Shadowing Practice: The Future Of Work (& The New High-Income Skill Stack) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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I want to ask you a question that may sound weird at first.

And that question is, why are you watching this?

Why are you watching this video specifically?

Because you have access to ChatGPT.

You have access to Claude.

You have access to all of these AI tools that are supposed to get rid of information, make creators obsolete, make writers obsolete, make everyone obsolete.

But you are still watching this.

And of course, you could ask AI for information on the topic that we're going to talk about,

or you could just paste the YouTube link into AI and ask it for a quick summary.

And it would do a pretty decent job and be able to give you the information.

But I really want you to think about that, right, before you go all doomer on me and how AI is going to replace everyone,

because that question alone sets the foundation of this video.

It shines a light on what the future of creative work could look like.

That's exactly what we're going to break down very extensively.

And the problem is that AI is coming for everyone's jobs, right?

At least that's what people say.

And it looks like it's going to actually become true.

And the huge problem with that is that AI isn't only coming for the jobs.

It's coming for the meaning.

It's coming for the purpose in life.

If you've been on social media, if you've been living in modern society, you understand that we have this mass scarcity of meaning and purpose.

People just don't know what to do with their lives.

And if people's work is a source of that purpose, especially creative work, then what happens when it's gone?

What happens when work doesn't equal purpose, when work doesn't equal identity, when work doesn't equal how you mattered and how you acquired status in society,

which is a generator of meaning, whether we like to virtue signal about not playing status games or not, you play one every day.

Most people think we are in a crisis, but personally, I think this is one of the greatest opportunities ever.

Because when AI can do everything well, then everything becomes a commodity.

It's not worth paying for.

So the second question

that forms the foundation of this video is how do you become a scarce resource that people want to pay for, especially as a creative?

And that comes from your taste, your perspective, your story, every other skill that we're going to break down in this video step by step.

This is going to be a mix of practical stuff and theories just to show where we're at in society.

So buckle in because we have a lot to talk about.

To start, I'm just going to rapid fire context.

I'm going to show you how we got into the situation of not having any meaning in our lives, what that means when jobs go away, and what the opportunities actually are.

So let's get into this.

Hold tight.

Try to pay attention.

Here's the history of meaning in four acts.

Act one Meaning came from up there.

So for most of human history Meaning was given to you by gods kings elders

and scriptures You didn't have to find it

because it was assigned to you This is in very early foraging societies in act two

or during the industrial revolution Meaning was found from out there.

So science replaced religion as the dominant framework work, meaning shifted to productivity and progress.

You earned meaning through your work and through contribution to the machine.

Then in act three, where we are now, meaning was deconstructed into nothing.

Meaning is found nowhere.

This is postmodernism.

We deconstruct everything because no single perspective is privileged.

Nothing is objectively true.

Meaning isn't given or earned.

It's just gone.

And that leads to act four, where meaning will be found in here.

Meaning has to be generated from within by you for you.

So why does this matter for creatives or creators or people who don't want to give up their work?

Because there's two types of work.

There's the mundane busy work, the repetitive work, the mechanical work, the assembly line style industrial work.

I don't care if that gets rid of.

I mean that in the kindest way possible.

I know that people's livelihoods are at stake, but we're going to talk about how things will look with that too.

But then there's creative work, right?

The ability to see reality from your own lens, pull it into your mind, synthesize things together, create something, share it with another person,

and then get feedback for your contribution in the form of money or currency or just another form of value.

That's where humans find meaning.

And so when meaning went from being handed to us to being earned through labor and then being found nowhere,

it becomes our responsibility to create meaning, Creatives are the meaning architects of society.

So if jobs form the foundation of meaning right now, to an extent, how do those go away and what happens?

So the traditional economic loop is that you work a job, you get a wage, you spend, the company profits, and then that creates more jobs or the ability to pay.

This is just a cycle, right?

And AI breaks this loop because if AI does the jobs, wages collapse.

