You Have About 36 Months To Make It

So, I've been seeing this statement circulating online, and it pretty much says you have about 36 months to make it. And it makes sense because AI will continue to replace jobs, no matter how much people fight against it. Money as we know it will change or even cease to exist because millions of ASIs, or artificial super intelligences, will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension, dictating humanity's future. And aside the point, if you're interested in crypto, this is probably the last time you're going to see incredible gains because they're being regulated. They're being adopted, and after this, they're going to become more like stocks.

Now, my intention with this video isn't to scare you or sound sensationalist. Everything I just read is things that I've been seeing circulating online. I'm indifferent. I don't know whether it's true or whether it's false. So, those aren't my opinions. That's just what we're here to talk about today. It can be absolutely wrong, and I expect most of it to be wrong. You may not have 36 months to make it, but in my eyes, you have about 36 months until the definition of making it changes drastically.

Now, my intention with this video is to provide you with a perspective that will allow you to notice opportunities in this future that is coming very fast because it's quite obvious that something is changing, right? We're in this very noisy time on social media, on YouTube, everywhere. And usually, what that means when there's a lot of conflict, a lot of chaos, that means that a new ordered structure is going to emerge. And we don't know what that is yet. Thankfully, human nature remains pretty much the same. And I can't help but think that this period of rapid growth is marking a clear distinction between machines and humans. Those who lean into their humanity will thrive. And those who can't stop identifying with mechanical living, on the other hand, may not.

So, the first thing we need to talk about is the concept of doers versus directors because this is going to become extremely important whether AI takes over the world or not. Are you a doer or are you a director? So, I want to set the scene with this with a very kind of famous Sam Altman quote. "One thing is certain here: the amount of power that an individual has is vastly more now than it has been at any time in the past." And this has occurred in three layers. First, the internet gave people access to any and all knowledge. Power transferred away from schools and institutions. Second is that social media gave people the leverage to attract their own audience. Power transferred away from employers, publishers, centralized media, and even record labels. People can now learn, build, and earn without being dependent on someone else's authority. And third is artificial intelligence is giving people the ability to create, automate, and outsource almost anything. Power is transferring away from traditional gatekeepers and intermediaries. People will soon be able to operate at the level of large teams with a fraction of the manpower.

Now, I know this isn't true for all situations, but this is largely true. The internet gave you an insane amount of power. And if you were born in the digital-first age like Gen Z was, or like me, who's kind of a Zillennial, I heard that yesterday. It's like the people born from 1995 to 2000. It's like you're in between millennials and Gen Z, where you're kind of still digital-first, but Gen Z people are obviously those who have grown up with this technology, and they're leveraging it, and their lives are both substantially better and substantially worse from this because they haven't learned how to negate the worst.

So, with that said, whether you've taken advantage of these or not, you have three superpowers at your disposal right now to take control of your future. And those are: one, learning. So, the ability to adapt and figure out what actions you must take to get specific results. Two, persuasion. The ability to build trust and attract people to a mutually beneficial vision or narrative. We're talking about persuasion and mutual benefit, not manipulation. And three, execution. So, the ability to turn ideas into reality through automation, creation, and delegation.

So, this creates a clear distinction between who will thrive and who won't. Doers versus directors, employees versus entrepreneurs, low agency versus high agency, those who assign work rather than being assigned work. So, you assigning the work either to yourself, self-direction, directing your own career, or to an AI prompt or an automation tool or something of that nature that allows you to do more and pursue your personal goals that bring more meaning and fulfillment to your life.

So, free people, the definition of a free individual is those who pursue their interests and do many things throughout their lives. It's those that don't need permission to identify and solve a problem, to create value in the world. And since new problems emerge as reality gets more complex, and we're entering this period with AI and technology that is making reality very complex, there are more problems to solve than ever. There is more opportunity than ever. For that reason alone, if you don't understand that problems are infinite, I would recommend you take a year and read "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch and truly study it and understand it. If you want kind of a summary of it, I talk about it in my free book, "Purpose and Profit." You can buy the paperback on Amazon, but on my Substack, it's free.

So, if problems are infinite, then solutions, or value, or wealth creation is also infinite. That means money is also infinite. But money is not limited to the definition of a US dollar, right? It's changing right now with Bitcoin technology. The reality is, in the past, it was seashells, right? You traded seashells. That was your money. In the future, we don't know what it's going to be. It's going to take the shape of culture and society, but it's still infinite because it represents value exchange, and that's innate to human nature.

