Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Ruben Hassid - Author of “How to AI” | The #1 AI Teacher (Billions of Views) Explains Who Survives and Who Doesn't

Transcript

Ruben Hassid - Author of “How to AI” | The #1 AI Teacher (Billions of Views) Explains Who Survives and Who Doesn't · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Every second word out of people's mouths was AI, but that still doesn't mean that people are understanding how to use it. There's a very small select group of people in SF and other groups of entrepreneurs around the country that actually use it in their company, but the average person is just scared and stressed by it. Most people love to talk about it. Very few people
• 0:19
  actually try. Ruben Hassid built one of the largest personal brands around AI, helping millions understand how to use it instead of fear it. Every major industry is trying to figure out the same question. How do you use AI to stay ahead instead of falling behind? What's your message to the people that are scared of AI?
• 0:36
  People don't understand that AI is not making all of us better. This is not the right way to frame it. It's making mediocre much better. I'm not paying my lawyer to make contracts. I'm paying my lawyer to find the gaps, the key bits. What I need is the thing that is not inside the AI. So this is why I keep saying master AI before it masters you.
• 0:58
  My fitness pal is a success story partner. Now I wanna talk about something I do every single day that I almost never bring up on the show, how I actually keep my health from falling apart while I'm running everything else in my life. When I first started my own health and wellness journey, my fitness pal was like the first app I ever downloaded
• 1:15
  to help me figure out my nutrition, my calories, my macros, all of it. When you are moving at 100 miles a minute, your workouts get sloppy. Your eating gets random. Don't even talk to me about when you're on the road. I mean, there's days where I look up at 4 p.m. and I realize all I've had is a coffee and whatever was sitting on the counter.
• 1:32
  And for years, I told myself, like many of you, that this was just the price of being ambitious. You're grinding, you're building, you don't have time to think about lunch. And that's a story that I kept telling myself, but it's not true. It's just being disorganized about the one thing that you can't actually replace, which is your food, which leads to your health. Food is a foundation for your energy, for your sleep, for your recovery, for your
• 1:56
  for your performance, for your life, basically. Food is the one input. You can have the best morning routine on earth. You can meditate, you can journal, you can cold plunge, you can do whatever you want. If your nutrition is off, everything else suffers. I see it everywhere.
• 2:11
  It doesn't matter if you're optimizing for the perfect body or you're optimizing to win the championship or you're optimizing your brain to be at 150% and always be cognitively dialed in. Whatever it is you're trying to optimize for, it starts with food. If your nutrition is off, everything else suffers. Over the last week,
• 2:29
  Not only am I working with MyFitnessPal, but I've been back in the MyFitnessPal app on the premium plan. This is the app that started off my own health and wellness journey years, years, years ago. And the first step that I took towards getting my own health back was downloading MyFitnessPal.
• 2:45
  years and years and years ago. I scan a barcode, it pulls everything up, it remembers my regular meals. It's done. There's no friction. And that matters because the second something is annoying or there's a lot of friction, I stopped doing it. And that's just the truth with me. This one stuck because it doesn't feel like work.
• 3:01
  Now, the moment I started logging what I was really eating, not what I thought I was eating, and there's a big difference there. I was way under on protein and I was eating most of my food after 8pm. And I was telling myself that my nutrition was fine because I wasn't eating junk, but not eating junk and actually eating right are two very different things.
• 3:17
  And with premium, I can see all of this, right? I can see trends over the weeks. I can see the macro breakdowns by gram, by meal. I can see where my energy dips in the day. It lines up with what I ate. And I can set custom goals for different days, which is useful because my training days and my rest days obviously don't look the same. Turns out that I wasn't feeding myself properly.
• 3:36
  And it's embarrassing to say, but it's true. It's not about obsessing over a number. It's not about punishing yourself for eating a burger. It's about awareness. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at. The MyFitnessPal app just makes you look. I just want you to start with one week. Just log what you actually eat for seven days and look at it. And I promise it'll tell you something you didn't know.
• 3:57
  And whatever it's telling you is going to help you function better today, tomorrow. And most importantly, it's going to help you live a much longer and healthier life. So go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com. That is podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott. That is S-C-O-T-T, Scott in all uppercase letters. And you're going to get 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 4:22
  Again, this is so you can start living a healthier, happier, longer life. Go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott. So Ruben.
• 4:40
  I had all these smart hooks and ways to start this conversation. But now that I've met you and I came out to San Francisco and I'm excited that we get to sit down because we're two content creators and we look at content, I guess, very differently, similar but differently. At least I hope what I do is I try and teach people and educate them.
• 5:02
  But the first thing I said was you should do more podcasts. And you said, well, why? And I thought, well, my thesis was when I started the podcast was that's how you build relations with people online.
• 5:13
  But you actually just had a very different perspective on how to create content that matters and helps people. So explain to me how you started your newsletter. Explain to me even the content you put into the newsletter, but also just your framework for content and thinking through how you want to be a content creator. Because it's very different than how I show up and how I create video all the time.
• 5:37
  So first I have nothing against you doing a podcast. Like you're good. Everyone making podcasts is doing extremely well. And it's true, you're right. The building relationship through podcasts is unmatched because you have someone's face, someone tone I was joking with you. You'll get my French accent if you were listening closely. And it's something you cannot have through text, through images or through any other medium.
• 6:04
  But that's the problem. It's too strong. This is what I was telling you. The best analogy is how I started my own music label when I was 17. I was a French high schooler and I was blown away. I was fascinated by the French touch. So it's the 2000, early 2000, you had...
• 6:24
  incredible artists and the most known one. It's the duo Daft Punk. And you also had another duo, Justice. I was... By the way, I love both of those. Yeah, I was obsessed, man. Like I even created like a Facebook group for both of them at the very early days of Facebook. And the whole premise is...
• 6:42
  They started as, we don't want to give interviews. We want people to be interested in the music. And then they went a little step above. They went like, oh, actually, we're not even going to show our faces. We're just not going to show our face.
• 6:56
  Just people will only appreciate the music, no interviews, no nothing. And I think this is something that I've been very drawn by, is the idea that my content is useful. I'm a stepping stone on someone's journey. Someone will use my contents
• 7:13
  to achieve things in the future. I don't want them to be a fan of what I do. I want them to use it as, I told you, IKEA instructions. And this is something you've been like, what? So I love that your content stands on the quality of the content. Yeah. And not, I mean, with podcasting,
• 7:34
  no hate to any of the video podcasts out there, but I'll name a very specific example, who I love his content. So, Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett. One thing that differentiated him, he's a great interviewer, great question asker, but one thing that differentiated him, and he speaks about this, is how he made his podcasts feel like movies. And he made a trailer, and he wanted to emulate the experience you'd get when you walk into a movie theater and look at a trailer for a new movie coming out. That's what attracted people.
• 8:03
  So that's how he attracted people and built the podcast to make something that was more of a marketing play. If you think about just pure quality of content in the podcasting world, I like to think that I do a good job. But an example that stands out to me would be Lex Friedman. Yeah.
• 8:17
  So really, there's zero marketing. There's nothing. He's exceptionally dry. Yeah. But the content stands on the caliber. You take it a step further because my theory was to build a relationship with somebody online, video is an easier way to do it. You actually remove a lot of the video component and you just focus on these are the words that are going to impact your life or teach you a thing.