And if wages collapse, spending collapses.

And if spending collapses, the entire economic system falls apart.

And this brings up the post-labor economics framework that David Shapiro created.

He actually has a book called Labor Zero coming out about it soon.

I would highly recommend going and watching his YouTube video playlist on post-labor economics because it's very enlightening.

And while it's just a theory and it may not happen, I think theories are cool.

And another thing about creatives is that the more attention you attract to a theory

that leads society in a new direction and the more supporters you get for

that thing that tends to create culture and society the more attention

that is invested into a creative idea is more likely to

come true than not things just don't happen humans build what they want to see in the world

and that could very much be a thing

so the very very brief version of post-labor economics is

that household income comes from three sources there's wages so you get paid for your labor this is what ai threatens.

Then there's transfers like government payments, UBI, etc. But the problem with this becoming the dominant source, just everyone getting paid by the government,

is that it becomes politically unstable and it distorts markets.

And frankly, if we're here for meaning, I personally will not find a lot of meaning just sitting on the couch all day collecting money.

I need to grow.

I need to challenge myself.

I have maybe 60 more years on this planet, like, unless we solve immortality too, but I need to do something.

And then the third way is capital income.

So this is owning assets that generate money.

And this is where things get interesting because the future probably requires broadening capital participation, regular people owning income generating assets, not just billionaires.

But that's just the thing.

I still want to do something.

I still want to create and people will still need meaning that is derived from just that.

And that's where you and I come in, the people who value this way of life.

So even though we talk about all jobs disappearing, all jobs are not going to disappear.

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There are still going to be jobs that require humans in the loop.

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So things like high liability roles, because you want a human accountable for that thing, statutory positions that have legal requirements.

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Then there's the experience economy.

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So bartenders, boutique shops, art galleries, live performances.

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This is going to see a huge boom coming into the future.

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and then the meaning makers or the meaning economy, which is people who help others navigate the human experience.

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And then there's relationship and trust jobs, so like sales, diplomacy, negotiation,

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etc. But the pattern here is that the jobs that survive are the ones where the human is the product.

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It's not what they produce, it's who they are.

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And personally, what comes to mind here is a quote from Naval that I read a long time ago.

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And that quote is, there are almost 7 billion people on this planet.

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Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies. And

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if you've watched any of my one-person business videos where I

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go on the more heavy philosophy side rather than the practical side, you can see what I'm getting at here is that every person has the chance to become their own enterprise.

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I mean, think of where we're at.

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I think this makes sense.

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You have AI.

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You can learn anything.

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You can build anything.

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You can do what people have been telling you you've been able to do.

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Will everyone become their own company?

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Of Of course not.

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Is everyone watching this video?

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Of course not.

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Will everyone even register this as important?

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No, I'm just providing a potential opportunity for those who want to take it.

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And if you've read my book, Purpose and Profit, it's free to read on my substack, link in the description, then you see where I'm getting at here.

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Because in that book, I go over the creative way of life where you identify problems, you solve them, that removes the limits on your potential.

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It forces you to learn.

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And then from the solution you create, you turn that into something that you can give someone else.

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And that is arguably the most meaningful way to live.

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So not only is this a way to gain an advantage in the future, it's a very meaningful thing to do.

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And speaking of meaning, that leads to the second point where we're going to talk about the anatomy of meaning, because I want to give you a framework for understanding how meaning is generated.

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That way you can engineer meaning.

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So in order to understand how to generate meaning, we need to understand what leads to meaninglessness.

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And there's two killers of meaning here.

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There's stagnation, so no forward movement, no progress, you just feel stuck.

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And then there's isolation, so no connection to something greater, feeling like you don't matter.

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This is why modern life feels so empty.

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I mean, just look at your phone.

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You're not progressing in any way.

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You're not contributing in any way.

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You're not connected to other people.

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You think you are because you're in this digital world, and there is some form of connection that can come from that, but you're not globally connected to so many freaking people.

