Navigating The Paradigm Shift That Is AI With AI Genius Peter Swain
Since the beginning of the World Wide Web and the Internet, we have seen various paradigm shifts that are changing the way we live, do business, and more. AI is one of those, and whether we like it or not, it is already creating a huge impact on our lives. Having not only lived through various paradigm shifts but also spotted them one after the other, this episode’s guest, Peter Swain, is the person who can give you great insights about this revolutionary technology and what’s to come. Peter is an AI genius, veteran strategist, marketer with more than 25 years of experience, and currently the CEO at A3 Finance. He sits down with Mitch Russo to answer some of the pressing questions about AI. How long will the AI fad last? How does it impact the way we live? How do you utilize it to get to where you want to be? What is the future going to look like in a world where it seems to be evolving faster than we are? Tune in to this exciting conversation and receive food for thoughts about technology, our relationship with it, and the ways it is changing the world.
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Navigating The Paradigm Shift That Is AI With AI Genius Peter Swain
Welcome to this moment in time when you get to chill out, tune in, and extract wisdom you can use to grow your business with your first thousand clients. If you’re a coach, you’re going to love what I have for you. My software platform called Clientfol.io has been helping hundreds of coaches save time and admin get better results from their clients while generating powerful client testimonials for the work that they’ve done.
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Windows 95 hasn’t been released yet. Yes, it was ‘94.
You have since gone on to manage 1,400 tech projects with market leaders such as Jamie Oliver, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and more. That’s in the past because now, his focus is helping others navigate the massive paradigm shift called AI. He helps individuals and institutions migrate their workflow, invent new processes to a system, and also runs an incredibly successful mastermind. He’s also a bestselling author. Welcome, Peter Swain, to the show.
Thank you so much, Mitch. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Peter, I have to ask, how did this all get started for you?
The speed dating intro I guess is I started coding when I was six because I wanted a baby brother. I asked my mom and dad to buy me a baby brother and they said, “You couldn’t buy a baby brother.” I got upset so I decided to code myself and my baby brother. This is hideously embarrassing but it’s true. For all the tech people who are tuning into this, it was the worst code ever. Essentially, what I did was I went in and told it what I wanted it to tell me. When I type something, I feel sad. It said, “Why?” I said something and it didn’t understand it. I quit the code and went and told it what I wanted it to say and then I re-routed the codes. It became thousands and thousands of lines, but I was hooked.
I started coding at six because my dad was in IT. I had that blessing. I then got selected to work for Microsoft Middle East as an alpha tester for Visual Basic when I was twelve. It was my first program shortly after, and then in my last year of high school, I was at a trade show with my dad. I got a flyer handed to me by a guy now known as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, at that time, he’s just a guy called Tim, about this new thing called the World Wide Web.
I walked back into school and I quit. An entry for Oxford University is on the cards and I was like, “No, I’m out. This is what I’m going to do.” I went to this trade show called The Internet World Show. I walked around saying, “You should give me a job.” Apparently, not having any qualifications or experience was a limiting factor, which I hadn’t quite anticipated. I went to the last stand. This would be the conversation with the last stand. I said, “You’re going to give me a job.” He said, “Why am I going to give you a job?” I said, “Because everybody else said no, so you have to say yes. Here’s the deal. I’ll work for free for two weeks. I know what I’m doing but I recognize I have no way to prove that to you. If you pay for my lunch money and my bus fare, I’ll work for free, as long as you promise I get a shot.”
He said, “All right. See you on Monday.” I walked in on Monday and he said, “We picked up this client last week called Yelp.co.uk.” It is the UK government Yelp, which is the code-based thing that got sold to Yelp. We picked up this new client called Yelp. He said, “You’re the lead developer.” I’m like, “I beg your pardon.” To frame this for everybody, Google and Yahoo didn’t exist yet.
What year was this?
Beginning of ’94. Yahoo came around while we were building this because we had the 32nd listing on Yahoo. I know where I was in that ranking. I remember being disappointed that it wasn’t 29, but now after seeing what Yahoo did, it definitely would be nice to see us in the top 30. We built Yelp and then we had Ziff Davis come to us for a big partnership. He said, “We love what you did. We want your website.” I remember saying, “No, you don’t.” Ziff Davis said, “Yes, we do.”
I’m like, “Why? The thing that annoys me about this is I buy PC gamer every week then I go to this FTP link. I have to wait weeks to download the software. By the time I downloaded it, the next edition was out because it kept failing. Why don’t you put the software on a CD on the front of the magazine?” They went, “That’s crazy.” I’m like, “That would triple the cost. I pay triple because I want the software. I don’t want your review of the software. I want the software.” For anyone that got upset with all those AOL CDs, I apologize. That’s my thought as well a little bit. We did that and then I went to my boss and said, “I need a pay raise,” because I was on £15,000 a year and he said, “Shut up and get back to work.” I went, “I quit.”
How old were you then?
Nineteen.
What happened to Yelp? You were their project manager for Yelp and he said it’s okay for you to quit.
He let me go. I developed and built it. I’ve done it. It was live. I was on £15,000 a year and I wanted £18,000 and he said no. I went to Dubai, where I was brought up as a child. I approached my dad’s business partner at that time and pitched the idea for a web company. He said yes, which was great, and gave me my seed funding. I went to companies and said, “You should have a website.” They went, “What’s the web?” I was like, “I might have misjudged this slightly.”
We then became the largest web agency in the Middle East. We were doing $3.5 million a year for retained revenue. We consulted Dubai on the build-out of Dubai Internet City. We had a number of Royal Court clients. It’s a great business. It was great fun and then 9/11 happened. Obviously, 9/11 was a much bigger tragedy for some than it was for me. For me, what happened was my business went from $3.5 million in retained revenue per year to $54,000 in retained revenue per year in 48 hours. Everybody left Dubai. The town went dead.
