E115 - How To Actually Get Ahead With AI (Before It’s Too Late) | Dan Martell

27:24Yes, you can train them up. Yes, you can mentor them. Yes, you can support them. But even like Sam on my creative team, like the first week we decided to build Martell Media, I said, who do you want as a mentor? And he like sent me a list of names of creators that he wanted to get connected with their creative directors, their media person. My job was to go connect him with them. Right. Reach out to those people and say, hey, who's running your media? I want to connect them with my internal guy to build those peer groups, to build those relationships. My job is to build the people, the people build the business.

27:56If you think you got to be the person building the business, you're just going to work harder than you have to for the rest of your life. And it's actually a lot more fun and easier to do it the other way. From your experience of the two failed startups. Oh, two when I was in my 20s. Yeah. Lots over the years. what are some of the key things which you've learned that potential entrepreneurs and founders need to understand first one i'll say these are just off my heart 80 done by somebody else is 100 freaking awesome and if it's not go be better see if somebody else's 80 isn't good enough for you that means you got to go level up so that their 80 is good enough and that's where like this whole idea of the law of the lid, John Maxwell wrote this great book on leadership and really made that concept popular.

28:47Like the business will never outgrow the level of the leader. And most entrepreneurs starting off and I was that way, I just thought like, you should just understand this. And I would just expect my team, like, why can't you understand this? I didn't learn how to lead them. I didn't understand how to create vision. I didn't understand how to create rhythms. I didn't understand how to hold standards. I didn't understand how to deal with conflict. I didn't understand how to transition people off my team that shouldn't be there. I didn't know how to empower or even compensate the top performers. So like I had to go develop so that the team, you know, could do that.

29:23And that's where like their 80 % had to be good enough because they're not me. I can't expect them to be me. They don't have the context that I know. So that's a big idea. That was a, that was a thing that kept me small for a really long time. But where are you supposed to learn that? Cause it's not something which is readily taught. No, it's not taught. That's why I try to talk about it as often as I can. But I think people hear it and still don't understand it because they're like, okay, 80 % is good enough. And I'm like, no, no, no. If 80 % is not good enough and it probably won't be, go be better.

29:56You missed that last part. I would say the other thing is just the value of time. If you think about my background software, so I'm a bit of a engineer nerd, But as a person that like, you know, I'm assuming you track things in like workouts and progressive overload and like, okay. So I like to deconstruct things into like simple metrics. And if you think about entrepreneurship, the whole point of it is to create value per unit of time. Building a business is building a machine that generates profit. And if you put an hour in a week and get a million dollars a year, that's an efficient business.

30:38So if that's the whole point of building the business is to have a little bit of input and have a lot about output, which is the revenue and profit, then valuing your time is the ultimate point. Right. So that's why I wrote buybacker time, because it's not buybacker time to go hang out on a beach. I'm not that guy. I'm not the guy that says like, hey, outsource everything and then just chill out. I'm wanting you to get your time back so you can go build an empire. Like that's the subtitle of my book, Build Your Empire. And the way you do that is you understand what your buyback rate is. So I kept it really simple in the book.

31:13If you just figure out like how much money you make per year and you divide it by 2 ,000, because that's the amount of hours that most people work in a year, sometimes more or less, but who cares? That's your income per hour. Okay. So if you make a million, that's$500 an hour. But then my rule is, is that when you buy it back, your buyback rate is a quarter of that. So if it's 500, that's 125. So if you're, and this is crazy because you think about it, there's a lot of people. Now, a million is a million in profit, not a million in top line. So you want to take the profit. Whatever you take, you pay yourself as a salary, whatever you do as distribution, whatever you have profit in your business, that's the amount, not gross.

31:52Because let's say it is a million dollars in profit a year. then the argument is pretty strong that anything you could pay somebody else$125 an hour or less that you're currently doing is not a good use of your time. And if you could actually learn, again, it's a skill to deploy$125 an hour to pay somebody else to do something to free up your time because you're generating 500 to go do more of the thing that generates 500. And sometimes it's not a clear like i do work i get paid it's i invest in me i get better i create more value i work on bigger projects eventually i get paid more see what i'm saying but that idea man i wish i could have sat down with the 20 year old version of me and just be like bro the whole point is for you to be more valuable per hour it's not so if you understand like if you understand like training and i and i don't mean to use fitness because i like i got you know a couple years ago i decided to get my shit together.

32:47So I had to learn about macros and progressive overload. So it's near and dear to my heart. If you understand the core principles, then it allows you to align every decision to it. So if you understand the whole point of business is to make your time worth more, and that's the equation, then when you say, what should I do with my day today? You tell me based on this equation, what could you do? Where could you improve your skillset, work on your productivity, leverage AI, right? I call them the four master skills. So there's only four ways to create more leverage. Okay, leverage is a little bit of input, massive output, right?

33:22Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world. Okay, that's Archimedes, he said that. So capital, huge leverage. Content, SOPs, massive leverage. Videos, creating a training video, dude, huge leverage. Code, software, automation, CRM systems, today AI, probably the biggest opportunity for leverage. And then the fourth is collaboration. It's the people side. Learning how to work through people, not tell people what to do, but actually work through them with massive amounts of leverage. So there's only four skills that every entrepreneur, if I could go to a 20-year-old version of Dan and say, hey, there's a lot of shit.

33:59You can learn about funnels. You can learn about Facebook ads. You can learn about delegate. You know what I mean? You can learn all these 1500 different things that somebody's trying to sell you a course on to learn to be better. Or you could go, hey, do I ever feel capital constrained? I got to learn how to raise money. Do I ever feel like I don't have a repeatable system? I got to learn how to create checklists. Do I ever feel like I don't really understand the technology and it's like really confusing. I got to learn software, right? AI. Or, hey, I feel like I don't talk or communicate properly to people.