• 8:39
  Yes, as I said, and I keep explaining to my team we're building IKEA Instructions. So just like IKEA Instructions, it's someone who has never built a piece of furniture, has never handled a hammer in his life. It's 2 a.m. He probably fought with his girlfriend for two weeks over this piece of furniture. You know, the box is sitting in the living room for like, God knows the amount of time. And somehow you have to give him instructions
• 9:06
  that he will follow to build it. He's the one building it. I'm only the instructions to get there. And so should I make videos about how to build your IKEA furniture? Probably not. It's like some piece of text, just what's necessary. He doesn't want to know the story of the furniture? No, he wants to get the steps.
• 9:27
  and the necessary images so that it get there. And then you have other stuff, like for example, how many steps? 60 steps? 50 steps? 10 steps? 2 steps? 2 steps is too little. 60 is...
• 9:42
  delusional so you need like the right in between and then you go step beyond what do i start with what's the first step so in a lot of the things that i do it's about change management it's about this guy who's sitting in his living room it's 2 a.m and he has to make the change the box needs to change into a piece of furniture so i want to be that i can instructions to people
• 10:07
  So your bar for content is exceptionally high because there's nothing outside. There's just a substance. Yes. When you first started, like, where did you start on your content journey? It was LinkedIn? I was, no, I was nine-year-old, actually. I was nine-year-old and I learned English because I was obsessed with a video game called Guild Wars. Which I know as well. How old are you now? You know Guild Wars? Of course I know Guild Wars. No way. You're kidding now. I'm 35.
• 10:32
  You're 35. I'm 29, but my brother is 33. I know Guild Wars, yes. And he showed me Guild Wars. And I started playing when I was seven. I was obsessed with it. I was young. I was very young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was watching him playing. Then, it's funny, then my mom was giving us, like, timing to play. But I was using all of my time, because it was the family computer. I was using all of my time not to play the game,
• 10:56
  but to find ways to build up characters. And then I was writing blogs on how I did. And this was my happy place. I believe it was the happiest moment in my life. It was like from seven to 14, I was writing blogs about Guild Wars.
• 11:12
  And in a sense, I was doing exactly what I'm doing today, which is I was building IKEA instructions on how to build up those characters. Because you had an insane amount of competencies you could choose from, but you had to make your own mix of eight. And so I was making blogs on the one that I was choosing.
• 11:32
  And then why? But at first I was making it in French. Do you know how many people was interested in? Like no one. Less than that. And then I was watching like the American, the English forums. I was like, oh, so many people. I need to be better at English. So I started writing blogs in English. I love that. So this is the idea of what? Theory crafting? Yes. So theory crafting, is that...
• 11:56
  When you look at what you did with Guild Wars and theory crafting and taking a complex topic and unpacking it, when did you notice, because I am fully aligned with you, this is the issue with AI right now. It's too complex and too many people are talking about the latest release or the latest model or the latest LLM.
• 12:18
  And there was even some chart. I can't remember where this chart was, but it showed the amount of people that are actually using AI versus... Because in SF, I'm sure... By the way, I'm not even from here. I'm in Miami now. And before I was in Toronto, I'm Canadian. But everyone's talking about Miami and Toronto and Miami. But in SF, it's like you can't... It's not even...
• 12:40
  There's not another conversation that's happening. It doesn't exist. We went to dinner, we went to lunch, we went to breakfast. Every second word out of people's mouths was AI.
• 12:51
  But that still doesn't mean that people are understanding how to use it. There's a very small select group of people in SF and other groups of entrepreneurs around the country that actually use it in their company. But the average person is just scared and stressed by it. So they talk a lot about it. And you said, who are the people who understand it? I can give you a very spoiler, like direct answer. It's only the people who tried and they tried long enough. That's it. Most people love to talk about it.
• 13:20
  Very few people actually tried, actually read the document, actually went on the tool and tried. People say, what's your competitive advantage? Why people read you? I'm like, because I do try what I'm writing about. And when you try it, it's kind of like you're trying to explain to someone biking, right?
• 13:38
  But you've never been on a bike. I've been on a bike. I felt from the bike. I felt the wind on my face on the bike. So when I'm telling you how it feels to be on a bike, you actually believe me. But most people, I'll give you an example.
• 13:54
  I consult, I have a consulting firm, and we went into this very old school law firm. And the guys were like, we cannot use Cloudantropic. Like, we can't use it because we've heard and we keep talking about it, that it's not ethical, they're not gonna use our information the right way. And I ask them, I keep asking them the same question. So you guys talk about it a lot, ah, every day.
• 14:20
  We talk about Cloud Entropic every day, the fact that we should not use it. And then what do you think about it? I'm like, did you guys read the SOC 2 compliance of Entropic? Like what Cloud Entropic are saying towards how they deal with privacy? Oh, no, we prefer talking about it. Like we haven't read the document. So it's like...
• 14:42
  They spend an insane amount of time talking about what people are talking about. But no one's actually reading the thing. No one's actually testing the thing. And this is the only thing that separates good people that understand. It's just that they tried from people who are just either scared or they just love talking about it.
• 15:00
  I think that the future, the next five, 10 years will, and you will agree with this 100%, will be defined by the people that actually use it and do it and live it and breathe it and test it in their business, in their life. And the people that don't, the people that just sort of ruminate on it or push back against it or the people that are afraid of it.
• 15:19
  I see this gap that's going to be increasingly widened between the people that are successful and have jobs and have careers and have successful businesses and basically the rest of the world. And that gap is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And that's a whole other scary conversation. What life is going to look like for people that don't understand how to use it. But the reality is. How's the life from people who don't understand the Internet and don't want to use phone? Not great.
• 15:45
  And we could argue that is it good or bad? I'm not here to argue if the internet is good or bad or the fact that we have phones is good or bad. But here in Miami, we could get on a call, we can get work done. So there is a chance that the fact that we can use a phone and the internet makes our businesses a little bit more healthy, a little bit more sturdy. Well, it's a fundamentals of like a functioning economy.
• 16:12
  is internet, is like the AI, the way that I look at it, it's not like a nice to have. It's part of the underlying ecosystem that drives all commerce, all career, all business. It's a new way of working. And I understand why people are scared. Like, have you ever seen this, and I have to send it to you, this ad, the first ad for spreadsheets for Excel.
• 16:36
  It's a brilliant ad, by the way. Don't quote me on the year. I think it's like the 80s, 85, 87, or the 90s. And it's two guys who are going into an elevator. And you can see they're like super stressed, all suit up in a corporate building. And the guy's like opening his computer. No, the other guy's like...
• 16:58
  It's not ready. We don't have the... The spreadsheet is not ready. But at that time, it was like physical ones that you would show. And they're going into a client meeting. You understand it. It's a client meeting and the elevator is going up. And then the guy's like, don't worry, I can edit the numbers. And he's opening and it's like the premise of Excel is just a table and some numbers. And he's editing the numbers and the guy's like...
• 17:23
  you can edit numbers on a table? He's like, yeah. And then, beep, they arrived at the top of the elevator and job is done. And when you see this, it's obviously comical. You almost feel bad for these people. Like, whoa, this is how we used to work. But I think this is what's happening. It's a new way of working. And it's just stupid to think that...