So, we got that out of the way. You need to become a director. You need to become an orchestrator. You need to become high agency. You need to identify, solve problems, learn, build, all of the things that you would do if you were pursuing your own goals and didn't conform to the life that you were set on as a child by your parents and teachers. And the thing about that is that whether AI was coming into play or not, that's the best way to live. That's how you live as a free individual. So, I don't understand why you're complaining if AI is coming in and kind of forcing people to do this if they want to thrive in the future, because that's how you thrive in the future either way. It doesn't freaking matter if AI is the catalyst to that. AI is obviously the catalyst to that.

"Oh, but Dan, AI just generates slop and it's going to turn the internet into this wasteland, right?" The dead internet is accelerating, and I've created an entire video on that. I don't think that's the case at all. The internet's been dead for a while now, AI or not, and there's still very much a living internet. So, how do we get on that side? How do we get on the side of the living internet? We need to understand that taste is the new intelligence because there's a huge anti-AI crowd. And personally, I think they're going to lose. I think that is the losing side. I do not think that you should be on, like, you should identify as anti-AI.

So, as we continue moving toward the future, and as technology continues to develop, there will be an uproar of emotional people who are identified and attached with the tools of the past. And these people will attempt to discredit those who start to integrate AI in their work, especially creative work, because people have a lot of pent-up emotions around what creativity is, what art is. And I think that is blocking their ability to see how AI actually plays a role. Because most people think that AI generations are just random, that you're just like, "Oh, I'm telling this AI to create a post, and then I'm going to post it, and I'm going to try to play that off as art." You're only seeing the surface. You genuinely do not understand it. And that's exactly why these people are so highly emotional because it's just a principle, right? People hate what they don't understand.

So, my advice here is to ignore these people and do not become one of these people because maintaining a pessimistic mindset in general is bad. But over the coming years, it just creates this destructive confirmation bias. The people who are upset at me at this point in the video, which are going to be quite a few people, are just reacting instantly to what I said. If they actually had a critique, if they actually had something reasonable to say, they wouldn't be so emotional. They would be able to respond with calmness, and we would be able to have a good discussion about it, and we'd probably come to a solution where both of us are happy with it. But that's not how YouTube comments go. In general, you become what you focus on. And if you're trying to stop an avalanche from the bottom of a mountain, you're going to get crushed.

What these people don't understand is that how we create is evolving, just like it has before. And these highly emotional people are nothing new. It happens during every technological shift. Think of photography or video. These are extremely recent developments on the timeline of humanity. I don't think you would argue that many people consider computer-generated graphics, CGI, or photo editing like Photoshop as an art form in one way or another. These things weren't able to be created in the past. You couldn't generate a hyperrealistic scene with computer-generated graphics in just a few clicks in the past. It wasn't even possible. And yes, it's difficult to create those things because you have to acquire the skill to do so. But the fact remains that it's a lot easier to do it than it was with the previous software. And it just keeps getting easier and easier and easier to do it.

So, just because a few clicks on your screen are being replaced with natural language doesn't mean it's any easier to create something we see as art. Especially when what we see as art changes as culture does, and culture is shifting rapidly right now. We don't consider people artists for what specific tool they use. We consider people artists for why and how they use the tool. We grade them on the final product, the story, the emotion, the vision, the soul, not the hours of labor that went into creating it. You can spend 10 years or 10 seconds writing a book and call yourself an author, but that doesn't mean the book is good. And especially doesn't mean that the book is art.

So, this is what the anti-AI crowd gets horribly wrong. They lump everyone using AI into the same category. If you use AI, they cut you off. There's actually people that do this. Like, imagine that. "Oh, my friend in high school uses ChatGPT. He's no longer my friend." Are you are you serious? You've allowed a little chat box to control your mind that much? And you are you are angry at the person who you think is becoming dumber by using ChatGPT, but you just allowed it to do the same thing to your mind because you boxed yourself into this little ideology that AI is bad. That's how you become dumb. That's how you limit your ability to think and see nuance.