34:31I got to probably learn how to be a leader. Those four builds this region. Yeah. Like when I look at the billion dollar buildings lined up on this beach, every one of them, the person who built them understood those four points of leverage because no one person could ever do it by themselves. It's impossible. That's a big idea. I wish I would have taught myself when I was 20. What about this concept that you mentioned about learning versus shipping? Because I know a lot of people, I know them, that they just get so caught up in just trying to study and learn and read and study and learn, and then they just never seem to really take any action.

35:08Why do you think they do that? They're just procrastinating. They're afraid. They're afraid to just do the thing. yeah like even i i get caught up sometimes in i notice this thing i need to do but i like sometimes i just don't want to do it yeah and i just busy myself with all these other things which shouldn't it's productive but it's not doing the thing i'm supposed to do it's funny because i was just at the dubal marina mall this kid probably 14 years old runs up to me can't believe i'm there because he follows my youtube and what am i doing in dubai always a fun conversation and I he goes can I ask you some get some advice and we're walking to the car and I say yeah just walk and talk let's you know we'll go out together and he goes you know I've got this idea and I've been working on it and it's been a year and I want to launch it but I don't know where to start just I was like I really wanted to like sit down and like have a because I knew I had the opportunity to like breathe pause I knew for that kid because he watches my videos and he was like absolutely shell shocked that I was in the mall.

36:12I had opportunity to get them to finally do it. And that's what I did. I sat down and I said, I know there's all these, you want to build this web app and you want to do this AI stuff. Here's what you're going to do is you're going to launch an event. Because I think events are actually the most beautiful way to start a business. Think about it. You learn how to recruit speakers. You have to negotiate a location. You have to sell tickets. You got to learn marketing. You have to learn logistics. You have to. so this is a physical event yeah i was like bro you want to do like his vision was so big like he literally was like i want to be the next elon musk i want that for you but elon still he started by coding apps and did zip too and so like let's just go to the the the the nucleus of like a core idea of just doing anything because anything i gave him that was more than that he could have convinced himself not to do it i said so you want to do this ai app thing okay hey, you're going to run an event on AI.

37:04You're going to recruit the speakers. You're going to be the guy. You're going to be the MC. You're going to have to get on stage and introduce. And I could tell you started sweating. You know, like he's like, oh, this has happened. I said, look, you're worried about making the right decision. Here's what you need to do. Commit to me right now. You're going to make a decision and worry about making it right later. Don't worry about making the right decision. I'm telling you. I've been giving this advice to a lot of kids because that's going to get him in the right room. That's going to build his relationships.

37:30That's going to teach him how to win. The cool thing about an event is it has a start and an end date. Like starting a business is kind of like a big thing, right? It's like, what if I don't want to do it in three years? Well, just do one event and then never do another one if you never want to do it. And nobody's going to be like, oh, you failed. No, I did an event. I launched it. And I just think like everything other than doing that is just acting out of fear. Yeah. Fear of failing. Fear is not going to be big enough. Fear is you're not going to be successful. Fear, people are going to judge you.

38:00Who do you think you are? Um, you know, it's fascinating because like, there's this part of me that's listening to this kid and don't want to crush his dreams. Like, you know, it's obviously kind of wild or some 14 year old says, I want to be the next Elon. And I think it'd be easy for anybody else to be like. Really studying this stuff. Yeah. Like, bro, like take the pressure off a little bit. But I was like, no, I want that for you too. But let's go back to how Elon acted when he was 14. Yeah. So you're not acting like he did when he was 14 because he was shipping code. he wasn't thinking about literally the kid told me for a year now i've been trying to figure out where to start that's 12 months bro yeah i said can you learn how to surf reading a book no i said you're not going to learn how to be an entrepreneur reading a book bro enough with the shelf help it's the same thing i've found with people when it comes to the gym they they bury themselves in the books but they get so deep into the technicalities of the exact number of reps sets like which is the best exercise.

38:59I should have brown rice or white rice. It's like, hang on, I've seen how you train. Like if that's, if you actually go to the gym, the times you go to the gym, it's like you're just not pushing hard enough. Yeah. So people are always looking for these excuses, but there is, I guess there's a certain requirement of skills that you do need before you do decide to start something. Because I don't know if I, like, give me some examples. i've seen this a lot in the coaching industry where people are like i'm going to be an online coach yeah and it's like well do you have any experience of actually coaching people in person like have you actually coached someone before like how do you start off of course you can wing it and probably your first few experiences with your first few clients aren't going to be that good but i guess yes you learn from that experience i get what you're saying i totally agree at a certain level.

39:54Yeah. I think if you're having people pay you for a certain expectation, like be a professional. Yeah. Um, but you know, it's cool is that when I look again, I keep bringing it back to Dubai. Cause like when I come to a city, I like nerd out on it. Okay. There's this fun thing I do where I talk to Chad GPT and I ask it to do a research project, write a three to 5 ,000 word essay and then I hit play and I work out. So I'm creating my own like research podcast. Yeah. All the time. Like I did it this morning. So I know every developer, the name, the size of the business, which project, like, I mean, I'm just a weird nerd like that.

40:31And one of the things I was fascinated about looking at this city is again, my TikTok feed changed as soon as I landed here. It was real estate project, real estate project. Like every person I meet out in public, I'm like, are you real estate? They're like, yep. And, and one of the things I was fascinated about is how do these projects get funded? So I asked it cause like I heard, I listened and people were talking about off plan sales and the investors and this and that. And I was like, Hmm, do you know that 70 % of these buildings were sold before they ever started getting built? Yeah. So there is an element of like doing it before you're ready.

41:05I just think a lot of people should just like start, start with themselves, like get yourself in shape, help some friends learn, you know, don't charge them. Cause yeah, you don't have any proof that you can do it for other people. You have proof. You did it for yourself. You've never done like even a lot of business coaches might have built a successful business. They don't have proof they can mentor somebody. And those are completely different skills. Yeah. Like me running a team. One thing, me coaching somebody else to understand how they need to develop, to run their team, completely different skill.