• 17:44
  Obviously, people are scared. Obviously, people resist the change. But it's hard to believe it's not going to be our new way of working. And to go back to your previous point, the people that will leverage it and the people who won't, we have a name for the first people. And this is kind of like my mission is that more people become them. We call them clickers. Have you ever seen, hopefully, your mom is still here. My mom is still here. And when she's using her phone, I'm going to pull out my phone.
• 18:12
  She's using it this way first. It's very important. That's so important. But then she, there's a second thing. Everyone knows this one. When she's not using the phone she's used to use it, she's asking me for permission, like, should I click here? I don't know. I've been here. And so the problem is that she thinks the phone's going to explode on her face when she's going to click on it. And I have no problem with mom. My mom is a pharmacist. She doesn't have to know how to use technology so much.
• 18:41
  But the difference is the clickers. The clickers, they open a tool, they click everywhere. They see a new tab, they click on it, they try some stuff. They're not afraid of technology and they're not afraid of trying. Kind of like a kid who wants to run, keeps on climbing up, running, trying, climbing up.
• 19:01
  But you have very few people that are clickers. So my goal when writing IKEA instructions for how to use AI is to get more people into becoming clickers. And eventually they might outgrow me. That's okay. They might outgrow me and they'll be on another journey on being a little bit more technical, a little bit more advanced. But I've been a stepping stone in their journey.
• 19:25
  one of your ideas is master AI before it masters you. And this is not to scare people. Really, it means that if your work can be templated, you need to find an edge above the template. So,
• 19:40
  By the way, just to give a shout out, your newsletter, and I'm actually curious, I'm going to go into this idea in a second, but your newsletter, you mentioned that it went from, it's incredibly fast growing, if not the fastest on Substack? Probably the fastest on Substack right now. Went from, so we started May 19th. Today's the 13th, I think. Oh my goodness, it's almost a year anniversary. Congratulations. Yes, exactly.
• 20:02
  And when I started, I had like a small newsletter where I was just sharing some few stuff. I had like a couple of thousands of people on it and went from a couple of thousands to. Was it always how to AI? Was that always the premise? Yes, it was always how to AI, but I was not pouring as much energy as I am today.
• 20:20
  Today, I would say most of my job is to write two newsletters a week and my team does the rest. So today it's almost 600. No, it's more than 600,000 people growing by a couple of thousands of people per day. And yeah, I'm having tons of fun writing it. Why do you think that yours grew so fast when there's so many creators that are putting out AI content? I think good content wins. And that's it. Yeah.
• 20:50
  And when you look at the newsletter landscape, you have a mix of, you have tons of news, okay. And it's very hard to break in because there are so many. Discovering the latest. Latest news, latest news. This happened, this happened, Nvidia, this, this, this. It's like a bit downing. And then you have all the ones who are testing, but usually it's a conglomerate of multiple editors.
• 21:19
  And I always tell my team consensus, skills, creativity. So I'm building my team in ways that it's super small teams and only one person is calling the shot. And for my newsletter, I'm the only one writing it, the only one calling the shot.
• 21:35
  So because of that, I have a big concentration of no consensus, maximum creativity, and I'm testing everything that I'm doing. So I think just very few people are doing that. They're trying the tool, writing the newsletter, feeling it, and avoiding podcasts.
• 21:56
  Because it's hard to do all of that. It is, yes. And then do keynotes and then do podcasts. Of course. And then to your point, the biggest news organizations die through consensus. Yes. So that they don't have an edge or unique perspective. They have something that has been copied across every other mainstream news organization. Or even worse, have you ever tried to get a concept approved by 20 people?
• 22:24
  unfortunately, in past lives when I've worked for companies, and it doesn't work out well. It doesn't work out well because it's like someone has a very blunt, strong stance on something, and then five other guys are like, I'm not sure if we should do that. The other 10 are okay. But then you kind of find a consensus, and it becomes this bland, generic, watered-down idea of a concept. But the problem is content is...
• 22:49
  You have to take a strong stance for contents. And I'm okay to be wrong in my own content. And I'm okay to try and fail. But I think this is why people find it useful. Because I've been there, tried it, and I'm sharing where I've been so far. Like, okay, so this was my path. And I felt here, here, this was useful. So you guys can probably find something useful too.
• 23:11
  Let's go back to this idea of mastering AI before it masters you. So if your work can be templated, and this is where everybody gets scared. Everyone's like, oh, AI is going to replace my job. Okay. So what do you mean by master AI before it masters you? And then two-part question, which I don't like, but it's important. What's your message to the people that are scared of AI? I can give a very simple example that is not AI.
• 23:37
  20 years ago, okay, imagine if I give Scott a magic computer, okay, and you are a designer, okay? Everyone knows Canva templates. You have...
• 23:50
  Every posters, every slides, every whatever they're doing, like happy birthday, like gift cards. You can build pretty much everything. And they have an insane library of templates, right? If I gave you that magic number with Canva 20 years ago and you were a designer and you were getting designer gigs and you were the only one who had access to those templates, you would have been the richest designer on earth.
• 24:20
  you are creating world-class templates, not templates, designs. But what is the value of the template when everyone has access to the template? It becomes a tool. It becomes something that is commoditized. And then when Scott wants to, the new Scott wants to raise, let's say a 1 billion seed round, you don't want the guy making the pitch deck using a template for Canva. You're like, oh no. So that is the average. Yeah.
• 24:50
  I want more. And so this is what's happening with AI. People don't understand that AI is not making all of us better. This is not the right way to frame it. It's making mediocre much better.
• 25:05
  The average got insanely good. I'm not paying my lawyer to make contracts. I can make a contract extremely fast. I'm paying my lawyer to find the gaps, the kevets. He could use AI to make contracts, I don't care.
• 25:20
  What I need is the thing that is not inside the AI. So this is why I keep saying master AI before it masters you, because as you said, if your job is just templates, the Canva templates, or just writing some contracts or making sure that the PDFs has the right information inside it, you're not getting ahead. You don't have that special edge. And the problem is,
• 25:45
  the templates are getting better and better by the time. Like every day, the AI is getting cheaper, better, cheaper, better, cheaper, better. So you need to have that little taste that is on top of it.
• 25:59
  Amp is a success story partner. Now, most people don't fall off their fitness routine because they're lazy. They fall off because life gets in the way. The gym is a 30-minute drive. Equipment takes over your living room. Some days you've got 20 minutes, not two hours. Amp fixes that. It is the smart home gym that actually looks good in your space. It's sleek, it's premium, barely takes up any room. Here's how it works. There's one smart dial.
• 26:20
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• 26:48
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• 27:03
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• 27:22
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• 27:48
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• 28:14
  It's built for every industry. It's ready for every boardroom. NetSuite.ai slash Scott Clary. My fitness pal is a success story partner. Now, here's something I've noticed after interviewing hundreds of founders on the show. The ones performing at the highest level, the ones that are consistently winning. They aren't just optimizing their business and their calendar and their team. They're paying attention to what they eat.
• 28:35
  And the ones who aren't, they're usually the first ones to burn out. And this pattern is consistent enough that it actually got me thinking about my own nutrition, not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like, what's going into my body and how is it fueling me. That's why I started using the MyFitnessPal app.