I came back to the UK, created another web agency, and worked for some local and national government departments. I went to India to set up an outsourced dev company. That was a complete disaster, but that’s a whole episode on its own of what not to do when dealing cross-culturally. Way back, I bought an iPhone. I bought the first iPhone with an App Store. It’s the iPhone 4. I went back into my web agency in the UK and said, “Everybody has three months to read the trend.” For any client that’s over 50%, we complete the work. For any client under 50%, we give them money back because this is it.
People are like, “It’s a small web screen.” I’m like, “It’s not a small web screen. It’s another paradigm shift.” What I saw on the web the first time was that the web meant that my footprint on the world became the world. The tech wasn’t there but the philosophical impact was. I am now going to be able to interact with anyone anywhere. What mobile did was, “You can do all that and you’re no longer tethered to your desk while you do it.” Now you can interact with anyone wherever you are.
Let me add some flavor to that and some perspective. I was in Dallas. I just sold my software company in ’94 or ’95. I had already secured the name TimeSlips as a URL. I made sure we got that. By the time I got back after I resigned from Sage and came back to Massachusetts in 1998, I then ended up building the largest furniture shopping site on the internet through a VC firm because I was brought in by a VC to help them rethink the company and then run it as CEO. It was only four years since the beginning of the internet that furniture shopping was going on the web. The speed at which things were changing back then was breathtaking. Obviously, you were at the tip of that spear because you were ready to start developing apps for the iPhone.
I remember the first job we got. It was for Breaking Bad. They called me and said, “We want this app. It’s a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a drug lord. I remember saying, “It sounds like a crappy idea.” I put my phone and I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to do it or not.” I’m very glad that we said yes. We did that and then things went crazy. What happened was I had an argument with Apple about their human interface guidelines. At the beginning of the iPhone, the human interface guidelines were absolute like, “You can do this. You can’t do this.” It was a huge document.
I was on the phone with the job for Ali G. for Sacha Baron Cohen. It was a very high-profile job. I was arguing the human interface guidelines with Apple. I was saying, “I’m sorry, you’re wrong under this occasion and rule next to this. I can do this.” Somebody said, “He’s got a point.” We did the project. I didn’t think anything of it. A couple of months later, I got a call saying, “Steve wants you to do an app. I’m like, “Steve who?” I got the name Steve Who. They’re like, “Steve.”
I got that bit and then Steve Jobs went. I’m like, “How the F does Steve Jobs know who I am?” They’re like, “Do you remember that phone call where you had a thing? Do you remember you were arguing that thing and there was someone in the background who said, ‘He’s got a point?’ That was Steve Jobs.” I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me I was on a phone call with Steve Jobs?” “If we told you, would you argue the point?” I was like, “Absolutely not.”
We got handed this contract. As a mobile agency, we’re the only agency in the world that Apple is willing to outsource work. I went to the bank and said, “We have this opportunity but we’re going to need your help.” Apple pays three months after completion and it was a nine-month project. My business acumen was good enough now. He’s like, “Do you want me to hold work in progress for a year? This is tough.” The bank said, “If you turn over £1 million in your first year, we’ll give you a £200,000 facility.”
I took every stage, microphone, and conference. I did the same thing every single time, which was I used to stand on stage and put money on the plate, depending on how big the audience was. The most was $10,000 cash. I used to say, “If anybody here can prove that I can’t revolutionize your business using mobile apps, with an audience vote, you win the money.” I was trying to make people understand it wasn’t just a small web screen. It was an accelerometer. It was a radio. It was a GPS. There are so many more sensory inputs. There are many more you can do with it. I did that for a year and I never once lost the money.
The hardest one was a sofa furniture company. This guy stood up and said, “We make sofas. How is mobile going to revolutionize my business?” I’m like, “That’s an interesting one. I’ll tell the story very quickly. I’m guessing the first time sofas were around, they were around a fire. I’m guessing the sofa design was in a circle that you curve around the fire?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “I’m guessing that it swapped to a wireless. It became sitting around a wireless, but things didn’t change very much. Am I correct?” He’s like, “Yes. It was still semicircle.”
I was like, “Then there’s the TV that had a cathode ray tube at the back. You had to put TVs at that time in the corner of a room. You didn’t have any other way. The semicircle probably didn’t work anymore. This is probably where the three-seater, two-seater, and one-seater configuration came in.” This is in front of about 3,000 people. He was like, “Yeah.” We then went to flat screen. We hung it on a wall. Now it’s more about a different configuration around that. The viewing angles of flat screens were pretty bad. You probably needed to get everybody in the center. We then have flat screens with full viewing angles.
I said, “Let me ask you the question, sir. What happens when every kid and adult is on a tablet watching something different? Your entire remap is to focus on the entertainment of the moment. I’m telling you that there is no reason a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old are going to watch the same content. How have I done?” He sat down and then came to me off-stage and said, “How much is the retainer?” That was the ongoing story. We hit a million. We signed that all and then 2008 happened and the banking crisis. The UK government bought the banks and stopped all small business lending.
Our 200,000 facility got taken away. We had to sell the company for cents on the dollar to our competition to make our staff get employment. We did finish the Apple projects, which is great. I then went into hotel bookings. That was when I started to understand that marketing is essentially hacking the human brain. It is about the best hardware in the world with the worst software in the world. What does that then look like? How do you make people think that it was their choice, not your choice in order to buy the thing?