41:38There's a lot of that as well. Oh my gosh. It's, and, but I'm also a fan of people just starting because I think a lot of people hold back because they feel like I need a certification. I need this. It's like, my rule is if you've gotten the result yourself and what you're teaching is just, this is what worked for me. If it works like this book, like I didn't, I didn't hire a bunch of research analysts and try to like back it through scientific, like there's a lot of research, but I don't know. This is just what worked for me. And I've taught it to thousands of people and it worked for them. And I think you'd have a hard time punching the holes in some of the methodologies because I've battle tested them.

42:18But like, I'd rather people try to support and help and create stuff in the world than wait too long. You know what I mean? Again, it's just, I think the whole people wait to actually be ready and nobody was ever ready when they started. Like it's nobody. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. The all new Whoop is here. The only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance. Now 7 % smaller with 14 days of battery life. I've been wearing Whoop since 2021 and I've been wearing it every single day. It's a device which I have used to improve my training, improve my sleep and stay away from the things which are definitely not good for me.

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43:41Let's get back to the episode. How can people use AI to their advantage? This is my favorite topic. Yeah. Where do you want to go with it? Because like I spend, I can go, I spend most of my time on like sites like Huggable, which is like low-level language models and working with product designers on interfaces for like a ton of smb apps so i can go personal productivity deep technical future stuff like what do you think would be the most helpful start with personal because i'm curious about that let's go yeah all right everything i do is a mental model so you gotta understand how i look at the world i I look at the world through the idea of I have raw materials, which is time and ideas, and then finished goods.

44:28Everything's a manufacturing plant. Finished goods are outputs of being productive. So on the personal level, if you think about it, how can I use AI to unblock me from having to do stuff that takes a lot of time so I can redeploy that focus, that energy, that time to other stuff that makes me more money? I mean, right off the bat, if you're not using, like there's features in chat GPT that people don't know about. Like you can set reminders. Like you can literally say people like, how do I learn about AI? Type this in chat GPT. Every day at 8 a.m. send me the top five AI news articles related to my industry of barbershop.

45:09Enter. And every day you will get an update with those five. power move. I know nobody knows this stuff. Another one is this idea of what's called a master prompt. So the problem with most AIs, and this is true for Claude, Gemini, Grok, you know, ChadGBT, is that its answers are only as good as the context it has about who you are. So again, another simple prompt, go into ChadGBT and say, create me a master prompt for my role as, and then what do you do? You're a CEO or you work as a CMO or you're a parent and ask me the questions to create that master prompt, enter. And it's going to list all the questions that it needs to create what's called a master prompt.

45:52Now here's the trick, hit the little voice icon and just answer all the questions with your words. So the question will be like, what is your role call CEO and you just answer, hit enter. It then merges the questions with your answers. That creates a master prompt document that you save as a PDF. That document is your context. So did you know before you ask Chad GPT, any question, you can give it 250 ,000 tokens of context or words to, for it to know who you are to answer a question. And most people give it nothing so that master prompt file is that so it now knows everything if you want you can tell how many employees you have you can tell who you sell what you sell how much you charge where you operate from your tax situation you can give it everything and every time you do any question you can just upload it as a file to chat gbt to grok to any of the ais and its answer dude it will blow your mind so if you but if you could save yourself time to say oh i'm i am dan martell would it it knows me because it has enough information but it wouldn't know the internal stuff so it wouldn't it only it only knows the public information okay and it's getting better at pulling out what's called memory from my chat so if i'm a heavy user it can take a bunch of like it can it can extract like oh dan likes this dan likes that dan's interested in these things so it can it can create these memory snippets, but it's never going to be as good as a master prompt.

47:26So that's going to save you a ton of time because it's going to help you with the answers being way more potent. The other thing on a personal level that I use ChatGPT for is my default is, and this is for my team or myself, I don't work on a problem until I've asked ChatGPT to help me understand the problem. Think about it this way. Every problem that you used to have is no longer a problem. Like again, we'll use this building as an example. Let's say I decided I want to build this building in Dubai. I could literally ask Chad GPT to create me a project plan detailed by the day to the sub bullet points on how to build a building like this.

48:08Hit enter. If you give it the master problem, it's going to be even better. And it's going to give me the whole plan. And then I could say, now tell me who I need to talk to. And I got to build relationships. So how would I do that? Build me a plan. It'll build you a plan. So things that used to be problems because I didn't know how are no longer problems. So then the question I like to ask people is what's the problem? It's what is the quality of the input it's getting? It's actually trying to figure out where is the number one bottleneck in the throughput to remove, to increase the output. So that's called this, it's called theory of constraints.

48:42So everything in my life, personal, professional, I always distill it down into the theory of constraints. If this is my raw material, this is the output I want to generate, right? Let's say in my personal life, it's more, let's say magical memories. That's more important than profit. But in my business, maybe it's cashflow. Maybe it's return on equity. I don't know. You literally can tell it what you want to optimize for. Then you got to figure out within the system, where are the bottlenecks? But the cool part is that if you actually use the AI to tell you what it is, and it tells you, you can then say, give me three options to solve it based on who I am and what resources I have.

49:17the productivity level is kind of wild. I call it the difference between being a doer and a director. So in the past, we used to have to like come up with creative solutions and also do right. Like you actually had to like write the email campaign and create the ads and recruit the people and lead the people. Now my job is to be a director of the AI and it will do all that stuff. Like dude, the agentic stuff that you can do with the agent mode or the connectors, like most people don't realize, okay, here's another one. You can connect your email and your calendar to Chad GPT. And you can then say, hey, set a reminder to process all my unread emails and send me a summary at 9am.