• 28:52
  I wanted to see what I was actually eating, not what I assumed I was eating throughout the day, but the real numbers, what my protein looked like, how my macros, macronutrients were broken down, where my calories were actually going throughout the day. And the app gives you all of that. Now, what kept me using it is that there's zero friction. I can scan a barcode on something I eat and it pulls everything up. I can also voice log.
• 29:14
  what I ate. It also remembers my regular meal. So most days I'm logging everything I ate in under a minute. It's very, very easy. Food is a foundation for your energy, your sleep, your recovery. It's not one of many inputs. It is the one input that matters. So go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium. That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com code Scott. Cash app.
• 29:42
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• 30:28
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• 30:57
  It's hard to say. If you're an electrician or a plumber, life looks good for now. I actually will need more of them. So, you know, they probably don't need. If you're a cook, you probably don't need. I mean, depends if you're running the restaurant. But that's the thing. It depends. Depends if you're running the restaurant. So there's a ceiling on your career now because if you're an electrician or a plumber or a cook, you can do the physical thing.
• 31:21
  This is not a podcast about robotics, but you can do the physical thing. Precisely. But you can never run a business because the business owner who does the landscaping or runs a restaurant uses AI. I'll give you an example.
• 31:35
  I have two coffee shops that I love down my place. And one of my favorite things when I'm writing my newsletter is that no one knows that I'm writing a newsletter in Tel Aviv. And I love to hear signals from people who are very much outside of this bubble here in San Francisco, outside of the devs, outside of Twitter. And I talk to real people. Yeah.
• 31:56
  And I'm talking to this, so my barista, and he's telling me how he wants to move to another place that is much more expensive, but it's a big kitchen. And it's very rare to find big kitchen in Tel Aviv. But he said, maybe...
• 32:11
  If I play it right, like the rent's going to be much, much more than what I can afford. But if I can plan some dinners, some private dinners, I could maybe make it up. I'm like, yeah, like you should explore that. I would love to go on a private dinner. I know he's an exceptional cook. And then he says, do you think I should ask AI for like a business plan? And I was like, in my head, I was like, I have to write a newsletter on it now. It's like...
• 32:39
  Yes, I think you should. And that's the kind of enablements that I can give to like a guy who just want to pay his rent, have a big kitchen, maybe want to host. So this is the kind of stuff. And imagine now he wants to make some images, some marketing. The guy's running a coffee shop.
• 32:58
  with the HR around it, the turnover, like everything. And on top of it, he wants to do like a side business. Yeah. AI will help you do that. Um, but to your point, what's going to happen for people who don't adopt, um, what happened for, um, what happened to the tribal agencies and the internet?
• 33:22
  What happened to them? What happened to hotels who just stopped, didn't want to go on the internet? And it's an interesting answer because the answer is not everyone died. The answer is either you go,
• 33:37
  ultra super duper premium and somehow you find a way that you're not using AI, but tons of people that you manage, that you pay, and that's why you charge an insane amount, like a very high premium.
• 33:53
  Or I think you need to start thinking about being on the internet, connecting to your clients on the internet. I think, I mean, for knowledge workers, for me, it's, it's, it's inevitable that they have to figure out how to use it. And I, and I'm done something that I keep bringing up is more people just have to think like entrepreneurs, like they cannot just be static in their job. So you got to learn the skill sets that you could go and build a, you could, you could be an entrepreneur.
• 34:20
  because your mindset is dialed into building and learning. Yes. But you choose to work for a company. Yeah. And that's the future of jobs. And it's scary because, yes, our grandparents...
• 34:34
  Like my dad changed jobs twice. So he had two jobs. It's not so much two jobs. Like in today's standards, two jobs in 40 years. Crazy. That's crazy, right? Two jobs in two years. Yeah. See? And you probably learned like you learned how to write and then how to run a podcast. And then I bet you have tons of other businesses like...
• 34:58
  And if I ask you, Scott, in 10 years, do you think you're going to acquire like very wide different skills? You'll be like, oh, I have to. You have to, yeah. But you have to. Yeah, I know I have to because I have to keep up. So that's what's scary is that the speed of technology is insane. You have metrics on it. It's called VUCA. And I forgot what the four letters is. It's velocity and some other stuff. Insernity, velocity.
• 35:23
  and C and A acceleration. This is how you measure technology curves, and it's just dramatically increasing. It's exponential. So you have, for example, how fast we adopt radio, how fast we adopt fridge, how fast we adopted a bunch of other stuff. But then the curve becomes just exponential. It's going straight up. Straight up. And because of that, our brain are definitely not...
• 35:49
  accustomed to like, hey, your job is going to change 10 times in the next five years. But the truth is, this is what we need to do. I always bring this example of that 70% of Americans not so long ago, like 100 years ago, were doing agriculture.
• 36:12
  They were farming. Logistics in farming, in the farm, or raising animals that will be used in the farm. And a bunch of other stuff, but agriculture. And we went from 70%.
• 36:28
  to less than 1%. I don't know if you have friends who are farmers. No. I don't have friends who are farmers. And I think 100 years ago, it was like, what do you mean? Yeah, all my friends are farmers. Your cousins and your uncle is like, everyone is a farmer. I mean, at least more than half of the people you know are farmers. So what's hard is that we went from 70% to 1%
• 36:49
  I think, I believe like 100 years, maybe 50 years, it went sharp down and then. But here, what we are doing, it might get faster. We might go from whatever percent are copywriter, lawyers, or customer support to less or more. And it will be extremely fast. So the most important skill set, to your point, is adaptability. It's your ability to learn and to build.
• 37:18
  What do you mean by taste is the only skill left? And here you have the exclusivity, but it might take 10 years for me to finish it. I'm writing a book for myself. I'm writing a book because I don't want to, I want to write something that has no deadlines. Because I'm writing two newsletters a week for over a year now. I'm writing, I wrote a thousand LinkedIn posts, two per day, forever. I'm writing a book that has no deadline. And the title is Don't Pick 27.
• 37:48
  And no one steals my name of a book. I see you. I chose it. It might take five years to write it. Don't steal it. Don't pick 27. The idea, even if I don't write it, the idea is that if you ask an LLM to pick a number between 1 and 100, it will most likely pick 27. Why? Because humans...
• 38:11
  most likely pick 27. It's a good number that we like to pick that feels like random, but it's not random, obviously, because our brain are...
• 38:21
  Pretty similar. We would never pick one. We would never pick 100. Exactly. You want to be a little bit different. Somehow we love the number seven. So 47 and 27 are the two highest mentions, yes. And 27 is the highest. And so because of that for a long time, maybe now they fixed it, but LLMs were saying 27. Claude, Gemini, Proplexy, anyone.
• 38:43
  And the idea of the book, Don't Pick 27, is the idea that if the AI is the tastemaker, is the one choosing, calling the shot, you'll always have the average. You always have the Canva templates. You'll always have the free contract templates on Google when you're trying to make a contract that is a little bit more specific than the one that was templatized on Google. So the idea of taste is the only thing that is left is because...
• 39:12
  You're still the one asking the AI. And more importantly, and that's the part that people always forget, once the AI answers, you're still the one deciding what was good, what was not. And AI is not built to be a truth machine. If I say, I'm Scott and I'm having a podcast with Ruben, you cannot ask the AI, what's the best way to interview Ruben?
