AI Is Lowering the Cost to Build Wealth—Here’s How to Take Advantage with Scott Clary

22:39We got to build AI into the thumbnail somehow, Scott, so that it's clickbaity. Just turn me into a robot. Put me on the thumbnail, then you're good. What the hell is going on? I couldn't have even envisioned what's happening two years ago. I feel like I'm bleeding edge as anyone, but it's like, what a time to be alive. It is a time to be alive. There's so much opportunity. There's so, so, so much opportunity. That's why a lot of my messaging is get off social media and stop getting upset with what's happening in the world. I'm so glad you said that. I'm putting an asterisk on that. As we're hearing in this conversation with Scott Clary, entrepreneurship today is really about how fast you can adapt.

23:19Whether you're building a business, a brand, or a career, the people who win aren't necessarily the ones following the traditional playbook. They're the ones willing to rethink how value gets created and where opportunity is actually moving. That same shift is happening in investing. Sharp investors are applying that same entrepreneurial mindset to their retirement. That's where BlockTrust IRA comes in. Instead of relying on outdated traditional allocation strategies, you can move your IRA into Animus AI, an advanced system designed to help identify opportunities and navigate changing market conditions.

23:56Since 2020, BlockTrust IRA's Animus AI has significantly outperformed Bitcoin as a benchmark. Visit writeaboutcrypto.com to get started and see if you qualify for up to$2 ,500 in bonus crypto. Block Trust IRA, smart crypto investing powered by AI. Okay, I'll come back to you. Keep going. And just focus on you and focus on the opportunity that exists right now and focus on all the incredible tools and technology because you can be mad about a lot in the world. You can be mad about what's going on outside the U.S. You can be mad about or be happy with the government that the U.S. currently has. You can be mad that AI is coming and you're worried about replacing your job or you can look at AI and be like, wow, that's the greatest opportunity ever.

24:41The future belongs to people who are optimistic. Your life will be so much better if you ignore things that don't apply to you and that are outside of your control and just focus on what is actually in your control. Now, AI in particular, you could be all upset about it taking your job or you could understand that now with AI, you have the opportunity to 10x your output. You have the opportunity to build a business from scratch, as we just saw with Medvi, even though they had some questionable marketing tactics. They built the first ever, I think, one or two person,$1.4 billion revenue business.

25:10So now with AI agents and all the different tools that sort of accompany the things that are being built right now, you can do anything. You can build anything with basically no capital and almost no people. And I think that this is a unique time in history. I speak a lot to entrepreneurs. I'm going to talk a little bit about how AI plays into people who don't feel like being an entrepreneur because that's fine. But for entrepreneurs, like the barrier to entry has never been lower. There's this really cool chart that you can look up that shows how many people historically would have taken to build a million dollar business and say, I'm not going to make up numbers, but say back in like the 40s, say it was like 50 people or 60 people.

25:44And you fast forward to the 2000s, maybe it was 10 or 15 people to build a million dollar business. Now you fast forward to 2026. It's one person, one person can build a million dollar business with AI and tools and software. And then you can make the argument that one person can truly build a billion dollar plus business. And we'll see what happens with again, Medvi. But outside of that one example, there's going to be more and more examples. And for people to know, that's a peptide company. And the founder used his brother plus AI. And I think their revenue was clocking in in 2026 at$1.4 billion.

26:13But there was some sketchy affiliate marketing going on. Everyone's wondering what's going to happen to them. But the point is, they still had$1.4 billion in real money coming in, regardless of how they got it. But the point is, even if that was the first example of a billion dollar one or two person business, there's going to be many more. So the lesson is AI is the greatest tool ever right now. And I think that if you aren't understanding and aren't learning it, you are going to be left in the dust. Obviously, you've heard the cliche, you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody using AI.

26:42Even if you're not interested in starting a company, you cannot ignore AI. The future employee is somebody who could be and thinks like an entrepreneur. They are just choosing to work for a company. So what does think like an entrepreneur mean? And what does could be an entrepreneur mean? It means that they are learning the latest tech. They're figuring out how to apply it to the job that has to be done. They're figuring out how to make themselves 10x more useful to the company. And they just learn and they stay on the bleeding edge. That is the future employee. I'm a big fan of hiring people that could be entrepreneurs because they research and they stay up to date and they know what's going on.