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And frankly, these companies profit from you being addicted to this thing, to this machine.

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So if stagnation and isolation lead to meaninglessness, what leads to meaning?

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And there are two pillars here.

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Pillar one is progress.

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So forward movement, because humans need to feel like they're going somewhere, not arriving at a goal and just stopping

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and giving up like the person who built a $100 million company and then stopped and then found that their life lacked meaning.

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But progress is achieved through creative problem solving.

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It's through struggle, not through suffering, so to say, through struggle.

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There's a distinction between the two, and I would encourage you to remove any negative connotations you have with the word struggle.

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And then pillar two is contribution.

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So progress and contribution, forward movement, and a connection to something greater than yourself.

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There's a Nietzsche quote for this on happiness.

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If someone posts it, post it in the comments, because I can't recite it directly, but it's something like happiness is the feeling of resistance being overcome, of progress being made.

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So this insight isn't anything new.

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We just need to be reminded of it.

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But when it comes to contribution, humans need to feel like their progress matters to someone more than themselves.

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And this is why solo projects can start to feel hollow after a while, because you need an audience, a community, you need a cause.

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And I'm not talking about a million followers like I have.

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There are plenty of people with just tiny followings, or even a tiny community in their real life that are able to sustain some form of an income.

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And now when we talk about money, if jobs go away and money starts to transform and money moves away from being a productivity metric, what happens?

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Personally, I think money is going to continue to be a status symbol, but it's going to be a tool to express agency.

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It's going to be a tool for growth.

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Just like it is now, we're just removing the shallower layer.

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We're transcending as to what money was in the first place and what it was meant to be, which is your ability to do things you weren't able to do before.

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And it's kind of a physical representation of your growth.

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So if those are the two pillars, progress and contribution, for meaning, what are the generators?

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How do you actually generate meaning in your life?

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The generators are struggle, curiosity, and status.

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For struggle, that's the engine of progress.

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For curiosity, that's the direction of progress.

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And for status, that's the proof of contribution.

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Now for struggle, I'm talking about what you choose to struggle for because that defines what your purpose is.

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It's not struggle that's imposed on you.

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It's not a goal that's assigned to you.

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It's what you consciously choose.

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So it's like the creative who chooses to master their craft, to build an audience, to say something true.

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That struggle generates meaning.

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Now curiosity is non-linear attention.

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It's following threads that don't make sense yet.

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It's not something that AI can make sense of.

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AI can't be curious.

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And that's how you solve problems or discover ideas

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that nobody is even thinking about because nobody else is curious about them

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because curiosity works in a weird way in the brain.

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I talk about this example a lot, but it's just so simple yet so powerful is that if you were to take two people, me and you, reading the same book,

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would we highlight the same lines inside of that book?

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Would the same things stick out to us?

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You may even think the book is just trash

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and it may be the best book I've ever read because at my situated point in my life, from my perspective,

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from the experience that's culminated over time in my head to create this very unique way of viewing the world

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that we don't think is unique because we live in our heads.

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That's where curiosity comes from.

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That's your unique edge to an extent.

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You just need to learn how to channel it because like follow your curiosity.

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How is that practical?

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What does that lead to?

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We'll get into it.

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But now with the third generator, status, status gets a bad rap.

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So let's just call status recognition, recognition for your work or your contribution.

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It's the signal that your struggle mattered to someone.

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It's the signal that you're not here alone in this void on earth.

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So what are these three generators?

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Struggle, curiosity, status.

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It's a story.

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It's quite literally the foundation of a story.

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Now, why do stories matter, especially going into the future?

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Because your brain is a story engine.

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That's what we find meaningful.

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We crave novelty, drama, myth, and meaning.

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And this is especially true when we're not in survival mode, when we're in leisure.

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And when jobs are replaced and we have our base necessities met across the board, this becomes even more important.

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This is what people are going to be looking for

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and paying for mostly because they're not worried about paying the bills for their house.

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They're kind of just lost.