• 39:38
  It's stupid and you know it. What's the best way to interview Ruben? It's going to give you a good answer, but it's one answer. The right way of prompting it would have been give me 20 completely different angles
• 39:53
  on interviewing Ruben, even better. Here is all of the information I gather about Ruben. Fact check it. After that, okay, I think we got something solid. I cross-checked. It's good. Now that you know all of this, what could be 20 completely different ways of asking Ruben like a contrarian view or something he firmly believes in? And that's how you get like the Jarvis mode of like, well, I have 20 completely different ways of asking Ruben questions.
• 40:23
  I'm the one you have the experience of running podcasts I don't so if I saw the question I'll be like
• 40:32
  think this is good. But you, Scott, would be like these four ones. These four ones. But I'll tell you something, too. Part of the art of a podcast is understanding the energy of the room and what the guest is actually excited about and the tonality and the inflection in their voice and when their eyes light up over a certain topic. And then you go deeper on that topic. It's impossible for an LLM to figure that out ahead of time.
• 40:55
  So I have notes. I have notes for everything. I have too many notes. Half the time, I understand the journey that I want to go on. And AI can help me plan out this journey. But I barely look at these notes when I'm interviewing because it can't have taste. And taste is only something that a human can understand. It can get good at giving you ideas, but it can't have the final say. Are you concerned with people completely outsourcing their thinking to AI? It's happening. It's happening.
• 41:26
  It is happening. We outsource our dating lives. We outsource our orientation. We outsource. I definitely and I'm being self-critical. I don't have a driving license. I'm 29. But I promise everyone in my family I'll get it before being 30. So if you watch this in 2027, you can send me a DM and ask me if I have my driving license because I'm supposed to have it this summer. OK, you've you've had permission to become lazy.
• 41:52
  Yes, because I have Uber. Like, what do you mean? I can be in China. I cannot, but Korea. I can be in Korea. I lived in Korea for a year. And there I could get a taxi very easily on my phone. I could drive around. I didn't have to. I don't feel the pain of not having a driving license. It's okay. So this is okay, I guess, for a driving license to a certain extent. But for thinking and work, which is LLM's,
• 42:21
  it becomes like a little bit risky, a little bit scary. That's why I keep telling people, you mean in the loop, bring taste first, take the right necessary steps on how do you want to get there? What do you try to achieve? My starting sentence of almost all of my prompt is, I want task for success criteria. So I'm already defining...
• 42:48
  what am I doing here? You know, not trying to find like, I don't know what to do, like tell me what to do. No, I just know it won't give you the right answer. When people completely outsource their own thinking,
• 43:03
  I've noticed this when I use AI too much. I find that it doesn't just create worse content. I find that I actually think slower in all areas of my life. I find that the words that I could normally pull or the stories that I usually like, especially on the podcast, I find they don't come as quick. I don't know if you found that, but I am concerned to a degree if we completely outsource our thinking that we become like dumber.
• 43:28
  As somebody who uses AI all the time, because we're talking to two different groups now, because the first group we were addressing was somebody who wasn't using AI. But now we're talking to the group that overuses AI in this future that we're talking about. Somebody who writes about AI every single week and probably plays with way more like I try, but you probably play with every single tool that comes out. How do you protect your humanity as you use AI as a necessary tool and your intelligence and all the things that come with it?
• 43:56
  There are many things to cover here. First, I want to debunk the stupid MIT. MIT actually said, this is not true. There's this stupid academic research. Academic research. They tested it on 50 people.
• 44:12
  on your brain scan. You've seen it everywhere. The brain scan of chat GPT makes you dumb. One, it was 50 people. Two, it's not even what the study said. The study said, if you only use it without thinking before what you are trying to do, yes, you activate way less part of your brain. Just like if you said, prepare the podcast with Ruben and then you end up here in the room
• 44:37
  And you've never thought about it. You're like, oh, so this is common sense, right? But what I've seen in practice is more, you have the people who don't think about it before asking the LLM. So this is what I was saying. Bring enough context, know where you're going and apply judgment after. So you have before, bring context, know where you're going. The LLM helps you, human in the loop, give it follow-ups, feedbacks.
• 45:06
  And then once you get the final piece, it's not the final piece, you probably need to twist it a little. It's a fun tool to brainstorm, to explore, and to discover new ways to do something. But you're still the cold shotter. Then you have the other extreme.
• 45:23
  And the other extreme, I call them the Jarvis obsessed dudes. They're all dudes. They're all on Twitter also. And they eventually build an agent orchestrator, B2B SaaS. But these guys, they want to build Jarvis the same way people were building Notion Second Brain.
• 45:43
  It feels so good to think you're productive and you have all of those automations and agents that are doing so much work. It's this joke that open claw is everywhere. And when you ask someone who's using open claw, so what do you do with it? It's like, it doesn't matter. Let me show you my open claw. The end point is the fact that they're using the technology.
• 46:09
  not what they're doing with the technology. So it's almost like they're signaling that they're in touch. Exactly. I think it's just, it's kind of like people who are obsessed with a postal card, and I'm okay with that. It's true that it's a fascinating tool to use when you're vibe coding for the first time. Definitely feels exciting.
• 46:29
  But it traces back to one of my favorite interview answer on stage after his keynote in front of a wide audience of experts. It's Steve Jobs, 96. And again, don't quote me on that. I think it's 96. I remember his hair. He has long hair. Obviously, the sweater he has. He's on stage like this with a... How do you call the little wooden... A podium? Yeah, exactly. And a guy's like...
• 46:59
  How do you call that? A heckler? Like someone who's trying to assassinate him. A heckler, yeah. Asking a question like, would you like to tell us what you've done in the last seven years? Because basically he done nothing. And also, why don't you use that...
• 47:14
  specific technology that he should have used and he didn't on his latest updates. And Steve Jobs has the best answer that people should really watch because he's like, I understand that tech guys love that technology and potentially that technology is the best. But so far, what I've seen is this is not what people want and how they use it.
• 47:37
  So the same way people always ask me, Ruben, where is your newsletter openclaw? I'm like, show me the receipts. Show me that it's actually good for knowledge worker, people who don't code. For now, I think it's way too hard to get in if you're not someone who's coding and way too hard to maintain if you're not someone who's coding. So again, someone stopped me yesterday. I was at a LinkedIn event. He was like,
• 48:05
  I feel I have to get on top of agents. Everyone's talking about agents. It's in San Francisco. You see the word agents 50 times a day. And he said, where is your newsletter on agents? And I said, I would argue you don't need agents. You don't know how to build agents. And even if there was like a very simple ways for you to build agents, for now, you can maintain it.
• 48:30
  So this is why LLMs and the EI industry obviously is going on a hockey stick of a trend, but it's always important to be attuned to
• 48:43
  What can you do today? The actionable things you can do today. Truly impact your life for the better. Yes. And this is why my subsec is How to AI. It's not the potential future stuff you could do. It's not about the cool release that might have an impact. It's what is impactful today for your writing, your searching, and how you deal with your work.
• 49:03
  Odoo is a success story partner. And yes, it is Odoo. And they made sure that I pronounced that right. A few years ago for the podcast, I was paying a video editor in one city, a designer in another city, a VA overseas. And every Friday, I was logging into three different platforms just to pay people. Different fees, different invoice formats. I had a Google sheet that I was updating at midnight some nights to track who got paid and who didn't. That was the whole system. It was more chaos, but that's what I had at the time. Odoo would have saved me from all of that.
