Transcription
So, if I were to ask you just for because we weren't recording then, what you think maybe the most consequential thing we should be talking about right now is as it relates to suffering and everything that's going on in society, what would that answer be?
I think it's uh AI, but it's not just AI, it's nanotechnology, it's how technology, the rapid change in technology, and if you don't believe it's going to destroy humanity, and it's going to liberate us from a lot of labor, if you believe that, the ones that promote that concept. If that does happen and we displace this many jobs in this short a period of time, jobs are not just money. Jobs are meaning. It's not the only form of meaning, but it's meaning. So, it's like you talk about, well, we'll do give people UBI and okay, I think you might have to because the changes are going to happen so rapidly. Like I said, you know, farming, 80% of us were farmers 150 years ago. Now, it's 3% and we feed the world. That's a long transition.
Uh, I think I mentioned to you off the air here, I was visiting with President Obama 10 years ago and towards the end of his term there and I was saying, "Hey, I just got to talk to you. You know, you inherited a pretty tough economy from the original 2008 explosion breakdown. We lost 8 million jobs." So, I said, "There's technology coming right now that we can predict is going to displace more than those 8 million jobs." And I talked to him at that time just about I said, "Just take one like self-driving cars." We were just starting to come out. I said, "In the next 10, 12, 13, 14 years, they're going to become ubiquitous." And I said, "There's 8 million truck drivers, Uber drivers, and taxi drivers. And are you doing anything to retool them?" I said, "Because >> just in the US, >> just in the US." I said, "Because if you don't, think about this. If I'm a business person and I can hire a person to drive a truck only eight hours a day, I have to pay for the healthcare, which gets more expensive every year. Um, they're going to at me about things. And I can buy a truck that can drive 24 hours a day. My insurance is cheaper because it doesn't make mistakes and I can depreciate the asset. Am I going to hire anybody? I said, so those jobs going to go that's 8 million. That's one sector. We could look at pharma. There's so many industries affected. So I said, we've got to retool those people now where there's 10 years to gear them up because these are not people that are going to do it on their own and they're going to be shocked. The shock to their system. The loss of dignity of of being in control agency of their own life, of their own job, of their own direction is huge.
And if you go back to like the Ludites, you know, you're from the UK, right? You must know your history there. 1800s, you know, Merkantile, they come up with these machines and how did people react? And by the way, this story is the same across history. We have a radical change like this. All these people are displaced and what did they do? They rioted. They took hammers and they destroyed those machines. They threatened to kill the owners of those companies and some were shot and killed. They blew up and firebomb places. And what did the UK uh you know do about this? They passed a law in the first year of this of these ludites saying you destroy machine, it's capital punishment. They hung people because they couldn't have them destroy the growth of the of the economy, right? And guess what? 15 years later, the same thing happened again with the thrashers. thrasher machines that were used for wheat and they lost all the jobs and the people and the government overreacted. I'm not trying to be overly dramatic, but if anything's this transition is just going to be smooth by us doing nothing, they're wrong. And the problem is, as I mentioned to you before, I think the leverage is not in favor of us taking care of society. The leverage is the carrot and the stick. The carrot is I can make a trillion dollars if I have the right LLM or, you know, if I get to artificial general intelligence, who knows? And if we don't do it, China's going to do it. That's the stick. And then they're going to run the world. So there's no focus on safety virtually, as you well know. And there's certainly no focus on what's happening with these jobs.
Right now, high school students are getting jobs more than college students for the first time in 50 years, right? You see the displacement. You know, you got friends just like I do. Mark Benoff's one of my dear friends. They let go of like what was it? I think it was was it 5,000 customer service agents and now it's done with AI now. Now he wants to elevate them to other jobs. So we have to look at what this means to our society. We have to anticipate what this means and we've got to retool not just the jobs but the psychology because people talk about a post-work world. You hear people talk about this all the time. Elon, people like that. They labor is not like electricity. You just take it for granted. It's so cheap. It's so easy. Well, if that's true, and he's talking 3 to 5 years, and a lot of people say Elon's early, he usually is uh in his predictions, but Ray Kerszwell is a good friend of mine. He's the most accurate predictor of technology in history. And he's been saying 2029 for almost 20 years is when we have artificial general intelligence. If you go to Hinton, I think you've interviewed Hinton, haven't you? Right. So, he's the longest. He's saying 2030 to 2040. He's given us a little more room. In the next 3 to 10 years, this is going to happen. How are we prepared for this? And so this is the questions I'm trying to bring up to people that have influence to say if you're in business, you got to take a look at this. If you're in government, you got to take a look at this. And so I I just got um they haven't announced yet, but I just got selected to be on the federal advisory committee for the president and for the health and human services, and I'm on the mental health side. And I'm hoping to use that position to bring more of government's focus into this category as well because it's got to be addressed >> when we recite these. And that's by the way the answer to your question is and that's suffering. >> That's suffering at the highest level. Not just financial suffering. That's emotional suffering. That's loss of identity suffering. If I am a coder, I am a truck driver and I lose who I am.
