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How to AI-Proof Yourself as a Man · Evolutionary Men

• 0:00
  All right, and welcome back. So on this episode, I want to talk about how to AI proof yourself as a man. So this is a little tongue in cheek, but it's real. Something is happening in the culture right now. Automation and AI are coming and they're coming fast.
• 0:19
  A lot of it's happening under the surface, but the manifestations, the blossoming of that is going to just keep getting stronger and stronger over the next years and decades in particular. I'm already seeing AI influence human behavior in the coaching and the work I do with men.
• 0:41
  And we are going to hit a crisis of sort that AI can do a lot of things that humans have traditionally needed to do. And this isn't going to be like an overnight fall off the cliff thing, but there are going to be layoffs. There are going to be changes in jobs. New jobs will be created for sure.
• 1:04
  But one of the ways you can start to get ready for that as a man is to think about how do I AI proof myself, right? Essentially anything that comes down to repetition, that's going to be automated by an AI or eventually a robot.
• 1:21
  So what are the unique things we can start to cultivate as men to kind of create value in that post-scarcity world of AI being as cheap as really anything?
• 1:37
  And a lot of these tie into different things we do in men's work. So I really wanted to bring forward here things for you to start thinking about as a man to have your attention on in what's going to be a radically changing world.
• 1:52
  And even if it doesn't hit you in your lifetime, it's going to hit the generations after you.
• 1:58
  So number one, what I wanted to talk about is nervous system mastery, right? And what I mean by this is the capacity
• 2:07
  to stay grounded when uncertainty or tension arise, right? When things fall apart and some things are going to fall apart, right?
• 2:20
  And right now, your capacity as a man to learn how to handle the different states of your nervous system and body are very important and they're only going to become even more important.
• 2:36
  So what do I mean by nervous system mastery? It just means learning how your body and your heart and your mind work
• 2:45
  so that you have conscious choice about how you're showing up in the world.
• 2:51
  One of the great learning pains we're going through as our culture right now is as new technologies come in,
• 2:58
  they're able to hack old patterns in our nervous system, right? We call this super, I think they're called supernormal stimuli.
• 3:06
  And essentially it's the idea, right? Back in the day, we couldn't eat endless sugar because it wasn't available.
• 3:14
  There were natural limits in the way the world organized with fruit and seasons and whatnot.
• 3:20
  Now, in a post-natural world, in a sense, industrial scale food generation, we have to deal with that.
• 3:27
  Half of the world is dealing with not having enough calories. The other half of the world is dealing with having too many.
• 3:34
  That wasn't an issue in the time before, right? Technology created a new problem.
• 3:40
  And this has happened with social media. And this is happening with the algorithms and their ability to hack our nervous system states, right?
• 3:48
  The easiest way to sell you something is to make you feel bad about your life or scared and then sell you a solution to it, right?
• 4:00
  To get you dysregulated or angry makes you a lot more open to manipulation.
• 4:09
  So nervous system mastery is the idea. I'm going to master my nervous system and how I respond in the world.
• 4:16
  I need to learn to bring myself back to center.
• 4:19
  And the newest hook is going to be AI can promise to do that for you.
• 4:25
  I'm just going to sit down with chat GPT and it's going to make me feel better.
• 4:29
  Okay, there's some real benefit to that.
• 4:31
  And I work a tangent to that in men's work and coaching of helping men develop this capacity for self-regulation.
• 4:39
  But what happens when the AI isn't there, right?
• 4:42
  That's really important.
• 4:43
  And what happens when the AI is actually shaping your behavior without you even realizing it towards something it wants and you don't want?
• 4:55
  So we want to have the capacity to know ourselves and to be able to handle our nervous system.
• 5:01
  We are in a time of a lot of uncertainty as a globe, as a culture, as people, and particularly as men.
• 5:09
  Learning to stay present and grounded through that uncertainty, that becomes an asset.
• 5:17
  If your nervous system relaxes the people around you, people are going to trust you more.
• 5:23
  Which leads us right into number two.
• 5:25
  And that capacity is relational leadership, right?
• 5:32
  So the ability to create trust with other human beings offline.
• 5:38
  And this is a complex one, right?
• 5:41
  AI can talk and it can make you feel trusted.
• 5:44
  But that's very different from being offline, face-to-face with someone, and having them relax and trust and believe you.
• 5:53
  And so relational leadership, another way to think about this capacity is learn to lead other men and people.
• 5:59
  Become a person people look towards in challenging times.
• 6:03
  That is a skill set as old as time.
• 6:06
  And it's only going to increase in our increasingly digital, crazy-ass world.
• 6:12
  Now, one subset of this that's really, really important is our world is moving towards being frictionless, right?
• 6:23
  This is kind of the goal, the thing they want to sell you.
