Peter Swain on What Nobody's Telling You About AI

We're on the call. Steve wants you to do an app for Apple. And I went, Steve who? And he went, Steve Jobs. ChatGPT became so smart, it became dumb.

Peter Swain has been developing since he was 6 years old. He's been able to do amazing things in the world. He's been able to make amazing businesses and work with amazing companies. And he's been contracted by Apples and Google and Microsoft, so much so they kept him on retainer.

And he's even gonna show us why he thinks the winner, you're using all sorts of different tools, why he thinks the winner might actually be Grok and Gemini.

Dropped out of high school, became one of the first web developers in the world. We were the first ever agency that Apple ever outsourced app work to because he felt that we understood the direction of Apple better than some of his internal team. If you want to understand the technology, you have to look at how it's going to impact humanity, and then you kind of work back from there. To me, if I can't trust the conversation It doesn't matter how cheap it is. I'm just out. I just got no interest in part of the conversation and I can't trust ChatGPT.

This is Peter Swain. Welcome back to another episode of ClickFunnels Radio. I'm Chris Cameron and joined with me is Dante Torelli, but we've got Peter Swain here. Peter, I wanna kick this thing right off. This has been crazy the last few months. Everybody is talking about AI. It's AI this, AI that. I hear it over and over and over. But why on earth should somebody listen to Peter Swain?

Yeah, so, well, honestly, Chris, I don't think they should be. I think they should be using AI and getting better with AI. But if they're taking a break from that, then maybe this isn't a bad place to hang out for a bit. I think I've got some unique experience here. I started coding when I was 6, saw my first application at 12, and then I was part of the lead development team of this little thing in the UK called Yelp.

Early on too, right?

Yeah, I was 17. Uh, it was the 32nd ever listing on Yahoo. Um, and I'd just gone to this PC World user group, this kind of trade show with my dad. Uh, and there was this guy called Tim Berners-Lee, um, now Sir Tim Berners-Lee, suggesting that this thing was gonna be huge called the internet. Um, so I did what any self-respecting individual would do is drop out of high school. Walk away from my unconditional entry for university, um, and became one of the first web developers, uh, in the world. Um, so I've had this really deep entrenched privilege to be part of tech disruption now for all of my life. I mean, I'm inherently, I'm unemployable. Um, so, cause I tell people that they're an idiot if I think they're an idiot. So it doesn't, doesn't do well in enterprise.

Well, I'm wondering though, like a lot of times people have something that they want to achieve, right? And like, okay, that is what I want to go get. And other people, you know, have an internal kind of desire. They're like, I would like to do this because it fulfills me or whatever. What drew you to tech? Was it just like, oh, I see opportunity there? Is it something like you're like, oh, I'm really interested in this, I love this? Like why that at such an early age?

Do you want the, I'm guessing you want the actual truthful answer. Yeah.

I mean, you can tell us lies if you want, but we'll be able to tell.

Well, we could do that. Two truths and a lie with me is a fascinating game.

I bet.

So I told my dad and my mom that I wanted a baby brother, and they decided that one of me was enough, which in retrospect, I understand.

Fair.

So they bought me a computer and told me to code my own brother. Are you serious? Yeah, my dad brought me a Spectrum ZX80 and said, "If you want a baby brother so bad, make your own." So—

Wow.

My first piece of code—

That's the most forward-thinking thing I've ever heard, especially you fast forward to 2026. That's crazy.

I would say—

'Cause today you probably almost can.

3.4 million people as of now have decided to opt out of a human relationship and having an AI relationship instead, which is nuts, right? That's kind of where we are. So yeah, I guess it is possible to some degree. But yeah, so I created my own baby brother. That was, that was how it all began, if I'm being completely honest.

But what'd you name him? Sam.

Nice. Uh, solid name, isn't it?

Um, and was there any reason for Sam? Like, why'd you choose that?

It was 3 letters. Um, when you're— when you don't know what— when you don't have copy and paste yet, which the Spectrum ZX80 didn't have. You're typing it quite a bit. So yeah, it was that. Fun fact, my son is now actually called Sam.

Really? That's amazing. Did that just work out that way or was it purposeful?

I think I forgot, to be honest, because our daughter got named Olivia May Gotham after a Facebook post, which is a whole different story on its own. So we felt we needed something kind of suitably embarrassing for our son as well so that they could hate us in equal measure. So we played around with like Sam Peter Solo, Sam Peter Skywalker, and none of it. He ended up being called Montgomery, Sam Peter Montgomery Swain.

Oh.

But he was named after the guy in the cinema. I was like, do you like your name? He's like, I love my name. Like, great, Sam it is. Like, we'd been, we'd been like batting it around for 8 and a half months. We're like, you know what, Sam it is. But anyway, like back to, back to the story. So yeah, so I, I built Well, I didn't personally, I was part of the team that built Yelp. And from there we did some really interesting projects. We, we did the first ever CD-ROM in the front of a magazine. So you're welcome for all of those AOL CDs. You can blame me for that. We did the first ever shopping automated checkout for Tesco's in 1996. That was, and they decided it was too early, but it was like a research and development project. We did the first ever video banking kiosk. And then we work with people like Williams Formula 1, Sony, Colgate, Amdahl, Ford, the Euros, the Olympics, Petrol Boys, yadda yadda yadda.

We were adding this up. It's like over 1,400 different like products.

I stopped counting at 1,440. I had a tally sheet of 1,440 and I was like, I think I've probably proven this by now. I probably don't need to carry on counting. But so then it was mid-2000s. I went to India to create an offshore dev company. That was a hideous failure, like horrendous, horrendous failure. But on the way back from, in duty-free, I bought an iPhone, the 3GS, the first ever iPhone. And I said, this smells different. I played with it on the plane and I walked back into my office and said, guys, you've got 6 months to retrain. We're no longer a web company. We're now a mobile company. Anyone that's halfway done, we will finish the work. Anyone that's less than halfway, we give them their money back 'cause we're now a mobile agency.

Is this how you got commissioned by Steve Jobs to do some stuff for Apple? How did that happen?

Well, I— so we were doing a job for Breaking Bad, which was the first job we ever did. They called me and said, hey, we want to do this app. The basic story is a high school chemistry teacher becomes a drug baron. And I said, that sounds like a horrific idea. And then my fractional CFO reminded me I couldn't afford to pay my rent. And I was like, it sounds like a great idea. I love this idea.

This is the most That second answer I think was correct.

The second answer was correct. I'm really glad I, I didn't stick with the first one. So, but it was such a high profile job. We're on the phone with Sony and Apple, um, weekly just reviewing progress and sending builds and all this kind of stuff. And we are on this call. I, I don't wanna get too technical on here, but Apple have these things called Human Interface Guidelines. It's like this huge document that says how you can design an app. And when in the very first version it was literally a huge doc, it was a Lever Arch file and we had done, you know when you swipe for more information? At the very beginning, most people wouldn't remember it now, when you swiped you had a left and right arrow, but there was, so, but what we had done is like a bullet timeline below the information that we're swiping.

Sure.

And we're on, we're on the call and they say, you can't do that. Standard everywhere now. I'm like, okay, I can do that. 100%. And I went, I said, I don't mean to be abrasive or rude, but you're wrong. Your human interface guidelines in section 17, subsection 3.2, it says that if the data that is being scrolled is a timeline, the preferred user interface element is a bullet. Timeline, not a left and right arrow, because the bullet timeline infers a start and an endpoint, whereas the left and right arrow infers a loop of data.

Okay, so, mm.

I said, however, you're Apple, so if you want me to do it the other way, I'll happily do it the other way, but I'm not wrong. And some, this guy said, well, he's got a point. And then the phone went dead. Like, oh, shh. I've re-screwed this one up. And I got a call the next day from a gentleman called Brian Johns, who's the head of developer relations worldwide for Apple. And he went, hey. I went, hey Brian, I'm really, really sorry about yesterday. I didn't mean to upset somebody. I didn't mean to inflame somebody. He went, no, no, no, it's fine. He went, but how did you know that? And I went, well, I, I, I read, I read the document. He went, it's like 200 pages. I'm like, well, yeah, but I'm designing an app. In collaboration with Apple and Sony, I thought I should probably read the document. He went, no one reads the document. I'm like, yeah. I was like, well, okay, well I did. And he went, anyway, Steve wants you to do an app for Apple. And I went, Steve who? And he went, Steve, Steve. And I went, yeah, no, I got the first name. Steve who? And he went, Steve Jobs. I went, okay. For the record, one, I think that might be the only Steve that doesn't need a surname. So you win that one. I'll give you that.

