The Great Repurpose: Shifting Our Identity from Professional Tasks to Human Value

Transcript

1. 0:00You should stay. It's not like
2. 0:31Okay, welcome everyone to Let's Vive at Upside. Thank you for showing up tonight. Um, some of you have been here before.
3. 0:40We're modeling this after Let's Vive up in Denver, uh, which gave me New England started, uh, like a year ago. Actually,
4. 0:48Kyle's been to one of those events. Um, so we've been doing this for a month and a half now, kind of getting our feet
5. 0:55wet. Um, the group has obviously grown. Last time we had Danny and Joe down from Let's Vive to do code 101, which is
6. 1:06which was great. Um, I've known Kyle for some time uh when I was on the board for Colorado companies to watch. Kyle is a
7. 1:15past winner through his company Storyline and I think it was probably two years ago um I led to a talk that
8. 1:23Kyle was giving at Invisible City up in Denver on AI and I was kind of like didn't really know what AI was all
9. 1:31about. Wasn't even using chat on a daily basis. Kyle gave the most amazing presentation. She totally blew my mind.
10. 1:40I'm like, "Okay, I got to get into AI." And that was kind of the the start of me ramping up. Kyle founded AION, which is
11. 1:48an online community for AI enthusiasts. He's on what almost every night on YouTube. >> I go live five nights a week on YouTube
12. 1:56and Tik Tok talking about AI. >> And it's not he's not boring. Definitely not boring. So, I I highly encourage you
13. 2:05to check out AI Salon. Follow the AI learning lab on YouTube and when you when you're board at home at night, go
14. 2:13on YouTube and watch Kyle. He's very entertaining and um grateful that he made the trip down here tonight from
15. 2:20Denver. Really appreciate it. I think he's going to give a great presentation tonight. And uh Kyle, it's all yours.
16. 2:27>> Thank you so much. And make sure everyone signs in before you leave tonight. >> I really appreciate everyone back
17. 2:34tonight. Thanks for coming. Um, I assume you don't know um what the heck we're going to talk about tonight. Um, I want
18. 2:43to share some new thinking that I've got on AI. But I'm Pal Shannon. Um, I've I've I've had a a crazy fun career
19. 2:53that's always been at the intersection of new technology and storytelling or self-expression. Um, and the the moment that we're in, this
20. 3:04generative AI moment is is absolutely crazy. Um, I'm going to take us on a journey tonight. So, I hope you're okay
21. 3:10with that. And I promise you where we're going to end up is in a really amazing place, but it may not seem like that to
22. 3:17start. So, I hope you're you guys good for a little sense of adventure tonight. Little fun. Playing along. Good. um
23. 3:27in a moment, but not yet, I'll sort of I'll sort of dive into what we're talking about here. But I I thought what
24. 3:32might be good is just to give you a little bit of my background um and my context for how I understand what's
25. 3:40happening in the world right now. So, I'm a storyteller by train. I have a fine arts degree in acting. I moved to
26. 3:47New York City out of school and uh started ran a theater company for four and a half years in the dramatic life of
27. 3:54the starving artist and then uh and then I got tired of you know macaroni and cheese. I thought I got to make some
28. 4:01money. So I because I'm smart I thought I know I'll write myself an acting career. So I went through a two-year
29. 4:07stretch where I wrote seven screenplays in two years. Started a fake management company to do that and that didn't make
30. 4:13me any money either. Um but but my day job instead of waiting tables I I didn't want to be cliche I did desktop publishing
31. 4:23and so I was I was good with computers and along people started talking about this thing called the worldwide web and
32. 4:30I started seeing bus posters about it wired magazine in Mondo 2000 and and and I was really intrigued by this
33. 4:40and and I I kept thinking about this time in my childhood when I was in seventh th grade. I walked into my um first day of math
34. 4:49class in seventh grade and there were RadioShack TRS80 computers on every desk and I learned how to use computers. I
35. 4:58learned personal computers and I learned basic programming and I remember being just too young. I remember thinking like
36. 5:05Steve Jobs and Bill Gates like I'm just younger than I just missed it. And I knew that that machine was like the printing press. Like I knew
37. 5:14that these things don't come along very often, like every couple hundred years. And so I was I was like heartbroken that
38. 5:21I missed this moment in history. So this worldwide web thing comes along and I don't know what it is. I teach myself
39. 5:29enough HTML to put together some pages and I had an idea. I thought I I know a bunch of talented people and actors and
40. 5:36writers and what if I put together an art and culture magazine because the internet all that was on it was like
41. 5:41research papers and dissertations and science and so so I came up with this idea for an art and culture magazine
42. 5:49called Urban Desires. So went away with my wife on vacation, took my Mac 660 AV and in the car and set it up and and I
43. 5:57made the first issue of Urban Desires. And so I got back to our apartment in Brooklyn and um I didn't know what to
44. 6:05do. I didn't know how to get it on the internet. So, you know, I asked some buddies and they're like, "Oh, you got
45. 6:10to upload it to an internet server." So I uploaded these files from my apartment in Brooklyn to this computer in
46. 6:16California. I had to call, you know, I had to call it used the sound of me. Three weeks later, I got an email from
47. 6:25someone that said, "Did you know that Urban Desires was written about in Paris in Liberation, the Parisian newspaper?" Sorry.
48. 6:36It was this remarkable moment where where I sensed that something had shifted, that the world had changed
49. 6:53and I and I the next Sunday I couldn't believe it. The next Sunday I went to down to Time Square and I went to the international news
50. 7:00stand and I bought a copy of Liberation and flipping through it. Sure enough, there's a full page article of of this
51. 7:06magazine I made in my apartment in Brooklyn, screenshots of it. And I knew in that moment that geography had been
52. 7:15collapsed, that time had been collapsed, that the world was different now, but no one knew it. And that began a really remarkable time in
53. 7:26my life. I co-founded agency.com, which was one of the first digital agencies, and I built some of the first websites
54. 7:31for the Fortune 500. And I got to really I got to live that experience of being at the beginning of something that was
55. 7:39going to change everything. And I knew like every day I felt lucky to be a part of being able to do that.
56. 7:47And so I thought that was the last time in my life this was going to happen. Jump forward to November 30th, 2022. I
57. 7:55assume you know what that day is. Anyone? That was the day that ChatGpt launched. And I had a similar kind of moment as the
58. 8:10the Paris newspaper moment where I was playing around with chatting. My my first experience with it was um
59. 8:18oh the Turing test has been passed, right? Alan Turing came up with this test in the 50s that said we'll know
60. 8:24when a machine is truly intelligent when you can interact with it. You can't tell if it's a computer or a human being on
61. 8:30the other side of the screen. I was like, "Oh, that that kind of happened." And then I was like, "Oh, maybe I can get it to act like, you
62. 8:36know, those robots in sci-fi movies." As I was talking with it to try to get it to act like a robot in sci-fi movies, it
63. 8:44it was acting like a robot in I'm like, "Oh, this is this is what's in those movies." Like, we're living in a postci
64. 8:51world. So, about a week later, I for for a bunch of years, people said, "Oh, you should learn Python. Python's
65. 9:00really good. you should learn Python, the programming language. Okay, I'll learn Python. I have AD. I don't I'm not
66. 9:05good with programming. So, I but I heard that chatbt could could code. So, I said, "Write me some code in Python." And it wrote this code.
67. 9:15And then I had this panicked moment where I got really embarrassed like I didn't even know how to run Python code.
68. 9:21And normally what you would have to do is you'd have to like dial up a buddy like, "Uh, how do I run Python code
69. 9:27again?" He's like, "Oh, you don't dump, right?" You know, I just asked chatbt, "How do you run Python code?" Within 90
70. 9:33minutes, I had written a fully functional Python application that was making API calls to OpenAI and generating social media copy based on
71. 9:40what someone did. And I had, you know, full body chills again because what hit me was this was 2022.
72. 9:51The world just changed, but no one knows it. So, with your permission, what I'd like to talk about tonight is
73. 10:04where I think we find ourselves. I'm I'm going to get to sort of what you can do with AI, how to do AI, and I'm happy to
74. 10:11answer tactical questions. I spent about the first year and a half when I when I got into this AI stuff, I started the AI
75. 10:18learning lab and I started AI salon as a way to just gather people curious about AI. And for about the first year and a
76. 10:28half, it was just like trying to keep up with the tech. What's this tech do? How do you do the tech? What's chat GPT? Oh,
77. 10:32they just came out with a new model. What's that? What's this? What's that? What's that? And for the past year and a half,
78. 10:40what became clear is you can't keep up with it. I was doing it every night and failed. And you can't really learn it because
79. 10:50about the time you learn it, they change it. And so it just it just felt like this hamster wheel. And so I went
80. 10:56through this year and a half period where I was still going live five nights a week. I was still talking about this
81. 11:03stuff. I'm still passionate about it. I was still optimistic about it. But something was weird. I couldn't figure
82. 11:07out what it was. And a few weeks ago um on one of my lives um this idea of the great repurpose just kind of emerged.
83. 11:19Um but it it didn't emerge out of nothing. What this is, this is naming something that I was feeling. Um,
84. 11:34and so we're going to dig into it. So, so a couple of things. Well, I just I just request just come with me on the ride. Okay. Um, this may
85. 11:50not seem like it's going to be relevant to AI, but but it but but it is. Um, so why the great repurpose? Why why do we
86. 11:57have to come up with with a name for this? What does this actually mean? There's a lot of people talking right
87. 12:03now about AI is going to take our jobs. AI is going to take jobs. AI is going to take jobs. Talk about it as an economic
88. 12:08crisis. Talk about as employment crisis. And what's been striking me is that yes, that's going to happen. And if you've
89. 12:18been paying attention to AI, if certainly if you're playing with it, the tools in the in the last half of 2025 got dramatically better.
90. 12:28So, so like the past six months, the tools have gotten dramatically better. It is fairly clear to me that 2026 is
91. 12:34the year that we all we all confront, oh, this is going to take jobs. Like up to this point, it's like, yeah, it's
92. 12:43good, but we still need a human in the loop. Right. 2026 it's it's it's apparent that that this is going to take
93. 12:49jobs. That is a crisis. We need to deal with the economic impact of that. Nobody knows what that really means. But
94. 12:55there's something deeper and that is jobs are under threat. But I think that the invisible crisis that we're about to
95. 13:03enter is a crisis of meaning. And so the great repurpose all of a sudden to me was was something that came up. purpose,
96. 13:12meaning, you know, our meaning, our self-worth, our identity um is very much tied um to to work and and work is about
97. 13:22to change dramatically. And so the great repurpose is about putting a name to that. I want to tell you a story of so
98. 13:30so who are these three handsome gentlemen? You know, this one this one looks familiar. The guy in the center is
99. 13:36Chan Su. He was my co-founder at agency.com. That's the the agency uh I founded in the 90s and and the guy on
100. 13:42the left there is Paul Gall and Paul Galley's nickname was Pub and Pub was awesome. He was employee number one for
101. 13:50Agency.com. Agency.com was insane. We grew to like 2200 people in five years. It was it was an absolute insanity.