27:17They know Claude Cowork and Claude Code and they know that chat image 2.0 dropped last week and they're already using it. Like they know all this stuff and they could be entrepreneurs if they want it to be. But for whatever season of life that they're in right now, they don't want to be an entrepreneur. But that's fine. But they still bring that entrepreneur mindset to the company. Those are the people that I love to hire. And it's not just me that feels this way. I did a live podcast with the CTO of Dropbox and the CMO of Carta last week in Miami. And the CMO of Carta was saying how all the roles that they're hiring for, say, for example, there's a marketing role they're hiring for.

27:49They're hiring for a copywriter or a graphic designer. That's how they used to title their roles. The job postings that they're putting out now, they're calling them marketing engineers. So marketers that understand marketing, but not engineers in like a computer science degree engineer context in a I understand how to code, develop, design right with AI. And the title is now marketing engineer. And those are the people who they're hiring going forward. So they don't hire anybody who doesn't understand how to use AI. So these are people that are employees that are figuring out AI and they're staying on the bleeding edge.

28:19So I mean, whether or not you're an entrepreneur and now you have access to the greatest tools ever to build something yourself with basically, again, no help, except you and your mind or you're an employee. This is how you have to think. We were talking before about how to use AI in businesses. And this is something that obviously people are thinking about. How do I use it for pick a task? How do I use it to write copy or create an image or whatnot? What I'm seeing with my company right now is we're using AI to do a couple of things. So first of all, it increases the effectiveness of every single employee because now every single employee can become an expert copywriter and an expert graphic designer.

28:54And I don't need them all to do everything. But the point is that now my developers can write code in a fraction of the time that it would take because now we can write the code and the developer only has to spend the time debugging it. Or a graphic designer or a copywriter. Well, before I would have to hire for somebody to emulate and to write at the level that I write at. I still do a lot of my own writing. I like writing. I find it very cathartic and relaxing and it helps me organize my thoughts. But to find a copywriter that can write at my level, because I've been writing for a while now, I'm sure that's$80 ,000,$90 ,000 per year salary.

29:24If that person was full-time copywriting, we're talking like every single social post, multiple newsletters per week, like everything that I put out. Now I can find a junior copywriter that understands AI that can now put out content at my caliber because now I can train a Claude project on 10 ,000 hours of me speaking and podcasting and I can give the copywriter access to that cloud project. Now, I still need that person to edit and to make sure that all the ideas make sense. Like you can't just use AI and ship it. But if I wanted to find somebody to replace me as a writer for my content, which I don't really yet, but if I ever needed that, I could train a project on me and what I believe and how I write and all the things that make Scott, Scott.

30:06And then I could probably hire somebody for 30 to$40 ,000 per year that could manage that project and create really, really, really good content that sounds like me, feels like me, incorporates all my lived experience and my ideas for a fraction of the price. So now my entire copywriting team could include one leader who's a little bit more experienced, but then you can scale your output with more junior employees that can leverage AI. So that's one example. AI is radically changing everything. And I don't know how you're using it. Obviously you are to some degree because everybody who's building a business is, but whether or not you use it increase the output or increase the ability of yourself or your team, or you outsource certain parts of your day to agents.

30:48I'll give you one more example. All this admin work that I would normally hire an admin for, I still have an admin, but she uses AI. So now she can do 10x the amount of work in a fraction of the time. So if she needs to plan travel, she's using Claude Cowork. And she's reviewing everything before it actually books everything. But she's saying, hey, can you find the best flight options across all the Travelocity, Expedia, Google flights? Can you find all the best flight options to San Francisco between May 12th and 16th? So now she doesn't have to spend two hours searching. Now she puts that prompt into Claude Co-Work and then she can go do other stuff.

31:23And then she comes back in 20 minutes and she sees all the options. This is how you use AI. This is how I use it. And this is how you should use it. But it's changed my life and my business for sure. It's so many things. It's hard to actually put it into one thing. It's the great exponentiator. I knew that Scott Clary would know what I meant. And I think my audience that knows how that I like to make up words at this point knows what I mean. If he trained his GPT to write as well as this newsletter was written, I'd be very impressed, but I can almost tell it's coming from him. Even if it is at some level, Scott, it feels and breathes and acts like you.

