someone was like, yeah, we're gonna lose our humanity with AI and this is bullshit. And I was like, okay, I actually think AI will force us to be more human.

Um, that's my— yeah.

And, and, and again, I'm not saying all hail AI, everything is awesome with AI. I can list you a thousand things that is terrible about AI, just like I can list a thousand bad things about the internet. And technically right now we are on the internet and I don't think we're doing something wrong. Um, it's actually pretty cool. Brazil, Tel Aviv, tons of people from everywhere in the world. This is cool. Um, So the same with AI, but, but with AI, what I was trying to say on stage, and I think what you rightfully said, is we'll be forced to be more human because we'll be forced to be pushed to our boundaries of like, okay, so writing stuff, making Excel files, doing accounting right, uh, is pretty much solved, uh, because turns out that it was just like some boxes to fill correctly. Now, could we go, could we go a little bit deeper? Like, what could we do better? And the same happened in history, by the way. Um, you check the 1900s, we only have statistics in the US, but I'm pretty sure it was true everywhere else in the world. 90% of the people in the 1900s were making food. So you had people farming, you had people handling the animals that helped farming, and you had people doing the logistics. This is before the car. So you had to move stuff around to bring the food from one place to another. So people were making food. 90% of the population was making food or farming or doing the logistics. Um, we didn't wake up in the 1900s being like, You know what? We should go to the moon with electricity, but actually making a computer with that electricity, which is kind of like the steam machine, but just bear with me a little. And then once we do electricity and computer, maybe Netflix and Amazon. We, we've, no one had those ideas. It was actually even insane to think about this. We didn't have the bandwidth to think about that. We could only think about horses, cows, uh, um, is the winter is going to be hard or not, like stuff like this, you know, I'm just guessing, but like probably true. Yeah. Some people might have been like, hey, can we go to the moon? But it was not even realistic. Um, and I think the same is going to happen with AI. It's like, oh, now we have more time to more opportunities to do something more human. Um, and this is why health is huge, longevity, events, having real human experience. I think all of that is going to be very big industries that has nothing to do with what I'm writing about every day. But, but still, like, it's like, oh, now we have more time to do this and this and that. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's, um, yeah, it's so true. I feel, I totally feel it's bringing us back. To our humanity. And I really love what you said earlier too about this, like, playfulness. Like, this is how I view AI and like, and I think more people, like, I almost want to see, like, can I break my brain sometimes? Like, when I'm using AI and like, and then I'll do like, like, I'll tell you one of my favorite prompts I did. And I think Carolina thought I was crazy, but it was like the most fun. And it kind of reminds me of my gamer era too. I basically, I think I was working through one of our sales pages and I basically made up this crazy scenario. I was like, Hey, like, I want to get all of the world's most, like, enlightened spiritual gurus in a room. Let's get Ram Dass. Let's get Eckhart Tolle. Let's get Michael Singer. Let's get all these guys. Let's get 10 of them. And then I want, like, the most hardcore, like, direct response copywriters out there. Let's get Frank Kern. Let's get Russell Brunson. Let's get all these guys. We're going to lock them in a room. And AI, I want you to, like, simulate a full week of them having this one debatable question. And what happens is they go back and forth eating pizza and they have to arrive to one. They, they, here's, I gave them a bunch of choices. So like, I want to actually, and what I wanted to do, I was like, I actually want to follow the narration of how they have a mental thought process as they debate this from both sides, having to get to one ultimate decision on what we should do with this thing. And it was like the most fascinating conversation and it was just like so fun. And like, and that's, you know, that's what excites me about AI the most is the ability to like go to these places that you just never even fathom, you know, like, like that would just never happen in, in, in real life, you know, and yeah, it's just, you know, Steve Jobs predicted it.