Right, right.

Number 2, how the eff does this guy, how does he even know who I am? And he went, you know that guy you were arguing with yesterday? I'm like, uh-huh. He went, that was Steve. I'm like—

Amazing.

Sorry?

Are you kidding me?

And he's like, yeah. I'm like, why didn't you tell me? He went, would you have argued? I'm like, no. And he went, that's why we didn't tell you. He jumps onto calls pretty often. Like he'll just literally dial himself in whenever he chooses and you were just lucky enough or unlucky enough that he was there.

So—

Wow. We were the first ever agency that Apple ever outsourced app work to because he felt that we understood the direction of Apple better than some of his internal team, which was amazing. It was a very cool project. It's also the project that killed the company. Fun fact.

Wow. But you know what I find these leaders like, I've seen these reels of like Elon or something, and someone's asking like a different cooler or something on one of his rockets. And he's like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, we should probably do that. Okay. Yeah, actually, we're going to do that. They can objectively think. And so this guy sitting on the phone with you, you're arguing with him and he goes, oh, you've got a point. And that got you the callback.

Mm-hmm. That was it. Like, you've got a point. Because I'd read, I'd done the work. Like, when I interview people now, almost my entire interview is like, so tell me what you know about me. And if the answer is, I don't, I, I, I, my 60-minute interview lasts 3 and a half minutes. And I go, okay, we're done.

Yeah.

Sure. And they're like, sorry? I'm like, no, we're done. If this is how much care and attention you took towards trying to land a position with me, we're, we're complete. And I don't want to waste your time. I don't want to waste my time. You know, I've just— you just got 45 minutes of your life back. Congratulations. People get really upset. I'm like, yeah, I'm, I'm not that hard to track down. Um, yeah, I don't care if they got it right or wrong, or they drew a conclusion that's wrong, but I just want to see that They actually care enough to have actually done the work.

So you want them to care more about you and your company and your business and your purpose than— does that trump somebody who's super skilled in your mind?

100%. And with the rise of AI, I think we're going to see more and more of that. Because let me give you another example. So when I started working on— after the mobile agency, which is this project, the Apple project, actually was the project that killed it. Originally, ironically, 'cause we were so overextended because of the payment terms of Apple. And then 2008 hit and the financial crisis hit and the bank took away the overdraft and, you know, it just didn't work anymore. But anyway, the next project I worked on, one of the gentlemen that used to be a customer of ours approached me and said, hey, I wanna build out this solution to do hotel bookings. I wanna take on like Booking.com and Expedia and that kind of thing.

One of the most saturated markets out there.

Yeah, but, well, we got to, we got to $420 million revenue in 5 years. So we did. Oh, real pretty sexy. We worked out a couple of distinctions, but which we can come back to. But the first, this first call was an hour and a half long. And at the end of the call, he turned around and said, hey, curiously, why were you late? I'm like, sorry? He's like, why were you late? I'm like, I don't think I was late. He went, yeah, the call started at 10. You were with me at 10:03. Why were you late? And I was like, come on, 10 o'clock, 10:03. Um, anyway, I'll tell you what, until you learn to respect my effing time, how about I don't respect yours? And hung up. I'm like, what just happened? And I went and spoke to my wife and she's like, well, he does have a point. I'm like, what do you mean? He went, well, 10:03 is after 10 o'clock. You were late. Like, huh, okay, fair enough. So, you know, you guys notice, like, I logged in on the exact minute that this thing was supposed to start. Yes, you did. To the second.

Yep.

Because he drilled that into me. He was a Swiss banker by trade, um, and his, his point was you don't mess around with someone's time and you don't mess around with somebody's money. Those are the, those are two things that are very, very sacred to people. You keep those contracts and you keep things clean. And he drilled that into me for 5 years. So if like 10 o'clock means 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock means 11 o'clock. And it's quite fun when we now meet every, we meet every 6 months to just kind of stay in touch. We always try and get there 5 minutes before each other. So if we're meeting for dinner at 9, we now end up showing up at around 7:30. It's so— Right, right. I'm gonna be ahead of him. And I'm like, look how he still manages to beat me every time. So we ended up showing up about an hour and a half early for a 9 o'clock.

Respecting people's time is absolutely huge.

Well, Hermosi said something that I thought was really interesting. I'm sure it, I'm sure he wasn't like the source of this, but you know, he's the, he's the lips I heard it from. And what he said was, you do not get to define your brand. Your customer defines your brand. You just get to define your actions and they will take from that what they want. And he went, but the problem is that everything is both positive and negative. All right, so let me give you an example. I used to do these live 1-hour, which I still do. We do all, all of our training is still live because, hey, I move so quickly you can't re-pre-record anything. But we do, we'll do an hour live. But I used to run for like 3, 4, 5 hours on a 1-hour slot. And I was like, I just wanna add as much value. I just wanna pour in. I just wanna like teach.

And you had people staying?

Mm-hmm. Oh, they almost 100%. But then the wealthiest person in my room, like an 8 to 9 figure guy, that kind of realm, once turned around to me and said, I love your programs. I just wish you respected me a bit more. Like, what do you mean respected you a bit more? And he's like, you asked for an hour of my time and you took 4. Ooh. I'm like, oh, so in my head I'm pouring more in and trying to give more value. Overdelivering. Do more. Overdelivering. In his head, I'm taking from him. So it's one of the phrases that we ended up banning in our company of this idea of, you know, underpromise and overdeliver. No, just, just promise and deliver. Just, just do what you say when you say. How you say it, thanks very much.

But I think that's all expectations, right? Mm-hmm.

But don't try and overdeliver 'cause you're borrowing from somewhere else. You're either borrowing from your health or your family or your money. No, if you said, I'm gonna do XYZ and you're gonna pay ABC and both parties are happy with that relationship, there's no variability added to it and you're not, calling on your team to do more and not how much more value can we add? No, just deliver the transformation that you said you were going to deliver in the time you said, at the price that you said, and they will come back happy.

Yeah. Not only promise what you're going to give them, but get them the results that you're promising them.

100%. Because even if you say, I'm going to give you— if you do this, I'm going to give you a million back in a week, and you give them a million too. You have introduced variability into the equation.

Even though it's, yeah, even though it's surplus. Even though it's better. Yeah.

Wow. But you didn't deliver what you said. So next time, does that mean you're gonna deliver 800, not 1.2, which would be the same offset? And are you then gonna say, but I did do 1.2 last time, so the 800's okay? Or if you now say you're gonna do 2, do they now expect 2.4? Because you overdeliver by 20%, right? So if you now only deliver 2.3, not 2.4, there's a good chance they turn around to you and say, hey, I'm not happy. And you go, why not happy? I said I'll give you 2 million and I give you 2.3. And they go, yeah, but I was expecting 2.4. Why are you expecting 2.4? Because that's what you did. Yep.

That's the expectations that you've set.

Tell them you're gonna deliver X and deliver X, no more, no less. I genuinely, and it's a real mind shift for people, but I think it's, genuinely the right way to do things.

I'm just sitting on that one for a second.

Yeah, me too. That was 'cause we hear so many people so many times wanna get up on top of a mountain and say, oh, oh, oh, under-promise and over-deliver. And you don't hear many people say what you just said, Peter.

No, just tell people what you're gonna do and do it. I mean, it really shouldn't be rocket science, but apparently it is. You know, you look at the king of expectation setting, Elon Musk. So as you said earlier, it's like, yep, how are things going? Yeah, we blew up 7 rockets, which is exactly what we were planning to do. He's a trillionaire. He's a trillionaire from blowing up really expensive stuff. That's pretty impressive, right? I could blow up some expensive stuff if people wanna pay me for it. For a good time, please call.

That's right. Well, okay, so I think this is really interesting, this overdeliver thing, but then you started running a fund, but I wanna get to something just before that. What's a BAFTA?