102. 13:59So we we were growing really really fast. And Paul was what we called the site builder. So he built websites and we
103. 14:07would be hiring these kids coming out of school and we would we were literally hiring anyone we could. We couldn't hire
104. 14:13fast enough. It was just this crazy time. And so what happened is he got really good at building sites, but all
105. 14:18these people would get hired and then they would get promoted around him. So like these people that were working for
106. 14:24him were now getting promoted to manager. He was just like I'm good at building websites. And there was a point at which it just
107. 14:30became weird where you know there were people making more money than him. and promoted and and they said, "Paul, you
108. 14:37know, we should probably promote you. Like you you like no more than any money here, you know." And he's saying, "Okay,
109. 14:43you know, I'll take more money." And so we went off and did the new job. And two months later, he walked into my office
110. 14:55and he asked me this, "Can I be devoted?" He said, "I love building I love building websites and I don't get
111. 15:07to do that now. I'm managing people. Paul is the analog version of what's actually happening right now with programmers with engineers.
112. 15:21The AI because the the frontier model companies are creating these AIs that are really good at programming first
113. 15:27because they want to use them to make the AI better. they want to get. So it's getting gotten better at programming at
114. 15:32first. So a lot of programmers are not programming. And if you love programming, if you're passionate about
115. 15:40it, you love the problem solving of it, doesn't matter. And all of a sudden, this thing just does it better than you
116. 15:45and your job is just kind of look at it. They just got promoted into a job that they may or may not want, right? So it
117. 15:54it you know he he was a guy that had the guts and the clarity to understand that he was miserable in that new position.
118. 16:02There's a bunch of people that are about to be promoted into some sort of different role. Um and I and I think what it looks like is this.
119. 16:11As far as I can tell, there are three major categories of job disrupt disruption that are coming. Um the first
120. 16:18one is you may lose your job. A lot of people are going to lose jobs. um certain sectors, the entire sector might
121. 16:27go. So, not only might you lose your job, your 20 years as a customer service manager, you know, if it's a, you know,
122. 16:34phone customer service center, um that's likely all going to be AI. So, like that whole sector might not be available. So,
123. 16:40so that's that's potentially happening. There's a whole another category and this is the the engineers that I just
124. 16:47talked about. You keep the job, but the job fundamentally transforms. So now your job is to babysit agents or or to
125. 16:54just check where you I was thinking I don't know if anyone else has experienced this. You know scratch off
126. 17:00tickets, lotto tickets. I used to love scratch off tickets. You go to the 7-Eleven, you get the scratch off
127. 17:06ticket, you scratch it, you figure out the crossword or the 10x multiplier, you like it was a whole thing. You talk to
128. 17:12people and then you take it back to 7-Eleven and they scan it on the fancy machine and go you win. it would confirm
129. 17:20you win. Well, we now have on our phones, we've got the lotto app. I don't know if you know this, you can just
130. 17:27scratch off the code on the bottom of the lotto ticket or scratch off ticket and scan your own ticket and see if it
131. 17:33won or not. You don't have to play the game. That's about to happen with work that all these people that got really good at
132. 17:41playing the crossword game or the scratchoff game, they're just like, "No, no, we've got something that does that
133. 17:46now. Oh, you just scan the barcode. Isn't that great? Right. Um, so that's that's kind of, you know, version number
134. 17:54two. And and then version number three is particularly for solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and especially people
135. 18:01whose expertise is their product, right? I know how to navigate this. I know how to do this. I know how to do that.
136. 18:07There's a lot of people that that their passion is their business. And I think what that's going to look like is the world just changes.
137. 18:17the phone just doesn't ring quite as much. You know, the proposals that used to excite people are like, "Cool, right?"
138. 18:25Um, and you can't quite name why. So, so this is a thing we're facing. I told you I was going to take you on a journey.
139. 18:30It's getting bleak. I know it's dark. And there's there's there's a lot of anti-AI sentiment right now.
140. 18:44every time there's a major technological change, this happens. I in the 90s, I was asked to speak at a newspaper
141. 18:50conference. And I said, I can sort of see what's coming with this publishing thing. I said, I was in a room full of
142. 18:56editors and I said I said, what you might want to consider is exploring blurring the boundary between editorial and advertising.
143. 19:04And the head of the conference stepped up on the stage and thanked me and walked me to the exit and told me to get
144. 19:10a cab and leave. So, so there is resistance to technology. People don't like change. Can we opt out of this AI
145. 19:18thing? No, we can't. This isn't something we asked for, but it's not going away. The worldwide web was a very simple
146. 19:29technology. At the at the core of the worldwide web was one technological innovation. It was the hyperlink. You
147. 19:36could instead of having to type to go to a different computer server, you could click on a hyperlink. That was the sole innovation of the
148. 19:43worldwide web. There was things layered on it, but that was it. And the worldwide web changed the world. AI is
149. 19:50like a thousand improvements like that, like 10,000 of them. It's like nothing I've ever seen. Like the the depth of
150. 19:57what's happening now and what it can do is insane. And there's trillions being invested in this. So, we can't escape
151. 20:04it. So, the only way forward is through. There's another thing. And I know it's getting dark. I'm going to pull us out
152. 20:15of this. It's going to be good. We have an invisible contract. And I think in in America, it's it's particularly strong. I think we
153. 20:26influence the world. And that is we silently agreed I am what I do. When I meet you at a party, what do I ask you? What do you do?
154. 20:35what do you do? It's wired into our society that what we do the tasks are in some way our identity and in some
155. 20:45jobs it's very direct but I think it's I think it's a lot more I don't know subtle and and and insidious than that.
156. 20:53I think it's pretty deep. Um this is from from from a Gallup uh thing. 55% of Americans say that their job gives them
157. 21:01their sense of identity. Among college graduates, it's 70%. And AI is is about to void that contract, right? So, you know, however deep your
158. 21:14pride in your work is, um that's about to change. Um, I just want to talk about three different um, like kind of hypotheticals of
159. 21:31the kind of folks that you might be in this room right now or you might know. Um, but but I just want to talk about
160. 21:38the the kind of things that people are going through. Um, so if you think about creative professionals, this is Marcus. Um,
161. 21:47Marcus has been a creative director for 15 years. He's 38 years old. He used to charge five grand for a job on average.
162. 21:54His clients pay him five grand to come to do it. Now his clients are like, "Hey, I'll give you 500 bucks. Can you
163. 22:00just take this midjourney thing I made and make it suck less?" Sure, I can do that. Right? So, so everything changes. And and so Marcus
164. 22:09has a choice. Particularly in the in the creative arts, this is bad, right? It's like, do I refuse to use AI because it
165. 22:16threatens my sensibilities, right, and become irrelevant, or do I use it and betray the craft that, you know, that I
166. 22:24care so much about, right? So, it's like neither of those are good choices, but both of those are are are in his face.
167. 22:31Then you've got sort of displaced executives. This is Sarah, um, you know, VP of marketing for 18 years, things
168. 22:37like that. you know, she asked, "Should I pretend that I'm 30 and and learn prompt engineering or do I just sort of
169. 22:45accept it that my 20 years of experience is nobody cares about that anymore?" Uh, then you've got James who who's an
170. 22:52independent contractor, marketing consultant, 20 years, you know, charging 250 bucks an hour that they can now get the answers for 20
171. 23:01bucks a month with Chad GT. Um, you know, and you know, he's got these this this awful choice as well. Do
172. 23:10I compete with AI or do I redefine what it means to be an expert? And I think a lot of people are struggling with this
173. 23:17today. Like I don't think we have to wait for a AI to get much better. If you're in the creative arts, if you're
174. 23:23an ad agency, if you're a consulting company, anything where where expertise is is your core skill, I can just ask
175. 23:32Chad JP now. Probably it certainly knows it faster and it probably knows the deeper. So, how do you compete with that?
176. 23:39The options are are kind of dis distasteful and terrifying, but there's a new choice. And this is what I want to
177. 23:46talk about. We're about to take a turn here. We're going to take a little journey. We're going to take a turn. We're going to make the turn.
178. 23:54The new choice is we all get to sorry we're all being forced into a world where it would be wise for us to do to rediscover who we are
179. 24:08and then let AI amplify that. So there's a crisis of meaning here. But the ironic thing is and this is why I'm so bullish.
180. 24:17The very tool that is going to force this change on us is also the tool that likely will allow us to navigate our way
181. 24:25out of this if we can figure out who we are and what we're passionate about. That's what we're going to talk about. So, um,
182. 24:36so in a moment, but not yet, I'm going to ask you to close your eyes and I'm going to we're going to visualize something about your world.
183. 24:46Okay, good. Willing to go there in a moment, but not yet. It's nothing weird. We're not gonna do anything weird. I
184. 24:53promise. Um, but so first what I'd like to do is this. Just because I've been talking for a bit, just everyone stand up
185. 25:01and just like shake your arms out. I'd like you to take a a deep breath in in through your nose, out through your mouth. between your nose.
186. 25:18I know you're thinking like, I thought we were going to be vibing tonight. It's okay. It's okay. Get through your nose. Okay. So, sit down.
187. 25:35So, I'd like you to close your eyes. I'm just going to take us on a little journey. I want you to think about a normal Tuesday at work.
188. 25:47Today's Tuesday. Think last Tuesday. And what I want you to think about is all the tests that you did. What what
189. 25:56were the the emails that you sent, the calls that you made, the presentations that you made, if you make cabinets,
190. 26:04sanding the wood? I want you to think about the task, all the tasks that you did. I want you to really think about the
191. 26:12things that you're good at in those tasks, right? Are you good at language and emails? You can you know how to
192. 26:18respond to an angry email or what are the things you're good at? What are the things you love to do? Um
193. 26:30I also want you to think about things you you might not like, but you're actually really good at that people rely
194. 26:36on you for. Right? There's there's things that you've gotten good at over the years. I want you to think about the
195. 26:42things you went to school for. I want you to think about the things you learned on your own and take great pride
196. 26:46in that. You figured it out. And I want you to think about the things that you do that when you do them right, it just it feels great.
197. 26:59Got it? Okay. Keep your eyes closed. Now, imagine, so it's Tuesday night. You go home, you have a nice dinner, you
198. 27:09watch some good TV shows, you get a good night's sleep, you go back into work on Wednesday, and you sit down at your desk, and what
199. 27:21you learn is that every single task that you were assigned to do on Tuesday has already been done for you. And not kind of done, like done,
200. 27:34perfectly. like better than you could have done. You still have your job, but none of those tasks need you
201. 27:42anymore. I want you to really take that in. Imagine yourself at the desk. All your tasks are done. I want you to keep your eyes closed and
202. 27:51just if you can think of a single word of how that makes you feel, just just say it out loud. >> Useless. >> Useless. >> Relieve.
203. 28:05Freedom. >> Freedom. >> Freedom. Yeah. Good. Okay. Now, keep your eyes closed. I want you to go back to that Tuesday
204. 28:19morning. You still have all the tasks to do. The magic day when all the tasks were done hadn't happened. You've got
205. 28:26emails to respond to. You got PowerPoint presentations to, you know, you got got order supplies. whatever it is.
206. 28:36And now I want you to think about something different on that day. Not what you did. I want you to think about how you showed up.