I mean, he didn't predict ChatGPT. He had no idea, but he said one day, one day we'll be able to upload everything from Socrates, the Greek philosopher, and then we can maybe discuss with him. That would be crazy. Today? Pretty doable. Like, yeah, maybe it's not going to be the best Socrates of the world, but, um, with what I wrote today, and again, I'm not here to, it's just that I published it a year, uh, an hour ago. It's, it was kind of like my point was like, I'm just a text file, but everyone is, uh, if you just condense everything into like a massive encyclopedia of who you are. You can just move it around on every AI platforms you want. And then just like you can have conversation with yourself or someone else uses it and have a conversation with you, or you do it with, for, with someone else like Steve Jobs, for example. And then you can have some conversation with Steve Jobs as good as you can, you know, get some, get your hand on his view on taste, what to sacrifice. His business vision, not his life vision because, you know, business vision of Steve Jobs is probably better. And, uh, you could have a conversation with them. I even go as far, and now this is the creepy side, you see, I said sometimes it's creepy. I, I, I made an avatar of myself and my voice 2 years ago and it was working. I called my mom with it, the French version. Of my voice, she couldn't know which one was what. So I was like, what the fuck? Okay. Um, now I did it again. It's even better. But then you think about it and you're like, wait, so I'm 28. I'll be, let's say in 100 years, I'll probably be dead. I'm sorry guys. Um, but in 100 years, okay, you have all of my taste and opinion on a single text file. And then you have perfectly trained voice and avatar perfectly. My kids and my grandkids can 100% have a conversation with grandpa, like 100%. It's not even, it might happen. I can already envision the company doing this. Yes, it's straight out of a Black Mirror episode. This is not the point. What I'm saying is it will happen. And I don't know how to feel with that. Like, sure, having discussion with Napoleon, cool. Um, with me as my grandpa living forever, talking to whatever generation after, that would be crazy. Um, but when you think about it, for example, my dad's dad never talked to him. Um, never met him really. My mom's mom neither. So I think I would have been fine talking about even like family's recipes, like some light stuff, you know, hearing them and seeing them live. Um, I think I wouldn't even be against it. My, my mom lost her mom when she was 12. So she only has black and white pictures of her mom, very few of them. And she's like 20 on the pictures, the, her mom. 20, sometimes 25, black and white. Some of them, she's on bikini on the beach. It's funny, my grandma, but she's like younger than me. Uh, and that's all we have. And, and so when Gemini, uh, upgraded Nanobanana, first thing I did, I asked my mom, can I play with those pictures? And she was like, sure. And then I colored them like it's an iPhone who took the picture, which took the picture. And then I used Veo. To animate it for like 2 seconds. And there's one where she's like this on the beach and she's sitting and then the animation is like just doing this. That's it. I said it to my mom. I did 100 tests and then this one was working one, working fine. And she called me and she was crying and it's just for them. She was like, whoa, my mom is moving and it's believable colors, you know. But it raises the question of like, we might be able to talk to the dead in a very surprising way very soon. Um, and, and hopefully, um, uh, we can deal with all of that, you know, like on a, I don't know, emotional level.

Yeah, that's a, that's an important point. Like I never really thought about like, you know, having my voice or anything and then having like my kids being able to talk to me like in the future. Um, if I'm present or if I'm no longer here, but then that also like invites like, um, us like questioning a lot of our beliefs if it's like right or wrong or, and more like, can we just pause and step into the possibility and see like what we want for ourselves? But it's fascinating, like where it can take us. Right. And as you said, like we could not imagine in the 1900s where we are right now. And even this feels like, whoa, but what is beyond? Like, we cannot even like imagine it's, it's so huge. And I don't know, the ability to expand is like beyond what we can conceive or try to predict.

Look, it's, it's, it's, I know it's heavy conversation. Again, I, I, I'm going to state it again. I'm not here to say this is awesome. Everyone should do it. No. Um, and, and, but it's conversation. For example, I had this conversation with my mom of, uh, SafeWorld. Because that's it. I can tell you right now, we're past the point already of I can replicate you on a video extremely well, extremely well, and your voice extremely well. And I can call someone, FaceTime. FaceTime is strong. If you put some urgency and some panic, and say like, I don't know where I am, I use someone's phone, I would wire you money very fast. Uh, I personally, I would be like, fuck, yes, sure. Prince of Nigeria. No, this is next level scam. So this is the kind of conversation I'm inviting people, not, I'm, I'm not a doomsayer. You will never hear me being like, you know, fearmongering people. You'll all lose your job. Everyone's going to die. No, but I've seen something on the internet, uh, models that got out the months before. And I'm like, oh, okay, we're past that. That's it. This is point of no return for this as well, uh, for this at least. And, and I think a lot of that is going to happen in the near future, some positive, some not. It's important to have a conversation with kids, with grandparents, with your partner about the implication of the technology.