I don't know. BAFTA is like an Emmy or a Golden Globe.

Okay. It's like an Oscar kind of then in the UK.

Yeah.

So what did you do to get that?

So we got after the contract with Breaking Bad, we did some work with Ali G, we did some work with Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver. So we ended up doing these really cool apps and we got called by an Egyptologist. Um, and this lady, she was a genius. She'd worked out how to use satellite imagery to find pyramids that were still under the sand.

All right.

That was her. That was her dick. But what they'd given her was like a TV screen and an iPad, and on the iPad was a green screen, and she was supposed to use the green screen and it had, tape where she was supposed to press in green and she was supposed to use it and then they would animate the thing on the TV. But for all of her smarts, and she was an insanely smart lady, she couldn't work out how to use this green-screened tablet in her hand. So they had us build an iPad app just for her to use. And it didn't really do anything. [LAUGHTER] It was just like, "Swipe here," so that she could actually swipe, so she could see the swipe, so she could feel good about the swipe, and then they would actually put it on the TV. So it didn't actually cast anything, or— It was just a very elaborate presentation, essentially. Um, but yeah, we got a— an honorable mention in, uh— The show won a BAFTA for set design., and the iPad app was part of that, and we got an honorable mention for that as well. So that was fun.

That's a— your resume is insane. Like, your resume is insane as we go look. Like, you've done everything. But you talk about overdelivering, you talk about being exact, but you also ran a fund, $80 million. Okay.

Yeah.

I've done money management. I did that in a previous life, 15 years of it. And people were always extremely happy, Peter, if I came in and said, hey, you know, we're going to get you 15% a year and I delivered 25. They were thrilled. So how do you handle that in, you know, a fund, an investment?

So the fund was, the fund was not the most successful time. So what, what happened, I met this guy called, um, now let's not do that. I met this guy and he was insane at institutional money and understanding the numbers, but really couldn't understand humans. At all. Like it, it would just alien to him. And I was like, well, I'm pretty good at the human thing. You seem to be pretty good at the number thing, so why don't you give— so, so I'd like you to give me half of the fund. And he, he didn't think at the, the first time around that was such a good idea. I'm, I'm, you, I, I won't say his full list of language around my suggestion, but my, my, my point to him was you, you keep what's here right now, which I think was like 65 or something, and I'll take half of whatever I grow it to as, as we go up and you get the other half. So you are on a win-win, like the worst case scenario, you are just where you are. The best case scenario, you're getting half of whatever I add.

That's right.

And you teach me this, this other game because this is a whole different game. And it was a debt fund that worked in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina as a secondary lender behind the banks. So we lent to people that needed medical expenses, education expenses, all these wonderful things. And it was really, really fulfilling to do. The problem with that whole industry was I went into it assuming that 80% of people in finance were good, smart people trying to do good things. Yeah, you see, you laugh, right? Exactly.

I've done it for 15 years. Yeah, that's a heavy assumption, man.

Yeah, it was the other way around. It was only 20% of the people were smart and actually trying to do something capable, and 80% were either dumb or outright thieves. One of the two. That seemed to be the majority of people I ran into. And I walked out of it because we had some, we had some wins, but we had some losses. And telling people, I think it's fine institutionally, but telling people in retail money that you've lost their money. Is something I never understood what that was. It's not that for lack of trying, it's not that we didn't do the right things, but the whole reason you get a return in a transaction is because you're taking risk.

Risk.

And if you take risk, every so often those risks come to pass. Like for example, the problem in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina was the Argentinian president got elected the new Argentinian president got elected and said he was gonna dollarize the economy. So imagine what happens to $60 million of loans in pesos on the secondary market. Like, Yep. We used to make our money by lending the money, getting 3 repayments in the door so that we knew that they were a good pay, not a bad pay, and then selling them to the likes of Santander. That, that was the business model. It was working great until you turn around to Santander and say, hey, we've got a tranche of 4 million pesos worth of loans and they go, we're not buying pesos. This guy just said he's going to dollarize the economy.

Dollars.

And then you're turning around to the people that you said this is the expected return schedule and you're trying to explain that the president of Argentina and they're like, pull the other one. I'm like, I don't want to tell you.

Yeah, there's so many external influences. I mean, not to get into too much of my stuff, but Peter, 2008, I know exactly what you're talking about because that was the phone calls I was having, just watching people lose money. And we had done really well up to that. And there's, there's nothing, nothing worse. Well, moving forward, is that why you pivoted? There was also something else that happened in November of 2023 that changed everything for you.

So, so yeah. So if you kind of put the kind of the V1, the V2 version of me— V1 is this web version of me, V2 is this mobile version of me. V3 was like, I've done everything I can do in marketing now. Like 1,400 projects. There's not much I haven't seen. There's not much to learn. And intellectual curiosity is still my main driver of, of like, oh, that looks fun because I don't understand it and I want to understand it. So the V3 went into this dalliance with finance. And I, I was feeling pretty good that I was mastering it, but I definitely wasn't where I should be. And then ChatGPT's beta came out in November. And I can't remember what day it was, I think it was like 13th or 14th, but on the 15th, on the next day I downloaded it. And the day after that I called my partners in the fund and went, I'm out, take my stakes, take my equity, tell me how I help transition. I'll work with you for a year, but I'm gone. I need to create a mastermind for AI.

It was that clear, that fast.

100%.

How do you make a decision when you see something moving and like, I'm going to uproot everything because this is the way it sounded like you did this. Hey, we're now a mobile app, you know, developer. Like when you're talking about Apple, you made that same decision. You seem to have a knack for this.

Yeah. So if you want to understand the technology, you have to look at how it's going to impact humanity and then you kind of work back from that. So take the web. The web's remit was you can now work with anyone anywhere. But that was, that's the core promise. The day before I downloaded Sun Tzu's The Art of War from the University of Phoenix, which was the first ever thing I did online. And being a Brit, I thought Phoenix was a bird. I was like, this is a real place. This is so cool. And I'm talking to this network administrator, like passing messages with this guy in Phoenix. And like yesterday, my footprint on the world was how far could I persuade my mom to give me a lift? Today my footprint on the world is the whole world.

Mm.

I'm in. And then mobile came around and I was like, web was super cool, but it allowed me to work with anyone anywhere. But this thing, mobile, allows me to work with anyone anywhere from anywhere.

Yeah.

And there's a thing about technology of when you add extra inputs and outputs, it becomes almost magical. Because when you— the key, you know, a PC has a keyboard, a mouse, speakers, maybe a printer, normally now a web camera. Those are your inputs and outputs. Whereas a mobile phone has a gyroscope, a radio, a GPS. So you're adding all these new capabilities of how you can start interfacing with the world. So to me, the web was you could work with anyone anywhere. Mobile, you can work with anyone anywhere from anywhere. And Facebook and, and co, I ignored 'cause didn't really like it. I still don't like it. I don't think it's a particularly positive thing that we've invented of putting in everyone inside echo chambers. That's not good.

Mm-hmm.

The Bitcoin of the world I thought was the greatest solution waiting for a problem to fix. Like mathematically it's beautiful, but it doesn't actually do anything that we need it to do. So I kind of skipped that a bit. But then AI, when it came around, very quickly I realized that, I mean, it was actually in the OpenAI original mission statement, was to remove the tax of human labor from the economy.

Mm.

Remove the tax of human labor from the economy. That is one of the most poisonous, toxic sentences I have ever heard. And I spent the first couple years trying to talk to people about this and they're saying, yeah, but, We've said that with every technology that it'll displace jobs and yada, yada, yada. I'm like, no, no, no, no. This one's really is different. This one is not how do we help you do what you do quicker, cheaper, faster? It's not a better mousetrap. This one, its job is how do we make it so that you don't need to do it? That's a different, that's a paradigm shift. That is a Maslow's hierarchy of needs reset moment. Yeah.

100%.

That this thing is, this thing causes us to rethink how do we human? Right, let's just do a little, little game between the two of us 'cause I think this is fascinating. So Chris and Dante, I'll just do this super quick. Imagine that it's your wife's birthday and you go to ChatGPT or Claude and you say, I need to get a present, what would you suggest? It recommends the present. But you buy the present, you go to Amazon and you hit buy now. Okay.