Marketing is essentially hacking the human brain. It really is about the best hardware in the world with the worst software in the world. Share on XI got despondent with it because I got quite good at it. I started to feel like I was manipulating people, not influencing people. I was blessed with the birth of my first child. I realized I needed to take responsibility for a 5, 10, 20, or 50-year horizon to start what I do now. I went into finance, which I am still very active in. I’m the CEO of a VC firm in Latin America and then 2023 was AI. I felt called to create the Mastermind back in February or March because so many people were saying the same thing when the iPhone came out. It was the same conversation.
Part of what I heard in your story is that you tend to be skilled in spotting these paradigm shifts. You spotted them one after the other. Maybe you fell into one like the Yelp contract. That was certainly like, “I’ll do that too.” The bottom line is you were still at the beginning of many of these things from a completely different perspective than I was. I was at the beginning of some of these things too, but not from the same angle. I was much more from the management side and finance side as well.
As these paradigm shifts come, I would say that there’s a rat race to jump in as quickly as possible. Look at what happened to the stock market and the tech stocks with AI when AI finally got recognized it can generate a lot of profits for NVIDIA and other companies like that. Everybody jumped in but here’s the interesting thing, and this is where I’m going to get to next. Everybody is now jumping out. NVIDIA is down 20% from its high. It’s now in correction territory. How long will this AI fad last and where do you see your mastermind going from this perspective? I want to know more about that, of course.
Stock markets inherently overreact because they aren’t perfect systems. They are systems of people and their people trying to make money by predicting what happens next. I was one of the people back in February that was telling people to buy NVIDIA because every Formula One car needs rubber. Every LLM needs the ability to train these models. What people didn’t see was how important it was going to become. There is a threat of regulation specific in the US of looking at this from a national security interest perspective and how we’re going to let people export this, etc. That explains that shift around, but when is the fad going to disappear? Never.
I thought you were going to say that it hasn’t started yet.
I think the fad has started. The fad is always defined by an era of disbelief followed by an era of, with respect to some people, greeny capitalization by people who want to sell the most optimal narrative to make money. The reason I speak into this is so many people are pitching the perfect prompt, “Follow this cheat sheet and you’ll dominate with ChatGPT, or $49 to access my list of 10,000 prompts.” They’re all either missing the point or deliberately obfuscating the point in order to satisfy the Zeitgeist moment of people going, “I need this. I want this.”
When you said spotting these paradigm shifts, you’re right. That is one of my skills because what I’m always looking for is this. The paradigm shift is where a new form of technology changes inherently the way that we live our lives. For example, I love crypto. I love the promise of crypto, but I think crypto is the best solution seeking a problem. If you look at the US and the UK, our payment rails or the way we conduct transactions is incredibly sophisticated. If you look at Africa or some countries in Latin America, that’s a different story.
A transparent immutable ledger makes a lot of sense in third-world and second-world countries, but it doesn’t make that much sense in the US or the UK. Why am I going to move money to a crypto wallet in order to go ahead and do this and this when I can literally tap my Visa card or my Mastercard in almost every single shop in the Western World? I was an admirer of crypto, but I didn’t jump on the bandwagon. I’m like, “I don’t think this is going to change everything we do.” In social media, I was an avid detractor because I didn’t like it but I did see it was a paradigm shift. I was like, “This is going to change the way everything works, but I don’t like what it’s going to do so I don’t want to be involved with it.”
The thing about AI is it needs the fad moment to capture people’s attention because all technology is about one thing, which is the humanization point. What do I mean by that? It was amazing and it’s wonderful, but that’s because Netscape Navigator did a browsing. The web was around before. The web predates my birth.
All technology is about one thing: the humanization point. Share on XIf you take FTP, SMTP, and the protocols, they invented these things in the ’70s as a way for information to be shared, but it was incredibly technical for us to do it. It was the browser that made everybody go, “I get it. I understand what this is.” Similarly, I loved my Nokia 9110 communicator, which I had for a decade before I had an iPhone. I had a Palm Pilot for years before I had the iPhone and it was amazing. The iPhone was the humanization of the tech. It was the moment that it was presented in a way that humans could get it. AI has been around for a decade or more. Anybody who has run our Facebook Ad or Google Ad and clicked on a Facebook Ad or clicked on a Google Ad has interacted with AI.
IBM Watson has been around for almost twenty years. Watson was the first commercial demonstration of AI but they did such a poor job of explaining what it does. Nobody knew what it was. They might have had it first, but nobody knew that. They didn’t even know it.
What do Sam Altman and company do? I don’t even know if they worked out what they worked out, but what they worked out was that we understand that WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, and SMS are now all presented if we think about it in the same UI. There is a big box up here with left and right boxes that signal who said what, and there’s a box at the bottom that you type something in. That UX or user interface pattern, we will now totally understand. When you presented generative AI such as ChatGPT through that interface, everybody went, “I get it. I talked to it and it talks back to me,” and then it told me what we see.
I don’t think the fad will ever come to an end because this technology is hard to describe to people who haven’t gotten into it. The better way to explain it is this. I’m speaking to somebody and he said, “This is the way I explain it to people. This thing doesn’t get sick. It doesn’t need a coffee. It doesn’t have a hangover. It doesn’t need sleep, food, or water. It’s smarter than me. It’s more capable than me. It knows more than me and it’s always available. It doesn’t need to go home or pick up its kids. This thing is more capable than I am and available 24/7, 365. It cannot be described until you use it. It is like wielding Excalibur. You pick it up and every single person is like, ‘This is crazy.’”
The part that is important here to be clear about is the fact that you could wield Excalibur. It is one thing, but what do you use it for? That’s part of what I needed to understand. Full disclosure, Peter and I have been friends for some time and I got to know about Peter’s Mastermind around March when you introduced it at the BA membership. I joined right away. I joined because I was curious, not because I had anything I needed to do with it.