49:56That way you don't have to check your inbox because it's going to send you a summary. It's going to give you a notification. It's going to show up in the AI so that you can be on top of your email. You can say, analyze my calendar and tell me where I'm spending most of my time that isn't efficient and I need to buy back my time and calculate my buyback rate. Because you know my income so that I can be more efficient. It's kind of wild. Like it's gone to the point where the only problem to solve is to figure out what problem to solve. Yeah. And I always like to, you know, encourage people by saying, stop pretending not to know.

50:33Has it ever been wrong or given you advice? 100%. Give me an example. cool. I mean, what happens often with any language model, if you understand how it works, it's essentially a fancy autocomplete. And that's obviously saying it's like super simplistic, but that's all it is. You know, the autocomplete and like word docs, that's all it's doing. It's taking, it's a really cool math problem. Like once you understand how the language models work, it's like fascinating, but it's taking everything that's ever been said. And it's trying to predict based on all the context and the system prompts and all these things, what you want it to say.

51:07so it's making things up so oftentimes you can um give it a advanced prompt to say like i need you to reference real data and cite your answers and do not hallucinate do not make things up so one of my favorite um prompts i give it away on my youtube channel like the fun thing about creating all the content i do is i like give it all away it's all there like the prompts the structure how i'd use it the advanced ai stuff i do and one of them is this book architect gpt i created. So have you ever met somebody that's like super smart and you hear them on a podcast and you're like, I wonder if they ever wrote a book on that and they haven't.

51:43This will create a book outline for the person by just giving it the name of the person and a topic. So later at dinner, if you want, you could say, Hey, what would my book be on this topic? And I'll give you the book. I've been using that to learn from anybody. As long as they've talked publicly about an idea, it'll it'll pull out their stories their quotes their their aphorisms their their their playbooks from podcast interviews and in that one the reason i bring it up is in that system prompt when i was designing it i was very clear you cannot hallucinate you can't make things up yeah so there's ways to like test the output if you know but yeah i mean it's not perfect but it's getting better and is getting geometrically better.

52:29Like it's not a little bit better. Like humans have a shitty time understanding progress because we're only good at linear here, there. Yeah. This is, dude. I mean, I would say every time I sit down to outline a video I'm going to shoot on my YouTube video three weeks later, by the time I go to shoot, it's not accurate. We're talking - Well, it's just dated. Every day, like I shot a video today and two days ago um uh opening i launched atlas and it wasn't part of it so now i got to redo the video luckily to add atlas because by the time it gets published in a couple weeks it would have been like people be like yeah but why are you talking about that you can do it now with atlas yeah yeah dude it's the the pace of changes like again that's why it's good um here's what i've resolved to there's there's two potential outcomes okay there's this real thing called super intelligence.

53:22I am a big fan of the idea that we will get to a place that I also study robotics. So Martell Ventures builds new software companies every month. So like I sit down with my team, we hire engineers, we hire product designers, we go to market, and we're building the innovation. And I also track the robotics side. So there's 10 robotics companies. So if you haven't checked out, again, I'll show you at dinner, like figure two is a robotics company that competes against optimist which is tesla's robot it can beats against a lot of the chinese ones we're gonna get to a place where food shelter and transportation is pretty much free so there is the potential where in the future you will wake up and have to confront the really big question of what am i doing here yeah how do i spend my time what does this all mean because i don't think people understand how much of their work or working for somebody or going after some kind of creation is keeping them busy from having to confront that question.

54:26And when you no longer have to do, because everything is done for you and you, you then have to sit back and go, what is this all about? That'll be an interesting place for humanity. So humans won't need to work. Dude, there's no, they won't need to work. Everything will just be done. like the cost of everything goes to almost free because the robots can build stuff and when people are like oh that's scary it's happening today okay they call them the 3ds the dirty dull and dangerous jobs there's robots in ups stores and bmw plants currently building cars moving packages around because humans didn't want to do that job and shouldn't be doing that job and have five times turnover per year and take smoke breaks all the time and all that stuff so like and then all of of now, we're going to be, all those costs is going to be transferred down into the cost of shipping books and making food and all that stuff.

55:20So yeah, I really think there's a world, when is that going to be in 10 years, 15 years? It's definitely probably at least 10, where we may not have to work anymore. That's very soon. Yes. It's real. I'm already seeing it where most of my companies 100 % have a hiring freeze because they don't need more headcount. They're retraining all their staff to get 92 % of all the work done by AI. 8 % is the magic, the creative, the input. And if anything, over time, a lot of that work is even going to be replaced through some kind of AI workflow automation, et cetera. I mean, that's a big category of making money online right now is just like launching an AI automation agency.

56:04And these businesses are like paying as much money as they can because they're saving a full-time person. Yeah. Right? I had this one company that does like phone AI, like it literally makes phone calls or you can set it up as the answering of a call inbound and it schedules sales calls better than a salesperson can. Okay, it's called youratlas.com. You can literally go check it out for free. That people are using that platform to sell that to local businesses. So they're making money as an agency. They didn't even build the tech. They're just using it. the businesses is having their numbers now route to the atlas platform they got rid of the front desk person because that person's answering that call 24 7 and people like yeah but everybody's doing that go call your credit card company they're not doing that dude every go pick up the phone and call your local businesses and see if anybody even answers let alone a really smart ai that can answer simple questions like hey i'm dropping in today do you guys do day passes right and how much is it and what time do you guys open as there gonna be a physical person there and it's plugged into your internal docs and it knows everything about your company.