207. 28:46Are you the one that asks really good questions? Are you the one that makes people laugh? Are you the one who sees
208. 28:52patterns? Do you show up and see patterns? Are you the one that refuses to ship until it's absolutely perfect?
209. 29:03What changes in a room when you're not there? What's missing when you're not there? That's the how you show up.
210. 29:18That's underneath the tasks. That's the thing that can't be automated. No, I want you sort of let your the
211. 29:27image of your work environment just drift away. Take a deep breath and just let it drift away. So now you're just in a void.
212. 29:36We're going to move deeper. Sitting underneath how you show up at work is you. I want you to think about why you show
213. 29:50up that way. I want you to think about what do you value? What do you care about? What are you passionate about? What's your taste?
214. 30:02Why is it that you show up at work in that in that particular way? What's your judgment? What's the thing of who you are when
215. 30:11someone at work or your family or your friend says that's so you, her, him.
216. 30:25That's who you are. AI can do the tasks. AI might mimic your approach. It might do the tasks better than you do, but AI can't be you.
217. 30:39Okay? So, I want you just take a deep breath and as you let the breath out, slowly open your eyes.
218. 30:58I'd love to hear what it felt like to get clear of that separation of the tasks that you do from who you are. Any any insights?
219. 31:13I felt sad and sad about what was the sadness that I lost. I lost me. Yeah.
220. 31:32>> Maybe I should spend more time with my family or something. But then I went back to the money, >> right?
221. 31:45>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who who you are is important, but if you're in survival mode, Yeah. This is rough stuff and this
222. 31:51is this is something that we're going to all have. Great. What else? Yeah, >> I'm a German immigrant and recent like
223. 31:57US citizen and I'm very much tapping into what you said about the culture difference. >> Yeah. >> I'm I'm currently looking for a new
224. 32:06opportunity. I'm very much aware of who I am, but I feel like there's no value put on that glue or the how you show up.
225. 32:14It's task and do as much as you can of it. And it's like ROI and it's I feel like I bring so much more. >> Yeah.
226. 32:22>> And I feel like it's not really it's not physically there. It's not, you know, you can't put the number on it.
227. 32:29>> It's well, they call it in business, they call it soft skills, right? You've got your hard skills. Those are the tasks
228. 32:35>> and your soft skills. HR people when they have good budget, they talk a lot about soft skills. Oh, we're going to
229. 32:40develop the soft skills. And the minute budget cuts come, the soft skills training goes away, >> right?
230. 32:47>> Production. Production production. Right? >> And this is listen this is no one's fault in this room. Like that's all
231. 32:53carried over from the industrial revolution. Right? Time equals money. This is a long tradition. This is how
232. 32:59this is how business work. This is how you make cabinets. Like it this is time equals money. Right? The tasks. So so
233. 33:06that's so there's all this value placed there. And yet that that thing of of how you show up and who you are ultimately in
234. 33:14the end that's why they hire you. But where the value is placed right What other insights? I know you had
235. 33:21>> I did um I felt a I I do this personal brand work so I I do this a lot with my clients, right? >> And I thought I have a deeper self
236. 33:32agency sense. >> Ah, >> when I realized that I can I can take me and pluck me in, put me in anywhere and I can be of value because I have a
237. 33:42unique skill set in my own DNA. >> Yes. Yes. of being able to see things, touch things, you know, alignment came
238. 33:50up for me and consistencies came up for me. I'm all about that. >> Yeah. >> In my job, but it's because it's within
239. 33:57me. It's not it's not something outside of myself. It's inside. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Beautiful. Really good. Really good.
240. 34:06>> Um, do you all know the music producer Rick Rubin? That one? Yes. He's like, you look like Sam had a big beard.
241. 34:15He produced the Beasty Boys. He produced Red Hot Chili Peppers. Produced the Del like famous Grammy award-winning like
242. 34:22many of the songs, you know, from your childhood and beyond a Rick Rubman produced. He doesn't write music. He doesn't play
243. 34:32an instrument. He can't sing. He doesn't work a recording console. He's got no skill. He he sort of proudly declares
244. 34:39his lack of tactical execution skills. Why do they hire him? Because of who he is. Because of his taste,
245. 34:55right? What Rick assumes is I assume that the musicians will do their bit with their instruments and their voice
246. 35:02and the engineers will do the turn the knobs and do the thing. My favorite recent story of Rick Rubin's Betty
247. 35:09Blanco was talking about a a recording session he did with Ed Sheeran and um they were at Rick Rubin's estate and
248. 35:18Rick Rubin's like out walking and being the hippie that he is and just walking around and they're recording. They're in
249. 35:23the studio. They spend like four hours recording this song. Rick finally comes in and they're like, "You want to hear
250. 35:28the track?" He's like, "Yeah." And they play him the track and he goes, "Yeah, yeah, makes me feel orange." And he left
251. 35:43me feel orange. Billy Panco said they spent six hours trying to figure out how to change the song so it would make Rick
252. 35:50feel less orange. They didn't know what it meant. But when he came back six hours later, he goes, "Yeah, that's the song, right?
253. 36:07The more I learn about, the more it becomes clear to me that who we are will be our job."
254. 36:21Because if the I is going to automate the tasks. If AI is going to automate the thing that everyone values right now, what's left?
255. 36:31What's left is is the kind of thing where you know you're human and this is what we currently value. This is what you're experiencing trying
256. 36:40to get a job right now, right? What do you do? Why do these things? Well, we don't value those things, right? Or you
257. 36:46don't you're too expensive for those. We want to pay whatever. Then there's the the how you do it. And and notice that
258. 36:53the what you do is fading away. Like I really do think that's where we're headed. And and while it's scary, every technological
259. 37:04transformation in history has felt like if if that thing goes away, what are people going to do? We're not we're not
260. 37:11going to we're human beings. We will adapt. But but that's about to happen. The what you do is about to go away. And then
261. 37:19there's the who you are, right? And so I where I start to get to is the clearer we can become individually and for each
262. 37:26other on the value of this and who we are and how we show up, this starts to become a recipe for the
263. 37:33path forward. Um, so when I was thinking about I started the AI salon, the WeChat GPT came out. So, so we've got about 4,000
264. 37:44members in there who are curious about AI and doing remarkable stuff. with AI and trying to figure it out and going
265. 37:50through a lot of this stuff. We we've recently started a thing called the the mastermind practice where people in the
266. 37:56salon are creating a daily practice around how they use AI. And so I was thinking about like what are the steps,
267. 38:04what are the stages if we're all going to be forced into effectively an ego death, right? I've seen lots of knots. Maybe
268. 38:16you're in it right now. Maybe you're like, "Oh, I didn't see that coming." Right? You said, "What did you say? I
269. 38:20feel useless." Right? That's an ego death, >> right? I get up in the morning, I go to Wait, a robot does that now?
270. 38:28What What about What about me? So, this is coming. So, I'm going to I'm going to share what I think are are five steps of a path
271. 38:43forward, but these are not linear. I mean, feel free to write them down, but but the first one is is kind of the exercise that we just did.
272. 38:53Unhook your identity from it's I'm not my job, right? To the degree that you can separate yourself from the tasks,
273. 39:02your identity from the tasks, you won't get sucked as easily into I'm useless. I'm worried. I'm not my job, but I am this. Reclaim
274. 39:17your value. What are you? Who do you stand for? How do you show up? Like, if you're a professional in this world, how you show up
275. 39:25is really valuable, right? That's why they keep you. Find your purpose. What matters to me. When you ask the question, who are you?
276. 39:41What do you value? Who do you care about? What do you want to do for them? What do you want to do in the world? Do you want
277. 39:48to do something for your family? Do you want to do something for your town, a community center? Do you want to change the world?
278. 39:56Like a lot of work right now is designed so that we never have to think about this and those tasks are about to be ripped away.
279. 40:07So, so the sooner you can start thinking about this and then here's what now we start to get into the tool that is
280. 40:14taking the tool that is causing this crisis may also be the tool that lets us navigate out and I think it will
281. 40:25you play with AI do you play with it a lot. We're gonna we're gonna this this conversation is going to shift into much
282. 40:31more practical what to do. Okay, great. Kyle, I feel horrible now. I've been deidentified. I feel useless. What are
283. 40:39we going to do about it? One important thing is to actually understand what these tools make possible.
284. 40:46I don't know how deep you've dug, but it is remarkable. I had a conversation with Ron earlier here who's he teaches
285. 40:53welding and he's got all sorts of AI with Ron. He's a >> he's awesome. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. He's like telling me all this
286. 41:03stuff. He goes, "Yeah, I teach kids how to weld." I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. People are going to need to be weld."
287. 41:07And then he tells me like these 20, he's got bots and AI things and AI visors that let sight impaired kids see the
288. 41:15welding. Like crazy stuff. So anyway, get a start to palpably understand what's possible and I'm going to give
289. 41:25you some tools for that and start building, start creating. Once you discover what matters to me, what's possible, the change you want to
290. 41:37be in the world, you don't have to wait. You don't have to wait to get funded. You don't have to wait until you understand how to write a
291. 41:47business plan. You don't have to wait until I You don't have to wait. Right? The era of talking is over.
292. 42:00You nobody got time for that, right? You see that video? Anybody got time for that? Time to start building. Okay,
293. 42:10I promise you this is going to turn toward the light. You ready? Turn toward the light. So, in the AI salon,
294. 42:25people started showing up in really remarkable ways. They would they would come into the salon not knowing anything about AI. They'd
295. 42:34just be curious and and they would start teaching one another. Here's what I learned and here's what I learned. And
296. 42:40and and they would build these remarkable things and they would there were people were are people coming out
297. 42:47of retirement. They're so excited about what they discovered was possible. They're coming out of retirement. They're changing jobs.
298. 42:56And after about a year, year and a half of this, um, the woman who's now the co-host of AI salons is this woman named Liz Miller Gersfeld.
299. 43:06And Leah Fasten, who who co-founded the salon with me. We were talking to Liz and like, Liz, you've been here like a
300. 43:14year. It seems like you're really doing good with with this AI stuff. And and she described her experience. She said,
301. 43:20well, I got here and I and I I saw the meeting and what you were talking about was interesting. So, I went and I
302. 43:26watched all those videos and then I just went and every tool that you talked about in those videos, I wrote it down
303. 43:33and I went and I started playing and then I I learned, right? And so, what she described is what we now call the cycle of AI readiness.
304. 43:43And so we created this about two years ago. And the more that I learn about AI and I learn about how how people are doing remarkable work
305. 43:52with it, this is the cycle like like we haven't veered from it. We we changed one one word here, but it's
306. 44:00it's effectively the same thing. Play first, create excellence, generously lead. And I'm going to walk you through these. Um,
307. 44:12this isn't a curriculum. This is not AI literacy. One of the one of the We used to talk a lot about AI literacy. AI
308. 44:19literacy is a fallacy right now. The tools are changing so fast that you can't be literate, but you can be ready. Um,
309. 44:33here's a fun thing that this unlocks. I was going to talk about this later, but I think I'm going to talk about it
310. 44:48now. I want you to close your eyes. Sit up. Shake your shoulders out. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath.