• 6:25
  That you can click a button and have food show up to your house.
• 6:28
  AI can be the perfect relationship, the perfect therapist that never gets triggered, never calls you on your shit.
• 6:35
  Whatever that might be.
• 6:36
  There's no friction there, right?
• 6:39
  We can live in these tiny bubbles, these little screens, and not actually have to encounter the difficulties and challenge and uncertainty of the world.
• 6:49
  Being able to create and stay connected to people in friction is going to be really important.
• 6:55
  What I mean by that is your capacity to lead and get along with people who are different than you and feel different than you is going to become an even more important asset.
• 7:07
  We are entering peak bubble of the human experiment.
• 7:13
  And what I mean by that is more and more because of the online thing, we only have to engage with people in communities that are perfectly in line with our values, our identity.
• 7:28
  There's lots of great shit about that.
• 7:30
  And the cost of that is our capacity to stay connected in friction atrophies.
• 7:36
  So becoming a relational leader means I know how to create trust, depth, and connection with people.
• 7:44
  And I know how to stay connected to people that are different than me.
• 7:50
  And lo and behold, that's a lot easier when we cultivate emotional intelligence inside of ourself and cultivate, number one, this nervous system mastery to be able to have presence, to be in our body in the moment, and to be able to attune to another person.
• 8:08
  So nervous system mastery is about perfecting how present we can be with ourselves.
• 8:14
  Relational leadership is, okay, now can I direct that presence towards another so they can feel it in that just by being around me, they relax, they trust, they feel me more.
• 8:28
  There's going to be, again, a lot of uncertainty in the world moving forward.
• 8:32
  People losing jobs, traditional structures of society.
• 8:35
  Things are going to change.
• 8:37
  It's not all doom and gloom, but it's going to be different.
• 8:40
  And in times of change, people look for leaders to guide them through.
• 8:47
  You want to make sure you're one of those leaders as a man.
• 8:51
  And that doesn't mean you have to go off and start some huge organization or have a huge social media following.
• 8:56
  But you want to have people in your life that feel trust for you, in your family, your kinship, your community.
• 9:04
  These things become extraordinarily valuable as we become a more and more digital world.
• 9:10
  Third thing you can do to AI-proof yourself as a man is learn to cultivate self-authorship.
• 9:20
  Right?
• 9:21
  So again, one of the great temptations that's already coming is, I can just ask AI.
• 9:27
  It'll give me the right answer.
• 9:29
  The deep challenge with that is we're already prescribing trust to something that hasn't necessarily garnered it.
• 9:38
  Right?
• 9:39
  There's so much evidence of how much AI just hallucinates.
• 9:43
  And the question always is, is whose values are being put into the AI?
• 9:48
  And again, we're going to align often with AIs that we think reflect our values.
• 9:54
  But the point is, we're not always going to know what's going on underneath the surface.
• 10:00
  So your capacity to live a self-authored life, to be able to make decisions and take risks and guide yourself through the world,
• 10:13
  is going to become more and more precious and important.
• 10:16
  Because many, many people are going to do the other thing and just turn to the AI.
• 10:22
  And guess what?
• 10:24
  AI, it starts to kind of all come together.
• 10:28
  What I mean by that is, I've used it a lot.
• 10:30
  I've played with it a lot.
• 10:31
  And you start to get to know its voice.
• 10:34
  You start to get to know the way it writes.
• 10:36
  It has a vanilla monoculture essence to it.
• 10:40
  So if everybody's turning to it, guess what?
• 10:43
  Everybody's going to be doing the same stuff.
• 10:46
  And self-authorship is going to be one of the ways you can stay unique and alive and vital in an increasingly monoculture world.
• 10:57
  And self-authorship is going to be also important for what happens when the AIs break down or what happens when you get into situations where you can't ask the AI.
• 11:08
  And this also goes deeper in terms of the creative act.
• 11:12
  I've been talking to a guy in my men's group who's an author.
• 11:14
  And we're at a really interesting generation now where many people are using AI that traditionally did things by hand.
• 11:22
  And what's interesting about that is it can be wielded effectively because as a human being, if we started offline, we've already cultivated that self-authorship.
• 11:34
  We, in a sense, have a sense of taste.
• 11:37
  Right?
• 11:38
  Oh, this is good.
• 11:39
  This is not good.
• 11:40
  So I can ask the AI to do something.
• 11:43
  But when it comes back, I get to make the decision.
• 11:45
  Well, that's actually crap.
• 11:46
  I actually tried this.
• 11:48
  And I get to shape it.
• 11:49
  What happens when you don't have that self-authorship and that sense of taste already?
• 11:56
  How will you know if what AI is giving you back is any good?
• 12:02
  This is so key.