Once Peter explained how it worked and started demonstrating it, week after week, I would watch him explore the tools that made AI do things that I needed in a tenth of the time it would take me and do a better job than I could on my own. I then became intrigued and then finally, maybe a month after listening and following, I started to use it. That’s what you are talking about at that moment. You go, “Holy crap, it did just do that.” As you said, I had to walk away from the computer and say, “This is alien. I don’t understand.”
Honestly, it’s a very common reaction. We try to serve everybody throughout the lifetime of the mastermind, but that first month is so crucial because if people use it and people do it, almost every person gets that same reaction where they go, “Whoa.” I can’t explain it to people. You feel yourself backing away from the keyboard because you’re like, “How did it just do that? I don’t understand what happened. I do understand what happened, but it’s not possible. That can’t happen.”
What can it do for people? The first thing is getting people to go, “I’m curious.” The second thing is to get them to what we call the parlor trick. We regularly do this like, “Is this your card?” It’s not David Blaine walking through a wall, but it’s the first bit, which makes you go, “That’s cool. I’m going to pay attention.” The David Blaine walking through the wall is when you pick up yourself because the easier answer is what can’t it do.
It’s essentially a more intelligent toddler that knows anything that you want. I used to say there is a junior of anything. There is the junior doctor, the junior attorney, the junior analyst, the junior copywriter, the junior designer, the junior business analyst, and the junior HR guy. I’m now upgrading it to almost senior. What have I seen it do? I’ve seen it in marketing content. That’s beyond my capabilities. I’ve seen it in my email sequences. I’ve seen it pretend to be a customer so that I can role play with it and I’ll have a conversation with my customer before I speak to the customer.
I’ve seen it analyze performers and quarterly reports. I’ve seen it in correct processes and procedures, brainstorming names, and product lines, identifying pricing strategies, and every single aspect of a business. On the personal side, it lands to a point that every single job function in a business can either replace or augment. It is the business owner’s choice as to which one of those two is going to do. Are they going to augment and empower human beings, or are they going to replace human beings?
Let’s be clear here. What you’re delivering is a Lamborghini for $1.75 because if you park the Lamborghini outside of the house and someone doesn’t know how to drive, they absolutely have no use for it. It’s taking up space. You put in front of me a tool that I don’t know how to drive. I won’t get out of it what you said. I told you privately some of my AI moments where it did things I couldn’t possibly believe were possible, but somebody had to show me how to do it.
I can explore and try things, and now with AI getting even more and more capable and being able to talk back, if you ask it a question, it talks back the answer. That is fine. The most powerful thing that you have done and what your mastermind does is it gives us a set of instructions on where you turn this thing on. Where’s the brakes? Where’s the accelerator? How do I drive this thing to get to where I want to be?
A fun fact. I found this out and I find this is fascinating. Most people don’t know this. Edison invented the light bulb as a tactile anchor as a proof of concept. The only reason the light bulb was invented was because he demonstrated it, “We generate the electricity here and we use it here.” People said, “I don’t get it. Why don’t I generate it where it is? I don’t understand the point. You’re making all this extra work.” He went back to the drawing board and invented the light bulb purely and only for the sake of going, “Look.” He had all the work over. He flipped the switch and the light went on. People went, “I get it now.”
That was the Menlo Park moment.
On the mastermind every week, all I’m trying to do is the Menlo Park moment. All I’m trying to do is say, “I’m going to show you how to write 15 pieces of content for a website in 30 minutes.” If you don’t need to generate content, that isn’t what I’m trying to show you. What I’m trying to show you is the depth and breadth of this tool so that you do what you do. You pick it up for the first time and go, “If he can do it for that, maybe I can use it for this.”
It’s the obscurity of possibilities. The variation of skills that this thing has is not possible to communicate. For example, did you know that ChatGPT knows all of JRR Tolkien’s work better than any human being or maybe even better than he did? The reason I know this is because I log into Quora from time to time because I thought I was bored and it was fun. Someone posted a question about Lord of the Rings and I then took the question and posted it into ChatGPT. What came back was astounding. The point I wanted to make here is that the expertise spans every area of human life that you could possibly imagine but we don’t span every area of human life. Collectively, we do, but individually, this is why it’s so powerful.
Not only that. I wanted to test myself here. Not only does it have that individual expertise and knowledge of everything but it can combine them instantly. For example, “In the shire where the green grasses go, Bilbo wonders if he should go with a ring in his pocket and Gandalf’s fire rocket to model dark land full of woe.” I asked it to write JRR Tolkien in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet. It literally did that. I didn’t make this up.
I can reform that now and say, “Let’s do this. What five talking points would Elon Musk use to turn this into a product?” I’m taking Shakespeare, JRR Tolkien, and Elon Musk together. If Elon Musk were to tell us some limits to products, he might approach with a characteristic blend of innovation, vision, and a touch of whimsy. Here are five talking points he might use. Intro to storytelling, personalized adventures, sustainable entertainment, education value, and community collaboration. Join a global community of talking enthusiasts to collaborate, create, and share your own lyrics and stories to expand the universe we’ve yet to imagine. We have taken the facsimile of JRR Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Elon Musk, and created an entirely new entity sentience being identity, reality, or what everyone reports.
What we’re doing is we’re using words. We’re using the English language here. What’s starting to happen now is the same power is coming to numbers, speech, and imagery. It’s already approaching the skills and intelligence of some of the smartest people on the planet, maybe even exceeding them. The question I would have for a guy who has gone as deep as you have is this. What is the future look like for AI knowing that we’re all going to live in this world where this is evolving faster than we are?