Yeah, I had another question that's really been, I've been thinking about a lot lately, and there was some larger, rather larger Substackers here that were engaging in this conversation around, well, I saw this thing about, maybe you saw it, about Bandcamp banning AI, and then I saw these larger creators here on Substack basically suggesting and tagging Substack team like, hey, you should go in the same direction because all AI is like fevery and all this sort of thing. And I felt myself tightening because for me, I feel like I'm very much with you. Like, I believe AI is inviting us to higher levels of creative expression and it's an art form that we don't fully understand. And I talked about how we're kind of like these— for most people, we're like 2-year toddlers who don't understand how to use their extremities, but we need to go through this. And I feel like going to this level of like, oh, I'm just going to ban this because I don't understand it is the wrong direction. And I'm just curious, like, what you're hearing and how you relate to all that.

So if I may, I will divide the debate in two because I have two different opinions on, on university banning and the future of social media. Um, I'll start with uni. My university banned Google and YouTube and search all at once. Uh, I couldn't search anything when I was doing anything, uh, exams or, uh, I quit uni and I'm quite happy about it. I have a very big view on which should you pursue, uh, um, a diploma or not. My dad doesn't speak English and that's good because otherwise you'd be like, Don't say this to Phil.

Uh, I'm a dropout too, so I'm a dropout. I also worked in the music business, so we have a lot in common.

And I, and I, that's crazy. I dropped out at the last year of my master's too. So I was like, I had just needed one class. It's not like I was like, ooh, I'm losing. No, it's like, I was like, okay, I listen, I don't need it. Anyway, so about uni, I have a lot of takes on it, but unless you want to be a doctor or some very specific like job, an astronaut, um, you should probably not waste time. The only reason you would go to uni is to delay being an adult. And that's the only reason I'd be like, okay, then why not? Because network, hmm, go do some projects, talk about it online. You'll get much more network. So, okay, this is on the side. Future of social media and Substack. Weirdly enough. Yes, I agree. We should not let AI be there. I'll explain. One of my favorite memes, if you don't know that meme, then it's going to sound very weird. There is this meme, it's just an image. Okay. Everyone knows what's a meme. It's an image and it's a, it's a, it's a guy giving like a raffle. How do you say that when you raffle? Raffle, right?

Uh, raffle.

Yeah.

Raffle.

Raffle. So they give a rifle to a monkey and the monkey is like, thank you. And AI kind of feel like this, meaning on my LinkedIn account, I went from 100 genuine conversation in my comments to 80% and 20 was AI to 50%. And I, I don't know if I have 50% comments that are real right now or 30%. Hopefully it's 50. But it is sure AI is the same thing that makes everything so creative, but it can destroy the internet so fast. It's absurd. The speed it can destroy it just because of people being like, oh, I can create an account, have a bot, and then just press some button and then it shoots some messages that looks okay. Um, and I think Substack is of high quality because right now it's kind of preserved, but, uh, I called this out years ago and the CEO of Instagram for the first time on, on January 1st made an announcement about the future of Instagram and he pointed out as well that for sure the future of social media, you need to put your ID, you need to even maybe, uh, put your finger before doing anything so that we know it's you. Maybe you can only upload pictures. From the fact that you took a picture now, like you take it now or there is no picture. Um, and all of those things, like, I agree, it will be a shame for creativity. Um, but people are not, all of them are not with good intention. And then you can have an army of bots that looks good very easily and then pushes people around. Um, and this is not what you want. This is how a platform dies. And right now, if I put much more effort on Substack, it's because it's preserved, uh, compared to LinkedIn. And I hope Substack realizes that. And I don't know how we could do that. Um, but make sure that, you know, it's still this place with high quality long format article that you can write with AI or not, that's okay. But, you know, you need to put some efforts. I don't know.