Yep.

Who bought the present? You or AI?

Yeah, I did.

What?

You did?

I bought it.

Cool. Good. Next one. We now step up a bit and it says, do you want me to buy that for you? So you go to Claude, you go through the conversation, it recommends something, but it has your card, so it goes and does the purchase. Who bought it then?

Oh, this is looking great.

I bought it.

Still you? I'm still taking credit. Come on, it's my wife's birthday. I'm gonna take credit, Dante.

Next one.

Yep, that was me.

You go to Claude and say, "Hey, it's my wife's birthday," and it goes, "Yep, no problem at all. I've got 3 things in the basket. I'll go and buy one." But there's now no conversation about what's gonna get bought. Who bought it then?

I'm still taking credit. I'm still taking credit on this one.

I think I stole one.

I bought it, maybe.

Okay. Okay. It's getting gray though, Peter. Here, ready for this one? End of that experience, it says, do you want me to schedule this for next year and just do it for you? Come the next year. Who bought it then?

I'm not buying that. Okay. Yeah, I didn't even know I bought it. You know, it's there. Yep, I got you.

Okay. It's like when my wife buys something, you know, for, for my mom or something on Mother's Day, and then I'm like, oh sweet, yeah, I I didn't do that.

Right. There are 5 love languages. Gift giving is one of the 5. Tell me a guy that you know that if AI turns around and says, hey, I can just buy it for you and I'm gonna buy better than you're gonna buy because I've got access to her history as well. Tell me one guy you know that's not gonna hit the button and say, yeah, you've got $150 limit, just knock yourself out. I think we all agree we would all do it. Yeah. So what happens to the definition of love if your partner's love language is gift giving?

This is what I've been saying. Like, we are, we are dehumanizing our entire economy. And that's what scares me. I listen, I'm optimistic for all the good things. We're going to get into that too. But you bring up such a good point. This is scary. And that's why I say cautiously optimistic, not because I think they're all going to like hold us at gunpoint and just eliminate us and use us as batteries. Maybe, right? But at the same time, there may be a swing back to this humanity, like people wanna congregate, people wanna be human.

I mean, this is, what you're referring to is the 30-year gap, is what we refer to as of the, if you look forward 30 years' time from now, we've invented a superintelligence, and if everything goes according to plan, and we haven't, you know, we're not batteries, then we don't have heart attacks, we don't have strokes, we don't have cancer, we don't have Alzheimer's, we don't have climate change because this, ridiculously smart thing has just gone, oh, we just do that and fix it. The problem has always been, well, how do we get there? Because we're looking, the interesting statistics at the moment say that there is somewhere between a 20 and 30% persistent unemployment heading our way at the end of next year.

Yep.

So a Great Depression level event that is persistent and consistent. COVID was 18, Great Depression was 23. So we're talking, a substantial number of people not in work. Now, that doesn't need to be your direct customer for the second and third order consequence. You know, if that's your customer's customer, well, your customer doesn't have money anymore, which means your customer can't afford to pay you.

Yep.

So it gets quite interesting because 69% of the US economy is driven by consumer demand. If there isn't any consumers, then yeah, I don't know how that works.

Right.

So this is, and this is why I, this is where it gets ironic because I think I'm one of the only AI experts, coaches, trainers in the world that if I could undo this, I would. Not because I think AI is bad, I just don't think we're ready for it in any way, shape, or form.

Yet you're diving into this harder than anyone too Even to the fact, Peter, where you're saying, hey, every few months I'm deciding who I'm keeping and who I'm laying off because AI can do it. So you're having this wrestle here, but you're diving in to say, how do we do this?

I would say they're making that decision, not me, because I've brought all of my team in a room and gone, hey, just so you know, AI's coming for your job. So, and they're like, what? I'm like, hey, I'm not trying to be a dick about this. I'm just telling you the truth. And I'm just telling you stuff that other managers aren't telling their teams, but this is what's happening. So if you think your job is to press this button, this button, this button, your, your time here is short because AI can probably do that better than you. If you think, if you spending your time thinking about my customers and what my customers need and how we can serve them better, you've got a job for life. So it's really your call if you adopt AI and you invest in this so that you can upskill yourself, so you can say to me, what's next? What other challenge can I take on? What other responsibility can I have? I'm for you forever. But if you think, if you're trying to compete with an automaton by acting like an automaton, mm-hmm, good luck.

Yeah.

Because people say like AI hallucinates, which it does. And let's just call that for what it is, lying. So AI lies. So do humans. So what's your point?

Yeah.

Like, I just like making an apples-for-apples comparison. And it's estimated that humans lie 14% of the time and AI lies 25% of the time. So when people say AI lies 25% of the time, I'm like, yeah, humans do 14%. So yeah, AI is losing that battle by 11, but it's not losing that battle naught to 25. Let's just call it for what it is.

Yep.

The cost of— you know, I'm, I'm, we're doing around $50,000 of dev a day and it costs $250 worth in tokens, but that money isn't going to an external dev agency.

Right.

But the product owners that we used to hire, we are still hiring. We're still sort of thinking about, well, how's Chris gonna use this? That still gets paid. Our payroll's gone up, not down since this whole thing happened, 'cause we're now investing in more human-facing people instead of more back-office people. So our account managers are a better standard than they used to be. Our salespeople are a better standard than they used to be because I think the human touch is the irreplaceable part of the equation.

I love to hear you say that, Peter, because I think so many people are diving into this. You seem to have found a balance of, okay, it is what it is, and I'm gonna capitalize on this without eliminating the human element.

Yeah, to me it was, you know, I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old, and it's critical to me that they grow up in a world where they can have meaning. What they make of their world is up to them. But when I first touched ChatGPT-2, which looking back was terrible, but I was like, this is gonna ransack the world. So I could decide to stand on a soapbox and just like shout at people, but that's never worked. It's never going to work. It is inevitable because of the prisoner's dilemma. There's nobody, nobody's gonna put this thing down. People are gonna pick it up. Because the first order consequences of AI are so amazing. Say, hey, it's gonna make you 20% more money. You're like, oh, I'm in. It's like, yeah, second and third order consequences, it's gonna pillage your community so there's no one to sell that to. And they're like, oh, I'm out. But they still won't, they'll still be in because humans are inherently selfish.

Yeah.

We don't try to win the race by bringing people with us as a general rule. Unfortunately, we just try not to be the slowest person on the pitch. As a general rule.

Yep.

So my thought was, well, how can I help people augment humanity and align more? And I think entrepreneurship is the bastion here because SaaS companies are in trouble, like are really, really in trouble. And if you could look at someone and go, okay, what is it you do and they go, oh, I make the best holders for AirPods. Now, what I'm trying to get to is the Medicis of Italy where you had patrons and artists were able to be artists. What if AI runs the sales platform and AI's doing the marketing and AI's doing the financial and AI's doing the legal so that you don't have to be entrepreneurial anymore to make money. Because right now, I think it's pretty unarguable that the best marketeer wins. It's not really the best product. Product or service. It's the best marketeer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

I don't know if North Face is the best jacket. I, in fact, I haven't even bothered ever checking 'cause I just buy what North Face told me to buy. Most people, so a few years ago, only ever wore Nikes. Not necessarily 'cause they were the best, but because they were the best marketeers. So what if the next version of our evolution as a species is actually about the best product winning? Like, I think that sounds like a really cool— Yeah. World, like the idea that the person that can design the best headphones actually succeeds because the AI goes, yeah, I can find the avatar, I can find the Dream 100, I can do the ads, I can connect with this, I can do with this. You just do you, boo. You just focus on geeking out on the best set of headphones ever. And what then happens is the cost of goods drops, so the margin goes up. So you could be running 90% margin type businesses, not 30% margin businesses, which hopefully, and I'm trying to do this kind of 3-year investigation in my head in kind of a very small period of time, hopefully means that you choose to earn $500,000 instead of earning $3 million. 'Cause on $500,000 on a 90% margin, you're still doing $450,000.

Yep.