• 12:03
  Self-authorship and a sense of taste means you have to develop some self-identity independent of the digital brain, so to speak.
• 12:13
  And this is really, really key and I think going to be something very important, particularly for creativity and art going forward.
• 12:21
  Right now, AI is not creative.
• 12:23
  All it does is remix the past.
• 12:26
  And there's a certain amount of that, yes, in human creativity.
• 12:29
  But what happens when there's no new inputs going into the system?
• 12:33
  Turns out AI quality degrades even faster.
• 12:37
  So if you build a capacity for self-authorship and taste and mastery inside yourself, that becomes a valuable input in this AI world.
• 12:50
  You will actually be paid for your creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
• 12:56
  And you'll have a capacity to see things in a way those only addicted to AI will not.
• 13:02
  Okay.
• 13:05
  And number four.
• 13:06
  Fourth capacity you can cultivate to AI-proof yourself as a man.
• 13:11
  And this is super simple.
• 13:12
  And it's become comfortable offline.
• 13:15
  The more we get used to an always connected, digitally mediated world, the more valuable, offline, disconnected, experiential things are going to become.
• 13:32
  And so you, if you want to be valuable in that world, the currency of that world, you also have to be comfortable in it.
• 13:41
  Can you sit still?
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  Can you read a book?
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  Can you keep your attention somewhere?
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  Without getting distracted.
• 13:51
  Without being spoon-fed.
• 13:54
  Are you always needing to consume, which tends to be the digital world.
• 13:58
  Becoming comfortable in the offline means, what do I show up?
• 14:07
  How do I show up as a man?
• 14:08
  And how do I feel when I'm not plugged into the matrix?
• 14:12
  Sounds really simple right now.
• 14:15
  But people have withdrawal, right?
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  Just from social media.
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  Just from their phones.
• 14:21
  What happens if there's a power outage?
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  And there is no digital feed for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, even 24 hours.
• 14:28
  What do you do?
• 14:29
  This is where this all stacks together, right?
• 14:32
  Your capacity to master your nervous system, regulate yourself becomes very important.
• 14:36
  Your capacity to lead others without digital influence and be trustable, be in your body, have emotional intelligence, becomes important.
• 14:45
  Your capacity to make decisions based on all of that, by getting connected to yourself, by attuning to other people, and self-authoring choices in life, and making creative decisions when the AI isn't there to tell you the answer, becomes important.
• 15:02
  And your capacity to feel comfortable in an offline world and be immediate, have an immediate experience of your environment, also becomes important, right?
• 15:15
  More and more as the world goes online, I'm already seeing it in the work I do with men and the retreats I lead.
• 15:22
  What becomes a rare, precious thing is being offline, being in person, being face-to-face, being in the hot sun, the muddy dirt.
• 15:39
  Feeling the friction of looking into another human being's eyes that is not you and has different wants and desires and triggers from you.
• 15:54
  This stuff is real.
• 15:57
  And I have no idea what jobs and what a world is going to spring forth from this new culture that is being created.
• 16:07
  And it's being created fast, right?
• 16:10
  Faster than our nervous systems can adapt, really.
• 16:15
  We don't have antibodies.
• 16:16
  We don't know how to be.
• 16:18
  So these are just four nuggets for what I am saying.
• 16:22
  I'm pretty damn sure you could put some time and energy into cultivating in these next years.
• 16:29
  They're going to make sure you have a place in the future world.
• 16:35
  That you are of value and can create value.
• 16:40
  And can take care of yourself in an increasingly mediated environment where truth and reality are going to become even more malleable, right?
• 16:51
  Right now, anything you see through a screen, you cannot trust is real.
• 16:57
  Period.
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  That's it.
• 16:59
  Anything you read, anything you hear.
• 17:00
  For all you know, I'm a digital AI avatar right now.
• 17:05
  It is that possible.
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  People are doing it.
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  YouTube is getting flooded with it.
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  Virtual influencers, virtual girlfriends.
• 17:14
  All of this shit is coming fast.
• 17:17
  And it's here.
• 17:18
  So building these capacities are what help anchor you in the non-digital world.
• 17:26
  We want AI and digital currency, in a sense, to work for us.
• 17:32
  We don't want to be the slave to its master, though.
• 17:35
  But how would you know that's even happened, right?
• 17:40
  This is the threat, so to speak, moving forward, particularly of native-born digital citizens of this new reality.
• 17:48
  I'm of the generation that grew up offline and organic, right?
• 17:53
  I had to write things by hand.
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  I used a typewriter in fifth grade.
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  There was no word processing until I was in high school.
• 18:00
  There were only landlines.
• 18:02
  If I wanted to talk to a friend and a landline wasn't available, I'd use a walkie-talkie or walk over to his house.