• 49:30
  accounting, invoicing, project management, inventory, HR. There are over 45 apps all in one platform. And the wild part is that the same platform that handles your books can also build your website. It can run your e-commerce. It can handle your e-signatures. It can do all of it.
• 49:45
  And it all just lives in one place. Now, how they work, when you sign up, the first app is free for life. You have unlimited users, hostings included, and then one subscription unlocks everything else. So if you're running your business across six tabs in a Google sheet right now, which I know some of you are, do yourself a favor and go check it out. That's odoo.com, links in the show notes below, odoo.com. Huel is a success story partner. Now, I'll be honest with you, I am terrible at eating well when my schedule gets packed.
• 50:12
  I'll look up. It's two in the afternoon. I haven't even had a real meal. And then I'm just useless for the rest of the day because I'm hitting a wall. So I started keeping Huel around. It's been an absolute game changer. They just launched into Target stores nationwide, which is huge. You can walk right into your local Target right now, grab the Black Edition ready to drink and the Daily Greens ready to drink.
• 50:29
  The Black Edition, this is a full meal, 35 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, gluten-free, and it's under five bucks. I grab one of these in between recordings, done, I'm good for two hours. And the Daily Greens is more of a health thing. 42 vitamins, minerals, and superfoods in one bottle. It's developed by a registered nutritionist, 25 calories, four grams of fiber, and one gram of sugar. I'll have one first thing in the morning. It's the easiest win of my day. Now,
• 50:51
  15% off for new customers. Use my code Scott at Huel.com slash Scott and do the post checkout survey. It helps to show. Go to Huel.com slash Scott, code Scott. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now, customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from. Now, when a buyer or a customer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? They're looking for a product. They're looking for a service and they're going into some AI chat tool and they're saying, hey, help me find the best one.
• 51:19
  If your company isn't showing up, you're missing out. And most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up. And by the time they figure it out, they've already lost a deal to somebody to figure it out. This is what AEO is. Answer engine optimization. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your buyers and your customers are looking for. It could be before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for.
• 51:47
  So check out HubSpot.com to learn more about AEO. HubSpot is the agent to customer platform for growing businesses. Hostinger is a success story partner. And look, with entrepreneurs, I see this constantly. Someone's got a great idea, a real idea, and they just never start. And it's almost never the idea that stops them. It's the setup, right? You sit down, ready to finally build the thing. And then you're nine tabs deep trying to figure out which website builder, which domain, what to do about email. And then three hours later, there's nothing live and you've lost a spark.
• 52:16
  Hostinger takes all of that off your plate. It's the affordable all-in-one place to actually get your idea online. You tell it what you want, or you just show it a screenshot, and the AI builds a real first version of your site in a couple minutes. Your domain, the site, your business email, all in one account, so you're not duct taping five different tools together and hoping it works, and it's priced low enough, then money isn't the excuse anymore.
• 52:41
  So if you've got something sitting in your notes app right now, trust me, it's way easier to start than you think. Go to hostinger.com slash success and use code success for 20% off. That's hostinger.com slash success code success. What are people actually using to make their lives better? Forget the people that are just talking about agents or open claw or, and by the way, I agree with you with most of this stuff because I've, I probably dabble in this stuff more than most because my background's in tech. So...
• 53:09
  Kimmy, Open Claw, Claude, Cowork, Manus. Like I've done, I've tried everything with the various degrees of useful or not useful. I'll tell you something. Like one thing that's worked really well for me is, is Claude Cowork because if I can, I can actually use probably a more expensive solution than most people want. But if I use lovable, Yes.
• 53:30
  plus Cloud Cowork, plus I also have like Supabase and Railway, I can get- So for a database, lovable to build websites. Exactly. Cloud Cowork for the interface. Interface plus actually modifying the GitHub. I can as a non-coder actually build an app. Yes.
• 53:48
  that's quite a bit of money. It's not like, for the average person who's just dabbling, I don't think they want to spend like a thousand plus dollars a month just to mess around with some app that's not good, which is just me nerding out, it's education. And I gave you the example of
• 54:04
  I have a consulting firm in New York. My favorite customer is, client is, they are exporting salmon. They're the biggest exportator of salmon. They make half a billion dollars of revenue selling fish. And they have a very small team. I don't want to call them out. They have a very small team. These guys don't need...
• 54:28
  like lovable and up and claw and that's okay uh they don't have a super advanced like technology that's okay they have like a real uh business with physical stuff that they're selling what they need is to be more productive and for them being 10 20 more productive is definitely achievable um
• 54:51
  versus the guy who just want to play with open claw and connect all of the AI possible. And when you ask him, well, you've been 10% more productive or 50% more productive, but to do what? So this is why my consulting business is more focused on legacy businesses, like real businesses. And I think these ones are going to be the one actually leveraging AI the most because they're doing it okay with their...
• 55:20
  limited amount of technology and that's fine. But as soon as you make it, you turn the knob a little bit by being like Pareto rule, the 20% that will yield the 80% of work. So this is not the open claw or a bunch of other tools. My follow up, just so you can go into that is what are companies actually using that are useful for them now?
• 55:41
  First, we're in spring 2026. It's important to... This is spring 2026. I learned my lesson, okay? I learned my lesson that goes fast. So you never know. You never know. I think businesses need, like...
• 55:58
  one general purpose model to run most work. And today I don't see any competitor to Cloud and Cloud Co-Work for knowledge worker. Again, it's important to explain for knowledge worker to do the writing part. I believe most people's jobs
• 56:19
  It's a hot take. It's to search information and write information. They search information. They search clients to reach out. They are looking for contractors. They're looking for people to hire. They're looking for new ways to do something. They're looking for information. And the second thing they're doing...
• 56:37
  They're writing internal memos, briefs, all the communication that you have with your team or with your investors, and they're writing externally. They're making external communication, marketing, or selling, sharing, follow-up with a sales pitch deck. So most people's job is searching information, writing information.
• 56:57
  For writing, so far, I don't see any competitor to Cloud Cowork. I am convinced that ChatGPT is about to release a super app very soon. Codex is already what CloudCode was. And a few months after CloudCode, we had Cowork. So I believe Codex will be there too. I'm invited by Google for Google I.O. I don't know what they're going to announce, but
• 57:22
  They just launched a Gemini app. They have Google Docs and Google Sheets. If they don't launch like a super duper app that is co-work for Gemini, I don't know what they're doing. Microsoft just launched co-pilot co-work. So definitely there is this first important piece that is the writing part. Now the searching part,
• 57:46
  Cloud is okay. Right now, I have the best experience with chat GPT, extended thinking to search. They also have a deep research mode that is...
• 57:57
  Insane, could search for like an hour, two hours. I did it. I run an experiment with the peptid markets. I was like, tell me everything about the peptid markets. It ran for like an hour, 30. I was like, what is that? Is this a bug? I thought it was a bug. And then I had like this huge reports. And I know a lot of people run on clients' reports that they have to go. Yes, yeah. So this was interesting. So this is the...
• 58:22
  most people's job, searching, writing. And these are the useful tools for those jobs right now. Yes, pretty much. And then you have the specific ones. If you want to make slides, it's going to be gamma. If you want to do, you need a note taker because most people's jobs is through meetings. People forget 70% of their meeting after one day. I think I forget 70% of the meeting within an hour. But that's why I try to have...