Which means that you could work 3 days a week for $450,000, spend time with your kids, travel the world, make love to your partner, and have a truly beautiful life. Because at the moment, to pull in $500,000, like worst case California, you literally need to earn $5 million, which means you have $5 million type problems. Whereas if you could operate on a 90% margin, well, you could only have a $500,000 business. And it's something we used to say to people quite regularly and still do, profit is sanity, revenue is vanity.

Yes.

Revenue numbers are only useful if you're looking at an exit or financing. Aside from that, they are just vanity numbers that you talk about over at a bar. The number that matters is how much do you put in your pocket at the end of the year based on whatever you did. So that's kind of where I'm trying to help people get to, of like, well, could, could you just be a solopreneur millionaire, because most people are not that good at the art of management of other people. I'm not very good at it because entrepreneurs by proxy never wanted to be told what to do. So they're not very good at telling other people what to do.

Right.

And then they get really frustrated when their people aren't entrepreneurial and it's like, well, of course they're not because the reason they have a job is because they're not entrepreneurial. So for me, like, telling my team what I need them to do is bordering on uncomfortable. 'Cause it's like, just, well, there's the problem, figure it out. Like, go.

Right.

Which is all on me because they didn't want to work for themselves. They wanted to work for somebody else. They wanted someone to say, we do it this way and then we do this, then we do this, then we do this. So I think that You'll see a resurgence in true entrepreneurship, not, not, you know, the, the MLMs and the franchises, but people actually going, you know what, this is my craft. This is the thing I love. This is the thing I want to put out in the world. And I think you'll see large companies doing what large companies do and shedding workforce, which we're already starting to see. I think they'll be laying off up to 40, 50, 60% of people as they untap AI efficiency. Those people are gonna have to go somewhere. Capital gain, sorry, capital works projects won't do the work. A universal basic living income, a UBI, is not an American concept. It's not a very particularly good concept, but it's also a very un-American concept.

I don't like it, yeah.

I'm not defending it, but it's just gonna get largely rejected. Yep. So if you've got millions of people coming onto the workforce and it's not just one company doing it, it's everybody in the sector. So there's nowhere else for them to go.

Right. And their specialized skills are no longer super important, right? Because specialists used to be great, but now it's really the generalists that can run all the robots. Then we get to a point, Peter, where it's like, well, there's only so many gas stations, right? There's only so many CVSs. Millions of people hit the market, but there's only so many places for them to go.

Well, Walmart canceled the renewal of cleaning contracts after 2020. By 2028 because they believe that Optimus Prime, Optimus robots will be able to do it by then. So even when you talk about those—

We don't even know that.

Yeah, 468,000 cleaners across big box retailers in the next 3 years will be coming on the market. Agricultural fruit pickers. Like you start thinking through when you've got a near trillionaire saying that he's gonna deliver 10 robots for every 1 human on the planet within the next 20 years. I wouldn't bet against him, and I don't think many smart people will.

So what do you do? Just invest in Tesla?

Yeah. It's a good option. I think what you—

Ride the wave?

I'm writing a book at the moment, which is called the AI Survival Handbook, which is called— essentially the working title is How to Plan in an Unplannable World. Because—

Put me on the early list for that.

And it's— thank you. I'm really enjoying it because one of the concepts that I've explored is what I'm referring to as pop-up capitalism of like this idea of a 3-year or 5-year business plan is moot. You, you can't put together a plan when the, the surface of the economy is just being reformed every 3 months at the moment. So it's how do you get in quicker? How do you make money quicker? And how are you able to exit quicker? So, so it's, I was calling it like pop-up capitalism, which is like you pop up retail, you do a little pop-up shop or Maybe that's why you have to do it with SaaS businesses as well.

You taught us, we had you on, what was it, 2 months ago or something, Peter, for 2 Comma Club X coaching?

Mm.

And you taught us these 7 levels, and correct me if I'm wrong, but everybody's at a certain level, and I think we mentioned riding the wave, but what can people do? I think first off, they have to understand where they are and then move on from there. Like, how much are they gonna adopt? What can they do? Would you mind taking us through some of this? I found this fascinating. And for listeners, like, this is amazing. Like, buckle up because what Peter's gonna share here, like, figure out where you're at so you know where you have to go.

I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna see if I can find it whilst we're talking. But essentially the idea behind it was the different levels of AI and help, as you said, helping people understand where they are and where they can get to. So if we walk through the top level first, the top level isn't yet achievable. That's the good news. The top level is where I think we'll be in the next 12 to 18 months, which is where—

When you say top level, you mean level 7?

Yeah, they're like, they're like, I think it was 6, but that one, whatever that was.

Let's go with 6.

Let's go with 6. The Zenith moment is around co-creating of value. So what I mean by that is imagine if you were going to you wake up in a more— on the morning and your AI says to you, hey Pete, how are you? I saw this trend on X last night, so I repurposed one of our products, launched a new course, deployed it. And by the way, there's $15K in the Stripe account. Like, that sounds like a— I think we're about 12 to 18 months away from that. And, and it scares me because it sounds hyperbolic, but I haven't been wrong yet. So I think that's probably, I think, where we'll end up.

Scary to me though.

Like, well, that's not necessarily the scariest bit. The scariest bit is then when you say, well, what happened? That's okay. But what happens when you wake up and it goes, hey Pete, just so you know, da da da, and I fired Bob.

Yeah.

Like, what? No, I didn't want you to fire Bob. What's up with you? I love Bob. You, you did want it to repurpose your IP and make you money, but you didn't want it to review your P&L and take somebody out that wasn't being productive. Hmm, that's interesting. So there's a price to co-creation that we have to reconcile, which is why I think we're further away from it than we may be. We're further away from it culturally.

It's going back to your wife's birthday or whatever. It's not just saying, hey, here's the things that we can do which one would you like to do? It's like doing it for you, or you're not going into it and saying what you want to do. It's just assuming and it's rolling.

Yeah, right. You tell it, you say, hey, I want you to be my ruthless CEO, make sure the company remains profitable and stays ahead of the curve. And it says, great, this is how I do it.

So imagine that the US puts an AI in charge of the water supply, which it will. Because it, there's way too many efficiencies to, to not do that. Now imagine that, and that has a nominal IQ of 140. Now imagine that Russia, no, let's not make it Russia. Let's make it Argentina. Argentina, some college kids invent an AI with an IQ of 200 and they tell it, to cure climate change, for the good of humanity, cure climate change. This was something I said and then Elon quotes it. I'm like, "God, you could attribute, that'd be nice." But what happens when the IQ of 200 argues with the IQ of 150 and persuades it to put chlorine in the water kill everyone in North America in 48 hours. You inevitably would—

Climate change solved.

Climate change solved. No, and I'm not trying to make this a political thing about climate change, but America is the biggest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet, full stop. You're the most advanced economy, so it's natural. So if you just took out everyone in America, you would fix that problem, right? And this is actually the most likely doomsday, of all the doomsday scenarios of AI, this one is actually the most likely, the unintended consequence doomsday. So not the deliberate AI decides to kill us because I don't think it will see us as worth its time. I think that the unintended consequence of AI is probably, of all the, I'm not saying it's likely, but of all the doomsday scenarios, that is is the most likely.

Yeah, that cautionary tale. Be careful what you ask for.

Yeah, have you seen it in I, Robot? When the robot, he says, why did you save me, not the child, not my wife? And the robot goes, you were statistically the most likely to survive. And he screams at the robot saying, that's why you are a robot, 'cause that is the wrong answer.

Yep.

And the robot's confused. It's like, no, technically you are the most likely to survive. And we all know that's the wrong answer. If I'm in the car with my wife and she has a 1% chance of survival and I have a 95% chance of survival, the robot should get my wife, not me.

Yep, every time.

Every time. But AI—

And we would never even think about that. Like in the moment, a human, we would never think about that. We would never reason or logic with that. We would just do.

And you would sit and try and wrestle my child out versus just pressing the button. You wouldn't even hit the like click button on the door for me versus going back to the child and trying to rescue the child. These are, this is part of what it means to be human that AI simply can't replicate or understand. So, and it comes back, it's, it all kind of comes full circle of when we're teaching people how to use AI and this is what I think I was speaking with Russell as well. It's like context, context, context, context. It's not the prompt.

Absolutely. Yeah.