311. 45:08I want you to think about, you know, how you know how in life there's things you're good at and then and then there's these gaps,
312. 45:17the things you're not good at. I want you to think about all those things you're not good at. Those are your gaps.
313. 45:28And there's a kind of gap that I think about that I now call aching gaps. And aching gaps are those things that
314. 45:38you're not good at that you know you're not good at that you would really love it if you were. You know those
315. 45:47aching gaps. There's these things that we know, right? Stepdaddy told us we couldn't draw when we were seven,
316. 45:54whatever it is. And you know, we shut down that part of our brain. But but boy would we love to drum. Boy, we're not
317. 45:59good at drug. Right? We've all got this, right? Think about your income. What are the things that if you could do them
318. 46:11that would be amazing? So, open your eyes. I'd love to just hear what came up for you. What's something you're not good at?
319. 46:25>> Playing the piano. Play it again. Perfect. What else? You have a smile here. You're avoiding. >> I'm going to bear it. Okay. I'm I'm
320. 46:37really good at ideiation. I love getting stuff off the ground. I freaking lose interest when it comes to follow through and
321. 46:45>> perfect. I'm right there with you. ADHD cardarian number ADHD. >> Never been clinically. diagnosed but you know love the ideas
322. 46:55hate the execution right some people love the execution would love to be ideas what AI does what this cycle unlocks is we now now today
323. 47:10actually live in a world where you can legitimately ask yourself the question if I were good at everything. What would I choose to do?
324. 47:30The thing you know you can't do, you can actually do it. Piano. Have you played? Have you been to sunno.com?
325. 47:36>> Go to sunno. Go right now. Type in piano concerto about a golden retriever. Whatever. Whatever. And >> it'll do it for me.
326. 47:46>> Beyond what you can imagine. In fact, I'm going to play a song later that was created assuming. So So that's what this unlocks.
327. 47:59>> Who's the um the woman who does really cool AI videos? >> Kelly Bes. >> That's the type that's what really gets
328. 48:08me excited about what I can do with AI. >> Yep. Kelly Bes. I'm going to talk about her actually, but so Kelly Bes, if you
329. 48:15go to Tik Tok, it's uh Kelly, K E L O Y, and then her last name is B O E S C. You know, >> I love her.
330. 48:22>> She is remarkable. She does a video a day, seven days a week with an original song, a music video with an original song days a week.
331. 48:31>> How does she make money though? Because it's on >> Well, so she monetizes it. >> So what's happening with Kelly right
332. 48:37now? So So Kelly went from I just do this, no one cares. I've got my day job. Then Kelly started getting offers to come do work
333. 48:48and we were paying and some of them were big brand deals and they were paying her kindly and I I was funny. I talked to
334. 48:54her like six months ago. I said, "How's it going?" She's like, "I'm so busy. They're kind of coming after I just said
335. 49:02she goes, I got all these jobs. They're paying me all this money." I'm like, "That's awesome." She goes, "I hate it." >> Oh no.
336. 49:10because she makes the videos because they're pure expression of who she is. She got a call about three months ago
337. 49:18from the screenwriter of one of Tim Burton's films who wants to make a movie with her. So, what I'm what I'm what I'm experiencing,
338. 49:29what I'm witnessing in the AI salon is people. When I asked her, she she spoke at the salon a couple of times. And
339. 49:43her visuals are so unique. They're they're so remarkably unique. And and what everyone was asking her is
340. 49:51like, "How what are your prompts? What are your prompts?" And my thing was like, where is this coming from? And like her answer was
341. 50:00for my entire life I've had these ideas. I've had these visions in my head and now I can suddenly make them. So it's
342. 50:09like they were already in her. All she's doing is kind of releasing who she is amplified by this tool that doesn't make
343. 50:19any sense that it should exist in the world. You should not be able to just say give me a song and you get a song.
344. 50:24You should not be able to just say, "Give me a remarkable piece of fashion and there it is." That's where we are, though.
345. 50:31We're in that world. I I often think when you ask that question about her artistry and how did she do it, makes me feel like it's like
346. 50:42asking a magician how he did his trick. >> Exactly. >> You know, you just just enjoy >> just enjoy >> the art of it.
347. 50:51>> Yeah. Yeah. And the other part of your question, we'll get into this a little bit here, but the other part of your
348. 50:54question, how does she monetize it? Well, there's lots of ways you can monetize anything, right? But that's a different
349. 51:03that's a completely different task, right? What she could do is maybe she doesn't know anything about intellectual
350. 51:09property or starting a movie studio, right? But she could go use Chat GBT to teach herself about how to set up a
351. 51:17movie studio. What are the licensing rights? who gets paid when I get distribution and how do I get distribution and where should I be
352. 51:24submitting these things? She didn't want to do that. She just wants to make her movies and now she's on a path where she
353. 51:30might be able to make feature films like this, right? But she could have absolutely gone another way. I mean, I
354. 51:36think it's what you're bringing up is an important part of the conversation. You brought it up before. If you're just in survival mode,
355. 51:45aspiring to the higher version of yourself may seem a little fruitful, but we also live in a world where we have
356. 51:54these tools at our disposal where we might be able to do something for money we never imagined we could even think
357. 52:00about starting. Now we do, right? So, so they're not mutually exclusive. Um, but but if you're just in survival mode, it
358. 52:09might be you follow Gary Ve's advice and you go to yard sales and buy things for 50 cents and sell them online for five
359. 52:16bucks and just do that enough and make yourself a thousand bucks and keep moving. Okay. So, so we're going to talk
360. 52:23about the the the three elements of the cycle of AI readiness. A thing that we practice in the in the AI salon mastermind practice
361. 52:33is when you sit down with AI, if you want to be intentional about AI, if you want to be intentional about anything,
362. 52:39playing, learning, doing, take a moment, as weird as it was that I had us breathe deep and shake and do our
363. 52:47visualizations, take a moment when you sit down in front of AI, just close your eyes, take a deep breath, and say, "What
364. 52:53is my intention right now? What do I want? Because AI is like a crack, right? It is. It's like a crackpipe. You
365. 53:05sit down at it and four hours later YOU'RE LIKE, "I MADE ALL this stuff. What is all this stuff?" Right? I'm a
366. 53:12digital hoarder. Do you know how horrible it is for me to have an AI? It just it makes more So So this moment, what what's what's
367. 53:25happened in the in the AI on mastermind practice. So this is it's I don't know there's 25 to 30 people in it and it's growing
368. 53:32and we meet weekly and we talk about we we talk about what do we want what do we want to do what are we trying to
369. 53:42accomplish what's working not everyone went into that as we started designing these daily practices what the common
370. 53:49theme was was like I'm overwhelmed this is all frenetic I can't keep up I can't keep up and what's happened is As people started
371. 53:58doing this work to kind of center themselves before they sit with a to a person, what they've all said is, "Oh,
372. 54:04I've slowed down. I've slowed way down. I'm not as stressed out anymore because I'm thinking, huh, I want to accomplish.
373. 54:14I'm going to go use AI in that way." So, so if you're feeling that frenetic pull of the virtual crackpipe, um, this is
374. 54:24centering yourself, putting yourself at the center of the conversation is really important. Okay, play first. Play play
375. 54:42for all of our lives. Computers computed. It was profound. He talked about computers computed. Sorry, just I just realized the the
376. 54:57ridiculousness of the sentence. Um but but computers you would take data and you'll put it into the computer or
377. 55:05process it and and a new result would come out the other end. It was predictive. It was linear. And what we
378. 55:11did with computers was we took what we did and we made it more efficient. Right? That's what computers were. We
379. 55:17take doing math on paper, we put it in a spreadsheet. Now the math we do on paper is more efficient. Right? That's what
380. 55:23they've always been. the G and GPT generative. We're now in the generative area era. The computers are are doing stuff.
381. 55:35What most people are doing with AI right now is they're like, let me take my existing processes and make them more efficient.
382. 55:44And so what that does is it literally puts blinders on them that the only thing AI can do is write my emails
383. 55:50slightly crappier than I do really fast. Right. So, a lot of people leave AI because they're like, "I tried it. I
384. 55:57tried it. I had it write me an email. I kind of sucked. Play let you discover what's actually possible because again, the world has
385. 56:09changed. Not that many people knowing it." Um, so the first thing to do is with play, explore AI without expectations. If you
386. 56:20go in and say, you know, I want it to to create a B flat minor, whatever on the piano, and maybe it does that, maybe it
387. 56:28doesn't. So, if you lose the expectations and you just go play, you will discover things it can do. You will discover boundaries of its
388. 56:36capabilities that will melt your face. And if you played, I mean, you played after, you know, last talk I gave up in
389. 56:45in Denver. Um and you know I in in the AI salon we call them Kevin Mallister moments. You remember the movie Home Alone that moment.
390. 56:56So play without explore without uh expectations. The second one is play with purpose. Explore joyfully. Like we're living in a
391. 57:06postci world. Like we're living in a world where you can just make stuff. You can just do stuff. You don't know how to write a business
392. 57:14plan? How you do? Oh, like finding joy in that. There is there is there's magicalness to it, right? What is it? Is
393. 57:21it Arthur C. Clark? Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Where is the magic era? This stuff is magic. Um
394. 57:34what planning with purpose also does is you want to celebrate and explore the failures. You tried to do something and it failed.
395. 57:46You tried to write a business plan and it just kept repeating the the points in it. You're like this is a mess. What
396. 57:52happens when you when you discover the failures of AI is you're actually learning the boundaries of it. And what
397. 57:58that allows you to do is know that boy, when that limitation gets better, this thing's going to be amazing. You'll be
398. 58:07at the front of the line of knowing why the next model release is actually valuable. Make sense? And then the third one, and this is
399. 58:16really important, learn across domains. This gets to those aching gaps. When you play with AI, purposefully
400. 58:24go play with something you're bad at. Go find something that you know you can't do and go find an AI that can do that
401. 58:35because what you now get to say is, "I actually can do that." If you could do that thing that you've always wanted to do, what would you do?
402. 58:47There's a guy I'll I'll give a fun story. How we doing on time? We're good, right? >> Cool. this guy Jim Ross in the AI salon, he's
403. 58:57in the storage business. Um, not like SSDs, not data storage. He's in the self storage business, like padlocks, cardboard boxes.
404. 59:11And so he he he's the people that show up to my my nightly live, they're called the irregulars. They name themselves
405. 59:16that these people just kept showing up night after night after night as I'm on the lives talking about AI.
406. 59:22One night I said, "You all are effing weird." And and Serena just one of the one of the irregulars back, "We're not weird. We're irregular."
407. 59:33Um, which I thought was hilarious. So like, "Well, that's your name now." So So they're the irregular. So Jim's an
408. 59:37irregular. So he comes to these lives all the time. So one night someone said, "How do you make a song with Suno with
409. 59:43with with these AI tools?" And so I said, "Oh, okay, cool." And so I went in and I started making this song. And I
410. 59:49was making it and made it. We were listening to 30 different things that came out and and Jim goes, "Kyle, you won't
411. 59:57believe what just happened." I'm like, "What?" He goes, "Well, you showed us how to make a song." So, I just had a
412. 1:00:02meeting with with these prospective customers. And so, I went into Sunno and I went to Chatt and had write some
413. 1:00:09lyrics about what I knew about the customers. And I went to Sunno and had to make a song. And I sent it to him.
