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America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first nearly
three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home
and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us.
Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures.
Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead.
Learn how at americancures.com. Pay for by pharma.
Let's start with a question that should make you uncomfortable. If AI can write better than you,
draw better, code faster, diagnosis diseases more accurately than you, then what is left?
What is your and my edge as a human? And today I want to get into that because I think for most
of history being human meant being the smartest thing in the room. Now you're actually competing
with machines that don't sleep. Don't forget they don't get distracted and they've read more books
than any professor a lot of. So that's what we're going to do today on the big deal podcast.
We're diving deep into what it really means to be a human in the age of AI. I'm your host,
Cody Sanchez, and let's get into it because we got to move fast.
The problem is this is going to happen faster than you can ever imagine. AI will take the
office cubicle jobs first because most people on cubicles, well, they don't actually work. It's
become like adult daycare. Uninterested people will fail miserably. Hyper curious people will win
hugely. And I know there was a lot of AI doomsdayers and some days honestly, I'm there. But I want you
to still remember that you're not competing with the machines. You're competing with the humans
who use them. So the game hasn't changed completely yet, but the gear and the speed has. You can
still win the old fashioned way out work out, learn how to ship the next guy. But some of your
competition, well, they just are moving faster than you can even imagine. We're going to have
this barbelled world where on one side, you're going to have someone who hasn't even figured out
you can voice to text on your phone. And on the other side, you're going to have people who are
running small armies of robots running circles around normal people. And yeah, you know, the poets
of pain are going to tell you this that the world has always been ending for somebody. You know,
they screamed about the printing press. They lost it about the radio, the television, the internet.
But the same rule survived every apocalypse. The ones who crawled out with bloody knuckles were
the ones who did one more thing, one more time, one more while everyone else was at the bar complaining
about the end of the world. And yet so many people are experiencing unbelievable pain through this
transition, like struggling to find a job, trying to build an income from online work,
starting over deep in their careers. I think America is racing towards a 10% unemployment rate,
maybe 20. And that's horrifying, by the way, because the Great Depression was somewhere between
12 and 20%. And yet so many people remain unaware, which is why I'm kind of yelling at you on
this podcast because we haven't talked about this before. Like if we do not understand what is
happening in the world of AI, I believe nothing else you do will matter. Like you will not be able to
find work in the future. Period, end of story. I'm yelling at all of my employees. I'm yelling
at all of my friends, unless you've already made your bag, if you've made your bag, you're probably
fine. They'll actually be like some deflationary pressures on costs of things. If you already have
money, you're probably fine. If you don't already have money, you better fucking figure this out.
Because if you don't, you won't get to be the human that asks the machine what to do next.
There will be a machine overlord on top of you telling you to flip the fucking burger patties
because it takes longer to create a robot than it does an AI that can oversee humans using video
technology. And this brings us to like a deeper truth. And that's that humans are meaning making
machines. So AI can predict patterns, but only we humans decide what's meaningful or not. And
I think the human brain is still obsessed with narrative. Like we don't want just information,
right? We want stories. Why did this happen? What does it mean? So AI can generate an infinite
amount of content, but it doesn't care if it changes somebody's life. It doesn't care if
somebody acts or not. It's got no skin in the game. I don't think it wrestles with shame and
love and envy and mortality, but you and I do. And that inner chaos, that's what AI can't take
from us and sometimes won't take from us. But I think that's what we have to protect. You know,
in 2023, open AI in the University of Pennsylvania had a study, which found that up to 80% of workers
could have at least 10% of their tasks touched by AI. I think that's low. But the best artists,
creators and entrepreneurs, they are worried because they're building. They've already figured out
their leverage isn't just their skills. It's the ownership of attention. A direct, meaningful
relationship with your audience is something AI can't create yet. And that's where you have to
use technology or you will die by others who use technology. For instance, if I wanted to get
attention today, I would use Behive. Behive is the infrastructure for independence in attention
economy. It lets you publish your newsletter, grow your audience, monetize your attention in one
place with no algorithms deciding whether your voice gets heard. So that's where I put my newsletter.