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And a big portion of the population

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that doesn't understand what I'm saying in this video is going to end up like

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that WALL-E character in the hover chair who just has like the the soda hat

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and the screen in front of his face at all times and he's like 300 pounds overweight and can't move.

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The question here is what is the main purpose of machines going into the future

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and what is the main purpose of humans?

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This is the question that everyone's trying to answer and this leads to a two-part insight.

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First is that people pay for speed and efficiency when they want to escape an experience.

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So this could be long wait times at the DMV, a fast food worker getting your order wrong, or bureaucracy at a company.

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But on the other hand, people pay a premium for experiences that they want to savor.

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So a five-star restaurant, a live theater, handcrafted goods.

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And I think this quote from Chris Paik illustrates this quite well, which says, the elegance of the future is not in man versus machine, but in their division of labor,

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silicon sanding the rough edges of necessity so carbon can ascend to meaning.

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We You will abolish baristas and canonize chefs, silence agents, and encore actors.

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AI handles the friction and humans handle the narrative.

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So that leads into the third idea here, which is that the creator economy equals the meaning economy.

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Because now we need to start making things practical, right?

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Struggle, status, curiosity, story, narrative, all of this stuff.

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Okay, cool.

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But what do you actually do with that?

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What does it actually mean for you on a daily basis?

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What are you actually focused on?

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The first thing here is just understanding the shift in how money is going to flow.

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So the old way is that you get paid for your labor.

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You get paid for your output.

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And then the new model is

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that you get paid by the people who believe in what you're doing

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and who want to see more of that in the world.

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In other words, you do something that you deeply care about and you attract other people to care about that thing, which is two distinct types of skills, right?

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That's business and art that's doing what you care about with love, but also creating it in such a way

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and persuading other people to see the value in it so

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that you don't become a starving artist who can't sell any of their work.

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So for the creator economy in specific, when you follow someone, when you follow someone meaningful, right, not just searching for information, not just looking to get a quick tip,

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not when you know what you want to ask for, because now you can ask that to chat GPT.

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What are you?

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You're listening to someone's perspective.

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You're buying their perspective.

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You're supporting their perspective, their opinion.

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You're supporting their curation, right?

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Whether they use AI or not, you follow a specific person because they are pulling the right ideas and making sense of them.

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So the scarce resource here is attention, right?

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Because it's scarce.

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There's only so much attention.

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There's only so many people on this planet and there's only so much attention that can go around.

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So if you learn the mechanics of capturing and delivering value on attention, like everyone's been saying in the marketing space for the past however long,

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then you can demand a premium on what you do.

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And so when it comes to AI flooding the space with a bunch of mediocre content,

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it doesn't matter because there's not enough attention to pay attention to all of that.

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And if it's mediocre, then it's mediocre and people don't want it and they're going to shift their attention to what matters.

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So that's the game now.

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It's not only production, but it's distribution.

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It's not only creation because anyone can create anything.

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It's curation.

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So attention is the ultimate leverage.

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And if you want to understand this, just look at Elon Musk or Mr. Beast, right?

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Elon Musk has millions upon millions of followers and he attracts capital, talent, and resources through that thing.

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His tweets quite literally shift the markets.

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Then you have Mr. Beast who reinvests what he gets from the attention back into the production.

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And he is slowly becoming a very powerful individual.

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But those are the extreme examples because personally, I don't want to be the next Elon Musk.

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It seems pretty risky.

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It seems pretty stressful.

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Maybe I could handle it.

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I don't know.

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Right now in my life, I don't want to be there.

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I don't want to be the next Mr. Beast either.

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I want to talk about something different.

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I have other things that I find more meaningful than that.

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I don't even watch Mr. Beast.

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I watch what I care about.

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So you have to understand that this isn't a winner-takes-all market.

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Almost nothing is, but especially in the creator economy, attention shifts.

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If you actually think about it, you understand that it's not very saturated at all.