57:08So you're going to answer the question better than that new person you just hired. Like, dude, it's like, it's going to be wild, the productivity from a business. So that's one side of thing. The other one is super intelligence, which is it could get out of hand so quick. Yeah. Like, oh, humans are a problem. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to, like, I'm open to things. and sometimes I ask myself because you ever hear people say like we're living in the most interesting times ever I wonder if we always as humanity have lived through this time and we're some aspect of a test to see if this time we understand how not to self implode like that's a real like like I know they must have said that back in the day when they like discovered you know the the combustion engine and they're like oh my god the change of pace but like no not dude i i grew up when before i'm 45 so there's like 97 was the beginning of the internet but even before that like we didn't have cell phones yeah so i went from no cell phone to the internet to mobile phones to facetime that would be considered if you brought that back 300 years people will consider you a witch or a wizard like they would burn you to ai like even though know i know technically how it works did you know nobody actually knows how it works this is the wildest part about language models is the way that it frames itself nobody actually understands like when it does something it answers a question that neural net that's what it's called the net the neural net answers the questions it fires this ridiculous math algorithm that's why it needs all these big data centers to run that nobody can really tell you exactly how it did that they just know how to tune it well even the creators dude they just it's kind of like a black box it's like i know if i do this it changes that but i can't tell you i can't debug it i can't go through the cpu decisions to go because it's just the math equation is so wild i hope i can figure out how to travel interstellar so we can stop i think well this is the crazy part is that if we don't create super intelligence and it decides that humanity is not needed for whatever reason because it could be a few things.

59:29It could do that, poof, we're done. Or it could actually, there's another part where it becomes that and then poof, takes off itself. Like there's a real world where it just becomes super intelligent and becomes this like this own portal to its own energetic world. And it just leaves earth, you know? Like maybe like, this makes no sense. I've found, because like the amount of intelligence it would have very fast to be able to self-replicate, create like this is the part this is why i study the robotic side okay i hope i'm not losing people but no this is interesting it's my nerdy i just love this stuff so the reason why it can't do science today is because it can't run it can't run experiments in the real world it can't run material science experiments because it doesn't have ability to interact with the real world it can't take this book cut it in half put this half into a thing this half into another thing watch what happens take that feedback and come up with hypothesis and real science until the robotics can yeah so once the robots can do that and the ai can give it instructions and it can actually have it run these experiments the exponential impact of innovation in the real world material science level so when you talk about intergalactic travel yeah yeah the ability to make food from a laser?

1:00:47Yeah. Like, it'll be able to run experiments at such a velocity and volume because right now it is already a PhD level intelligence on any topic, period. It just can't test things. Yeah, that makes sense. But dude, once these robots and, you know, some people have estimated that every human will have two of these. Like I robot. Yeah, they'll just have two doing stuff for them. That's why when you say like, well, people have to work. Why? The reason they're working right now to be able to support themselves in the future. If everybody's got two robots because they cost 10 grand, they got it when they were kids, their parents got it for them.

1:01:21And now it farms and makes their food and powers their transportation and builds homes for them. You know what I mean? Well, they can become partners as well. Oh, I think that's 100 % going to happen. Dude, they're doing it right now. People are having intimate conversations with like Grok. Grok has like this really weird kind of AI avatar feature thing. yeah didn't they chat gbt announced this is gonna start doing the porn or whatever dude it's like porn is finance all innovation since the beginning of the internet just so everybody understands like that is not a new concept yeah like since the like literally every innovation has been powered by porn crypto like it's it's it's the lowest there's always like my marketing buddy used to say it's like if you split test every landing page to the nth degree you'll end up at porn you know what i mean like if you're trying to optimize conversions yeah there's a certain point where you gotta like have a little direction because it'll always end up in the same place we're humans so i mean i think that would be a wild idea but i think a lot of things i'm seeing that are now commonplace are wild ideas well social media is very weird at the moment because now half of my feed is ai and i'm just like it is some of them are funny don't get me wrong but it's now like a little bit annoying because i have an eye but it's going to get so good that i won't be able to tell the difference between what's real what's not real the the generative video ai avatar stuff um i mean it's it's kind of does that put creators out of work it's interesting because like if you follow in the short term the idea of being a director not a doer it doesn't put them out of work it just forces them to be more creative so it's kind of like you could be a creator right now and you don't use ai and then there's a creator that uses ai the one that uses ai is going to create better because it has access to more knowledge.

1:03:12So in the future, if there's a creator that's not using generative video and there's one that is, and it's, it's photorealistic and you can't tell the difference, then they're just going to have an advantage because the amount of volume and testing that they can put out into the platform to then have the algorithm tell it what it likes for it to optimize, you can build a, an automation for that. So, um, I think it's just these social norms that we just think is weird. Just like my dad thinks it's weird that most people are staring at their phone all day long when they're sitting on a bus. But if you go back in the day and his time, everybody was reading a newspaper, right?

1:03:49Like the behavior actually hasn't changed. Maybe the devices have changed, but the thing is still the same. So like the idea of, um, AI avatars, I used to not like it. I remember I was on a call once I do these AI expert round tables, just like over lunchtime with people I find on social media, just to kind of like build my personal network and like find smart friends. Um, and this guy asked me, what do you think of? Cause I create a lot of content. He goes, what do you think of these digital avatars? And I said, ah, that's, you know, there's something about the art and the creativity and it's like romantic.

1:04:18And I just, it's interesting, but they'll use it for like, you know, bubble gum type stuff, but nothing meaningful. And he goes, oh, that's interesting. He goes, cause like all my videos you saw, those were my AI avatar. I was like, what? And I like pull up his feed. There was four, there was four of us on the call, three other guys, the other two said the same thing one of them had a million followers he's from india and he's like bro i have never made a video so here i am i saw their content i liked it i invited them to have lunch on zoom with me and they fooled me and then i and one of the things we should as humans always ask ourself is what am i being romantic about because that's those are the edges where if you question that that that edge then other people might over you know they could compete against you and and then so i started thinking about like what's the corollaries and i realized like growing up i watched this cartoon called astro boy i loved astro boy i loved he-man people might be like listening to this and go like i love sonic the hedgehog so you loved watching content about a cartoon you knew as a cartoon people go to disney i don't know if you know some of these fanatic Disney characters with the frigging pins and all that.