Yeah, that's the piece that I'm curious, like, and I'm with you on all of that, but it's, and I'm even like, if like, and I'm unapologetic, like I use AI, I think I use it in ways that are pretty constructive. And if I need to put a label on and disclose that and say it all good, if I need to share it, like that's actually me, it's all good. But I think like this, it's more about the snap, like, And I don't even know how you would do that at this point, but basically being like, oh, you can't use this at all in your creative process. And this is, this, this to me is, oh, it's a different distinction.

It's tough, but it's like, how do I let you write super cool, good article with or without AI? And how do I block bots from polluting the platform we're in? And maybe We have some steps towards that. Maybe to have an account, you need your ID and your, and your finger. That's already annoying. You have to pay to be on the platform. Already the cost of one bot goes from $0 or a few cents to run it to, oh, $10 a month. Oh, that's much more expensive. Um, Elon Musk, when he did it with Twitter, people misunderstood it. The point was it was a few cents to run a bot per month, so bot army would pay 10,000 baht. It was 10,000 times a few cents. Boop. But then he said, oh, it's $10 per account per month to pay. Oh, if I want to run 10,000 bots, it's $100,000 per month. Too expensive, not worth it. So they would stop doing it. So all of those things helps, and I won't be against it. I know people are like, I don't wanna put my idea, I don't wanna pay for the platforms, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, but very soon platforms will do it, will preserve, uh, the anti-bot culture. Would you use AI or not? That's okay. It's just that you want to talk to real people. That's it.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I appreciate that. Oh man, I could sit here and talk to you all day long. Honestly, this is a fascinating conversation. I know we've probably already gone a little—

One last question, but I loved it.

I loved it. Just as well.

It's just that it's 8 PM here.

Yeah, man. Yeah. I mean, honestly, you've been super generous with your time, so I don't even think unless there's anything, Carolina, you know, really, I would just want to ask, like, I think most people know where to find you here on Substack, but if there's like kind of like one thing that maybe, you know, in our audience, there's a lot of people that are kind of still kind of opening up and letting their curiosity come through, but maybe they haven't gone as deep as many people in your audience. Like, where would be a great starting point for them if they just want to test the waters?

I keep telling people, don't, like I post a lot of content on very different platforms, but just like I keep telling people, skip the noise. I'm like, skip everything, read just the newsletter. I post it twice a week. 99% of it is free, if not everything. Um, it's every Wednesday and every Sunday. Um, and, um, basically my idea is 100 times a year, I'm going as deep as possible. On one specific topic to be better at AI. My idea is that if I keep doing that every year, I'll be pretty good at it. I think I'm pretty good today. And, and a lot of people that follow me for 2, 3 years have been pretty exceptional at what they do. They're not solopreneurs. Some of them are, have jobs. Uh, I can think of Nelly, who's been reading my content for 3 years. She's at Philips. She's working at Philips for 12 years, but now she's like the champion of AI inside Philips. Like, everyone's like, hell yeah, Nelly, you're killing it. And I love that. It's not my win, it's her win. She did the job. She read my newsletter, we, and my, and my post, and then she played with it, and then she had fun playing, and then she went bigger and bigger and bigger. And now she's like, oh, I went from, I don't know, and I'm kind of scared and I have decision paralysis, to I'm pretty good at it. I can even teach my entire company and get a promotion for that. So this is really what I want people to, to, to, to do and to feel. They don't even have to read past articles, just hop on the train and hopefully we're going to get to destination together.

I love that.

Cool.

All right. I had a lot of fun, guys. Thank you so much.

Yes, me too.

It was very nice to connect with you. And, uh, thank you so much, uh, to be like so generous with your time and also with the newsletter. Like, um, I, I just love that. You know, I am here sharing and you guys just hop on the train and let's go.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I know a lot of people are kind of been jumping in as we go. So we put together a rather nice recap using AI. So, Ruben, you can judge a little bit and say, tell me how we did. But I'll put that together. I'll share it with you as well. All right. So we'll share that with everyone. And yeah, thank you for being here. And thank you again, Ruben. It was a real pleasure to have you.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Bye-bye, everyone.

Bye. Have a good night.