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Anyone can go viral today, and what they do with that virality determines whether or not they see some form of success.

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And then there's, of course, the people who build very slowly over time and attract a small audience and charge premium prices, and they make more than people with millions of followers.

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Not everyone is selling a $10 ebook.

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Not everyone is selling a $5,000 coaching program.

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Not everyone is selling this, selling that.

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There's so many different ways to go about this.

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And you take Justin Welsh as an example.

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He has a pretty large following, but he's not on YouTube.

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He's not on other things.

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He just writes.

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He's focused on like LinkedIn, his newsletter, and Twitter.

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And his entire focus is working on something meaningful for as little time as possible

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so he can enjoy the most time with his family as he can.

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And the other thing here that removes saturation even more is that some people aren't even going to find meaning through work.

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They're going to start to find meaning through family, through other things that allow them to grow in different ways.

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Now, if you're anything like me, I want as much growth as possible.

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I don't want to just focus on family because I understand

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that all domains of life interconnect and kind of unlock each other in certain ways once you become developed in those domains.

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So I don't want to just focus on vocation or career or family or health, etc. I want to focus on them all.

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And that creates this infinite game where you can just experience this growth and progression and meaning forever.

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The other signal here is that social media creators are just people posting on social media, whether you identify as a personal brand or a content creator or not, anyone who posts on social media,

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let's just call them a creator for ease of access.

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They're starting to become the primary source of information for something like news or education.

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People trust creators more than they trust centralized institutions and that's a very important thing because it's shifting more towards that.

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So this is a massive opportunity for people who have some kind of genuine expertise

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or some unique way of viewing the world and the ability to articulate

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and communicate it which are all skills that can be learned.

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Now to hit on the dead internet theory objection one more time where

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if AI just floods the internet with a bunch of content doesn't content become worthless?

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Yes It becomes a commodity.

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Once you can do everything instantly, everything becomes worthless.

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So what does that do?

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It increases the value in how much can be paid for something human and not necessarily just something human.

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Everyone's going to be working in some AI assisted way, but a human perspective, a human point of view, the curation, the taste.

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You can have this, you can have AI spit out 5 billion words that are amazing,

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super beautiful prose, but which ones are you going to select to stick around?

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And the last thing here is that skills are being abstracted up a layer as they always are, how they went from human labor to more animal labor to more machine labor, and now they're more to AI labor.

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So you don't need to focus on the technical or the manual.

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You don't need to set up a typewriter anymore.

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You don't even need to know how to write anymore.

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I personally like to do my writing manually still.

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I do research with AI, but I see no problem with someone using AI to write, right?

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As long as they're in control of the ideas and what's being put out there.

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Just because someone wrote it with AI doesn't mean that it's bad

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if it accurately represents what they're trying to say down to the word.

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The thing that does get on my nerves though is that I see like these AI patterns everywhere like, oh, it's not this, it's this, especially on reels.

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Like if you know, you know, and you can instantly spot it.

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But at the same time, is that just because we're noticing those patterns more and those were already a thing?

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But now that they are coming more from AI, they're more apparent.

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Are we adopting the language of AI or is AI adopting the language of us?

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So there's a lot of stuff here.

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So now for idea four, the last defensible moat is you.

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This is the core insight.

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This is the thing that if you come away from this video, this is the most important thing not even the skills that you have to learn that we're going to talk about next.

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This is it.

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And we'll try to make this point by understanding the swap test.

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I'm calling this the swap test.

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And this swap test is for knowing whether or not AI can replace you specifically.

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If you can swap the creator and the creation without it losing value, AI can replace it.

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If the value is tied to who made it, that's your moat.

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So some examples is like a generic stock photo.

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Obviously, that's swappable.

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AI can do it.

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What about a photograph from a famous photographer?

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That's not really swappable because the value is in her eye,

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her choices, her reputation, everything else that influences how you perceive the photo or image.

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What about a generic blog post about productivity?

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Obviously, that's swappable.

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What about an essay by someone whose journey you followed for years?