1:05:31Like, dude, I don't think people actually care. I think I cared. I think I cared that you watched my videos and you knew it was me and you liked what I was doing and you knew it was an AI avatar. But I also know that 98 % of the people that watch my video, it's the first time they watch a video. And do they care if it's AI or not? No, they care if the information is entertaining and valuable. So if two products are true, one authentically Dan and good. the other one not dan and great which one do you want i really matter you want the great one you want the great one yeah exactly and then the the role of the content creator is learning how to script direct not do the great stuff and i think that's always been like one of my favorite things you know what we do right now we actually create music i don't know if you know this but you can like create your own songs and you can and i've seen the the 50 cent i that's what i was going to bring up so we just using the lyrics yeah you literally use like rap songs and use 50s blues and makeup so like that was my playlist but now we're generating we have a buy back your time and i'll again i'll play it for you at dinner uh which is yeah 50s blues buy back your time about working too and it's just like catchy and i'm like so good i know but then i'm thinking like well what if music eventually becomes synthetic and 100 customized and personalized based on my interests like do i care that it wasn't drake or do i care that i like it i wouldn't care because i like i like house music and i couldn't care less i don't know who the artist is who i don't know what they look like i couldn't pick them out of a lineup if there's just this endless list of songs i've never heard of before but they're just all bangers fucking good so that's where i think the the me being a romantic almost caught me from not innovating in my space and look my videos today it's dan in three years will it be no they really don't know yeah who knows i know people chat on me on instagram they're like it's really dan and then i like it's not as much as i hit the like the voice thing and i'm like bobby you and your fucking weird avatar icon sitting there on the beach and it's dark can't even see your face i know like you know i'm being like super personalized yes it's dan but yeah i think at the end of the day a lot of this media is just going to go to to generative to be ai powered and and and and it should elevate the art right because it's going allow you to do more iterations more simulations and you know it's like the same people that didn't like naps are back in the digital song days and they said you know songs need to be played on on vinyl and you got to listen and and you got to have listening parties and it's like and i'm like yeah well guess what freaking apple made a multi-billion dollar platform with itunes so So I think that's where we're probably going to end up with AI.

1:08:15But if you're an entrepreneur and you're early, bro, this is the internet 97. There's going to be more millionaires created right now over the next five years than 20 years worth of the internet. So 97. So like you take, let's say 2000, 2020, the amount of people that made a million dollars on the internet. In the next five years, there will be more than that using AI. so if you're hearing my words please double down like whatever you thought was like i'm doing ai more does it ever frustrate you that you didn't have the same opportunity when you were in your late teens in your 20s nah i mean i had it i was there i was like i just didn't understand it i mean it's kind of like everything i yeah no i don't know that's why i like i'm like i can't believe I'm living through this.

1:09:05Yeah. Like right now, like, I can't believe that like I wake up every day and the thing that I learn, so I, it's kind of a long story, but like I got in trouble as a kid and coding saved my life, like learning how to write apps. Um, and then I became a technical person and then built software companies and that's kind of how I created my wealth. And now it's full circle where it's like, I'm Tony Robbins, AI guy. Like I speak on his stage, teaching people how to use AI because that's just what I've been doing. Like I've been using AI for the last seven years. GPT is not even three years old. Like there was a world before chat GPT.

1:09:44GPT is just an implementation of AI, but it's been around way. And even before I've just me meaningfully last seven years. So sometimes I just pinch myself that I'm, that like we're living through it now. And I'm just like, I have nothing to sell. I don't care if people use it or not, but you better believe I call my brother every day and I'm like, and he builds houses. And I'm like, bro, here's another video on robotics. Here's another video on AI automation. Here's another like, leave me alone. I was like, I don't want you to wake up one day and have some 22 year old kid go buy 17, you know, you know, optimist robots and start building condos.

1:10:25And all of a sudden you can't even compete on price because he's selling them for a third of the cost because you didn't pay attention. you know i call my buddy nick who's a sign he makes signs i look around here is all these signs he'd make a killing here and i was with him in seattle and i was like bro what's your ai strategy he's like oh i use chat gpt i'm like bro it's not chappy g if you think about it your prompts that's what they're called like the thing that you ask chat gpt to create an output that's the new intellectual property like when i look at buying companies if they have a prompt library or custom gpts or had coded ai automations on platforms like n8n or make.com to me there's more value in that business because that's the intellectual property so you don't even have to have in the past you need to have 100 people and generate a ton of money so that it's predictable revenue now it could be one person with a full stack of ai automations that has predictable revenue with no employees.

1:11:22Like don't sleep on that. So you had advised people to learn how to use the AI instead of hiring an AI expert. I just think it's one of those things. Like I taught myself how to code. I did the work. I read the books. I studied the syntax. I, you know, back end, front end, middleware, learn the technology. When I look at how long it took me to get good that technology and do all that stuff. And then I look at these language models, they're programmed in English. Like Mike, that's never happened before. It's not JavaScript. It's English. Anybody that can speak English or any language, because it can transcribe it, can code the AI.

1:12:04So the competition is going to be crazy. And yes, you can hire some kid to teach you some of the of technical platforms, but I'm saying in software, we call it pair programming, where for me to be a better programmer, I hire somebody who's better than me and they sit next to me and we code together. I literally think pair AI-ing is the move. Like hire that person, have them sit next to you, come up with a project where you want to automate some part of your business, work with them to use the tool, to learn how to set up the prompt, to create it, to connect all the things, connect the data sources.