31:57It's really intelligent. It's not there yet. I think that soon it will be. It can't capture everything. It can't capture the way that I write yet, but it's getting like very, very close. Actually, I was actually disappointed because Claude Opus 4.7, I thought that it was going to be this massive upgrade because they hyped this shit up like it's the Super Bowl when they launch these new models. But I found that it was a little bit meh. Like I didn't enjoy it that much. I'm like, oh, I'll put in my writing and be like, hey, this is my writing. Go write another piece. And then I read it. I'm like, no, this is shit.

32:25My bar is very high, but like the point is, No, but I started to worry, Scott, I do the same thing. We're similar. I do things like that. Then I go, am I just being too subject to your own words, your own work? I have to like self-critique sometimes, but then I don't know if I can remove myself from it. I think that you know what good is. I think that all creators know what good is. You know when a podcast hits, you know when a piece of content flops. And I think that for good creators, it is more important than ever to hold a high standard for your content because AI has allowed everybody to create shitty content at scale.

32:55The people that write and create good content, there's less and less of them because there's so much slop online now and so many creators are just pushing AI slop. I think that if you create well thought out, you put a little bit more effort towards your content, I think you actually stand out even more than before because you're like, oh, my God, there's no way I could have done this. And that's the reaction you want when you put out content. Oh, my God, there's no way I could have done this. If you can get that reaction, that's what builds trust the most with an audience in 2026 and forever, by the way.

33:22AI can do some things and it can even do some content, but your core content, okay, my exact words, the hitting stuff that you want to differentiate. I think of it back to like my marketing days where you have, I think of it as like a musician, like you have a drum beating and that's like the brand and it's beating while you've got the sizzle, the important stuff landing big time. But you got that drum beat over here. I think you can use the AI for the drum beat stuff. The stuff that's not crap, but like it's keeping some repetitive themes, some different things that aren't like, okay, my exact spoken word, my exact written word, but whether it's visual, whether it's logos, whether it's graphics done right, I think you can drumbeat with AI.

34:07I don't think you can land the uppercuts necessarily. It's a fine line and I struggle with it every day knowing which one. And sometimes you can cross over and you go, oh shit, that was just some AI slop and it was really meant to be an uppercut. I'm a fan of using AI. We've gone super deep on use cases. I wanted to mention one more thing before. There's so many different random use cases, but a big fan of using AI for is helping me brainstorm ideas and helping me figure out things. Research and brainstorming is huge. I never like to just write with AI and post because I can see when somebody else does that and I'm just not a fan of it.

34:38But researching and brainstorming is huge. That really helps, especially at the end of the day when you're tired. You just need like a little bit of help to get going if you're trying to write a post or trying to write anything or trying to do anything after eight hours of zoom we don't have as much energy so i think that ai helps just get the juices flowing a little bit but my point with all this is you just have to think in ai that's the answer because you mentioned there's so many different ways to use it and i'm mentioning a few you gotta know how to use it this is like cutting your grass with scissors or a lawnmower you gotta fucking learn how to use the lawnmower 100 but when you think in ai is a made-up idea you're making up words and making up ideas when you think in AI, you always think, how could I improve or expedite this task, this thing I got to do with AI?

35:18That's how you go through life now. Just go through life like that and you're going to be fine. How do I book this travel easier with AI? How do I write this copy or brainstorm this podcast idea or research a guest for the show? It doesn't mean that AI has to be part of everything you do. I think it's important that sometimes you actually do hard work yourself. I don't think that you should outsource all your thinking to AI because that creates a whole other problem. But for the average person who is not using it, start to just think, how do I use this to help with this task? I'll give you an example.

35:45My family was in town last week and my mom, she's retired now. She has like all these past generation photo books, like all these like photo albums and stuff like that of all the books and stuff of our child. And she has like 20 of these. It's crazy. Now we just have Instagram, but she has 20 of these photo albums. And she's like, what do I do with all these photo albums? Like, I don't just want to give them to you. Like you're going to sit in like storage or they're going to sit in a bin somewhere in the basement. And I'm like, why don't you turn it into some sort of memoir or something like that?

36:12We were brainstorming because I use AI a lot and I know the possibilities. I'm like, this is what you do. You're going to have all these pictures and eventually like maybe we can like scan or upload all these pictures, but you're going to have all these pictures. And as you flip through the book, I want you to have a microphone. I want you to record like what's going on in your life. These pictures are going to jog your memories too big. You know, this is like Scott's like, you know, second birthday. My parents came into town as we did for Scott. So you're going to narrate all this stuff. You're going to just record it and you're going to take this narration and then you're going to transcribe it.