• 58:49
  Like few amount of meetings because otherwise my brain just like starts leaking and like, wow. So I use Granola. I love Granola. It's connected to my Claude. And the beauty of it is that I open my Claude. I do that a lot. I would advise you to do that if you've never done it. I'm connecting my Gmail, my Slack and my Granola. So my notetaker to Claude.
• 59:11
  And when I'm negotiating a contract, I'm like, I have information everywhere. I like Gmail with my partner and also with my lawyer and another email thread with the three of us. And then you have Granola. I have meetings with my lawyer, with my partner, with one of my employees who had key information. And then my Slack, because there is the Slack thread where we shared some information. So Claude is like getting all the contexts.
• 59:37
  And now it's my thinking partner. It's not to give me a solution, but I'm like, okay, what's the strategy? How do we get there? And then I'm asking Claude to ask me questions. You use the tool Ask User Question. This is fantastic. It pops a form. You've never used it. It pops a form, and then Claude is like, well...
• 59:57
  I have your context now for your strategy for this contract. You want to be aggressive and ask for this? Or do you want to play soft and play for this? Or you want to derive to do this? And I'm like, I'm picking like, you can see the past of the MMORPG. I'm picking my own adventure. It is. It is exactly picking your own adventure. And I think this is what people want. We call it the IKEA effect. They build it with the AI. It's human in the loop. This is where you get the taste.
• 1:00:23
  So I believe this is key to give all the context to Cloud. And for that, what I use is Granola. I have Slack. People might have Teams with Microsoft or they might have Notion for their knowledge base. And I have Gmail, but you can put Outlook, you could put whatever you want.
• 1:00:41
  So this is interesting to me. So when you look at AI, how it works is you ask it a question. And it has a massive decision tree of all the different outputs that it could possibly give you. Yes. And it has to interpret what you want and then give it back to you. Yes.
• 1:00:58
  I would assume that for some reason, Claude has figured out how to do this better. So it actually didn't solve the AI problem. It solved the interpretation of shitty human communication problems. Yes. Better than most others. But I...
• 1:01:15
  I want your opinion on what this means for how people interact with AI. But I'm also just curious how ChatGPT that raised the most money, how Google, how Microsoft, out of these three giants, how did Claude...
• 1:01:33
  For most people that are in the space, it came out on top. They've been ruthless on getting enterprise to adopt it. And they understood that consumer is one thing. But then you suffer from the image that you're a consumer tool.
• 1:01:51
  I go to ChatGPT to ask for my health, to ask for the best tech house in San Francisco to celebrate something with my girlfriend or the best XYZ. Claude was like, we're here for work. This is serious business. And then they adopted...
• 1:02:08
  They wanted the fast adoption from enterprise, and they deployed as many resources to do it as possible. By the way, it's the Palantir playbook. Mistral in France is also doing it. They're doing it not at the same scale as Entropic, because Mistral is playing the EU play. So because the EU laws are so crazy, European laws are so crazy, they just go and adopt as many enterprises as possible. The same playbook as Palantir.
• 1:02:38
  but to get the enterprise to actually use Mistral. So the guys who did this,
• 1:02:45
  Got it right. Now what OpenAI did, they closed Sora, they closed Chagipity Atlas, the browser. It's still there, but they don't do much with it. And now all they talk about is Devs Enterprise, Devs Enterprise. They're trying to copy the playbook. They do. Google just announced today that they're having a massive investment in forward deployed engineers.
• 1:03:09
  Entropic launched a new fund also to have more forward deploy engineer. I have a consulting firm to help people adopt AI and to deploy engineer in these businesses. Now, what do I think everyone's going to win? I think the AI labs are making the right moves, but I think also the independents
• 1:03:30
  will have a hedge. When a company comes to me and in six months, 12 months from now, it's going to be very hard to choose what's best, but there might be like one that is better for like a legal firm. I know Claude is better in French for a legal firm or this time it's actually Gemini that is better for the Israeli insurance company that needs Hebrew insurance.
• 1:03:54
  can they go to Gemini or Cloud or OpenAI? Like Entropic, Gemini? They can't ask them like, hey, do you think you guys are best? Yeah, we think we're best. We're going to deploy some engineers to your company. But when they come to me, I'm like, oh...
• 1:04:09
  I don't work with those companies. I want you to have the right tools because we're going to do tons of work together anyway. I just want you to be as effective as possible, as productive as possible. So the space is going to be very interesting. I interviewed someone recently who was interviewing before me at OpenAI and Entropic and at Perplexity, the three of them in San Francisco, to be an account executive. And he told me like...
• 1:04:35
  There's a bit of a, it's a bit of a war zone because like, it's going to be hard to convince people that you're the right solution. And the competition is going to be like exponential to attract those enterprise and make them adopt it. Yeah.
• 1:04:54
  So this is my play for the next years is to be the guy that has no brand. I'm not branded OpenAI. I'm not branded Entropic or Gemini. You're the consultant. Yeah.
• 1:05:06
  I'm the consultant that is outside of the race, but want the best for your business and that's it. And for the people who can't pay for my services, everything is for free. Everything is for free on my sub stack. There is a pay tier of my sub stack, $200 a year. And this is only to join a circle community where you can meet other people. If someone's running a podcast,
• 1:05:28
  And you're like, hey, I have this problem when I'm searching for a person that I'm questioning. What should I use? Oh, I have the same problem. I found this automation or this stuff. So it's just for people to connect. And I feel like once you have to put money on the line. You take it seriously.
• 1:05:48
  You take it seriously and it filters out the spams, the who buy my stuff. So I have everything is for free on my sub stack. You could pay to have access to my circle if you want to mingle with other people. And then if you want your entire enterprise to adopt AI fast or have a roadmap on what we call AI fluency, this is where we get into play.
• 1:06:08
  So your ecosystem is as a creator. So you start off with a free content, LinkedIn, Substack. Those are like the main goal. Those are the main places to go. Then you obviously have the circle community, which you're launching. And that's going to be paid, which is fine. And then you have the consultancy as well. As a creator, as a creator.
• 1:06:31
  This strategy, I just want to sort of, this is a lesson for other creators and entrepreneurs. Because we, you and me, think the same. I put out a ton of free content. Almost like, to be quite honest, I probably could have made more money if I had gated things or built my content engine a different way. But I've always found that if you put enough value and enough free, the money will find its way to you. Oh, yeah. It does. It's true.
• 1:06:55
  A hundred percent for a creator who's just starting out. They're looking at you as a role model. Substack's very hot right now. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are like, oh, I want to just sort of copy what Ruben's done. Speak about how you built the audience and the actual company and the revenues, whatever you're comfortable sharing, that have come from you building content.
• 1:07:15
  basically a free content empire, because it's turned into real money. And I think people miss that point when they look at, like, how do I start a content strategy? They think I wanna monetize, I don't wanna gate my content right away, and I wanna find a way to make money day one, and I'm gonna charge people for a course, and I don't even do a course or anything, but I'm gonna charge people for a course right out of the gate. And I think that's why a lot of content creators get stuck.