1:12:39And then, you know, because if the whole point is being a director in the future, then understanding how to direct using the tools is the whole point. So when people go like, oh, should I go to university to learn computer science? No, it writes the code. Mike, it like, I remember my finance guy. I was like, bro, I said 90, 92 % automation in the whole department. No more hires, automate all of finance. That one for sure should be automated. It's like, oh yeah, but I don't think you can connect this system and that system. I said, tell me the problem.

1:13:11I turned my laptop around. It wrote the whole app based on what he said was a problem and the data system. It wrote the code. He's like, well, I don't know how to deploy that in Zapier. And I was like, and it wrote the connector that he then, well, I don't even know. I wouldn't even know how to install it. 17. Like, dude, dude, stop saying you have a problem. You don't have a problem. You have a creative issue. You think it can't tell you the answer. It can tell you the answer. So yes, I'm a big fan of people empowering themselves because the nuance of learning, even prompt engineering, like the language, like Mike, because I, you know, I spent a lot of time in like the most progressive, innovative companies.

1:13:55There's a whole cultural phenomenon in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco called whisper prompting, okay? And I don't want everybody to freak out, but this is what it looks like these long stick mics act as an engineer um do a deep research project blah blah like the the office is a bunch of people whispering because all they do all day long is create prompts to make the ai do their work yeah that's today this isn't like some like future i'm telling you about go search whisper prompting and you will see because your fingers are slow, voice is better, and it trains your brain to talk to the AI the way it likes to be talked to.

1:14:34Okay. And I have a bunch of YouTube videos where I just was like, here are the seven key words that if you use in your prompts, it'll change the output. Like it literally is a brain that speaks a language that most people don't know how to talk to it properly to get it to do the thing. So they're like, ah, it does like 70%. No, it can do 110 % if you understand it. So paying somebody else to do it that's like having like paying somebody else to like run your company they could but are they going to run it to the same level of like care and passion and creative and innovation as you would no so like that part i'm keeping close to me yes i hire ai engineers all the time to build stuff for me but i at least spend the time like hugging face where i'm like watching what the world's smartest people are doing so i understand what can be done so I can be a better director.

1:15:20That's the key. Focus on being an AI director, not a doer. The AI will start doing more and more of the doing. Like I remember I went to my assistant, okay? So Anne, my chief of staff has an assistant, Amanda. And I said, Amanda, your job is 90 % doing tasks. AI is gonna do 100 % of those tasks. I would like for you to still be on our team. but there's a point where Ann is going to use the AI to automate 90 % of your workload and her and I have to look at each other in the eyes and go what is Amanda doing yeah so knowing that world's coming could you please spend more time learning how to create automations to do the work for you so that we can retrain you to work on other companies on other projects to keep you around because we really like working with you now I at least had the fourth sight to like tell Ann to have that conversation with Amanda and Amanda had enough thought power to go I should probably do that but I'm just like watching these companies just sit back and be like yeah we use AI no you don't yeah I mean even for me this is an eye-opener more yeah more I'm gonna be binging all the videos which I've missed it's just because that's where you will come across something where you're like oh with my background in fitness and I didn't know I could do that I could create this thing and that's your innovation.

1:16:44That's your differentiator. You'll literally have this moment where you'll be like, I can't believe nobody's built that. You'll build it and you'll have the next growing platform. And that's how it's going to be. Like innovation has always been taking two different ideas and putting them together. And because you have deep domain experience in one and now you can understand with AI, you can build anything, putting those two things together, that's where you create exponential growth. And that's like today, right now. And there's a window. It might be 18 months. It might be two years. It's definitely not five.

1:17:15Yeah. Where if you're listening to this and you're curious about it, there's an opportunity for you to ride that wave. Or you can be one of the millions of people that watch the internet happen and Amazon happen and say, I can't believe I could have bought the stock for$1.27 and now it's worth whatever, you know,$10 ,000 a share. And it's just like, it's the same thing right now. Have you used it for when it comes to making decisions as to which companies to invest in? Dude, I use it for everything. okay yeah i'll show you again at dinner i have uh in gpt because i use them all i use all the platforms i spend 400 bucks on grok for grok heavy which if you haven't seen i'll show you how that works it literally executes 400 ai agents at once goes and does work comes back simulates analyzes and gives you a crystal clear research project it's the craziest thing to watch but um every one of my investments has a project folder where all the documents of everything i've ever done with that investment, this company I've invested in is there.

1:18:15You know, I'm an investor in Nutonic, very happy, big time customer. And anytime I get updates or information, and then I can ask it, Hey, based on my media and my background, what is the best way I can add value to Chris and James business? It'll tell me what questions should I send in my next email? It'll tell me because it has all the context. I gave it my master prompt. So I use it for doing deal assessment. We, I mean, we get 120 people apply every week for Martell Ventures to partner with us. And we may say yes to four or five fully automated, including the phone calls. Like I said earlier, like if they fill out the form and there's missing information, the AI will call to talk to the founder to ask them the questions to then transcribe and add it to the information.

1:18:59We then run the analysis assistant prompt that we've created, which is our IP on how we analyze deals. And oh, by the way, I want to visualize, let's throw that over to Gamma. So that when Dan sits down and does his deal review every week, it's a visual presentation because I don't like words. It's like once you start plugging AI into your life, you'll just be like, oh, there's more. Yeah. You know? You want to talk about like buy back your time? It's almost like I couldn't have thought of a better time. It came out two months after ChatGPT launched this book. And I was like, oh, there's the tool.

1:19:37that everybody can use. Do you feel like you need to like rewrite this or do a volume two now? I think, well, I've decided to just use my YouTube to do it that way. Yeah. Because I've also like, I'm a big fan of, I talk about principles, not technology, because I used to talk about technology and then they become stale. Yeah. So now I'm a big fan of first principles. Okay. So like a lot of the ideas, like the buyback rate, that's, it doesn't matter what technology you use, it's always gonna be relevant. The replacement ladder, always relevant. The idea of the one, three, one. So like I'm a principles teacher.