And it became a media asset of business and moat because it helps with growth tools, monetization
from day one and analytics that tell you what actually moves people. And so Behive is where the
best creators build their leverage because that's what being human in the age of AI actually
means. It means maximizing your connection to other humans. And so Behive gives you a direct
relationship with the only thing that compounds forever trust. So I asked Behive to do something
for you guys to give you a discount code. And they did. If you go to Behive.com, which is
beehive.com, use code code 30. You get 30% off your first three months because I want you to
own your audience just like I do. My working theory right now is that emotion is our moat.
You know, humans are hardwired for this narrative. So there's been multiple studies.
One in particular, they publish a study called Neurosynematics. So it's the neuroscience of film
where he basically used FMRI to measure brain activity and participants watching films with
strong narrative structure and compared this to more chaotic, non-narrative video. And he found
that structured narratives cause synchronized neural responses across viewers. What does that mean?
It means stories align brains. The more coherent, the better the narrative was, the stronger the
shared neural arrangement. You and I, our brains would be sort of like synced. So if you look at the
most influential entrepreneurs and artists in history is, you know, Steve Jobs didn't win because
he engineered the best circuits, right? He won because he understood desire. He understood style.
Taylor Swift doesn't dominate because she has the most complex, I don't know,
cord progressions or something. She dominates because she connects her heartbreak to everyone else's
heartbreak. And she does it at a level that the 10-year-old understands and so does the 50-year-old.
Martin Luther King didn't change the world by going through millions of books.
In scientific papers, he changed the world by articulating a moral vision so clear and
emotionally resonant that millions of people saw themselves in it. So AI is just a giant
replication machine, right? It's going to take everything that it's been trained on and
give you the average, but it sure doesn't experience them. And people can tell AI is the great
automator. And to automate, it first has got to be an imitator. And that imitation fools people
into thinking it's alive, right? But there's something different about when you live through
suffering and come out on the other side. That is humanity. If everyone can experience emotions
and suddenly has the same AI tools that they're disposal, how do you differentiate yourself
from everybody else in the age of AI? When like literal execution isn't what differentiates you,
because anybody can slap out a video, anybody can slap out an email, anybody can slap out entire
books in like 30 minutes with AI. Well, then what's the difference? It's one word, really,
taste. If any human with AI can generate anything, then it's what do you side to build the matters?
If you can create 10,000 images in a minute, the person who can say, no, no, not that, that's crap.
This wins. That's why founders like Musk and Bezos obsess over first principles in judgment,
which is like basically what at the base level should we be doing above all else? And taste is
about knowing what you're not going to do. It's like inverse thinking. And you usually get that
through having lived taste. AI doesn't have lived taste. It has something completely different.
As AI sort of lowers the cost of creation, I think the real bottleneck becomes psychological.
Maybe it's courage, like courage to put your ideas out there and to not let them be a gross
generalization of everybody else's nonsense, to take a controversial stance. AI won't feel
social rejection. And so it won't stake its identity on an idea. It won't get embarrassed.
You will. And that's maybe exactly why your work could matter more because it doesn't matter
now. Actually, if you're smarter than somebody else, it's your ability to share something human.
I want to tell you what's going to differentiate you in the age of AI. First, we've got taste.
Second, we've got focus. You see, we want everybody else's attention. But right now, we are in a
battle for where our brain goes. Your ability to focus deeply, resist distraction that is everywhere
in this age and think independently to develop a worldview that is different from everybody else
and not the average of everybody else is how you win. My biggest concern today is if you outsource
your thinking entirely, like I am seeing people do to AI, your critical thinking skills and your
taste will just atrophy, like muscles. If I get one more fucking employees, send me an email
or a script and it's like, it's not this, it's that. Or it has M dashes all over it. Or it's,
I'm struggling today because of X and Y and Z and E. It's so obvious that it's written by a
machine. It's like they have an idea of a spark. They throw it in AI. They let AI do all the
critical thinking for them and then they wonder why it's just like everybody else's slot.
If all you do is throw your idea into AI and let AI do all the processing, then it's like
hiring a ghost writer to write your love letters. Yeah, it gets the words right.