Now I just want to say one last thing. We've already been in a postwork world because I one person said to me recently, well, for 4,000 years we tied our identity to our work. I said, no, Americans all go, what do you do? Not everybody in the world does that. And for 4,000 years, our connection post before the agricultural revolution was really what tribe we're connected to. And our sense of significance was maybe our courage in battle, not our financial component. Or maybe it was our creativity, our poetry, our storytelling capacity, or maybe it was our generosity. Um maybe it was our wisdom. So we can find other things to have meaning besides a job. But if you don't take a culture that's been conditioned for 200 years to think a certain way, we're going to have a lot of pain. And I would like to see us have less of that if we could. And I'm only one person, but I'll do my best to help people make that transition.
>> It's funny because when we think about those historical examples of transition, I for many reasons think this is even more extreme. >> I agree. >> Because you have intelligence and you have you've basically disrupted both the muscles and the mind. But you know if the reason it's going to explode even faster is because we're moving from LLM to now actually studying visually what's happening in the real world. And when robots do that then the game changes their tempo of learning. And just think about this. You and I are having a conversation. I picked up one of your books here and I'm reading through your book. So I want to get a feel for who you are and everything else before I came here. I've seen some of your videos but and I know like I really enjoyed it. But I had to go get that. I had to take a couple hours to dig through that. You and I have a conversation. If either one of us learn something we're a machine. every machine knows it instantly. You push one button and they have all of that knowledge. There's none of this word transfer. It's just it's now. So, people don't realize what this really means. And when you're learning from the real world, not just LLMs, right now, you and I are our brains are predictive devices. They're predicting what is going to happen next to the best of our ability. And we're trying to close that gap as much as we can or we get jolted. Well, think how predictively that's going to do to people's heads when all of a sudden their labor is not needed.
>> And it's no longer blue collar labor, which is what people thought it would be. It's white collar labor. I mean, like my financial I have a lot of I have uh I own 95 different private equity firms. I have own the firms, not the actual funds, right? So, I get to do 20 of them and I got pieces of all of them. So, they're the biggest in the world. And so, I get to take a look at some of the things that are happening so fast. And I look at all those jobs and I see people in those industries and quantum is taking it took over maybe five years ago. I've seen the shrink in these offices from staffs the guys who are making 5 million $10 million a year that are now unemployed. Right? It's not just the blue collar worker. It's everyone. So you're right. This has never happened before in history. And what's being done about it?
>> More money's been put into it to accelerate it. >> The carrot and stick, the trillionaire and China, those two pieces are driving it all. And a few people are trying to hammer like Hinton and a few other people. We got to work on safety here so it doesn't eliminate the human race. And I'm not a reactionary person, but you know of what is it 25 30% of them people that work in AI say that they think it could potentially do that. I mean, like you could use electricity to kill people or light up a city. So all technology is that challenge. But this is a different technology. This is a technology that keeps learning can replicate itself. Right now they don't even know how some of this actually works. They don't know how the AI is actually working. It's teaching itself. These AIs now have their own language. I'm sure you know they're talking no longer in English to each other. And you know, I'm sure you've seen the studies, right, where they give them information on in the email and then they say they're going to shut shut off the AI and it blackmails them by giving them they g information about somebody having an affair and it blackmails them. I mean, it lies. So, we're we're living in a crazy world where the opportunity is greater than any time in his history for us to be creators. We were created and we're meant to create and we've got tools to create like never before. But we we're going to have to make sure that as we're doing that, we've got some parameters around safety and some parameters about what does it do to society. And I don't have the perfect answers for it. But I do know one thing, retooling is the answer. And I don't believe most people will be replaced by an AI. They'll be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI.
>> Yeah. One of the things you said there really blew my mind when I watched a video from Boston Dynamics this week where they the guy explained how these robots are going to learn and he goes there's two ways. One way is we're going to get our factory workers to wear a suit and every time the factory worker does something the the all the robots are going to learn that thing. And the other thing is he said is if one of our robots learns something whether it's how to pick up a book or how to make an omelette every robot learns it instantaneously. And my mind was like wow that is I personally don't know where this leaves us.