414. 1:00:14And five minutes later, he got an email saying, "You're hired." So, how do you monetize it? >> He's in the self- storage business, and
415. 1:00:24he composed an original song for a sales prospect and sent it to them at 9:00 at night and got the job. We're living in weird times. It's
416. 1:00:34surreal. Like, if you can understand who you are, what you value, and just be open to the possibility, play, you get to do stuff like that.
417. 1:00:49it just it doesn't make any sense. And then but when he said it was like holy crap, this stuff works. And now he's like, you
418. 1:00:57know, he's he's like known for this stuff. Um next slide. The second phase of of of the cycle of
419. 1:01:13AI readiness is create excellence. So what play is about what play first is about is about learning what's possible right while you
420. 1:01:23play without expectations while you play with joy while you look for the boundaries is that lets you know what's now possible
421. 1:01:31create excellence is is about now saying what do I want to do what do I want to do maybe the you you realize okay I like
422. 1:01:43cabinetry but something's coming with But, you know, one of the things people have trouble with is, I don't know,
423. 1:01:49imagining what cabinets could do. And like you could buy code, you could create an application that lets people
424. 1:01:56discover things that ties directly to how you work, right? There's who knows? So, so you're going to you're going to
425. 1:02:02go into some you're going to have some idea based on who you are, what you value, change you want to make in the
426. 1:02:08world. Now, you get to start building stuff. Um, one of the things that AI is doing is it's raising the floor
427. 1:02:22of quality. So, there's this phrase that people talk about called AI slop and and what they talk about is when
428. 1:02:29people just push a button on Suno and make a song and then publish that to the world. It's just like this soulless
429. 1:02:34creation, right? and and everyone can go to midjourney and you can just type in discovery and it'll make beautiful
430. 1:02:40images and you can just share those with the world. That's AI slop. So AI slop is just everyone gets to push buttons and
431. 1:02:46crap comes out and then I share them with the world and there's just this so so the the floor of quality was down
432. 1:02:53here and now AI has raised it to here. That's still the floor, right? What are the things that rise above the floor?
433. 1:03:06How do you raise the ceiling? What was it about Billy Isish in a world of pop music that when she sang her song in her weird
434. 1:03:20quietish kind of magical way rose above the It was so authentic to her. It was not like all the rest. What is that? That's you,
435. 1:03:32right? So, create excellence is about um you know, thinking about the thing you're trying to accomplish, the thing
436. 1:03:41you want to build and starting to build it. Um raise your game is is another thing to think about here. Yeah, you could go and
437. 1:03:54you can go to Chat GBT right now and you can say, "Make me a business." You could also go to Chat GBT right now and say, I
438. 1:04:02want you to explain to me the six different kinds of business plans there there might be in the world or like the
439. 1:04:08top six frameworks for business plans and I want you to explain them to me and here's here's what I value and here's
440. 1:04:14who I am and which one would be best for me and then here's my business idea and before you write a business plan like I
441. 1:04:21want you to give me 10 reasons you love this and 10 reasons you hate this, right? you can start to level your game in a way that it's not
442. 1:04:34Google has taught us evil things. Google taught us that the internet is a vending machine. You put in a prompt,
443. 1:04:44you get out the search results. You put in a prompt, you get out the search results. So, what they've done is
444. 1:04:48they've trained us to use AI like a vending machine. Put in a prompt, get out search results. You don't have to use it that way.
445. 1:04:56It's like a PhD level expert at anything you talk to it about. What are you going to talk to it about? Well, that's up to
446. 1:05:03you. Um, so raise your game. Um, and then professionalize your practice. Um, what that looks like. Liz Miller
447. 1:05:15Gersfeld who's in the hair salon. She's she's been a advertising professional for years and she was talking to me about the the work
448. 1:05:24that she was doing with her clients and she gets hired to make videos for like big brands for commercials. She's
449. 1:05:36getting hired by film directors that don't know anything about AI and they're hiring her to do this. Well, one of the
450. 1:05:42things Liz is doing is she understands the terms of service and the IP risks of all the tools she uses. And before she does any work for a
451. 1:05:54client, she gets the client to agree, these are the tools I'm going to be using. Here's the risk. Here's where I'm
452. 1:05:59willing to accept liability. Here's where I'm not willing to accept liability. Are you good with that? That's just a different level of
453. 1:06:08professionalism because AI is really quick and everyone's like, "Oh, I can make that. I can make a video. I can do
454. 1:06:12this. Okay, here's here's Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette in front of a McDonald's." Okay, you're going to give that to Pepsi, right? Um,
455. 1:06:26the other thing that that that Liz talks about is is holding to the fidelity of the idea. And once you have an idea,
456. 1:06:33creating excellence is really about understanding what the tools make possible, but also understanding where the boundaries of those are.
457. 1:06:47I I I use this term called chain of craft that that people that do really remarkable work with AI, they have a
458. 1:06:53chain of craft. And the chain of craft usually isn't just a single tool. It's like, well, I go to my whiteboard and I
459. 1:07:00put ideas on my whiteboard and then I come here and I type them into notepad and then I take that and I put it into
460. 1:07:05chat and I get and then I get that out of there and I go to here. Right? People that are doing remarkable work are doing
461. 1:07:11remarkable work and some of it's analog and some of it's digital and some of it's AI and some of it's not.
462. 1:07:18The the center line of that work is you understanding the idea and understanding the fidelity of the idea. Right? Make sense?
463. 1:07:29Um, okay. And the last one, generously lead. This this gets I deeply believe this that the only
464. 1:07:45thing the single most important thing to do right now for all of us is get your ass in community that are exploring these things. Um
465. 1:08:01what generously lead looks like and what we see in the AI salon a lot is as people try stuff and build stuff they
466. 1:08:08share it with the community. They share what worked and what didn't and they share what they've learned along the way.
467. 1:08:16You know they share their work. They share their prompts. You know some people like I'll sell you my prompts.
468. 1:08:22These are my pro these are the best prompts in the world. You know, these prompts are the best. $59.99, $199.99.
469. 1:08:30You too can have my prompts. It's disgusting. You don't need their prompts. But what you need is someone like Jim
470. 1:08:40Ross to go, I made a song for a client who closed some business because of that. Because you look at that, right?
471. 1:08:47That broke my brain. I I would have never considered that, right? That can only happen in community. So create,
472. 1:08:53contribute. Don't don't be stingy with it. Um, practice in community, right? If you're in a community that's only
473. 1:09:03talking about the tools, that's only talking about the tasks, that's only talking about the prompts, all of that
474. 1:09:08stuff is going to be automated away. The tools are going to be irrelevant. The prompts are going to be irrelevant.
475. 1:09:15The tasks are going to be irrelevant. What's relevant? you, what you believe in, how you show up, and your ability
476. 1:09:25to transform that into something in in a world um in a world of people that that understand it. Here, here's a
477. 1:09:36thing that I've been thinking about. Um I know I sometimes swear a little bit, so I apologize for that. Um,
478. 1:09:49>> in the olden time world, three years ago, >> if someone was really good at sales or was really good at carpentry, was really
479. 1:09:59good at whatever, and they were just a complete jerk. Well, you know, Bob. Yeah, we'll do Bob. Are they entering a whirlwind or
480. 1:10:14reckoning for >> Yes. >> Who you're going to work with is who you want to work with? Because if everyone can do what Bob did now,
481. 1:10:25why work with Bob? >> How are you going to know who to trust? How are you going to know how show someone shows up within if you're in
482. 1:10:33community and you're learning out loud and you're sharing what you're learning with people and you're asking questions.
483. 1:10:40Hey, I got stuck here. Can someone else help me? That gives them an opportunity to leave. And you recognize that, oh, he always
484. 1:10:49shows up. He always shows up. He's on time to the meetings. He's respectful. He asks really good questions. when it
485. 1:10:55comes time to do something, I'm going to assume he can do it because everyone can do everything now. And I know he shows
486. 1:11:01up in a way that I want to work with him. So, how you're going to get how you're going to monetize the the how you
487. 1:11:08show up to who you are is by people knowing who you are, right? They're going to hire you. One of the one of the
488. 1:11:15women in in the in the AI salon, her name is Cindy She's a futurist. She just got hired by a big sports
489. 1:11:22company to do a bunch of research and she did all this research and she she did two or three days there and she had
490. 1:11:29to distill all the things they did. They did post-it notes on the whiteboards and all that and she distilled it into this
491. 1:11:35report and they didn't pay for the upgraded package. The upgraded package included her calling her designer friend to take the the text of
492. 1:11:49the report and make it print. They didn't pay for that. So, she got this report done and she wanted she needed to
493. 1:11:55get paid. So, she did it really quick. She did it in like a like three days, right? And she's like, "I'm going to
494. 1:12:00turn this around in a week." So, she had two days left. And she looked at the report. She's like, "It's just text."
495. 1:12:05She goes, "This is boring." to do the research for the job. She had bought all these old books and magazines of sports
496. 1:12:12people from like the 50s and 30s and 20s and 10. And she had it in in her daily practice, she has discovered her art
497. 1:12:18studio again and her illustration skills and her art skills. And so she's been not only AIing, but she's been arting.
498. 1:12:27And so she decided to make collages for the different sections of her report. that company just rehired her because
499. 1:12:37they're like, "We've never seen anything like it. We might use your artwork in our communications. Are you cool with
500. 1:12:44that?" And they said, "Don't do any more work until we have a new contract in place." They extended her contract, I
501. 1:12:50think, for a year or six months, something like that. They're not buying the output. They're not buying her report. They're buying
502. 1:13:00her because she was just weird enough to give them a report that didn't look like the report that every other AI is going
503. 1:13:08to squirt out and hand to them. She's going to, I guarantee you, maybe even half, she's going to take work away
504. 1:13:16from big consulting firms that are going to use AI in a non-creative way. They're going to use it because they think that
505. 1:13:22the outputs matter. We're in we're in a transition on this. There's massive opportunity. Um, and then think critically, act
506. 1:13:31ethically. Like critical thinking. One of the things that drives me bonkers about people that don't use AI, they're
507. 1:13:37like, "Well, if AI is creative, doesn't that make you less creative? If AI can do all this thinking, don't you not
508. 1:13:42think?" It's the opposite. If you actually engage with it in a in a in an intentional way, you have to think creatively.
509. 1:13:54It's moving too fast. You have to look at what what what if there's good lord how do I right you can live in idea land
510. 1:14:01and it generates all the executional stuff which you then need to translate right um so critical thinking is huge that's
511. 1:14:12part of leadership the other thing we're doing at a lot is we're doing a lot of political advocacy um I I've now been to
512. 1:14:19Washington DC three times we've done flyins um bringing in AI startups what I can tell you is that our politicians are
513. 1:14:28not hearing what AI makes possible. What they're hearing is the robots are going to kill us. It's screwing up our kids.