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That's not really swappable because you haven't followed a specific trajectory or story from AI for years.

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It doesn't hit the same if that essay is just given to you one day randomly by AI.

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So what can AI not replicate?

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The first thing is perspective because AI can think about your perspective, but it cannot think from it.

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It can analyze what it means to be a first generation immigrant building a creative career, but it cannot be one.

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Your perspective is shaped by your beliefs, your experiences, your wounds, your wins.

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AI has none of these because it has no stakes.

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The second thing is your energy signature.

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And speaking of energy signature, I actually posted an article to my substack about it's a prompt for how to find your intellectual signature.

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And what I mean by intellectual signature is just this.

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It's what ideas are the most important to you that you can pull together, connect, synthesize to create this unique style of content.

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If you want to do the content creator route or kind of thought leadership, even though I hate that word, you like deep ideas and you find meaning in those and you want to share them.

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That's who that's for.

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So check that out if you want.

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Link in the description.

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But the energy signature is the human ability to select what to focus on and why it matters to you.

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So two people can cover the same topic or write about the same topic, and it will feel completely different when you read it.

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AI can mimic the style, but it cannot mimic care.

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Now, the third thing is sense-making, because AI can process information, but it cannot decide what information means.

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It cannot frame, it cannot prioritize, it cannot say this matters and this doesn't.

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Sense making is inherently human because it requires stakes.

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AI has no stakes.

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AI does not die.

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And that's just it.

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That's number four, which is trajectory because you have a life.

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You have a past.

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You have a present.

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You have a future.

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You have a story arc.

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AI doesn't have a trajectory.

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It doesn't have any mortality.

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It doesn't have any temporal compression.

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So if we solve immortality one day, it's still not the same.

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If we live forever, this moment still passes right now.

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This thing that we're living in right now, what I just said is gone.

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I can't redo it.

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I can't re-simulate it.

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I can't try over again.

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People think immortality will make life meaningless, but I don't think it will for that reason.

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So when you create, you're creating from right now and then it's gone.

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And the fifth thing is just evolving taste.

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And the best way I can put this is if I tell AI to write like me and I read it, I don't want to write about that anymore.

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My taste instantly changed and I'm going to write something different.

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If AI did that, it would just get stuck in this infinite loop and then it explode.

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And that's just it.

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You grow, you change, you look back on your work and you think it sucks.

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Now the point you've been waiting for, the post-labor skill stack or the post-AI skill stack, let's talk about it because I've talked about this multiple times in the past.

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I've said things like marketing, sales, writing, speaking, all of these other things, but I want to go higher level because we have to abstract out a bit.

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So this is more of a skill hierarchy than it is just a list of skills that you need to learn.

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And the thing here is that these aren't career-specific skills because you aren't going into a specific career.

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These are human skills.

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So this is just uncovering what your nature is and how to lean more into it.

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So the skill stack or hierarchy is first agency, the meta skill, then taste, perspective, persuasion, and then technical know-how.

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So knowing how to use a software or use AI.

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And these are ordered in a very specific way because they're hierarchy.

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They're umbrellaed under one another and one comes before the other.

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So agency or the meta skill is the ability to act without permission or prompting.

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It's creating your own story.

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It's setting your own trajectory.

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It's not waiting for someone to tell you what to do or who to be.

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Now why is it the meta skill?

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Because agency is what allows you to develop all other skills.

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Without agency you're just following someone else's path and that path is being automated.

423

So how do you actually practice agency.

424

That's through leaning in to the three generators of meaning.

425

Struggle, status, curiosity.

426

For struggle, you make deliberate choices.

427

You reject conformity.

428

You choose your own problems to solve.

429

For status, money becomes a tool for agency, not just a metric of productivity.

430

You're choosing to do what you want with money as the fuel.

431

Then through curiosity, you're filtering signal from noise.

432

You're following threads that interest you.

433

And this is especially important when everyone's just chasing the trends.