It hits a rhythm, I guess. It doesn't stutter. But if you let it talk for you for too long,
who's in love with who? And your voice is completely missing. And then one day you realize the
letters are perfect and none of them are yours. So you never actually train your own emotion. You
let it be done by a robot. Being human in the age of AI means choosing not to surrender your agency.
And here's the twist. The more synthetic and fake the world becomes, the more people crave that
real shit that they know is you. Like look at the rise of long form podcasts like this.
Raw, right? You don't have like 4700 visuals on this. It's personal storytelling because when
everything is too polished, imperfection is the interesting part. Imperfection is real.
Not all the other stuff. It's actually why I don't trust half of the time. Anything I see online
that is not from a name I already know. If it is some kind of good-looking woman podcasting
and I don't already know that she is real, I'm assuming that bitch is AI. Because you know what half
the time they are. And the part that kills me is they get three million views on some nonsense
that is not real, that is spit from somebody else's viral tweets. They have no world-lived
experience. And then there are three million views and hundreds of thousands of comments saying,
yes, queen, what are you doing? This is why we need to push back on sort of this fake shiny thing
we're seeing on the internet. We need to be edgy and intense about our opinions. And let me tell you
why. It's not just Cody's opinion and her ranting on the internet, although I think that's fun.
It's also that there are so many studies on authenticity. For instance, one was on when social media
influencers need to go beyond self-preservation in this study. They examine how their perceived
authenticity impacts their engagement and trust. And what do you think they found? Turns out,
audiences respond significantly more to influencers that they think are authentic and vulnerable.
Not just like super polished. Because AI really can simulate perfection. I mean, eventually,
it'll be able to simulate all of it at this fucking speed. But it cannot simulate vulnerability in
the same way yet. So if you want to be human and free, then you've got to realize like you shouldn't
just be the inputter. Hey, I got a question for chat GPT, let chat GPT think for me. Like,
you're the storyteller. You are the decision maker. It can be the processor and the database
and remembering things and you can use it to pull studies and ideas. I do that too. I don't find
these all myself for you. I use AI. But it means you own your perspective and you don't just like
take whatever comes out of it and then just repeat it verbatim. You should use it to sharpen your
taste and develop emotional depth and protect your attention and have the courage to say the quiet
part out loud, even at especially when you shouldn't. The moral of the story here is I want you to use
AI to amplify your impact in the world. Not just replace your ideas, your brain. Like, if you can
actually harness the power of AI to increase the speed scope and depth of your work, you're going
to be just fine. But if you use it not as an editor, but as the doer and everything and the
decider, then I think we're going to be like idiocracy with a bunch of people hooked up to VR like,
you know, veins connected to AI and just let the AI gods tell us what to do next. You know,
eventually let them move our arms and legs for us. And so I think we are coming into a world that
our kids won't even imagine what our world was pre AI, which is probably why the only things I see
my successful friends doing right now is making money to acquire assets because they're worried
about a post labor economy and getting as healthy as possible to protect them as they age,
probably because they think we can live forever now with AI. And in 2026, I think the first step to
making money is to figure out AI and deploy its powers in the direction that's best for you.
And to do that in business is what I do and teach and what we do in the boardroom here at
Contrary in Thinking. But I do think, you know, if you're like me and you're too chronically online,
like a single day during this AI boom kind of feels like 10 years. Like every time I don't look at my
computer for a week, I'm like, holy shit, it can do what now. And so if you follow these instincts,
it might take you down some weird rabbit holes, but we got to follow them anyway. And I always tell
my people like, if your parents fully understand what you do for a living, you're probably playing it too
safe. You got to get out there and get weird. Because unfortunately, historically, hard work
maybe could have just gotten you rich. Like if you just worked really hard, that might have
been enough. And sometimes I feel like that now because people don't seem to want to work that
hard anymore. They want all the things done in the sacrifices. But I think in some ways, hard work
now becomes propaganda. Like if all you do is work really hard on the wrong things, you're never
going to get rich. If it worked, we'd have millionaires in every factory in construction site.
Those dudes work super hard. Success in the age of AI isn't just about working more. It's
about working on the right things and then applying that leverage to it. Like I was looking at
notes the other day that said the Jeff Bezos made like $1.7 million in 13 minutes in 2023.