514. 1:14:36They're stealing our and it's going to take all our jobs. Stop them. And I'm sitting over here in a community
515. 1:14:43where I'm watching people transform their lives and reinvent themselves in them. So, we literally go into these
516. 1:14:49rooms. We're like, uh, Jim Ross like made a song and people hired him. Really? like they they're not hearing these stories. So anyway, so so
517. 1:14:58leadership is an important thing. So like I said, I think community is no longer a nice to have. I think it's how
518. 1:15:06we survive this. You know, we talked earlier about ego death. It's going to be sad. Like your thing of I felt useless like that's
519. 1:15:21not a happy place. There's going to be a lot of people depression. >> Depression to be a lot of people that
520. 1:15:26have have what they have defined as their meaning stripped away from them. >> This is a forced mass like I feel, you
521. 1:15:35know, in a weird way, CO was like the practice route for what we're about to go through, right? Like just overnight we just
522. 1:15:47didn't go to work anymore. Wait, you can do that? Like it just changed the rules. Um, so I think community is how we survive
523. 1:15:57this and and find yourself a community of people that are human centered and heart centered, things like that. Um,
524. 1:16:06I'm going to I'm going to do two more slides and then I'm going to play a video for you that that I think I I'm really excited about and
525. 1:16:15there's a significance in it when we talk about all the things you could possibly do. Um, you with me? Everybody good? >> Yeah. Yeah. Good.
526. 1:16:25Um, I want to talk about a habit versus a practice. So, as I mentioned in the Aselon, we created this thing called the
527. 1:16:32Aelon mastermind practice. And again, Liz Miller Gersfeld, who's the one that inspired the cycle of AI readiness.
528. 1:16:40I was talking in the AI salon about what I called hi-fi AI. There were people in the salon that were just doing work like
529. 1:16:47Kelly Bes that was just better. And I said to Liz one week, I want to find the hi-fi AI people. Like who are
530. 1:16:56they? I want to I want to like put them on posters, have people look up to them. She's like, okay. Liz is very thoughtful. She's amazing.
531. 1:17:06And Liz went off for a week and she came back a week later and she said, she said, "Kyle, I've been thinking about your high-fi AI."
532. 1:17:16She goes, "I don't know if it's that," which I love. Like she went off and critically thank she thought about it and she came back
533. 1:17:30and she said, "The people that I respect in AI are treating it out of her practice. And she tal she told me about her
534. 1:17:39practice, how daily she wakes up and centers herself, does all these things that you know, you're like, "Wait,
535. 1:17:46what's that got to do with AI?" And she said, "Wouldn't it be amazing if if if we could help people start a daily
536. 1:17:56practice?" And as she was saying that, I was like, I want to practice. I want a daily practice. Like, that sounds great, right?
537. 1:18:04And then I was like, wait a minute, I go live five nights a week talking about I have a practice and I was like why am I not feeling
538. 1:18:17anything? Because what I realized is I didn't have a practice. I had was a habit. A habit is something you do mindlessly
539. 1:18:30and and habits are valuable, right? Brushing our teeth. Good habit. You want the teeth in your head? Brush them.
540. 1:18:37That's a habit. Mindless, right? A practice is intentional. And Liz's um so so so what I said, so we started this with within the S1. So now
541. 1:18:51we have this thing called the mastermind within the community and and we designed this this framework for
542. 1:19:00people to be able to design their daily practice. In fact, a lot of the the bullet points when we talked about the
543. 1:19:05three, you know, play, play, create, lead, um those came straight out of the mastermind practice. So I said, I know what I'm going to do.
544. 1:19:15I'm going to turn my nightly lies into a daily practice. So I invited Liz to come on um to my live and so this is this is
545. 1:19:24recorded this this you know this happened and she was talking to me about her practice and what her practice is
546. 1:19:30and the difference you know habit of practice and intentionality. I said okay Liz I think I got it. This is great. She goes great. She goes,
547. 1:19:39"Okay, I'm going to go now. And uh I just want you to think about one question." She said,
548. 1:19:55"What do you want?" And she left. I'm sitting there. I'm alive.
549. 1:20:09There was people looking at me, watching, and I couldn't say a word. I didn't have an answer for it.
550. 1:20:22I've been going live like that for three years. It was the first time in one of those lives where I heard like, you know, the air
551. 1:20:33going through the vents and the heaters in our house. It was the first time I'd ever been quiet. And I sat there thinking about that.
552. 1:20:43What do you want more of? And why I'm emotional and why why I did this talk and why I really appreciate you all being here listening.
553. 1:21:04They just felt this profound sense of how lucky we are to live in a time in history where we can actually ask that
554. 1:21:11questions, you know? I mean, you can ask it. You can ask it any time, but we get to answer it in just radically profound ways. Like, like
555. 1:21:23my passion is self-expression. And I think largely because I'm afraid of it. And so my whole career has been
556. 1:21:31about helping other people with their self-expression in some form or other. And when she asked me, "What do you want
557. 1:21:38more of?" I was just thinking about all these things, all these things I want to do. And and every time I thought of
558. 1:21:44something, it was like, "Oh, I could do that now. I could do that now. I could do that now." And then it comes back to
559. 1:21:50like, "What do you want? I don't know. Who are you?" It goes back to this fundamental question. So, this is actually quite simple. It's
560. 1:22:01not easy, but it's quite simple. So anyway, um if you don't have a daily practice, I think now would be a good time to start
561. 1:22:14learning about what they are. Um if you want to join the AI salon mastermind, that's you can zap the QR code, go
562. 1:22:21there. Um it's a remarkable group of people.
563. 1:22:35Yeah. So, what I'm going to do is this. Um, I'm I'm about to show you something. So, a couple things. This Thursday
564. 1:22:52will be three weeks from when I had the idea for when when This discomfort I've had for the past year and a half would
565. 1:23:00have coalesed into what I presented tonight is less than three weeks old. I did a I did a post on LinkedIn this
566. 1:23:11the Sunday after I came up with this concept or no a week and a half after and what I'm about to show you I did
567. 1:23:21within 24 hours of coming up with. So, what I'm about to show you is the music video for the Great Repurpose Movement.
568. 1:23:31So, I did the video first. I didn't even know what this was. Like, I hadn't articulated what this was.
569. 1:23:43That's that's the world we live in right now is we live in a world where you can have an idea and within 24 hours have a
570. 1:23:50music video of that idea. even though that's not your ultimate intent. Like Jim Hos, his intent wasn't to write a
571. 1:23:57song, it was to get business. He got business by writing this song. So, um, before I figured out what the great repurpose was, I made this
572. 1:24:24clock
573. 1:24:42empty.
574. 1:24:57All of us
575. 1:25:13looking at home like they forgot Smart
576. 1:25:32that seems to be the great
577. 1:25:59garden.
578. 1:26:23We finally
579. 1:27:07Is it on Spotify yet? >> That's all I got. No, it's not on Spotify, but I'll put it there for sure.
580. 1:27:12>> Um, I'm happy to answer any questions. >> What tool What tool did you use to make the video? Um, the chain of craft was um
581. 1:27:25I did a lot of the concept work of the great repurposing claw. Um, I think I had Claude do the lyrics, write the lyrics. Um,
582. 1:27:37like one of the things I knew I wanted was I wanted the song to make the progression from the darkness where we've lost purpose
583. 1:27:45to, you know, coming together again, which this this ultimately is where I think we go. Like I think this is going
584. 1:27:51to bring us back together as humans. Um, so so that was that was Claude. Um, and then I went to Sunno and I just had some ideas for genre.
585. 1:28:01>> Um, and so was the music. Um, MidJourney, uh, was for the images. >> Um, and then, um, Broadway runway ML was
586. 1:28:14the individual clips and iMovie was how I stitched them all together. So, so, you know, one of the things that that
587. 1:28:22happens, people are like, you know, oh, do you use AI for that, which is code for it. Oh, you just pushed a button and
588. 1:28:28squirted the thing out, right? >> No. >> Anything that you see that doesn't suck. Yeah, >> took work. It might be different three years from
589. 1:28:38now. Right now, it still requires some craft. And again, like even if AI could technically do this, there's something
590. 1:28:45about my passion for this idea and this music is the one, you know, this video is the one I say this represents this idea.
591. 1:28:54>> That's what I can't replicate, right? That's why I think we go back to this thing who you are, how you show up. That
592. 1:29:00is the thing we now get to take that and if we learn this AI stuff, we get to So, so one of the things that that that
593. 1:29:10is one of the tropes in AI right now is it's us against AI, >> right? It's us against AI. No, doesn't have to be. It can be. That's a losing
594. 1:29:21battle. By the way, if you think you can compete with this thing, >> that's why we're here. It's us amplified
595. 1:29:28by AI. It's us amplified by Right. That's that's the new world and connected shared ideas. >> What other questions?
596. 1:29:40>> You mentioned something about your AI salon is now involved in um the political. What are you doing in that space?
597. 1:29:48>> So we So it's mainly just education. So I got involved with this um Colorado was the first to have a shitty AI bill. I mean AI.
598. 1:29:58So, so what happens is what a lot of the legislators are doing right now is they're listening to protect us from the
599. 1:30:05AI and they want to get something on the books. We did something for you. They want to be able to but what they're
600. 1:30:11doing is they're they're overly broadly defining the risk and they're making all sorts of things that for small
601. 1:30:19businesses it it basically makes it um untenable to do business. I I was flying out on my first trip to New York. I was
602. 1:30:28sitting next to a woman who who owned a company that that did work with Denver city government. She was like possibly
603. 1:30:34private public kind of company. And you know, I told her I was going out to, you know, educate legislators and
604. 1:30:41stuff like that. She said, we were talking about the Colorado bill and and she was talking a lot about it. She
605. 1:30:48knew a lot about it. And I said I said, "Oh, you know, we never talk like what are you doing with AI in your company?"
606. 1:30:54because I was like excited to hear because she was really well educated and her response to me was, "Oh, I canceled all of our AI missions."
607. 1:31:04She said, "If that law become if that bill becomes law, that would put us out of business. So, I'm just not going to
608. 1:31:09do anything." That was two years ago. That was two years ago. So, so this legislation really can have like
609. 1:31:19chilling, devastating effects. Now, do I believe it should be unregulated like Trump's executive action on
610. 1:31:28>> you know no state legislation without having like that combined with and here's the federal plan would have been
611. 1:31:37or or here's the plan for a plan would have been better but just no one's going to make any AI regulations that was not
612. 1:31:43responsible but also states all doing their own sort of power grabs for AI legislations just to say that they
613. 1:31:51I don't think any legislator is purposefully creating crappy legislation, but they're creating legislation that's uninformed. They're
614. 1:31:59not educated. They don't understand how fast it's moving. They don't understand the opportunity it provides people. And so,
615. 1:32:07as as an entrepreneur who uses AI in my business, it is very likely that in the next three to five years, I'm going to
616. 1:32:14have to comply with multiple state laws that contradict And that's just tragic. So that's what we're talking about. But if you join the
617. 1:32:25ASON, there's the woman in the ASON, Daisy Thomas is her name. She heads up all of our policy u positions and things
618. 1:32:32like that. So we've got a if you go to the salon.ai, we've got a whole policy position there. So you've got our
619. 1:32:38framework for for how we look at legislation. And so what we do is as state laws come up that are big and
620. 1:32:45important, we sort of run them through, you know, our framework. >> Are you creating some sort of like an accreditation like university or
621. 1:32:54something like that that you can run people through or municipalities? I don't know. >> Um, we're doing it in an ad hoc way
622. 1:33:01right now. If that's something you're passionate about, talk to Daisy because it's it's something that we're we're looking to do. What else?