Well, neither do I. But there are certain things, you know, it's leading us towards, you know, it's going to lead us to a great deal of violence because there are going to be people like have always happened with technology displaces them. Only this is going to be a global event across multiple areas. It's not just drivers of Ubers and truck drivers. If we don't get our act together and have a plan, there's going to be violence for some period of time. There'll be there's that grief period of loss and that people go through when something jars them that much and some people don't turn from that grief and some people are going to take this technology and they're going to go off. It's already happening now even without AI. There are more males at home 25 to 35 living at home with their family not working than any time in human history including the depression. Right? There are I think it's 25% or I think it was 30% I forgot the number. I just saw it recently of young men have never approached a woman to ask her out for a date. They play video games all day long. their mom does their laundry and they order Uber Eats. This is a mass number of people. That's just the technology of getting somebody gamified. Imagine with AI. So, some people are going to go live there and some people are going to go the Star Trek route and say, "I'm going to figure out what makes human existence be here." But it's not hard to figure out. The majority are not going to go the Star Trek route. And so, we've got to have a bridge because of the time compression. If this was a hundred years to do it, we could adjust. There will be more jobs. There'll be new jobs. There'll be new time. But it's the time frame that I'm most concerned about. So when you ask me what I'm concerned about, that's what I'm concerned about because it creates suffering. And it's something that we can predict is going to create suffering. And yet I see very few people in positions of influence and power doing much about it.
>> So on an individual level, if you were an 18-year-old Tony Robbins, what would you be doing at this moment? What would you be focusing on work-wise? How would you be designing your life for such a world?
I have five kids and five grandkids, right? So, I have a 52-year-old daughter and I have a thanks to CO a 4-year-old daughter. So, CO was good to me. I was home. So, um I look at my my especially my grandkids and my daughter and I say they're entering a world that none of us have known before. And so, how do I arm them for it? And the answer is a couple of things. Number one, I have to teach them not to do what most people in the world do. Most people you talk to of any even quote successful people, whatever that means, they're stressed all the time. Stress. I'm so stressed. You hear people talk about stress all the time. It's like they argue about who's more stressed. And I I look at that and go, why are they stressed? And the answer is because they're managing their life. We're not made to manage circumstances. We're made to create. We were created by something. Call it your creator, call it the universe, call it God, whatever you want to call it. And we were made to create. And when we create, we're alive. When we just try to maintain or manage or hold on to something, if we're just caught up in making a living instead of designing a life, life is a And that's why so many people have so many challenges.
So, I'm teaching my kids to be creators and I teach them the second piece, the most important thing I believe that's made me successful. And anyone I've ever interviewed, you interviewed a million people. You see if you agree or disagree with me. The three most important skills in life now are the ones that allow you to learn more rapidly. If you learn rapidly, you can win no matter what happens with the technology. And what are those three skills? Number one, the skill of pattern recognition. When you can recognize patterns, you eliminate fear. Fear comes from this has never happened before. I don't know what this is. Chaos. Like I hear people all the time talk about how we've never been this place politically where here in America where the most we're going to have a civil war. The And they don't do any history whatsoever. I I have these two placards that I have because back then they didn't have ads, right? They had placards and one is from Thomas Jefferson talking about Adams and one of Adams about Jefferson. And they said stuff that make Republicans and Democrats look like they're nice to each other. I mean, it's just unbelievable the stuff they said. This is a cycle. And so when you recognize a pattern, it gives you power, potential power at least. The first power is you're not not afraid anymore. You go, "No, this is not something that's never happened. This is not something that's going to I I can see this. I can see how this has been dealt with. What took us from living in fear from being hunter gatherers or trying to survive every day, didn't know if we're going to survive every day to being able to stay in one place? What pattern recognition?
>> I was going to say the seasons, but >> you got it. Really? >> That's it. The seasons. I figured you got the seasons. Because before that, you could do the right thing at the wrong time and you get pain. And three of the four seasons are the wrong time. So once we figured out, oh my god, if I plant in the spring and I take care through the hot summer, I get this big reaping and if I hang on to some of it to make it through the winter, I can live here. I don't have to worry. All my fear disappears. So we have the minute we understood seasons, it changed humanity. And by the way, there's the seasons to your life. You could say 0 to 21 is springtime. Springtime. How hard is it for something to grow in springtime? If you start a business in an economic spring where everybody's optimistic, you think you're a genius, you're just in the right season, right?