It's the context.

Yes.

Because human beings are fantastic at context. We are so amazing at context. We did this as an experiment once. There are 15 ways to answer the question, what's the time? And if I ask somebody at the end of my 1-hour webinar, like a co-host, hey, what's the time? Normally they don't answer the question. Normally they say, oh, it's about 10 minutes left. Which if you think about it is not actually an answer to the question, what is the time?

Yeah, they think there's a question behind the question. Because there always is.

Do you really get that? Humans do that. We have this thing called the interpersonal gap. I say something, it goes out into the ether, you receive it, you process it, and in the processing of what I say, you go, why did he ask that? Why is that relevant? How is that? What is that? Who is that? We are constantly putting context into the equation. We do it in everything we do. AI doesn't put any context into the equation. So if you say, hey, write me a business plan to make me $1 million in the next 3 months, I have no discernible skills, no experience, but it's key that I achieve this. It'll go, sure, here's a plan. Whereas a human would go, have you gone mad?

How?

How do you suggest we do that? And why is that so important to you? Perhaps you should go back to college or perhaps you should do this. Now if you want a plan that could last, take 3 years, no problem at all. We can do that.

Yeah.

Because humans have context. AI doesn't. AI is pure prefrontal cortex. So do we, I'll just skim through these levels quickly 'cause I think it's— Yeah, let's do it. Level 1, ad hoc AI use. So you're essentially using this as a smart Google. You may be asking it to help you with a recipe. You might have asked it to help you write an email. You're essentially treating this like a very smart tool. And honestly, that's where most people are that we find.

Most people, they're replacing Google with it. They're using it for just little helps here and there, questions.

Yeah, help me write this email. I go, oh, it's amazing. I'm like, you can tell these people normally because they've become experts at copy and paste. They're like, oh, I wrote this email. I'm like, no, not really. But anyway, level 2 is intentional use. So you're using the same tools, but it now comes tied to a business metric. So here what we see is people say, my churn rate is currently 7% and I would like to reduce it to 5%. How do I do that? So you're seeing people actually start diving into their business instead of— and maybe it's not even business use, it might be their weight or— but it's a driven conversation. Level 3 is where we start adding external tools and data sources. So we start using skills and connectors and we say, oh, here's our ad account and here's our Google Analytics account and here's our hosting account. And instead of having to go and find all those things and bring them in, it's connecting to them and doing them. Yeah. Level 4 is where we start running automations. Like, hey, I want this blog post and I want it on X and I want it on LinkedIn and I want 3 carousels and I want them all to link back to the blog. But it's still human-initiated. It's still the human that presses the button to run the automation. Level 5 is where the AI initiates, executes, and iterates, and humans only appear when they're needed. Um, level 1 through 5 is fully doable today, and level 1 sadly is where most people are. But I'll give, give an example of level 5 if you want.

Yeah, do, do level 5, and then I'm curious to get percentage of where people are at.

Yeah, so I have a self-healing funnel that looks at the ad spend for the day looks at the funnel down, and this is just, it runs every morning. It looks at which ads were performing. It kills the ads that weren't performing. It cycles up new variations of the ads that were performing and puts those back in the mix.

Flipped tests, just taking the data, iterates.

And, but then it looks at the Google Analytics data to see where the fall-off was for people, plans an experiment, an on-page experiment. So it'll change the color of the buttons and then it does an A/B, and then it will deploy the test. And then it'll A/B test it the next day and it'll pull down losers and put up new winners. And it's running on a 4-hour cycle. When I— we used to do that for a living. When you add that up, it's $200,000 for the web and the creative guy, $200,000 for the ad guy, $200,000 for the strategy guy. You're talking a million-dollar payroll to do that. For sure. And we used to do a 1-week cycle because we'd like meet on a Monday, agree the changes, people go and implement Tuesday, Wednesday, look at the data Thursday, Friday, come back on Monday and do the next step. I'm— for $12 a day, I'm on a 4-hour cycle.

Holy cow. Wait, you're saying that's your API cost? Like, that's your token cost?

$12, yeah. And yeah, and it just— my click-through rate on my ads is 12.5%, which people were like, what? Which is just off the charts. The ROAS is 9x. I'm just like, how can Facebook help me spend more money? Because every time I up the thing, I just— it does better. So I'm like, I need more data. Let's just go. So that's what I— what I mean when we say it can operate at that level.

Yeah. But, but you mentioned that the vast majority of people are at that level 1. And it was so funny. We had James Curran on a couple episodes ago.

James is a rock star. Love him.

He's amazing. He's so good. But he just saw a post. He said this, I think it was earlier today. He's like, hey, listen, you're going to have to go all in on AI or you're going to have to start growing corn. There's no in-between. And I look at your levels here and I say, okay, if you're at level 1, how do you get to where you're going to be like, okay, I'm all in on this thing without, I guess, sacrificing your soul to AI How on earth do you do that and still maintain that humanity? This whole middle ground, when we're talking about AI, we talk about business, talk about everything, is the toughest spot to be in, period. So how do we navigate that with AI and business in general?

In every single disruption I've seen, it's the middle that gets taken out because they don't have a defensible advantage. Louis Vuitton is still persuading people that a handbag is worth $20,000 when it was put in a sweatshop and no one's hiding the fact that it was created in the same place that creates a $10 bag, but for some reason it's worth $20,000. And Walmart is making more money than ever in the middle of the dot-com era and the dot-com boom because they've taken every cent of cost out of the transaction. So it seems to me that the very, the smallest unit economic businesses and the largest economic unit businesses seem to be doing fine. But Bed Bath and Beyond gone. Pottery Barn gone. Toys R Us gone. Like that mid-market is insanely hard cuz you can't hold the line of we have the best product cuz you don't. And you can't hold the line of we have the cheapest product cuz you don't. So I think you have to move to one of the two. How do you either have fully automated value production and creation. So have no humans, literally the AI is doing the sales, the marketing, and the, the delivery and the production. Or you go the other way, which is the way I would rather go. And how do you add as much human touching as possible? And how do you go as high up the value chain as you possibly can? So as an example, we have an AI agent that watches all of our members' social media and we'll buy them cookies. So if somebody's like, kids graduate, they get a present from us with a, hey, just wanted to say, and we use a RoboPen API. So it gets a handwritten note from me. Now, would I rather do that myself? Of course I would. But we got 10,000 people in our space. There's physically no way I could employ humans to watch everyone's social in order to work out when to send them something to say congratulations. We pay, I said, over the odds for our account managers. We onboard everybody personally into our programs where we do everything we can to say, hey, we've got you and you're safe and everything's fine. And don't worry because people come into our space technically scared, job scared, market scared. And it's more for us, it's more about creating a family or a lifeboat than it is in some ways even teaching them the AI.

I want to go back to your 7 levels or 6 levels really quick. Level 1, ad hoc. That's somebody, they're just waiting for their kid to get done with soccer practice and they're probably just using a free plan on ChatGPT, right?

Yep. 100%.

And you said that's most people. So I think we have a good blend of listeners here, Peter. I think some of our listeners are people who are prospective. You know, they're people that are like, I need to do things in my life. I want more. I strive for more. I want to do these things. They just don't know how, and they listen for hows and frameworks and strategies. And then we have the other blend that are already existing business owners, already existing entrepreneurs. So for the people who are not yet stepped into the world, who are still just using ChatGPT, how do they start getting out of that? Or do they even need to? What I really wanna get to is what tools are you using at your different levels?