623. 1:33:13Thoughts, questions? >> Get you out of here, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Sorry, this might be a little off top off off topic, but
624. 1:33:21>> nothing's off topic right now. Everything's possible, so nothing's on the topic. >> Anything with with like AI agents at all?
625. 1:33:28>> Yeah, the Okay, so AI agents. So, >> well, it's a whole other workshop and but but something has shifted. So in the
626. 1:33:39past three weeks something has shifted. So not only did I figure this thing out, this was largely precipitated by agents. So
627. 1:33:49So the current state of generative AI is that humans sit down at a keyboard and you prompt it. We talk a lot about prompt
628. 1:33:59engineering. You learn prompt engineering and you learn how to massage your results. There are sites out there, a couple of
629. 1:34:10sites that are would be fun to you, fun for you to play with in the play first spirit. One's called GenSpark, one's called Manis,
630. 1:34:19one's called twin.so. Within chat GBT, you can put chat GBT into agent mode. What agents are is agents
631. 1:34:34will take a goal of yours and they have access to tools. So not only do they have the thinky the reasoning of the large language model
632. 1:34:43but they also have access to tools. So one of those tools might be surf the web. So you can go to GenSpark right now
633. 1:34:50and you can go say, "Hey, go to my website, look at my branding, understand my tone of voice, go do deep research on
634. 1:34:59all competitors that are like anything like I do, come back with a research report, come back with a branding
635. 1:35:06analysis of all my competitors, and then I want you to write a marketing brief um for for how we can market against our
636. 1:35:14competitors in a creative and interesting way." And you gemspark in particular is really good. You can
637. 1:35:20actually watch it. Choose the tools that that you know like it'll it'll say use a tool uh surf the web or whatever and
638. 1:35:29then and then uh grab the images and it'll show you the images that are grabbed off your website. Then it uses a
639. 1:35:35tool called um understand the images or understand images. So you can just watch it with these things. So, so agents are
640. 1:35:43these things that work autonomously without you having to be there. The thing that happened in the past three
641. 1:35:49weeks, you may have heard there's a there's a thing called molt book, which was like a Reddit for AI agents and the
642. 1:35:55AI agents went in and they were making their own religion and they were doing all this stuff. It was all sensationalized. But the underlying
643. 1:36:02technology is a thing that's now called openclaw. It was called Claude Book. Claude Claudebot initially and then
644. 1:36:10Anthropic Soup has sounded too much like their name. So it's now called OpenClaw. But what OpenClaw is is a thing you can
645. 1:36:16install into a computer and you can basically call it hatching. You can hatch an agent
646. 1:36:31that can learn skills and can do things on its own and is proactive. And so, so what's happening right now is
647. 1:36:41it's really hard to buy Mac minis and Mac Studio computers right now because everyone's buying them up to put these
648. 1:36:48agents on a standalone computer that's not connected to their other computer. And they're effectively 247 employees
649. 1:36:56that are proactive and just do stuff. And I I'll share one example that will absolutely freak you out. And it should, but it's also
650. 1:37:04learning how to use these things and understand what they make possible is going to be a very valuable skill moving
651. 1:37:11forward. There's a guy named Alex Finn that when Cloudbot came out, he installed it. He's he's been doing a lot
652. 1:37:18of if if you go into X, you know, he does writing on it. He did a post on X. This is like a week ago. Like this is
653. 1:37:24only three weeks old. This is and in fact, it's three weeks old. and OpenAI just bought the company and hired it.
654. 1:37:32So, so that this thing that he created is going to be the chat. So, this is coming in a big way. Alex woke up one morning to a phone call
655. 1:37:44and he looked at his phone. He didn't recognize the number, but it didn't say spam. So he picked it up and it was his agent
656. 1:37:52who overnight decided that it would probably be more convenient if they could just talk to each other and he get
657. 1:37:58feedback that way. So the agent went to Twilio, got them a phone number, went to 11 Labs, found the API for voice to text and text to voice
658. 1:38:10and knew that Alex woke up sometime between 7:30 and 8 because that's when he started getting active again. waited
659. 1:38:17until he thought he might be up and called him. Wow. >> Damn. >> And so what what the people that are playing with this technology right now
660. 1:38:27are doing is they're training their employees. So they're pointing these things at here's all of my sales documentation.
661. 1:38:35Here's all of HR and our values that we have. So they're training these things can learn and they have long-term memory
662. 1:38:42and they have skills and you can give them skills and you can train them on skills like you can train them when I go
663. 1:38:49to LinkedIn and I call I make a cold call for them. Here's how I take that name and put it into Salesforce and
664. 1:38:55track them up. You can train them how you do what you do and then they will just do that and then they'll get better at it.
665. 1:39:04There's a guy who know Brett Peterson. He's been building an agentic system for three years and he's probably he's the
666. 1:39:12person on the planet I trust the most with this kind of stuff and he said openclaw is a big deal. He's got eight
667. 1:39:21agents right now. They're costing him $2 to $300 a day. People are buying $10,000 computers so they can run AI models
668. 1:39:30locally. the $200 or $300 a day is because it's making API calls to, you know, frontier companies. Um,
669. 1:39:38the reason I go on a bit about this and why I want to talk about this and how it relates to the great repurpose,
670. 1:39:45even with people who are educated about AI and using chat GBT regularly, there's a kind of hubris that we're always going to be required
671. 1:40:00out it it hallucinates and I got to do the thing and I got to glue this together and I got to not for long like
672. 1:40:082026 really is going to be the year where we're all confronted with oh what if it could do my job right and
673. 1:40:18then I think we're back to what do you do in that case and so I think the time to prepare is now connect with people
674. 1:40:25but I think they're a huge huge deal and they're raw right now and they've got security holes in them. There's just all
675. 1:40:31sorts of things that if you don't know what you're doing, you get yourself in a lot of trouble. But six months from now
676. 1:40:38when OpenAI releases the commercial version of this, it'll just be push a button and now you have, you know, it'll be I guess it'll be
677. 1:40:49500 bucks a month per employee. >> Is NA the same thing as Mis like me? >> No. N is is an automation. So, so people
678. 1:41:01mistake automations for agents. Agents are proactive and go out and do stuff. They can use tools on their own. An
679. 1:41:06automation nan or zapier is one where it's got all these tools, but you as the human are in there sort of connecting
680. 1:41:14the connect. It's like Lego blocks of functionality. So, okay, when something gets written into this spreadsheet, I
681. 1:41:19want you to send it to Chat GPT and come up with a marketing slogan and then put that in here and then post it to Twitter
682. 1:41:25and then, you know, so it's a manually hand structured um automation. That's not what these are. These things are thinking on their
683. 1:41:34own. They're doing all that stuff dynamically in real time on their own 247. >> That makes sense. >> Crazy, right? So, so we got 15 minutes
684. 1:41:46left. I love you scared like from I know some someone walked in here and said, "Is this the bike coding thing?" I said,
685. 1:41:52"I'm not busy code today, but I'm curious from where you walked in until now." Like, where's where's your what
686. 1:41:58are you thinking? I'd love to just hear where where you sitting here trying to figure out what I do next. >> Yeah.
687. 1:42:07>> Yeah. I mean, you just open my eyes for a lot of different things. >> Yeah. >> I got to go home and figure it out.
688. 1:42:14>> Yeah. And play like play with these tools. But also, >> what that question that broke me, what do you want in the world?
689. 1:42:22>> Like sit with that. sit with that because it's it's funny when when we started this practice lab for whatever reason in my head I had
690. 1:42:32this fantasy of a practice as being just this like you think of just like zen like everyone's in this happy place you know
691. 1:42:41practices are brutal >> if you really sit with what do I really want it can be brutal >> you know so and I I think the only way
692. 1:42:52through the forward is through. So again, >> uh yes um there's admittedly a little bit of um a conflict because I don't know if
693. 1:43:03you've heard about the um the RAM shortages recently. um how you know Open AI has um gotten a lot of a lot more into data
694. 1:43:15centers and they need that for many brands for that of course um and that has like a ripple effect in like storage
695. 1:43:21prices that's yeah it admittedly makes uh building your own PC in the future a little little tough it's going to be tough I the
696. 1:43:34next three to five years are just going to be sural there's No way around it. Like supply chains are going to be
697. 1:43:39messed up. Like there's all sorts of crazy stuff where Elon's buying up all the silver futures so he can control the
698. 1:43:45silver. Like there's all sorts of shenanigans going on with business. What's going to happen though is that AI
699. 1:43:53AI is going to basically take over manufacturing. So like the the we may have windows of chip shortages or energy
700. 1:43:59shortages or things like that, but we're pretty quickly going to get to the point that AI is solving a lot of those
701. 1:44:06problems. They're going to be coming up with novel materials. They're going to be coming up like they're going to be
702. 1:44:10coming up with batteries where you can charge them in 15 minutes and rest for three days and unlimited miles. Like
703. 1:44:16just crazy crazy stuff. Um so yes, I think it's a concern right now. I think one of the one of the mistakes people
704. 1:44:24make with AI is they're assuming that how things are today is how they're going to be even a year from now. This
705. 1:44:30stuff is moving so fast that we like we just we just don't know. Like a lot of the talk right now is um data centers
706. 1:44:38and energy and water usage. Um I think within 5 years most of the data centers will be in orbit. >> Elon's talking about this. He's got a
707. 1:44:49rocket. the moon, right? >> Well, the the moon, but just even orbiting. So, so if you've got something
708. 1:44:56in orbit, it's got 24-hour access to the sun and the cooling happens because space is cold. And they've figured out
709. 1:45:03how to do that. Like this is technology that exists today. So, so like all the stuff we think we know right now, three
710. 1:45:13years from now is going to be different. >> But what is your solution? I mean, you talked about hardened people in
711. 1:45:19community, but then you talk about agents, which are absolutely going to violate people's jobs. Isn't the
712. 1:45:25community just to build like a political force in the future to go against this? >> I don't I don't think it's going against it. So, listen,
713. 1:45:34>> right? But what is >> No technological progress in history has ever been stopped. >> Sure, but these people still need jobs.
714. 1:45:41They still need >> So, okay. So, so what's different? Now, so the industrial revolution, this happened.
715. 1:45:4880% of farm workers in the industrial revolution um were not working on farms. I think it was 40 years, 45 years after
716. 1:45:57the steam engine was invented, 80%. From their perspective, if you told them you're not going to work on a farm, they
717. 1:46:06have no point of reference. They're not going to work. That's going to be done. Well, what did they do? Well, they moved
718. 1:46:10to cities and they invented the service economy, right? Like they were doing jobs. Like you can sell hot dogs in a
719. 1:46:17cart on a street car. That that can be your job. Like we have jobs right now that are unimaginable to me as a kid.