434

You log on social media and that's all you see is one thing after another.

435

There's no uniqueness.

436

And it's okay if you chase the trends and try to hop onto them, but just doing exactly what the last person did related to that trend.

437

And how do you think you create trends?

438

So a good place to start here with developing agency, even though I've talked about it in a video called the most important skill to learn in the next 10 years, is you just have to reject the default path.

439

Go to school, get a job, retire at 65.

440

That's over.

441

Reject it.

442

Do something else.

443

Try something new.

444

Figure out what to do.

445

Take one step, even though you don't think that's the right step to take.

446

Just take it.

447

Make a mistake.

448

Correct the mistake.

449

That's it.

450

Now, the next skill is taste or the skill of discernment.

451

And the best way to understand the importance of taste, because everyone tells you, oh, you need taste.

452

You need taste.

453

You need agency.

454

You need this.

455

Why does taste actually matter?

456

For that, we look at the infinite library problem, which some of you may have heard before.

457

But in essence, if there's a library and that library has every possible permutation of any word ever written ever,

458

it just has everything, then it's meaningless.

459

It's worthless.

460

There's no opinion worth looking at.

461

And then there's the infinite monkey problem, where if you take infinite monkeys and have them just type for a billion years, eventually one will produce Shakespeare.

462

But again, what worth is that?

463

You're just going to look at it and you're gonna be like, oh, well, yeah, it's good, but it took a monkey a billion years and they have no idea what they're writing about.

464

Like it doesn't, it doesn't mean anything.

465

So the insight here is that curation matters more than creation.

466

You have to select what matters and share it with another person.

467

So how do you actually develop taste?

468

You develop taste by building things, by creating or curating or putting things out there and seeing if it actually works.

469

You build your own thing.

470

You make decisions.

471

Agency.

472

You see what works.

473

You see what doesn't.

474

You iterate.

475

Now the third skill here is just perspective.

476

It's expanding your human capacity.

477

Now we've talked about the levels of ego development or

478

that could also be synonymous with perspective development many times in the past.

479

But as you develop your perspective, what you're doing is you're opening it up.

480

You become less conformist, less ideological, and less dogmatic.

481

You're less stuck in this bubble.

482

You gain the ability to hold complexity in your mind, to hold contradiction, to see systems and to understand nuance.

483

And so this is what allows for genuine agency and sophisticated curation.

484

Because if your mind is so small and narrow, that contains the only opportunities and ideas available to you.

485

You can't create something unique if you're extremely dogmatic.

486

Now the next video is going to be specifically on this to make it more practical.

487

It's going to be called something like how to think like a genius.

488

It's about how to tap into five-dimensional thinking,

489

so to say, but it teaches you how to think and why that's so important because many people don't think at all.

490

Now the fourth skill is persuasion, which is the ability to make people care about what you do.

491

And that's a huge problem for creatives is that they put so much time and effort into something.

492

You have an author that works for 10 years on this insane book and then nobody sees it.

493

It's worthless.

494

So to learn how to persuade, I would just recommend learning about marketing, sales, probably copywriting, and just building on social media

495

because the more you actually do the things that require you to persuade and the more you make mistakes and realize,

496

hey, this isn't working, and then you learn new techniques to try and then you try it and then you get better, that's just how you learn.

497

Now, the fifth skill is technical know-how, or just using the tools available to you to do all of this stuff.

498

So this is like the practical thing that you can start trying to do from the ground up.

499

This is like the vessel for how you're doing what you're doing.

500

But it's mostly just AI tools right now.

501

Just learn new tools.

502

Try Claude.

503

Try ChatGPT.

504

Try Claude Code.

505

Try Manus.

506

Try all of these different things.

507

Or try Eden.

508

Because when this video goes out, Eden should be open to the public.

509

We're removing the wait list for a few days.

510

So join if you want to try it.

511

But we just introduced projects and the Eden agent.

512

And what Eden is, is it's a drive that handles your busy work so that you can focus on the creative work.