36:41And then what you're going to do is you can actually use a tool like Manus or Claude Code to take the transcription and say, hey, I like Manus for website building. I want to create a website private of all the memories. These are the transcripts of all the memories. So it's going to code up a website that has like the different years and the different people and the timeline. and then it's going to turn these transcripts into blog posts or articles and it's going to attach it to certain periods of life. And then it's going to say, okay, hey, can you upload a picture of Scott on his second birthday?

37:10Can you upload a picture of whatever your mom on her 50th wedding anniversary? And then you're going to have this beautiful keepsake that was entirely enabled with a little bit of transcription, transcription to AI, LLM blog writing, plus a website created around all these ideas. One of a trillion different things you can use AI for, but the point is she's trying to figure out how to capture all these beautiful memories, how do you use AI to do that? That's what I mean by think with AI, like adopt an AI first mindset to the task to be done. That's a fun little family project, but that applies to everything in life and business, whatever you're trying to do.

37:43Think, how does AI allow me to do this easier, more efficiently, more effectively, or just better? Yeah, 100%. Talking with Scott Clary, he is the Canadian AI risk taker. A lot of thoughts that I have when I think about when I'm using AI and I'm cloud coding some big shit. We got to have another call where we talk about what I'm doing. AI unlocks so much that if you will allow yourself to believe it because you could do something, you think knowledge is cheap. You can take all of this knowledge, you can apply it in ways that you never imagined possible because you don't need to have the skill of all of these things that we did in the past and this knowledge in the past.

38:19AI can do that for you. But how can you creatively deploy an unlimited army of knowledge and technology in new ways? And the dreamers and the thinkers and the creative people, I tell people all the time, and I know you are too, Scott and Ryan's in the world are real fucking dangerous right now. I'm not saying we're not going to be Jeff Bezos or anything, but if you're creative and you'll adopt these tools and you'll just unleash where you said everyday things you're thinking about, how could AI and stop doing the things you always did the same way and think more. I think creative people that put it to action are going to be the world takers here because knowledge is cheap and average is below average now.

38:59Good is not good. Good is average. But it's that creativity with the AI layer that I don't know people have fully grasped. You and I were in tech and we're in technology and podcasting. So we're immersed in all this stuff. but I don't think the general public has quite wrapped their head around it. I hope that shows like this do it. I hope they do it too. AI allows you to be super creative, dude. And it allows you to test ideas for nothing. I can build an app. I can build a piece of software. I can brainstorm 20 new podcast formats in a weekend. I can build a full app, a full app that would take like two months to build with a developer team.

39:36It would probably cost me$250 ,000,$300 ,000. I can build that in a weekend with no one else and not just build like an MVP, build like a fully functioning Stripe or Apple Pay integration, paywalls. I can build marketing emails that can go out to people. I can build an app, scrape a list, send 2000 emails, spin up a social media account, post 50 images that were AI created in 24 hours with a little bit of creativity and prompting. So I can take an idea I have in my head and I can basically ship it and see if there's any feedback at all in no time. The biggest indicator of success, but the biggest, I think the quality of somebody who is truly successful, of course, I have to believe they can do the thing.

40:17That's the sort of a prerequisite. But it's to shorten the gap between the idea and the action, shorten the gap between the idea and the execution of that idea. The shorter the gap, the quicker you can test, the more likely you can figure out if it works or not. And success is really just reps at the end of the day. If you try more businesses, one will work. If you have more ideas and you can test them, eventually you'll get data on which one works, which one doesn't, and you double down on what works. It's just everything in life is like a numbers game. You want to be successful? Take more shots.

40:46AI allows you to take 100 times more shots in no time with no money. That's a wild concept. So when people really truly grasp this, that anything they think about, they can completely launch tomorrow. It just changes the game. Now, you mentioned another thing, too. The tough thing about AI is the people that get it and the people that are with it and understand it and study it, they're going to move at light speed. Because now, Scott or Ryan, I can test, like I said, 15, 20 business ideas simultaneously. And then I could even spin up agents to almost run those businesses without too much of my direct involvement if there's actually customers that want to pay for whatever that business is.