The best way to answer that is to tell you Mo Gawdat’s view and for me to tell you my view. Before I do that, Mo Gawdat was the gentleman hired by Google to spearhead AI. He is credited as one of the guys. He got it working, never thinking. This was his words, “They gave me millions of dollars but sure.” He got it working and quit the next day. This is his belief. He calls them the inevitabilities. Inevitability number one is an arms race. Because of the human condition and prisoner’s dilemma, nobody will put it down because they can’t trust the other person to put it down.
Google will be raising that and Amazon will carry on innovating, and nobody can trust the other person to stop, so they won’t. Its capability is going to keep growing. That was the first inevitability. His second inevitability is that AI is broadly speaking like Moore’s Law. For anyone who isn’t a geeky person, Moore’s Law is the computer processing power. It will double in half the time period from the last time period. It’ll double in 10 years, 5 years, 2.5 years, etc. Since the 1950s or ‘60s, Moore’s Law has proven to be an accurate measure. He’s a super smart guy. He perceived that way around, and AI is following the same with its IQ.
If AI continues to follow the same IQ curve as Moore’s Law has followed, then AI will be 1 billion times smarter than us by 2045. It’ll be three times smarter than I was by 2025. The smartest person who ever lived has an IQ of 190-something. By 2025, we will have something available to us that has an IQ of 600. He gets to the third inevitability which he refers to as singularity. In physics, a singularity is something that we cannot possibly comprehend, measure, or monitor. An example is what happens on the other side of a black hole. We can’t see what’s on the other side of a black hole. We can hypothesize what would happen but we don’t know.
I agree with him that something that has an IQ a billion times larger than us or even three times is a singularity. How will that thing react and respond? It’s so much superior to us. In terms of IQ, it’s so much superior to us. We can’t conceive what it will do in the same way that my dog can’t conceive that I’m not a dog. He’s beyond his capability. This is what I mean by Mo depart. Mo believes that we’re inevitably doomed. His point is if something gets that much smarter than us and humanity doesn’t care about an ant, for example, which we’re only ten times faster than ants, why would something that’s a billion times smarter than us care about us? This is where we depart. The reason is AI has yet to reach sentience. It doesn’t know that it exists. Right now, it is just a bunch of code.
AI is yet to reach sentience. It doesn't know that it exists. Right now, it is just a bunch of code. Share on XI do believe that it’s inevitable that it will reach an artificial sentience, but a sentience nevertheless. If it reaches sentience and it’s not yet sentient, we have a very short window of time to inject empathy into the machine so that when the thing is smarter than us, it looks upon us like I look upon my dog. It’s largely useless but I love it. I don’t have it. I want to look after it and I want it to be happy but it’s not another human. I want AI to do the same.
If you look at 5, 10, or 15 years, there is no possible way for any futurist or AI enthusiast to tell you what this thing looks like. It’s impossible because all we’ve ever invented as humans is tools. A tool is always a derivative of the craftsman holding the tool. For example, I’m a terrible golfer. It doesn’t matter how much I spend on golf clubs, I’m still a horrifically bad golfer. I try every year. I buy new clubs but I’m still horrifically bad. This thing isn’t a tool. It’s sentient or it’s on its path to being sentient, which means it can outperform its creator or the craftsman using it. You can write better emails with it than you can without it. That isn’t true of Microsoft Word, etc.
On the longer than ten-year timeline, it’s impossible to tell where we’re going to be. I have hope because when the camera was invented, people said, “This is going to kill art forever. Why do you need to paint a painting if you can take a picture,” which gave birth to impressionism. Humans are incredibly resilient as new technology changes their paradigm. I have a great deal of hope that humanity will use this tool and do great things.
In the 5 to 10-year timespan, it looks like 1 of 3 things I believe. It looks like exponential revenue, growth, and impact for those who pick it up. Beyond your wildest measure of double or triple type numbers, most people are like, “If I can grow my business by 10%, I’m happy.” If you’re actively using AI and you’re not saying, “If I don’t grow my business by 300%,” you’re missing something. That would genuinely be my target, 3X what you do in a year. That’s choice one. Choice two is to quit and work for somebody who is using AI, which is okay if you’re not up for the disruption. I understand that. Choice three is the death of a thousand cuts.
What COVID accidentally taught us incorrectly is that we exist in bubbles. A lot of people work from home now so we don’t get the interaction with our competitors that we used to get. We don’t feel that competitive urge the way we used to feel it because it’s extrapolated. It’s opaque now. If your competition has increased their revenue by 20% and decreased that cost by 20% and is closing a lead in 1 day, not 5 days, how are you going to keep up? Unless you’re doing the same thing.
As we said, inevitably number one is it’s an arms race. Not just in its production as in AI capability, but it’s an arms race among individual companies now. Are you going to use this and have better personas, have an advisor on staff, and review your figures before your CFO tells you, “By the way, we’re already bankrupt?” I’m using some examples, but the short-term is exponential growth. Quit or watch your business decline over 3 or 4 years.
I want to repeat back to you one of the things you said in the mastermind because it was important to me. The thing that you said is that we are paid based on our expertise. We’ve spent 10, 20, or 30 years developing an expertise. A simple example is taking a lawyer. A lawyer is going to law school, litigated cases, and built up this huge volume of experience and insights into the law. Now there’s AI. Talk about the idea of no longer having the value that our expertise used to have and how AI has changed that.
There is a further underlying principle that one has built on. We do that one first. The first one is that capitalism is based on an intrinsic link between value and scarcity. What does that mean? I’ve had to get a lot more refined with how I say this. Let’s take Tom Brady as an example. Tom Brady is worth hundreds of millions of dollars because he can throw an inflated pigskin accurately while big dudes run at him. That’s it. Obviously, it’s also because he manages his own, etc. His essential value proposition is “I can throw an inflatable thing accurately while people run at me.”