So, these anti-AI people just see AI as a chat box. They don't see any of the other implications of it. They just think it's a chat box where you write this newsletter for me, or create this post for me, or create this image for me. And while some of the outputs of those may look visually appealing, that doesn't mean they're art, and it doesn't mean they're useful, and it doesn't mean they're going to get traction on the internet. And if people flood the internet with these things, you have to understand what market sophistication is. Eventually, those things get boring. Eventually, they don't work, and the pendulum swings to the other side, and creators are biased once again. You're stuck with this doomsday mindset when that never happens. We don't get to a doomsday with all this stuff, and AI isn't going to change that either.

If we think about it, this exposes something important in the anti-AI crowd. It exposes that most people have put too much emphasis on the labor that goes into creating something visually appealing so that it has become their identity, and people will fight tooth and nail to avoid limiting themselves less. I personally do not believe that art should be tied to a series of buttons that people press, but instead why they press that series of buttons. That's what art is.

Now, with all of this, I'm defending AI, but I think we can all agree that it is not smart to outsource all of your control and decision-making and work to AI. Yes, that's obviously a surefire way to become stupid, but that's not what everyone is doing. That's what stupid people are doing. That's both what stupid people are doing and what stupid people are focusing on. Neither of those parties see that AI has become a programming language for language itself. And when we're talking about AI here, we're talking about LLMs, right? There's much more than just LLMs, but for the sake of this, we're talking about those.

Most people don't understand that prompt engineering is an art that you can give hyperspecific instructions to an AI, and it will conform to those instructions so that it's very close to being exactly what you would have done in the first place because that's what the Photoshop tools, the AI, the AE, After Effects, Premiere, that's what those allow you to do. All of the little buttons and nodules are just a way to make it more specific to the image that you're trying to create. So, if you can't do that with natural language, one, you may have to go with a different medium, but you can do a lot with natural language. You can create what you want to create. You just don't understand prompt engineering.

And the thing here is that that's what most employed creative work is anyway, right? People are like, "Oh, I'm a photographer. I'm a video editor. I'm whatever it may be." But you're just executing project instructions that you didn't set. Right? You are the doer, not the orchestrator, not the director. That's not art, right? This is still industrial work disguised as creative work. Just because you have the job title of an artist doesn't mean that you are one.

These people don't understand that a word is the new brush stroke, the new Lasso tool, and the new Select and Mask. They don't understand that every minor decision an artist makes that imbues their personal touch into their work is still available. And that they can create more than what their wildest dreams allow without spending hours doing so, but they just can't see beyond random textbox generation. The single distinction that will separate art from slop is taste. So, in other words, nothing has changed. We just have a new tool to create. Just like how we got CGI, right? We weren't able to create those things before. Now we can create new things.

So, to end this section, if you can't create art with AI, then you weren't an artist to begin with. You were simply good at using a tool, and tools get replaced. Now, there's one crucial thing here. What's the distinction between a machine and a human? What work do we give to AI, and what do we do ourselves? And where is the future of work going to go, especially as AI comes into play?

So, we need to understand the distinction between utility and meaning because from what it seems, silicon, or machines, is going to solve utility. So, carbon, or humans, can transcend to meaning because we hate long lines at the DMV. We hate when a server gets our order wrong. We hate meetings that could have been five bullet-point emails. But AI and automation solve necessary work that humans hate. And on the other side of that, we crave the potential for failure. Humans crave the potential for failure. We hate the DMV and all these other things that are just inconveniences to our lives that we wouldn't derive meaning from in the first place, but we love watching the final batter in the ninth inning of a baseball game. We travel across the world for a five-star dining experience. And we cry at a wedding when the bride or groom is reading their vows. Imagine if they wrote their vows with ChatGPT. You'd probably be able to tell, and you probably wouldn't cry, and it wouldn't be that meaningful because you're applying AI to a domain that it doesn't belong in.

So, machines are for speed, repetition, and necessity. Humans are for story, novelty, myth, and meaning. Now, the thing here is that most people identify with the traits of a machine, and they're going to get left behind. So, the schooling, the job, the mundane tasks, the repetitive things. And that's exactly why general fulfillment is abysmal because AI and machines are actually coming in to do the work that should have been done by machines in the first place.