513

So think of a drive where you can put all of your files, your footage, your videos.

514

You can even paste social media links like YouTube videos, have those transcribed.

515

And then you can ask the agent to do things with that information.

516

Like I could tell it to pull all of my YouTube videos

517

and create a research document in this folder so that I can go and use that to write.

518

And then the projects feature is where I can, let's say, write a newsletter.

519

I can pull all of my sources in.

520

It's like notebook.lm, but this is all in one place.

521

Why is this different from other tools?

522

Because other tools don't have the foundation.

523

They don't have the drive.

524

You can access your local files on your computer with Claude, and you can connect to Google Drive, which sucks.

525

But how do you actually share it with a team?

526

How do you share it with other people?

527

You're stuck dragging, dropping, copying, pasting.

528

You can have Claude create a seven-day email sequence, and you can paste a bunch of your context into there, or you can already have all of the knowledge about your company in your drive

529

and then ask the agent to build out an email sequence for a new project.

530

And that's also in the drive.

531

And then your team member can log in, go in there, see it, boom.

532

So try that out as well.

533

Link in the description.

534

That's pretty much it for this video.

535

I hope it was helpful.

536

I hope it gave you some insight.

537

I hope it opened your mind to the potential of the future, especially for creatives.

538

I'm pretty excited and bullish on creative work.

539

So until the next video on how to practice thinking and how to think better.

540

Like, subscribe.

541

I'll see you in the next one.

542

Bye.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 542 sentences and 6516 words to shadow. The speech runs for 33:11. The speaker talks fast, about 196 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
skill noun	/skɪl/	A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate.
creator noun	/kɹiːˈeɪ̯təː/	Something or someone which creates or makes something.
curiosity noun	/ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/	Inquisitiveness; the tendency to ask and learn about things by asking questions, investigating, or exploring.
contribution noun	/ˌkɑntɹɪˈbjuʃən/	Something given or offered that adds to a larger whole.
practical adjective	/ˈpɹæk.tɪ.kəl/	Relating to, or based on, practice or action rather than theory or hypothesis.
meaningful adjective	/ˈmiː.nɪŋ.fl̩/	Having meaning, significant.
generator noun	/ˈdʒɛnəɹeɪtə(ɹ)/	An apparatus in which vapour or gas is formed from a liquid or solid by means of heat or chemical process, as a steam boiler, gas retort etc.
solve verb	/sɒlv/	To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out.
signature noun	/ˈsɪɡ.nə.t͡ʃə/	A person's name, written by that person, used as identification or to signify approval of accompanying material, such as a legal contract.
generate verb	/ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/	To bring into being; give rise to.
insight noun	/ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/	A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into.
infinite adjective	/ˈɪnfɪnɪt/	Indefinably large, countlessly great; immense.
wage noun	/weɪd͡ʒ/	An amount of money paid to a worker for a specified quantity of work, usually calculated on an hourly basis and expressed in an amount of money per hour.
loop noun	/luːp/	A length of thread, line or rope that is doubled over to make an opening.
productivity noun	/ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/	The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
go away verb	To depart or leave a place.
give up verb	To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
break down verb	To stop functioning.
bring up verb	To mention.
build out verb	To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.).
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
fall apart verb	To disintegrate, to break into pieces.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 140 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: worthless /ˈwɜːθ.ləs/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/, theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, myth /mɪθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: contribution /ˌkɑntɹɪˈbjuʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, isolation /ˌaɪsəˈleɪʃən/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, trash /tɹæʃ/
Long words — get the stress right: curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/, contribution /ˌkɑntɹɪˈbjuʃən/, generator /ˈdʒɛnəɹeɪtə(ɹ)/, productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, trajectory /tɹəˈd͡ʒɛktəɹi/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, creator, curiosity.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	you've been living · have been telling · everyone's been saying
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If AI did that, it would just
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've been · you've watched · you've read
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was given · was assigned · was found

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?