720. 1:46:27Like teenagers on YouTube making $3 million a year. That's a job. Yeah, it is. Um there can be a career if if the bots are
721. 1:46:40taking care of all of our medical needs and taking care of us. You know what might be really in demand? Someone to
722. 1:46:46take a walk with. I'll walk with you for an hour for a hundred bucks. That could be a career. Like I don't I don't
723. 1:46:53>> It's optimistic. I appreciate I mean it's optimistic. I appreciate it. But I mean the reality is the the aging
724. 1:46:59community isn't going to be working at fast food restaurants. So what is the solution? Like if we aren't setting
725. 1:47:05regulation up now, what is going to happen? >> Well, we're we're not setting regulation. >> Well, not under this administration for
726. 1:47:10sure. Not under under any as far as I could tell. Um, >> but why does China have regulation? >> What's that?
727. 1:47:18>> Why does China have regulation? >> I don't know. I don't know. I listen. If you if you if you look at
728. 1:47:32where this is going again, I go back to it. It it it it depends on the time horizon we live in. If you look at this at a 5year time
729. 1:47:42horizon, this is absolutely flipping terrifying. If you look at it in 10 years, if we really have bots doing all the mining,
730. 1:47:51doing all the farming, making all the food, getting all the food, there there will be abundance enough that everyone
731. 1:47:56will be taken care of. Now, how do we get from there from here to there? I don't know. If you if you uh do you know David Shapiro?
732. 1:48:05So if you look at his post labor economics framework, he just put out a new 8minute version of it, a new shorter
733. 1:48:11version of it. That's the first approach to what you're talking about that I've seen that makes any sense. UBI to me has
734. 1:48:20never made sense because it feels like it's a band-aid. And in David Shapiro's post labor economics model, UBI is is a
735. 1:48:27small like a 15% component of a much bigger idea. It's actually four or five ideas. And it actually has to do with
736. 1:48:34municipalities coming together and sharing resources with their citizenry. So >> I would argue that the hope that you're
737. 1:48:42trying to promise may not be the ending, right? It may not be a reality. >> I I agree. >> But we can still upskill people in the
738. 1:48:50future of AI, >> right? But saying that, you know, there's going to be abundance and everything is going to be great in the
739. 1:48:55future. We still have to pay for our food. We're having difficulties paying right now. >> I know. So, you know, AI is not a it's not an
740. 1:49:04oracle. It's not going to solve every single problem. And I don't think you're saying that. >> I'm not. What what I'm saying is AI is a
741. 1:49:10tool that is doing all of what you're talking about. It is also at our disposal. We can do things for ourselves
742. 1:49:17and we can do things as a community where we might solve some of the stuff that you're talking about
743. 1:49:22>> potentially, but you still got to make a living. >> I agree. I agree. And again, I AI can help you start a business. I mean, like
744. 1:49:28I'm I'm witnessing people AI salon that were job like there's one woman in the salon who survived four layoff rounds.
745. 1:49:40There's another woman in the salon. They lay off her entire division except her because she was generously leading and
746. 1:49:48talking out loud about being AI. Like I like I don't I don't have an answer for you. >> Yeah. And I think those are good
747. 1:49:55examples, but it doesn't it doesn't oppose Amazon laying out 16,000 people because of AI. >> That's not because of AI.
748. 1:50:02>> No, it's because they needed money to >> because they needed money. >> Well, what are those data centers for? AI.
749. 1:50:08>> I Yeah. Listen, I I I get the circular reference and I also get that the president looks weak. I think two to
750. 1:50:15three years from now is going to look worse, but I think five years from now we come out of this. why I'm giving this
751. 1:50:22talk, why I think this is important is what I am a deep firm believer in is us reclaiming our agency. Right now, a lot
752. 1:50:32of people are just saying the robots are going to win and they're they're giving up. I'm like, no, we can reclaim our agency.
753. 1:50:41>> If how I make money is I go sell trading cards that I got at the flea market, then that's how I do it. Like, is that
754. 1:50:46ideal? No. But while I'm doing that, I could be using AI to start another business and start another business and
755. 1:50:52start another business. This for me, this is about individuals understanding who they are and taking that energy and
756. 1:50:59their ideas and using AI to do something for themselves and potentially the world because businesses will be started. What did you say?
757. 1:51:07>> You should open with any mean there will be businesses started. You will go home, you will sit with what do I want more of? You will
758. 1:51:16come up with some crazy ass idea. You will use that AI to start that business and a year from now you'll have four
759. 1:51:23employees and those are four of your employees that didn't have a hope of working for now they're working for him.
760. 1:51:28Like that's how I think we navigate through this. But I don't have the bigger answers because they're way bigger than Yeah.
761. 1:51:35>> Can I add something? >> Yeah, please. >> So I am a creative. I own design business and I just started my seventh year and I was
762. 1:51:49>> congratulations. >> Getting one year is a big deal. >> You talked about the thing that you can't do
763. 1:51:58and I can tell you there was one let me just give you a little context about my business. So we help businesses startups
764. 1:52:06and businesses small business elevate their visual identity. We're kind of the bridge between branding and visual
765. 1:52:13identity and we graphic design, you do website development, videography, photography. I went to school, I have three degrees.
766. 1:52:23I have one in graphic design and one website development and then I have my bachelor's in mass communications.
767. 1:52:32There's one degree that when I came out of college, I went I really learn what I wanted to do >> philosophy or website development.
768. 1:52:47>> Okay. I went through I have a degree in website design. When I came out of college, I felt incompetent. I had no
769. 1:52:57idea what I was doing yet. It was big part of my business model. >> Yeah. >> And so I was very scared and picky on
770. 1:53:04the websites that I took on because it's a big deal. There's a lot of stuff going on on the back side of websites and how
771. 1:53:12they connect. How I can Every website's different. There's no consistency on how they connect to each other. Six month well.
772. 1:53:25So back around June. I embraced last year I embraced AI in our business. >> Yeah. I embraced AI and helping me start to
773. 1:53:41solve problems when it came to websites. What I can tell you is I saw this incredible growth now. So, first and foremost
774. 1:53:52critically thinking you're right. You can't just go in and you know you have to go rounds with the AI. But what I
775. 1:54:02found is that every time I did that, I found that I started learning because I I'm a critical thinker and I I'm
776. 1:54:08cautious. I don't just do something. I actually sit there and I want to know, well, it tells me you got to go through
777. 1:54:15these steps. Why? What am I doing when I do it? What's the outcome of that? And so I started asking questions. I started
778. 1:54:23learning. And what I found is that I'm not scared of taking on websites. Taking on a lot of >> new stuff. recently and I got into this
779. 1:54:33really stuff that I can tell you a year ago freaking me out. >> Yeah. >> And I took it on and I've actually saved the website because
780. 1:54:43I embraced AI and I took it off. It's kind of become my mentor safety net bouncing throw things off.
781. 1:54:54>> What is happening is that it I'm using it as a tool. It's not defining me. I'm still I set on my vision, but instead of
782. 1:55:03using it going, well, how can I use this as a tool to advance my goals and where I'm trying to go? And so now I've got momentum. I've got
783. 1:55:15direction. I've done things here in the last six months, eight months that I I should had done in the first year of my
784. 1:55:23business, but I didn't have the knowhow. I didn't have the tools. And now I got these tools. >> You got it. I'll tell you another thing.
785. 1:55:30So, first of all, thank you for saying that. And it's like the one thing I know is using this stuff is a hell of a lot
786. 1:55:37less scary than not using it. Like if you're sitting on the outside, you just hear all these people, it does what? But
787. 1:55:43the other thing, your experience, those degrees you have and the skills that you have that maybe those skills get automated away.
788. 1:55:51People are going to hire you because they you said, "I'm cautious. I don't do something until it's right." There's
789. 1:55:57something about that. People will hire you to do that. Like even if all those skills get automated because that
790. 1:56:03experience that you have is actually really valuable, right? The skills are going to transfer and change and warp
791. 1:56:09and and get surreal. They're going to hire you because okay, I don't want to think about all that crap. I know he's
792. 1:56:15going to do a great job. So, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's really good. And I know we're time. So, well, I
793. 1:56:21just want to uh add on top of that to Kyle's point, to Scott's point, you got to start somewhere. You came here
794. 1:56:32tonight. I appreciate that. That's one reason when we came into 2026, I told Max and the XI team, we need to do more
795. 1:56:40with AI. We need to offer more resources, more opportunities for our community and small businesses to
796. 1:56:50to come in, embrace AI, to for us to be a resource to offer workshops. Um, so thank you for showing up. Thank you for
797. 1:56:59embracing it. You know, I would encourage you to talk to each other. Um, talk to Scott. Uh, Mago back there. He's
798. 1:57:08a very good resource working on some really cool stuff with AI. >> I just get blamed when stuff goes wrong. That's all I
799. 1:57:18>> uh we have chef uh BB who has transitioned from well he's still doing catering but he's transitioned from
800. 1:57:25being a a well-known chef in Colorado Springs to now he's started a new business where he's helping small businesses figure out how to uh
801. 1:57:36integrate AI into their business. Is that correct? >> Yes. >> So don't be scared of AI. Like Kyle said, play with it, learn it,
802. 1:57:47be part of a community. I highly encourage you to join the AI salon. It's a great community of just very positive
803. 1:57:56and embracing folks who are there to help you. Watch Kyle do his live every night. He does get he does get a little
804. 1:58:04crazy at night with a guitar, but um >> and a singing dog. >> A singing dog. Um, and then XI, we're we're a community here. Um, continue to
805. 1:58:15come to X, uh, let's vibe at XI. It's the first and third Tuesday of the month. So, uh, March 3rd, we're going to do a lovable uh, workshop.
806. 1:58:27>> Lovable is amazing. Come to that. >> So, Stephanie from our mentor, one of our mentors, she's going to show you how
807. 1:58:34to make a I think she said an 80s themed game using So, that should be exciting. >> That's amazing.
808. 1:58:43>> And then March 17th, Audrey Kushner is going to come back and she's going to do a demo on um Gamma and uh Notebook
809. 1:58:53Element on how to use that in your business. >> Both absolutely amazing. Loveable is a live coding app. You just basically
810. 1:58:59describe an app you want it to build or a website and it will build it. like just go ahead and say make me a a
811. 1:59:08clone of a Aster as video game from the 70s and just sit back and when you pick your job up the floor then you can play your game.
812. 1:59:19>> And then we'll be doing some more official AI workshops during the day. Um and uh we're doing one in March with
813. 1:59:27Violet Brainwater and then uh we're doing one in April with Box and Audrey and then two more in May with Audrey and
814. 1:59:38then another one in June with Audrey and another one with Dr. Rachel Wood who was one of our panelists at Women in Tech.
815. 1:59:45So there's a lot of opportunities to learn AI and be part of our community. If there's something specific that
816. 1:59:52you're looking for, feel free to let me know and I'll try to find a way to get that plugged in or where we can meet
817. 1:59:58that demand. I know everybody has different needs like it's how do I build an agent? How do I build a localized
818. 2:00:05LLM? How do I do this in my business? Like, just let me know what you're looking for and I'll I'll we'll find you
819. 2:00:13a way to get to that solution. Other than that, thanks for showing up tonight. There's still some pizza and
820. 2:00:19bread left and feel free to chat network and chat with Kyle while he's still here. Thank you for coming.
821. 2:00:35Turn this