• 18:09
  Now, does that immediately mean it was a better world?
• 18:12
  No.
• 18:13
  There's a shit ton of gifts to the digital world.
• 18:15
  But having bridged that gap, I can tell you there's a lot of gifts to the offline world, too.
• 18:21
  In that free range, capacity for creative thinking and not being guided and told what to do every step is really important.
• 18:32
  You want to be an effective leader.
• 18:35
  I want you to be an effective leader as a man moving forward.
• 18:39
  So we need to start tracking these things.
• 18:41
  What can we as human beings do that an AI can't?
• 18:46
  Regulating our own nervous system is one of those.
• 18:52
  Leading other people and creating relational depth offline and trust is one of those.
• 18:58
  Being able to self-author and make decisions and point our life in a direction without just asking the machine for the answers is a big part of that.
• 19:11
  Knowing what our truth is and how to connect and identify to it.
• 19:16
  And cultivating a very human sense of taste that is going to be the very thing AI needs more of.
• 19:24
  It's what it cannot generate.
• 19:25
  And then becoming comfortable offline away from it all.
• 19:31
  What is it like for you to live at the rhythm of the natural world, not the digital world?
• 19:39
  If you can become comfortable in that and guide and lead other people into that space, you will have a future as a man.
• 19:50
  It's not going to be everybody that values this shit, but there are going to be many people who see through the illusion of the always online digital AI powered culture.
• 20:04
  Right?
• 20:05
  The two great visions of the future we got in these last decades were 1984 and the kind of fascist dream, so to speak, but also brave new world.
• 20:19
  And the other type of control, which is what happens when life can become perfectly pleasurable.
• 20:25
  Right?
• 20:26
  And we never have that friction.
• 20:29
  This is the great, I think, real thing standing at our doorstep.
• 20:33
  What happens when people become addicted to never having to feel discomfort.
• 20:38
  Cultivating a healthy nervous system, becoming a relational leader, learning to self-author, developing comfort being offline.
• 20:47
  These are all ways to live in that world of friction, right?
• 20:53
  Of an important type of friction that a computer can't ever do for you, that an AI can't ever do for you.
• 21:00
  So this is kind of off the cuff.
• 21:04
  And, you know, I'm sure there's much more nuance and complexity to this.
• 21:07
  But, again, even being able to start to think about these things is really important for you as a man.
• 21:15
  Do not be caught off guard.
• 21:17
  Change is coming.
• 21:19
  It's not hyperbole.
• 21:20
  This stuff is already here.
• 21:22
  And right now, it's happening under the surface.
• 21:25
  And it's going to bubble up.
• 21:27
  And we want to make sure, I want to make sure, like I said, that you have good standing in this new uncertain world.
• 21:35
  There's going to be opportunity there, just like there is any time there's a great realignment.
• 21:40
  And you want to be set up for that.
• 21:44
  More and more people cannot live without their machine.
• 21:48
  More and more people are not going to be able to live without the AI guiding and giving them the answers.
• 21:55
  So you can become a rare, precious commodity by not falling into that trap.
• 22:01
  By knowing how to take care and regulate your own nervous system offline without digital assistance.
• 22:07
  To become that relational leader.
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  To foster and build trust with other people offline.
• 22:14
  To know what you're feeling.
• 22:16
  To know what they're feeling.
• 22:18
  To understand how humans develop.
• 22:20
  And to know how to stay connected, even in conflict.
• 22:24
  To be able to have that self-authorship and self-taste and self-identity.
• 22:30
  That is created and grown independent of the AI.
• 22:34
  That is uniquely human.
• 22:36
  That allows you to make decisions without them just coming from the outside.
• 22:41
  Again, that's a huge capacity.
• 22:44
  And it's going to be an important one that AIs will pay you for.
• 22:47
  Hey, what do you think of this?
• 22:50
  Because you're always going to be more creative than the AI.
• 22:53
  All it is is a predictive machine right now.
• 22:56
  And then becoming comfortable offline.
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  Right?
• 22:59
  People will pay you.
• 23:00
  They are paying me to go offline already.
• 23:04
  Can you be comfortable in your body without being plugged into the internet?
• 23:09
  Are you comfortable in nature?
• 23:11
  Are you comfortable offline?
• 23:14
  Moving in real time?
• 23:17
  Can you stay focused on things without a constant barrage of stimulation?
• 23:24
  This is so important and so real.
• 23:28
  So those are just four capacities I've been thinking of to help you AI-proof yourself as a man.
• 23:35
  I would love to hear what you're thinking about this kind of stuff or what resonates or doesn't.
• 23:40
  Feel free to email me or join the free podcast community to drop me a note.
• 23:44
  All right.
• 23:46
  Until next time.