>> So 0 to 21, you're taken care of. And that season, you grow like crazy. Somewhere around in roughly, and everyone's different, 21, 22 years old, you go the next stage, 22 to 42, and that's your summertime. That's the testing period of your life. What happens? You are 21, you've heard all this stuff, and now you go, you know what? I don't know if I believe this I want to see what I believe. But I'm going to test all history, all studies of psychology show this is the most difficult time in most people's lives, right? 22 to 42. So if you're in that range and you're listening, I love you. Hang in there. You know, this is this is your ground. If you keep growing, this is a great time. All right? Somewhere in that range, you make a transition. Somewhere around 30, 35, you're 33, you just got engaged. Congratulations. Right? You start to move towards a family. You start to have those experiences. I'm sure yours will be very successful. many aren't. Right? So at 42 or 43 to 63, that's the fall. If you planted in the spring, right, and you worked your tail off during that hot summer, now you can do more with your pinky than working around the clock. You know more people, you have relationships. You recognize the patterns. You know what's going on. It's nothing's really a shock or surprise to you. You're more strategic. You're more efficient or more elegant. You have more choices. um you've learned a lot of lessons if you grew. Now, if you didn't plant in the spring and work hard in the in the summer, you're going to weep in the fall, not reap in the fall, right? But so now this is this is your power period. This is when most people earn the most money in their life if they're going to grow because they've accumulated knowledge, skills, relationships, and so forth. And then the winter is comes back to that 64 to 84 to 104 to the oldest humans 124. That period is a transition period to where you become a real leader because you're no longer, you know, in that 22 to 42, you're trying to prove yourself to yourself or maybe other people or both. But there's a point when you get into your power group. You know who you are. By the time you get into this last season, this, you know, 64 to 84, 104, 124, you know who the f you are. I mean, and and you you want people to like what you do, but if they don't, it's like, you know who you are. You don't give a I've just entered that season myself. I'm about to be 66 in a few weeks and um it's the most fulfilling season of all. Um it's mindbgggling. I wouldn't believe that when I was your age. That's why I'm sharing it. It's if you're healthy, if you're fit, if you're strong. Um if you don't do that, then it's can be a that time. But if you're healthy and strong, you have 40 year relationships, 35 year business relationships. You have friends that adore you and love them and you're it's unbreakable. It's unshakable. you have an intimate relationship or a family or husband and wife relationship if you've built to that point that is beyond anything you could have dreamed of or hoped for. You wake up every day and you know that life is a gift and you want to give back even more. Like you're more driven than you were when you were in the 22 to 42 stage. Those are the seasons. There's one more. There's seasons of history and your season of history shapes how you shape your life. So you can look at a thousand years of Roman history. I'm very much in history and 500 years of Anglo-American history. Um, and you start to see patterns. In fact, I'd recommend for everyone there's a book called Generations. Have you read it?
>> No. >> When I was working with President uh Clinton in those days, I worked with President Clinton. I went across the other side and worked with the speaker of the house Gingrich. I on the same day on Clinton's on on his desk on the resolute desk was this book generations. And I asked him about it and he told me about how it it's amazing. It shows how history is somewhat predictable and why the cycles are generated by different generations, how we react the way we're we grew up. And then I go over to Gingrich's office and he's a historian. He's got it on his desk. >> It's a pretty thick book, good size book. My point is it if you want to navigate your life, you need pattern recognition so you don't go in reaction. And one thing is to understand seasons are a great pattern. They freed us. There's seasons of your life. You should think about this season. What's this season about for you? What do you want to extract from this season? And every season has predictable challenges and predictable opportunities. And where am I in the season? Some people go through their springtime during a war, a winter time. Some people go through their springtime in a fall. We all grew up with different environments. And so we're shaped by that. And that's why history's changed. So, but let me finish the last last piece. I've gone way long. I apologize. But I said there's three skills. What What do we need, right? First one is pattern recognition. The second one is pattern utilization. So I watch you like you you and I both we develop companies took them public very early ages made a lot of money and figured out it wasn't just about money right you know looking at your history you didn't just recognize patterns you used them you saw them in marketing areas you saw online opportunities you saw things you didn't just oh now I understand it you jumped on it anyone who's incredibly successful in anything if they're great at dance if they're great at investing in companies they're great in running companies if they're great in singing they recognize there are certain patterns and then the final skill and this is what I'm teaching my children is you ultimately want to become a pattern creator take an example same learn learn to play the piano right yeah how do you learn to play the piano you got to recognize patterns and usually you're taught someone else's patterns that produce something beautiful
>> right could be boach Beethoven could be some rock could be whatever you're learning and so you learn those patterns and you practice them you learn to use them right and now you can produce the same music there is a point and I'm sure you've experienced this already and you're going to experience a lot more in the next 10 years of your life. You've taken so much input in you've recognized so many patterns that now you come through and you become the pattern creator. If you love the D CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.