41:22Not all businesses. You can't like AI, lawn care and whatnot. But I'm talking about apps and websites and things that are sort of more digital products. I can test out a lot of stuff very quickly. But the people that don't get it, they're going to be left behind. They're not going to be hireable. They're going to take way too much time and energy and money to build a business if they want to be entrepreneurial. Like I don't see a world where people that don't adopt AI have really great lives, to be quite honest. I think that you have to figure out there's always going to be certain sectors that are not going to be as impacted by AI.

41:49But I would even argue that if you're a lawn care company, the lawn care company that adopts AI in their customer acquisition process and their onboarding and their billing and their, they're going to be the only lawn care company because they're going to be able to do 100x of work at a fraction of the price. So any industry is going to be impacted by this. And we're not even going to get into robotics, which is a whole other stressful conversation people to go into. But the point is, if you don't understand it and you don't use it to make yourself more effective, I think the future is going to be very difficult for a lot of people who don't get it.

42:20What was the book, 10 Habits of Highly Effective People? That needs to be literally rewritten. Maybe Scott needs to write that. Do you get people reaching out to you? Because I've been in this limbo of writing books and dealing with agents and publishers for like almost two, three years now. Yeah, I get it. Eventually something will hit a shelf. I've got a book title called Raising a Brand, which is around this notion of either an athlete or just a personal brand. NIL, if it's an athlete type thing, but NIL, if it's just a personal brand. It's like nature raising a personal brand. And that doesn't mean like a YouTube sensation necessarily.

42:52But I think it's just so important that our voices put some like emphasis on this topic. It can't be. I know everybody's kind of maybe getting fatigued, but I'm excited. I mean, I literally, I guess it's funny you're talking. We're doing the same thing. I mean, I'm up till like 2 a.m. because I feel like it's not because I'm scared to get left behind or anything. It's just fun. Like I'm like, holy shit. Like I had to rely on so many other people to do certain things that I did when you needed coding and all these other things. I feel like I've got back to the Superman thing. I mean, it's not that I have superpowers.

43:20You're starting to become Superman. Maybe not so illusional. No, exactly. Scott, drop some deets on your amazing show, newsletter, all that stuff. I appreciate you, first of all, Ryan, for having me on. I'll give you my contact stuff and my podcast and socials in a second. But that reframe of being scared of AI and being scared of getting excited about it is a super important one. And you're right. It has been discussed a lot. But I'm just hoping and praying that one person listens to this and it finally clicks. And that's why I say things I don't think the future is going to be nice to people that don't adopt it.

43:50Maybe that's the line they have to hear. Maybe they don't have to hear from the CEO of Anthropic. Maybe they have to realize how this impacts them. And if they do, that's a win for me because hopefully that'll light a fire. Podcast is called Success Story where we have incredible conversations similar to these. and all my social is at Scott D. Clary. So you can find me anywhere. There's a lot of bad business advice out there. Scott Clary ain't one of them. Ain't is a word now, I think, in the dictionary. As Southerners like to say there, Scott, Scott's the real deal. You felt that here on the show.

44:20I know you will. You want to be successful? Go listen to Scott. Get it on his newsletter. It's real. It's raw. It's direct. It's honest. But it's fucking right about now. Scott, it's been a pleasure, brother. Can't wait to do it again. Pleasure's on mine, dude. Thank you. Can't wait. Ryanisright.com. Find the highlight clips, the full episode and links to all of Scott's stuff. We appreciate him for coming on. We appreciate you making us number one. See you next time. Right about now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanIsRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

44:55Thanks for listening.

45:03Okay, I take it back. You were right about Wild Fork. I knew it. What happened? I went to Wild Fork yesterday. Low prices, no shocking totals at checkout, no surprises. See, grocery shopping without the drama. Then I made an amazing meal with restaurant quality ingredients that tasted so fresh. Wild Fork blast freezing makes a big difference. My family got a full nutritious meal and I didn't feel stressed or rushed. I finally cracked the dinner code. Visit Wild Fork Meat and Seafood Market in-store or at wildforkfoods.com and make dinner simple again. May is Maytag month, and Menards is passing the savings on to you.

45:37You need reliable and energy-efficient appliances to conquer the day. Menards is your one-stop shop with appliances in stock and ready to take home today. Check out our top appliance brands, including KitchenAid, Maytag, Whirlpool, Amana, and Criterion. Save big money on Maytag appliances at Menards. And check out our weekly flyer on Menards.com for all the great deals happening now. Save big money at Menards.