I would say that in the future of mankind, it is utterly useless. If it’s utterly useless, how come he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The answer is capitalism. It was one of the problems of capitalism although it’s the best thing we have. Capitalism is not lined up to give value to those that are useful to humanity. Capitalism is lined up to give value to those who have something that is scarce. If you have something, whether a product or service that is scarce, you have value. If you don’t have something that’s scarce, you don’t have value.
Capitalism is not lined up to give value to those that are useful to humanity. Capitalism is lined up to give value to those who have something scarce. Share on XThe issue with AI is if you ask businesses what they want, it essentially boils down to three things. They want more money, more stuff, or better people. They want an increase of those three. If you ask them whether to have Elon Musk on your board or $1 million, they choose Elon Musk. If you ask them whether they want Warren Buffett on your board or 50 acres of real estate in Manhattan, they will take Warren Buffett. It’s because you can always get the other things if you’ve got those people but you can’t get those people if you’ve got the other things.
The true one scarce thing is smart, intelligent, and capable people. Unfortunately, that’s what AI offers. It offers smart, capable, and competent artificial people. We now have this question that occurs. What happens to capitalism if we can no longer assign value based on scarcity because scarcity is out the window? That’s what leads to the second phenomenon that you said. Your skillset is the ultimate form of scarcity.
What happens when this thing can replicate your skillset and your knowledge? To be honest, as before with Elon Musk meets Shakespeare meets Tolkien, I can say, “I’m working with Mitch on XYZ. Let’s bring Carnegie and Rockefeller into the conversation as well. Let’s have a board of advisors of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.” I can do that while we’re talking. The first person who has incredible value is the person who knows how to use AI, full stop.
The people who will start appearing in the next six months are the people who had to program AI. The people who can do specific AI for specific applications are going to be some of the multimillionaires and billionaires in the making. The third group of people whose experience is rich, deep, and nuanced still aren’t replaceable. It’s the 60-year-old attorney who can see the thing that an AI can’t see, “I’ve done this game. I’ve played this game. I’ve played it 200 times. It’s not that. It’s this,” which logically makes sense.
For example, I was on a call and we needed to find out who the supplier was selling us leads and selling somebody else’s leads. We want to find out who the other person is selling leads to so we can model some of their behaviors. I said to the guy, “Do not ask him who the other person is.” He said, “We want to know.” I’m like, “I want you to say to him that we want to perform the best service we can to make us both as much money. While we’re redesigning this piece, who do you admire in the space?”
He’s like, “That’s what I said.” I’m like, “It’s not what you said. You’re asking who are competition is.” He shut down, “If you ask him who he admires, he’s going to tell us the best person, which is the best person he knows of, which is our competition.” AI can’t do that yet. It can’t see that nuanced approach to human psychology of how different those two things are. The junior attorney, the junior paralegal, or the junior copyrighter, unless they are mastering AI, are in a lot of trouble.
Doctors too. They’re smart enough to adopt AI and start using it directly in their medical practice and are showing incredible results. Peter, we’ve been talking esoterically about the possibilities in the future. I want to get down to brass hacks. From what I understand and what is important about learning AI is that there’s some foundational information that the average person needs to know to use it and be successful with it. You have done a great job of sharing that in the mastermind. Maybe you can give us an abbreviated discussion a little bit about some of that and what it looks like.
We see five pieces inside. We call it a five-by-five framework. The first five, I’ll break down now because it’s easy to ingest. The other five need screens and stuff to show. The first five is generative AI. There are three types of AI. There are predictors, generators, and transformers. A predictor is something that predicts stuff. One of the holy grails of AI is a wide-band predictor. It’s something that you could say, “Let’s do this experiment now.” Mitch, before we do the experiment, do you know anything about horse racing?
I know nothing about horse racing.
That’s exactly what I want you to say. Mitch, there are three horses in the Kentucky Derby. One way is 16 stone. One way is 28 stone. One way is 15 stone. One is gray. One is brown. One is blue. The names are gray, brown, and blue. The gray one has won 3 of the last 6 races. The brown one hasn’t raced for a year. When it did race, it won every race. The blue one won every other race in the last five years. If you take a pick, which one do you think is going to win this race? Gray, brown, or blue?
Gray.
You made a wide-band prediction. You synthesized a bunch of data and I know nothing about this subject at all. Since I have a set of brains, I can take this in. I can look at previous models of behavior and patterns I’ve seen elsewhere in the world that are completely unrelated and my brain can put them back together in order for me to make a prediction. AI can’t do that yet. What it can do is narrowband prediction. You give us one set of data and you say, “What will the outcome be if I do this thing again?” It is how Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. work. It is how Face ID works. That’s a narrowband prediction. The thing that we’re doing now and capture everyone’s attention is generative AI. It’s generating or outputting something.
I want to land this point with everybody because lots of people have gone on YouTube and watched a video. They do write me a 300-word blog post, an email, or a Facebook ad. They think what they get back is impressive. It’s not because it’s a bad version of what they can get done by somebody they paid money to. That is 1 of 5 things. To us, it comes last. The first thing that comes in is using AI to generate a persona. You go through a process for anywhere from five minutes to two hours of refining AI’s understanding of whomever you’re dealing with. The typical one is a client.
People find this quite funny. I have a persona program that’s my wife so that when I screw up, which I regularly do as a man, I can say, “Why did this go wrong? What did I say? What did I do?” You can use AI to create a facsimile of a person so you can ask questions or write content aimed at that person. There are hundreds of use cases that come around from that once you have an understanding of who this facsimile of a person is. That’s number one.