So, it's obvious that there's going to be a lot of turbulence with this change, right? Going into the future, there's going to be a period where there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of other things, but that's how it always is. Like, I I don't mean to come off as like insensitive here. It's obvious that many people aren't going to be happy with this, and it's not going to benefit their lives throughout this entire change. But there's nothing that I personally can do about it except for see the situation logically and figure out how to position myself and you guys and everyone else. I I feel like I'm doing as much as I can do here with the perspective that I have in sharing it and acting on my own behalf and helping people that are close to me and as many people as I can do this as well.

The thing here is that we've collectively hated industrial living for decades now. And now that it's going away, it's like how my little brother when I would take his video game because he would never use it, right? He would never play it. But the second that I got my hand on it, the second that I got my hand on one of his toys, he just went insane. He said, "Get out of my room. Give me my game back." It's like, "That's exactly what's happening here." Except you're just being irrational, and you don't have clarity or the agency to figure out a new path in life. Zoom in, and it's scary. Zoom out, and it's wonderful.

To figure out what you want in life, choose something you deeply care about, dissect it ruthlessly, and shamelessly share your story, values, vision, and accompanying life's work in public to form an artisan-esque lifestyle with a small tribe of people who support what you do. Pair that with AI, and you free up room for leisure, the ultimate compliment to creative work.

So, now we need to talk about how to prepare. How do you prepare for this? Because you supposedly have 36 months to make it. That's obviously not set in stone, but it's as good as a number as you're going to get. Whether it's 24 months or 10 years, still probably happening. You can either sit back and do nothing and just see where that takes you. It's obvious that it's not going to be good. Or you use this moment of urgency as a time to turn your life around because that's when you turn your life around the most when you're under pressure. And personally, I don't see why you wouldn't pick the second option because changing your life doesn't mean you have to pack everything up, change everything, move across the country, do all of this crazy stuff. It just requires that you start thinking about your work. And it just requires you to think in general. It requires you to pursue something you care about. It requires you to take risks, create a story worth telling, and share it with those who can benefit. Everything that created the good life in the past is now becoming a requirement.

So, if we're going to break this down into steps, step one is to become a philosopher builder. Because there are two types of people that we tend to respect in today's world. There's the programmers versus the marketers. There's the big-picture people versus the technical detail people. There's the spiritual versus the practical, the philosophers versus the scientists. And the future demands that we merge these polar ends because a builder has always needed a thinker. A programmer not paired with a marketer almost always leads to a disappointing number of users. A hippie stuck in the sky and a scientist stuck in an atom are both missing the truth. Those who can embody this duality become unstoppable. And we're already seeing it happen. It's like an example of how job titles are shifting from designer and engineer to design engineer. And that requires a much more complex skill stack that are merging into one if that design engineer is actually good. Another example is just creators that are founding and fueling companies, right? They're pairing with programmers, creators, coders. Now, of course, AI isn't directly responsible for this, but the general technological shift is. Another thing here is that even coders alone are understanding the need for distribution, and they're generating millions of views on social media by themselves. And by doing that, by stacking that skill, they just drastically increase their earning potential. They can both work for themselves on the projects that they want to work on. And maybe not immediately, but they can out-earn substantially out-earn any job they would have gotten. And I know there's going to be people where it's like, "Oh, well, Mark Zuckerberg uh paid $100 million to get the top AI research." You're not a top AI researcher. The peak of human ability lies in being a specialized generalist. Not so specialized that you get replaced in an instant or taken advantage of because you are identified with a credential, but not so generalized that you are effective at effectively nothing.

Now, step two is to become a filter for ideas because ideas now matter more than execution. They they're not the only thing that matters, obviously, but they matter more. Why? Because if taste is the new intelligence and curation is the new IQ test, in a world where information is overflowing and anyone can create anything, choosing what ideas deserve to be executed deserves the first seat at the table. And that's the thing, it's never been easier to create something mediocre. So people that think, "Oh, I should just pump out as much content as possible and I can have ChatGPT and automations do all these things," you're going to lose or you're not going to have any longevity in the space because those things change, and you're not going to understand the principles that allow you to continue to get results.

Another thing is that UBI, or universal basic income, you know, everybody getting a certain amount of money deposited into their bank account each month. Some people argue that everyone will have more time so that they can self-actualize and become spiritual and transcend and all this other stuff, while other people argue that everyone will just become mediocre and lazy. And the truth here is that it's just a deliberate personal choice which one you become. 99% of people, as always, have just proven that they will become lazy and mediocre. That's the bottom of the barrel. Whether it be uh because of UBI and what they do with their life, or those that choose to create mediocre content because it's so easy to do so. If there's no friction there, it's going to get old quick. And the people who are actually deliberate about being good and pursuing excellence are going to rise to the top.