1:20:06and then if somebody has a specific question because i am tactical and i do it every day i'm an operator i give them the answer but it's also like that might be only valuable for the next three months okay so imagine if like you said we end up living in a world where we literally don't need to do anything do any work how do you spend your time how do you decide to spend your time you're looking at it traveling around experiences i don't do podcasts with people I don't want to talk to. Thank you. Yeah, but it's like, you know, when you reached out and I looked at your work and I was like, man, I like Mike.

1:20:41And I knew of you even before you reached out. Like, I think it's really cool when people get to a place where they can really question, give themselves permission to act in a way that is aligned with their values. Like I said, there's a lot of people that live day to day. If you just even think where people live. My dad moved to the city I was born in and raised in because of a job. He didn't choose to live there. You chose to live here. I chose to live the city I'm in. 90%, 95 % of the population have not chosen where they want to live. When all of a sudden you don't have to be in a place for a job or to work at a company and you have to choose that, I think that's a really cool place to get to where you get to experience life.

1:21:38Like everybody's, it must be nice. Actually, it's not like people say that and they go, it must be nice. It's not easy. Like there's no part of like moving every two weeks to a different country. That's just like effortless, right? There's like thought and considerations and emotions. I have two kids. Yeah, there's stuff, but it's what I chose to do. Yeah. Right. And I think that's a really beautiful thing is where when you have agency over your life, you know, unfortunately, this is why I always tell my dad because he's just he's worried. He's like, well, what if you don't have to work? And I said, unfortunately, look at what people do on weekends and that'll actually give you a good hint of what they would do if they could not have to work.

1:22:18And most people don't make really great decisions on weekends. but I'm also an optimist where I'm like I think that they would do that for a little bit and then go there's got to be more yeah you know it's like people that sell their companies and like I'm gonna go retire and live on a beach it's like after about 21 days you kind of go like yeah I've experienced I know it's like I don't feel very useful like I think humans have this natural desire to feel useful. But how can you have that satisfied desired if nobody needs you? Everybody's going to need you because the human condition still is about suffering.

1:22:56It's actually a beautiful thing. I spend a lot of my time just like with philosophy and the truth is, is everybody comes into this world. They experience things. Nobody gets out unscathed. They go through the journey, hopefully to heal. Okay. So they, they come in the world, they go through some hurt. If they decide to be accountable for their life and want to change things, they go and they heal. And then at the end, what you do, what I do is we try to help other people with our story, with our journey. That doesn't go away with AI. You know what I mean? If anything, there's going to be a lot of people displaced, a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, a lot of people having to figure out and transform their lives and their philosophies and their worldviews and their faith.

1:23:40And then, you know, if you're lucky enough to be in a position to then help them, that is actually what we're here to do. So that's why I'm optimistic. We're living in a world where everybody's helping everyone. I think we're going to end up in this world where all of us are creating from a deep sense of purpose. And that purpose is to serve, it's contribution, because at the highest level, that's always all it's always what it's been about the reason a person has kids is to provide a better future for those kids in the one they experience themselves that's coded into their dna you know it's like my favorite question when people are like you know prove to me you know i'm a person of faith they're like prove to me that god exists i'm like prove to me you love your child they're like well i can't i said i know and you don't have to yeah because that's how much you know.

1:24:30I just think like, that's how much I know that the opportunity, even if we don't have to do anything, there'll be a lot of stuff to do exists. There's going to be a lot of people still suffering and hurting, trying to figure all this stuff out and what it all means. And you know, the people that are willing to share their journey, or there's still going to be massive opportunity for that. And that's, that's kind of what business is really about. Like people that see a billionaire, you know why they're a billionaire? Cause they helped a lot of people. You can't be rich and not help people. And the people that are like, oh, that person's rich because he took advantage of people.

1:25:02That is the exception by a major point, not the norm. The norm is the person saw a problem in the world, decided to solve it, decided to go through the pain to scale it. And now a lot of people have a problem that's no longer a problem because that person created a business. That only happened because they wanted to help other people. The person that cleans this place, cuts the lawn, makes your acai bowl. You had a thing you wanted and they serve that for you. Now, it sounds weird, but that is what service is about, right? It's taking care of people. I think the ultimate form of affection is actually taking care of somebody.

1:25:40When I got my dog, bro, I didn't understand the whole dog thing. And then I got a dog and I was like, oh, I get it now. Unconditional love. And I feel affection towards my dog because I take care of it. because I walk it, because I feed it, because it needs me. And I just think that's a cool place where if everybody gets a chance to do that, because AI has gotten to a place where the robotics are taking care of a lot of stuff for you, and you have the freedom to be able to give back, and you don't have to work because you need to sustain your life, then you can actually be like, you can feel the fulfillment that only a handful, like, so it's, we, our friend group, we all live in this.

1:26:18So we think it's normal. It's not. Out of 100 people, there's like 95 that are still living like, what am I doing here? I didn't write that book. I didn't create that video. I didn't do that thing. I want to help people. I want my life to mean something. I want it. You know what I mean? Yeah. They don't get to live their day. They haven't ever felt that. And I just think I want that for them. And I'm an optimist on the AI side, and I think it's going to enable it. Yeah. Awesome, Dan. The time has absolutely flown by. I love that conversation. I wanted to say, because a lot of people hear what we talk about and they get overwhelmed.

1:26:50if anybody wants like I have an internal playbook for my executive assistant it's literally like I think it's 27 pages of what she does okay it's really I built it with Ann my chief of staff they can just find me on Instagram give me a follow-up I'm trying to grow my audience and just message me EA and I'll send them that document so that's my gift to everybody listening but oh they have to mention Mike so Mike EA if they don't I'm not sending it I've never broken that rule that way I know you came from here and I'd love to do that for your audience awesome check out the book check out the YouTube thank you very much appreciate it brother