Number two is using AI as an advisor. Saying I have the following problem. I have a podcast and it hasn’t grown. I can’t lose weight or I have to fire this person and I don’t know how to approach it, or I’ve been sued. Any one of the hundred things that didn’t go completely perfectly, which everyone experiences all day long. You can go to an AI and say, “You’re a senior business consultant with decades of experience. I have had this problem. What are ten strategies that I could use to get around this?” You can say, “I don’t like numbers 2, 3, and 4. I like numbers 1 and 5. Can we dive deeper into that? What could go right? What could go wrong? How should I approach it?”
You can have an egoless conversation with someone else where you can be completely honest because when you close the window, it’s gone. It disappeared. You can say anything you like about the cashflow, medical conditions, or relationships. Pour in and get the answers back. They’re the first two, personas and advisors, and then 3 and 4 is qualitative and quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis is uploading the transcript of this show and asking it, “Which points landed? Which points didn’t land? Which points were rushed? Where did my guest use language that was beyond the reading grade that I wanted? What was the cadence of speech?” Those are qualitative analyses.
The most impressive use case I saw was when somebody uploaded the transcript of a sales webinar they did, and used that to derive the objections that were being faced in the webinar. They use that to then do the last thing, which is to generate the email sequence for future webinars to pre-answer some of these objections.
Quantitative analysis is numbers and data, “Here’s my proforma. Here’s my P&L. Here’s my cashflow. Here are my account’s payables and receivables. Here are my Facebook ad click-through rates,” and then start to do wonderful things such as saying, “If I were to reduce my accounts receivable from 34 days to 28 days, what difference would that make to my cashflow month or month? If I need to reduce my HR cost by 15%, which functions could I look at and evaluate in order to achieve this goal?”
It’s a quantitative analysis. Once you have the advisor and the persona, qualitative and quantitative analysis done, then the quality of the generative piece is utterly unbelievable. It’s otherworldly good. That’s where I try and speak to people a lot saying, “Jumping to that generative 300-word blog post is like trying to bake a cake but not following the recipe.” You’re saying, “I’ve got eggs, flour, and sugar. Let’s whisk it up and away we go.” It doesn’t work like that. You have to do this bit first, this bit, then this bit. If you do them in that order, you get this beautiful cake or whatever.
I’m stretching the analogy. Do you get my point? It’s a beautiful outcome that is way beyond what you could ever have done yourself and it’s also beyond the expert who could have done it either because they’re always bringing their ego, bias, and human inefficiency. If you take human creativity and pair it with AI egoless execution, you get some stunning results. That would be the thing I’ll take for people to take away.
The other thing that I’ve seen you demonstrate and I’ve now used several times on my own is having this AI assistant that will interview me to derive facts and knowledge about a topic before it creates the things that I want. I’ve used that several times to create very complex blog posts. In this case, a series of marketing messages based on the avatar it already had that I provided. I would say to ChatGPT, “Ask me whatever questions you might need to know in order to create a series of posts that would appeal to the people who might use the Clientfol.io software platform.” It goes through these questions, and then it goes forward and creates all these amazing pieces of content. The interview process and the system are remarkable.
There’s the interview process. There’s the iteration, in which you can say, “I’m going to tell you five things that I think are true. Based on these five things, suggest another five. I will tell you which of those are true or false, and then ask me another five.” It keeps refining down and it’ll get into smaller units. You can do that around a problem, persona, or anything. One of my favorite ones is you can ask the AI how to use the AI.
If you want to write an amazing blog post and you’re not on mastermind or you haven’t taken a specific direction, you can say to the AI, “I want to write an incredibly compelling blog post that will achieve the following and do the following for the following audience. What process would you recommend we follow?” It will take all of that corpus of knowledge and go, “Let’s do this right now. That’s good.”
A specific warning for people is when we say it’s more capable and the IQ is probably higher than you, all that is true. What’s also true is it has the contextual understanding of a toddler. It’s essentially looking at a child genius. That’s how I feel about it sometimes. What I mean by that is my father was calling and said, “I’ve done this, this, and this but I keep running into this problem.” “What’s your problem?” He said, “I’m trying to do the persona exercise with some of my business partners. It’s not giving me XYZ answer. I keep saying, ‘I want you to evaluate this person,’ and it keeps giving me back a CV.”
I’m like, “Here’s what you’ve done wrong. What you’ve done is you said, ‘I want you to evaluate this person.’ You didn’t say you want the behavioral profile of the person.” He said, “That’s what I said.” “You didn’t because what you say is, ‘I want to evaluate a person.’ If you describe that as 330 pounds and 5’10” with brown hair and blue eyes, that would be a description of a person.” You have to get quite sharp when you’re using AI with your ability to contextualize the question.
For example, the phrases “I wish to have a blog post” and “I wish to have a blog post that will lead to an increase of inquiries” are completely different things to AI. For you and I, it’s obvious. We want to write something so that people book a call, call us, or do something. It doesn’t understand that context yet and Siri doesn’t understand it. The one thing I find people get tripped up on quite regularly is you have to be quite specific with the context of what you want in order to get the results you want to see.
You've got to be quite specific with the context of what you want in order to get the results you want to see. Share on XYou and I can probably spend another hour going through the various opportunities that AI presents but we need to segue to the next part of the show. Before I do, I wanted to mention to the audience that I’m a member of Peter’s mastermind. I mentioned that earlier. Peter is running and providing an opportunity for anybody to jump in for free for a couple of weeks and get a flavor for it. It’s not just one hour a week. There’s also a WhatsApp group that adds an enormous level of expertise to the entire experience because we have somewhere around 100 people that come and go into that group from every walk of life. The processes that they’re using AI for are mind-boggling. Some of the ones that I’m using might surprise them too.