Ooh, that's interesting. So across level 1, level 2, level 3, I would suggest you should be using right now Claude for all of them. I won't be using ChatGPT, I'll be using Claude AI. And Claude is like, Claude is the, if you only have one tool, Claude. From there you start, you start getting to this point of like, okay, well this is a great thing when I'm still driving the train. But what does it look like when I stop driving the train? We, we spoke about it quickly as this agentic thing, and that's where things start to get more interesting. So that's when you start to look at the open clause, the nano clause, the Nemo clause, these kind of things. Some people might have heard of those, which is where you start having an, uh, an all-purpose assistant and it becomes the, the burden of you versus it, or you ver— or in my case, me versus she starts changing. the amount I have to do versus the amount she does is now the other way around. So for example, she's gonna look at news specifically related to my audience and my area of expertise. She's gonna find something that crosses and correlates with my beliefs and my values. She's gonna then re-spin that into 3 different versions of those articles. She's gonna do a quick check in Semrush for keyword gaps and semantic search gaps and bring all that in. She's gonna pass that to another agent who's gonna score each of those. On the concept of the viral— the virality and the applicability to the audience. She's then going to send that to another one to write it, send it to another one to edit it, send it back to another one, that one's then going to approve it. And away we go. And once she's finished deploying that, she'll write the LinkedIn article, then she'll write the X article, she'll program 3 throughout the rest of the day pointing back to the LinkedIn, the LinkedIn will have a read more that points back to the blog. The sitemap XML has been updated, that's been pushed back to Google, to say that's there as well. The social team have been made aware that it's there and they've been given 3 versions of it that they can use across carousels and reels.

Wow.

So this is where you start looking and going, well, what's your zone of genius? What's the thing that, like, for me, it's these conversations. If I could talk to people about AI all day, every day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a we would make a ton of money, number one. And number B, I would have the time of my life because my ego is huge. I want audiences, I want people telling me I'm brilliant. I like, I love this, I love this. So I want to spend all my time doing this. I want to spend none of my time doing accounts. Hate that stuff. Mm-hmm. It bores me senseless when someone says, oh, we filed this incorrectly. And well then, File it correctly and stop telling me you filed it incorrectly. I don't even know why we're having this conversation. Go away and leave me alone. And when people say, yeah, we want to take your really great message in long form and turn it into short form, I'm like, shoot me in the face. I don't want to have this conversation. I understand it's important. I get it. But to me, these conversations, like hour, hour and a half long, we're actually exploring subjects are amazing. And when we're trying to put that into a 20-second reel, we're like, oh, we must have a hook every 5 seconds so that— I'm like, shoot me then. If they can't stay interested for 5 seconds, then tell them to go and look at someone doing a dance craze for all I care. Yeah. But I also understand it's really important and we have to do it, but I don't want to do it.

Yeah.

So to me it's about how can the AI bring me that leverage of not replacing the things I want to do, but replacing all the things that I have to do in order to do the stuff that I want to do.

Wow. Replace the things you have to do to free up your time to do the things you want to do.

What is it that we are trying to change? Like, what is the thing? Is it, uh, lifetime value? Is it sales? Is it conversion? Is it churn? Is it staff costs? Is it renewals? Is it reups? Is it net promoter score? What is the metric you're trying to move? Because all business do is divided into drama and math. That's it.

Yep.

And we should just be focused on the math and it's our job to stow the drama as much as possible. So if you know what the math is and you understand your business, then you can look at AI and go, okay, well, what can you do to help me with this? And maybe that's building software or maybe it's prompting or maybe it's agents or maybe it's skills or, but pretty guaranteed it can. You just need to ask it pointed questions and push it into the right direction.

Hmm.

Perfect. Okay. I wanna shift us a little bit, Peter. Hopefully I'm not shifting us too far into something you don't wanna talk about, but you've run businesses for a long time. How are you, how do I ask this question? Well, let me just ask it bluntly. How are you handling, like you said earlier, we have to train our employees on the AI, right? We have to empower our employees. You had that meeting with your employees. You were like, hey, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but AI's coming for your job. So how are you actually equipping and enabling your employees? Like everybody says, train your employees on AI, but what does that— I don't know what that means.

Oh, easiest way to do it. Bribe them.

Oh, okay. Now you'll get me with a good bribe. So break it down.

We, we, we, we, we're just implementing this now. We're going to start paying people for every AI workflow that they put in place. We're just going to give them a bonus. Because why? If you think about like, you're like, yeah, you should use AI. AI is amazing. And they're like, AI is going to take my job.— sucks. Like, so why, why would you think for one second that they— that— well, not you particularly, but why would one think that an employee is going to go, this is amazing, I now get to do more work for this— best case, more work for the same amount of money. Well, sign me up to this wonderful transaction. This sounds brilliant. I don't see why they're going to agree with that. The other thing is do this or you get fired. Well, that sucks. That's not a good way to motivate anyone long-term. Short-term, sure, but long-term doesn't really pan out very well. Or the other thing is, you know, do this and you're gonna do more work for less money and we're gonna raise the expectation of how much you are gonna deliver in it. Like, none of these equations work. So we sat down and thought about it and went, well, why don't we just pay them to, every time if they implement, if they automate part of their job, give them a bonus. Because it's way in our benefit if we pay them $5,000 to automate this piece of the work and then we never have to pay for that to be done again.

Yeah.

Do you have to check their work though? Like if they, you know, put out some crap.

AI checks AI's work.

There you go.

It really does. It's crazy to think about, but yeah, the AI normally does the checking of the work that's produced by the AI. Also, humans tend to turn out some really crappy work as well. So, you know.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

That's such a risk too. It's such a risk. Like, oh man, I have to go hire another human to do this. And the human may be great on the call and the interview, but then they get to the actual work and they're not great at the work. And now you're just spinning in a cycle. And meanwhile, the blogs are not getting pushed out. And your business suffers for that.

And fingers crossed you're not in California, cuz then you gotta keep them anyway.

Yeah. Oh, you're fine. I like you, man. I like you a lot. So, so what do you do then about like, well, I just, as you said that in my mind, I saw the famous meme of the people in India that all have the cameras on the top of their heads and it's like they're just training the AI to take them outta the sewing factory in the future. And then like, well, what do you say to people if they have that mindset? You're like, oh cool, Peter, you'll pay me more. So you're just paying me to out-train myself so you can fire me a couple months later.

I can fire you now.

Oh, that's real.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm trying to find a way to, so that you can add value to this transition. And if you're part of that equation, I think there's management positions, there's leadership positions, there's all sorts of different conversations we can have. But if your mentality is that, why don't you F the F off? Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure and I'll find somebody else to do it for me. Cheers.

Yeah. You know, we, we came together at ClickFunnels at the beginning of the year too. And Todd Dickerson did a similar thing. He's like, listen, I don't know what's going to happen, but this is the way that it's looking, especially coders, etc. Like, AI is coming for your job. Now, I'm not saying that to scare you, but I'm telling you that we can do more than what we're doing. And I don't know where this is going to end in 3 months, 6 months, but I will tell you that you're going to be better equipped to handle what's coming by diving into this with us right now.

And I thought that was a killer way to handle it. Yeah. And it's— You know, there's a lot of power in being willing to tell hard truths and being willing to hear hard truths. And we're in some hard truth time of this thing has come along and has changed. 'Cause all entrepreneurship is essentially about leverage. It's how do I get as much leverage as possible? How do I get more results than I can possibly physically do on my own? That's all we're trying to do. Is just get leverage. And the way to leverage in the past was partnerships, deals with other people and employees. That was leverage.

Yep.

That leverage is inconsequential in comparison to AI because the, one of the things that people don't see is AI has a perfectly efficient scale to it. And what I mean is, you can have a business. If that business is doing no work, the AI is costing you nothing. There's no building, there's no electricity, there's no gas, there's no AC bill, there's no pension, there's certainly no salaries. But as you scale up from 0 to 1 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 customers, it's going completely in line with that. We have been saying for the whole time I've been in AI that there'll be a solopreneur unicorn, and it came around, I think it was mid-February. A guy—

You're talking a billion dollars. You say unicorn equals a billion.

A billion-dollar valuation. He spent $26,000 in credits and he's a one-man band.

Fascinating.

And it's a GLP-1 e-com shop.

Now granted, he made thousands of fake doctors and did a whole thing to get there, but like, yeah, it proves the concept. Oh, that's the same. That's the same.

That's the same story.

Yeah, it was all, it was all a total sham. But like, it proves the concept. You know, he went about it unethically, morally, but like, give me, give me an ethical, moral guy with that drive, that idea, that passion. It can be done. One man show to a billion.

It's going to happen. You're going to see it more and more this year. I think you'll see it probably another 6, 7 times this year.

It scares me a little bit for economics, though.

Mm-hmm. It does. But yeah, here's the question, and this is genuinely like the beginning of the decision tree. Do you wanna stand in front of the wrecking ball or do you wanna ride on it?