So, your mind must become a finely tuned signal-to-noise filter. And for that to happen, you must understand that your mind interprets reality based on your identity and worldview, your values and beliefs, the code you live by, your level of development, the vision you are attempting to actualize. Your brain releases dopamine when information is useful toward your main and overarching goals. We've talked about this so many different times. Go look at my uh pop videos or any of the videos where I talk about reinventing yourself or taking back control of your life. We talk about all of that.

So, in order to develop taste or become a filter for signal and noise, you have to have your own point of view that you're cultivating. You have to have your own philosophy, your own vision, because that's what frames your mind to notice the unique ideas that are worth putting out into the world under your own philosophy, under your own brand.

Now, step three is to become an AI orchestrator because the first and foundational decision to make when adopting AI lies in when to leverage it and when to do it by hand. Usually, that decision lies in what you enjoy doing. For me, that's writing. I love writing books, newsletters, social posts, etc. And the thing here is that I do have AI prompts that complement my process because I I have a process, right? That I can teach AI. And I'm not talking about a process for writing. I'm talking about a process that refines ideas to the point of being able to put out something great.

So, as an example, I'll put the link to this in the description, but one of my favorite prompts is just like a very good thought partner, right? I programmed it. I wrote the prompt in a way that doesn't give me the answer. It asks me questions relevant to a topic that guides me toward insights faster than usual because I was able to take the process of how I generate my best ideas and put it into a prompt that kind of guides me through that so I can reach those ideas faster. So, rather than me having to go on a ton of walks, which I still do, or listen to a ton of books and content, which I still do, it creates this guide for my mind that helps me reach these certain points faster because the way you generate ideas is by thinking, right? Debating, conversing, uh asking questions to yourself. So, if I can program the AI to ask questions like I would myself, because when you're questioning yourself, you're usually running through a series of what, why, how, what, what, what, whatever. They're kind of predictable, and you can put that into a prompt. And if anything, it's actually drastically increased the quality of my writing and creativity.

So, all of my newsletters and social content is written by hand. And I change and refine a lot of the ideas that the AI gives me. But the AI output is just a prototype. It's an experiment. It's a first draft. Most people don't realize that. Like, obviously, yeah, if you just paste what AI says into whatever medium you're posting it on, then yeah, it's going to suck. You're not that you're not practicing developing your taste. You have to be tasteful and pick and choose from what the AI outputs.

Now, outside of your craft, outside of what you enjoy doing, I see prompts, prompt engineering as creating specialized employees because that's what it is. Even if it isn't completely there yet, you can get most of the way there now. And if this doesn't make sense to you, you don't understand AI beyond it being a random textbox generation where you ask questions and treat it like it's your friend. I personally hate marketing. I mean, I don't hate it, but I I don't like spending time on it, right? Because it is a formulaic process for me. It's not my art form, but I still need it to be able to sustain my writing, right? So, I have two options, right? I can hire a marketer who charges absurd prices, or I can create the process with AI and probably get better results than them. Why? Because I can uh upload the best copywriting books in the world to the AI and turn that into a prompt that helps me create a landing page. And I'll actually spare you that because I've created a free download on this that people have actually loved. So, if you want that, links in the description. It's like how I systemize my life with AI. It's like five to 10 video, five to seven videos of me just giving different examples of how to create a good prompt.

So, the lesson is to specialize in your craft and orchestrate a fleet of tasteful prompts that align with your values and vision. And if you haven't already started, the best way to learn AI is to try automating yourself out of a job. Not just your job, but things that you do. And yes, that increases your chances of your current job being replaced. But if you can replace the job, then someone else can. And with this, at least you upskill. At least you abstract out a layer. So, at least you could get a new job or do something different, or at least you have more opportunity because you learned a new skill.

I'll continue digging into this in future videos. But if you want that information ahead of time, join my Substack, my newsletter. I put out two newsletters a week, and that's on all things becoming future-proof, what skills to acquire, what potential business models there are, how to direct your life, psychology, philosophy, all of that stuff. You can find the link in the description. If you want another video to watch, there's one probably somewhere right here. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe while you're here. It's just a button click. Thank you again. Bye.