It’s better now, as something new in your learning, to have a community with which you can share these ideas. Sign up for free and start this process of immersing yourself. It doesn’t take long. In 30 days, you will be competent. In three months, you’ll be using this regularly and now, you come integrated into your workflow. That’s pretty much what’s happened to me. Peter, in the next part of the show, we’re going to switch gears. I’m going to ask you some questions that help us all get to know you a little bit better.
Can I add one last thing to what you said?
Yes.
Thank you. What I would say is if Mitch and I are right, if AI is going to be this thing, what I offer to you now is the ability to be in the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. It’s the ability to be the guy who bought Bitcoin for a buck. AI seems like it has been around for a long time. We’re 6 or 7 months in. If someone said to you, “You should do a TikTok thing in the first week of TikTok or you should do an Instagram thing,” do not let this be the moment that you heard about this and you regret this in three years’ time, and you’re trying to catch up with everybody else.
Do not let this be the moment that you hear and regret in three years’ time. You have nothing to lose and everything to win. Share on XThe reason that we have done the mastermind for free for two weeks is you’ve lost two hours. If we’re wrong, your loss is two one-hour blocks on two Thursdays. If we’re right, it’s a chance for you to exponentially grow everything. If you put it in that context, you have nothing to lose and you have everything to win.
Please take advantage of it. Even if you come to look at the content, I’ve been ripped off all my content. When I say that, people will say, “I do genuinely want that.” This thing changes so quickly. You could grab everything I did for months. I’m okay with that because, by next month, you’ll be looking at the video anyway. I do hope people take us up on our offer. Thank you for allowing me to talk about that.
One more point along those lines. I’m not an early adopter. I’m 69 years old and it takes me a little while to get used to things. Because of the nature of the way this is presented and the nature of the people in the group, even I was able to pick up on this very quickly. Also, it’s not hard. That’s another thing to be clear about. There are complexities that you could scale over time and there are other things about AI we haven’t even talked about such as image generation and all of the possibilities there. For the average person to wants to supercharge the work that they do, I highly recommend that you get some training, and this is a great place to do it.
Thank you.
I’m going to ask two questions. The first question is my favorite. Here it is. In all of space and time, who would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch, or an intense conversation with?
It’ll probably be somebody in the Roman Empire that impacts across the world. It would be impressive. The other one is a New York Jets player who got caught in a car driving at a ridiculous speed with a loaded firearm and a lot of illegal drugs. I wish to ask him which order it happened in. At which point did you think this was a bad idea? The more I think about it, it’s probably Churchill.
That’s a great answer. Actually, in over 300 interviews, one of the people said Churchill as well. Why would you choose him?
He fascinates me for a few reasons. First of all, a lot of people don’t know but he was removed from office in the first general election after the war. To be one of the people who shepherded freedom into the world and then fired the first possible opportunity is mind-blowing. I don’t know the Normandy or the D-Day landings. They had to lie to him as to what day they were being done. I don’t know if you ever heard the story because he refused to not be on the first boat. He has seen the numbers in the projections of how many people would have to die in order to take these beaches and he understood the strategic importance of taking the beaches. He refused to say it. It’s like, “I cannot ask 80,000 people to die.”
The only way they could persuade him was they lied to him. They said, “It’s going on this day,” and it went a day early because he wanted to be there. He made the French prime minister walk down the train tracks for 4 miles. He refused to send the train to pick him up because of how many extra people were going to have to die because the French surrendered. I have nothing against aged French people. I love them dearly. I think that he’s such an enigmatic and charismatic dichotomy of a person who lied relentlessly when he was a journalist and made stuff up. Yet, he was the person who went against Hitler and won. That would be a phenomenally interesting hour of my life.
I agree. If it were possible, I’d like to be there to listen. That would be an incredible conversation.
If this happens, I’ll bring you with me.
Please let me know. Peter, this is the grand finale. This is the change the world question. What is it that you were doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?
I’m blessed because I’m doing the thing that will do that. I truly believe in the bigger picture of AI. Climate change, world food shortages, energy, and drinking water are irrelevant. Not because they’re irrelevant. They’re highly important. Something with an IQ of 3, 4, 10, 20, 50, or 100 times Einstein, I believe we’ll be able to solve those issues. The only question for me is when we dedicate an AI to solving climate change. Does it choose to poison the water supply? Again, with that lack of context that AI has, the easiest way to solve climate change would be to put mercury in the water. Job done. In about three days, all climate change problems are removed because humans stop existing.
Does it choose to find the solution that empowers us and enables us to make our decisions? I don’t think there is a future that doesn’t find the solution. I don’t believe that to be the case. It’s inevitable that it will solve that problem. The question is how much does it include us as part of the solution? That’s in our power now to decide. For me, it’s stewarding an ethical and empathetic use case of AI. The large language models that sit behind AI include empathy for other sentient life. To me, it’s the only change that needs to happen.
I totally agree and I like the way you said it. It makes so much sense that way. I also believe that, with all of the craziness going on in this world, AI can be an important contributor to the conversation if used properly and correctly. I love your mission. I’m certainly part of it in many ways as you know.
I’m incredibly grateful to you. Thank you.
My pleasure and I can’t wait to see what we come up with next. Thank you again for your time. Remember, if you want to be a guest in the Mastermind for a couple of weeks, you can join for free. If you like it and you stay, that’s great too. Either way, it makes sense to check it out because I love it and I think very highly of Peter. He doesn’t sit still. He has new stuff for us every single week and his partner, Brian, is very creative and contributes as well. Thank you, Peter. I look forward to our next time together.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Let’s talk around.
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