Yeah, you're, you're exactly right.

There is no choice. There's no choice that it's coming in. That, that's, that's done. The Pandora's box is open. This is the way it is. So are you gonna be the guy that's not, not used to personally standing there? Oh no, what do I do? Or are you gonna be the person going, screw it, let's, it's gonna disrupt, let's go. Okay, let's go. What does it look like? Entrepreneurs see change as opportunity. Employees see change as fear. And there is never going to be a greater change in your life, I promise you, than this, because this changes how we human— we were always the smartest thing on the planet and we no longer are. There is no greater change that can ever happen than this. Which means that right now every single person that listens to this has unparalleled levels of opportunity to such a degree that makes anything you've ever been through look inconsequential. That is terrifying, but it's also crazy exciting.

Yes, it is. Yes, it really is.

Dropping bars, Peter Swain.

I know, right, man? I like Peter Swain. He's cool people. I have one more question about employees, Peter. How do you decide who stays and goes?

I said they decide themselves. Like if, if they're rocking up and going, hey, I just heard the podcast that you do with Chris and Dante. I think we should do da da da da da. And it'd be super cool if this and yada yada yada. And I spoke to some of the customers, like none of my team here, for example, thought to ask you if 5 of my customers could listen in today. Why not? Why not? That would've been cool. Go to my top tier customers and say, hey, Pete's gonna do a podcast. No one thought of it.

Yeah. Do you want to be in the live viewing?

Do you want to be in the live viewing of the podcast? You know, Pete just wanted to say thank you so much for everything and being part of our community. That's what I want my people thinking about. That wasn't me having a go at you, by the way, my team. That's what I want my team thinking about.

They're back there taking notes like, oh, little bit. Next time.

Not, oh, how do we do this, this? How do we program this automation of this email? No, let the AI do that. Oh, but the AI can't write it as well as we can. True, but it did it in 0.1 of a second. I, I want my team doing less and thinking more, not doing more and thinking less. And yeah, let the AI do. It's, yeah, it's a change in the, in the economics cuz you used to get paid for your output. And you really, if the cost of value— Now you get paid for input. 100%. Exactly. You know, if the value of work output is dropping to zero, which it is, then getting paid for it, lining your personal wealth up with the value of the output is a pretty dumb idea because the output is dropping to zero. What's still worth lots is the discernment of like, I was thinking about this. I was thinking about this and this over here and this over here. And if we put this together like this, it looks like this. But wow, that's super cool. That's a great idea. Well, let's go and do that. That's what I think people should be blowing themselves up for.

You are an amazing mind, man. It's just so fun to sit here and, and learn from you. Before we go, we do a segment and it's called Rapid Fire Questions. That's rapid fire questions by Dante and their rapid fire answers. So you're given like boom, concise one sentence, like we just, he's gonna hit you with some hard hitters. But this is brought to you by Funnel Hacking Live. It's funny that we've talked about AI this entire time. Make sure that you are not missing Funnel Hacking Live this September in Las Vegas at the Fontainebleau. It is all about AI. And in a world where we are going so AI, it's fun to come back together and see that community and connect as humans, you've got to be there. There's still seats available. Funnelhackinglive.com/cfr and get your seats now. But let's move on to rapid-fire questions. Take it away, Dante.

Okay. First question I'd like to ask is if somebody is just listening to this and maybe they've never owned a business, but they want to take a leap in, what's the best business somebody could start and utilize AI with?

Whichever one they are most aligned with. I think you can be a millionaire now walking a dog. Or building Lego for YouTube. Start with what is your absolute passion and then ask AI to help you turn that into a business plan.

Nice. You almost really nailed question number 2. If I'm going to choose a business, what do I go with? Do I go what I'm the most passionate about or do I go with what I'm the most knowledgeable about?

Okay, I'm gonna try and do this as a— I'm gonna try and get this answer succinct. 99% of all entrepreneurs are gonna fail and crash and burn. The other 1% are delusional 'cause they don't think they're gonna be in the 99%. You ask anyone in a room who's gonna be in that 1%, that 99%, no one puts their hand up. They said, well, no, 99 of you are wrong. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. There is no point doing this thing of entrepreneurship if you don't love what you're doing. Zero, zero, zero point in it. If you— I really feel passionate about this. If, if, if you are doing this to make money, don't. It is one of the hardest, toughest, crappiest jobs in the world. You are alone. The suicide rates in this industry, in, of entrepreneurs beats everything else. The depression rates beat everything else. The anxiety rates beat everything else. So if you're doing it for money, go and get a job. There is no point doing this unless you're doing something that lights you up and fires you up. That's your God-given mission that you're like, this is what I was put on this planet to do. Do the thing that lights you up because then it doesn't feel like work. So whether you succeed or fail, At least it was fun.

Hmm.

Love that, Peter. Is there a tool or resource that is not AI that you can't live without today?

Yes. I assume you want to know what it is as well, because that's— yes, that's probably not the right answer. This.

What is that?

It's called a moon ball. So it bounces at a weird angle.

I was not expecting a moon ball.

So I spend most of my life doing this, talking to AI, because, because it bounces at a slightly weird angle, it engages the other side of your brain. So it forces you to be like almost meditative, meditative. So we send these to our customers when they sign up, we send them a bouncy ball. So spend more time bouncing a ball, spend more time walking a dog, more time thinking, more time being discerning, less time working. So yeah, the one thing I can't live without apart from AI, ball.

A moon ball.

I travel with it and everything.

It's weird. Is there a mistake you made early on or any time in your career that you've been intentional to never make again?

I really, I make mistakes every single day.

But one that you made and you were like, I will never make this mistake again. We all make mistakes all the time and then we forget about it and we do it again.

It's a much longer story, but I pitched Sheikh Mohammed and I forgot to ask him what he wanted. So I was telling him this thing would make him really rich, forgetting that he was really rich. So he didn't do the deal. It's a great, great story. But the essential lesson at the end of it is if you want to sell anything to anyone, make sure you understand what it is that they want to buy before you understand what it is you want to sell.

Wow. Okay, fantastic. This is so fun. Okay, I think I have 2 more for you, Peter. If somebody has $10K, they have $10K, that's all they got. What should they invest that in?, should they invest it in like AI tools? Should they invest it in training? Should they invest it in hiring somebody? What do you think?

I think they should give $5K to charity to make it interesting. I think they should spend $1,000 on AI tools. And I think, how much is a ticket to Funnel Hacking Live right now?

Yeah, they, they vary, but you can get in for as low as $997.

So I think you should spend $997 on the ticket. I think you should get a hotel out of town and get the metro line in. So that's gonna cost you like $3K. So I think you spend $2K on AI. 5K to charity and 3K coming to FHL. Amazing.

Um, I have one more now. I pre—

And you should document doing the whole thing because they'll get you to your first 100,000 views, which means you can then monetize and sell them whatever you want.

Yeah. Yes, it will. Peter, Dotcom Secrets, be the reporter, bring them along for the journey. Hit them with that. I love that. You're so good. I wrote this one early on as I was doing research in you. I think it's really cool you wrote 8 books. So out of— you wrote 8 books. What's one sentence from the new one that would make someone buy it on the spot?

It's that subtitle, How to Plan in the Unplannable World.

Couldn't agree more. As soon as you said that, I was like, I want that right now.

It's—

Did you come up with that headline or did AI?

No, I came— I've writ— I wrote the first one. This one, You Can Be Proud or Rich, and I'm writing the last one myself. The middle ones were all written by AI. Nice. That's so amazing.

Peter, if we want to keep in touch with you, if we want to stay connected, how do we stay connected with you?

How does somebody get on the Peter Swain train? That's what I want to know.

The Swain train.

Yeah, the Swain train.

It's peterswain.com. We've got a number of different programs, a number of things, socials. We've got deep dives, which are free stuff that people can work with, but all of them are on the website. So www.peterswain.com. And the socials are Peter Swain 24/7 across all of them. So we'd love to, hang out and see people and get on the Swain Train. I love that phrase, the Swain Train.

Love it. Thanks again, Peter, for another great episode of ClickFunnels Radio. We'll catch you guys next time.

Thank you.