So that's like $23,000 per minute. By the time most people finish brushing their teeth,
he's out-earned their entire shift, maybe their month, maybe their year. Why? He's not like work
at heart. His tooth brushing isn't more intense than yours is. It's just he has a totally different
game because his inputs are different. And this goes back to that old rule, Pareto's principle,
the 80-20 rule, which is like with AI and automation, it's not 80-20 anymore. It's 99-1,
which is like the right decision at the right time will always outperform effort alone. And
the 1% of things you choose to work on will now drive 99% of your results. And I wish it didn't
mean you could not work hard. I sucked with the other day that's like, yeah, AI told me that I
was going to work a lot less and there'd be a post-labor economy. And so I wouldn't have to work
very much, which is why I'm confused as to why I'm staying up until 4 a.m. in the morning trying to
figure this shit out. So I do think you're going to have to work harder than maybe ever for longer
than you could imagine to find the right things to work on and to figure out how to keep up right
now. At some point, it'll like plateau and stabilize. But hard work is not going to be enough.
And if you had one truth, it's that you have to obsess on what you were working on. And only an
after how hard you are working on it, you know, I don't think there's ever been a better moment to
build an AI first business and eat every existing market's lunch because the incumbents are too busy
putting out fires, sitting in meetings, slapping AI first on their pitch decks instead of actually
building things like that's going to be your edge. While they talk about it, you quietly wire
AI into every workflow and make their mouth look like a puddle. But the real question isn't,
will AI replace humans? It's going to in so many ways we can't have imagined right now.
The better question is, what parts of being human are worth doubling down on? Because that's where
the value goes, right? If intelligence is cheap, then judgment probably matters more. If content
is infinite, then what type of content means more? If perfection is standard, then authenticity
is probably what we're chasing. If every job invented in the 20th century is getting threatened by AI,
but I do think the age of AI doesn't erase humanity. If we do this right, it forces you to
define it. And that's a terrifying gift that most people, by the way, will not do. Most people,
I see them everywhere. I mean, we have one company where we have, I don't know, 100-ish employees.
We have many other companies where we have hundreds or thousands of employees. I have a lot of
surface area where I get to see how people are interacting with AI. And the truth of the matter is,
too many people are outsourcing your brains to AI. And they're not even using it in a creative
way. It's like AI sucked their creativity out of them, even in the way they interact with it.
They just ask, write me a YouTube script. Okay, what about this? What about
write me a YouTube script on AI? Use the voice of Bukowski. I want it to be dark and edgy and
deep. I want you to imagine what it might be like if you were someone who's never touched AI
before, like a truck driver, philosopher. Okay, write me a V1 of that and then comb through it and
then pull out the best parts. And then add, I also want you to add the best psychological pieces
ever created. A mixture of like movie examples of it for like visual effect and simultaneously
from the best schools in the world on why AI will actually zap our creativity from us.
Which script do you think is better? Is the AI different? No. I just haven't outsourced my brain
entirely to a robot I barely trust. So I guess I want to leave you with this. Do not go find
the career. Do not go just find the hack with AI. Go find your curiosity. Code do something
absolutely unhinged. Do it for the plot. Come create it. String together experiences that have
never been strong together before. Be in real estate, but write poetry. Be in finance for studies
vibe code, but get some fucking vitamin D, you know. Go touch the world because magic happens
from the men who became obsessed with calligraphy, Scandinavian furniture, complex code and beautifully
simple computers. That's Steve Jobs, by the way. Creativity doesn't come from normal things.
So it makes it creative. I contemplate your mortality. The fact that you're going to die. Because to
know that eventually your star will fall should make you want to blaze. And if you enjoyed this
episode, share it with someone who's wrestling with the same questions. Because I think it needs
to be all humans united against the robots. Until then, I'm Cody Sanchez. I'll see you next week
on the big deal pod. Let me know what you guys thought about this one. And if I yelled at you too
much, but really, just don't outsource to chat JBT. Have you seen who runs that thing? Sam Altman,
Lizardman. You know, keep your humanity.
BigDeal