• 1:07:35
  First about the gatekeeping. Yesterday I was at a LinkedIn event and someone came to me and she was like, remember I live in Tel Aviv, no one knows what I'm doing. And it's great, I love it. It's the death punks. I'm just hanging out in the street, no one stops me. Maybe once a month there was a ghost like, hey, I'm like, what's up? That's it. But here obviously San Francisco at the LinkedIn events
• 1:07:58
  Some people recognize me. And there is this girl who's a student, super smart, Arlena Yang. And she was like ecstatic to meet me. And I love what she was doing because she's a content creator on LinkedIn. She has her own newsletter. And she was telling me about how useful I was to her. And she was sending me all the newsletters. She was like, yes, I'm just a text file. And then the one on cowork and a code for dummies. I sent it to a bunch of people. And this morning I had an interview
• 1:08:26
  with Airbnb. And they told me, how do I know so much about AI? They started riffing about all the stuff that I learned from you. And to me, I'm like, wow, I love being that person for her, or at least my content is for her.
• 1:08:42
  she never spent any dollar on what I'm doing. And that's okay. And I told her, like, she was like, I'm a student, I'm sorry, I never paid for anything. I'm like, doesn't matter. Like, I reach about, even hard to tell now, I don't even know, it's a couple of million per week on LinkedIn, on Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram. I would call it like,
• 1:09:06
  around 5 to 10 million people per day. And a fraction of that's going to pay me. A fraction of that. And that's okay. If I don't gatekeep anything, the few, I would say, 10,000, 20,000 people that will eventually pay me will find their way because I've been so useful to everybody that sometimes some person would be like, ah, I can pay for it, the sub stack. Yeah.
• 1:09:33
  And I find a lot of value connecting with other people that are in the same industry and want to learn from Ruben. And that's perfect. Do I think that 99.9% of the people don't have to? Yes. It's literally on the...
• 1:09:48
  on the welcoming page when you're subscribing to my sub stack, you have two tiers, $200 or zero. And the three bullet points, you can check now, three bullet points. The first one is like, if you're thinking, do I have to pay? No, go on the other side, go on the second tier, which is like, don't pay. You don't have to, it's okay. So I do think that money finds your way and the creators that, and I think this was your point, the creators that are building
• 1:10:17
  not with the intent of like monetizing. They do it in a very different way that is liberating. If a chef is opening a restaurant with sufficient margin, but with the idea that he wants to be a good host and make good food, there's a high chance
• 1:10:36
  that the ward is going to do his magic and he's going to have enough people coming up. So I think this is the same with creators. This is why a lot of the time I tell people, if you're a new creator, it would be great if you had a job on the side. And this is something that, you know, all the hustlers are like, no, quit everything. No plan B. Just go straight up to it. And if you're failing, it's because you're not doing it enough. Yeah.
• 1:11:02
  I think if you can't take the pressure of doing two jobs, creator and your regular job, you're not going to be able to take the pressure of being a creator and building a business because it's two different things. So in a sense, it's like keep your job and just be a good creator, useful to people, no gatekeeping, no monetization. And eventually...
• 1:11:25
  you switch to keeping this, but now having a business that supports it. But you need to think about it this way because when you do creator and business at the same time, you're just too stressed and the business is gonna hammer down. I don't think it'll grow. And I think that people can feel it. I think that people, I think that as a creator,
• 1:11:49
  I don't even think there's a world anymore where if you monetize too quick and you try to build a business around it too quick, you even can be a creator because there's so much free content. Yes. I don't even, like I don't, I'm just thinking of the people that I know. I'm looking at your newsletter. I'm looking at the Gary V's of the world, 100% free. Yeah, everything's for free. Everything's for free because if not, you can't grow. So you can't actually become a creator.
• 1:12:15
  you have to hit this inflection point where you have an audience big enough for you to sell your thing to. Yeah. It's like the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times Post, all of those journals, and every time, the one time you're clicking on it, the one time, and it says, did you pay your $2? I'm like, ah, come on. Why are you gate shipping everything? And why do you think the subscriber count on all of these legacy gated news mediums is decreasing? Yeah.
• 1:12:43
  or they're trying to find new ways to, but still to our point, this is why social media became so big because like people want non-gatekeep. Like content cannot be the thing that you gatekeep. It has to be something else, has to be educational, has to be consulting, has to be keynotes, events, something else. People read your newsletter. They read How to AI.
• 1:13:06
  I want to talk about the average consumer of your content. You're going to have some people that, you know, they learn stuff, they go execute in their job or in their business. But obviously, there's some people that are probably hesitant or scared or nervous to jump into AI and use it.
• 1:13:27
  So what's what's your what's your when you talk to this person? So you had a chance to talk to this person and somebody is reading a newsletter. They get that it's important, but they don't know where to start or don't know how to start or they're scared of starting. How do you get them over that hump? Because, you know, as somebody who's in this, that their life will be better. Their future will be safer if they figure out how to use this and use it. So what do you tell them?
• 1:13:50
  So this is my favorite kind of topic. And this is something that a lot of people come to my office in Tel Aviv because we're like a group of friends. So we mingle a lot in the office and tons of people come to the office. And when they talk to me, it feels like they're talking to the teacher. Like, I haven't done my homework. I'm sorry. I've never used AI. I'm like...
• 1:14:08
  Like, it's okay. I'm not like, I'm not your teacher. I'm not going to give you a grade at the end, you know? But this is the kind of people I want to help. This is like the people I want to help. The people that you said they could use it to do a better work. Most of the times it's because they've never tried.
• 1:14:26
  I don't remember the statistics, but it's insane the amount of people who only tried ChatGPT, the free version, and people who never tried it. I believe it's like 80% of people never tried AI or only the free ChatGPT. When you see the people who actually paid for a tool that is not ChatGPT, it's like 1%, 2%, 3% of the world. So this is nothing. So my...
• 1:14:50
  goal, my mission is to make someone try something else for the first time. And there is a test that I love is that people think AI equals agent and automation equals you're going to automate my email. And now I'm going to send a message to my boss that I didn't want to. And I'm like,
• 1:15:09
  Actually, no. Like, I never write about email automation. The reason why I don't think people want email automation, but it's a different topic. I love showing them Whisperflow. I don't know if you know the tool Whisperflow. It's voice-to-text.
• 1:15:23
  Very simple. You press a button on your keyboard, you talk, and then it writes. And you're like, oh, actually, I'm writing faster than I'm typing. I'm like, yes, three, four times faster. And it makes the experience of a computer
• 1:15:40
  much more delightful. Like you just press a button and you're like, um, Anisha, she's my right hand. Anisha, I think we have to cover like, uh, next week's LinkedIn posts. Like one, I think we, the strongs are not, the hooks are not strong enough too. I think there is some, some design problems. You need to check with Shaina about it and three, and then they see the list being built up one, two, three, and the names are correct. Yeah.
• 1:16:04
  Anisha, Shaina, my name is Ruben, it's hard to write. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, how do you do that? Like, just press the button, you talked? How does he know all of this? Like, you trained it? I'm like, no. If I'm saying your name, for example, and that person's name is Marjorie, a very French name, it's hard to write.
• 1:16:25
  I just press the button, say Marjorie, and it doesn't write it well. And then I'm like, no problem. I just edit it on my keyboard where I'm typing. Could be a Google Doc, a Slack. And then you see Whisperflow being like, okay, now when you're going to say Marjorie, I understand that this is how you write it.
• 1:16:44
  If you say Scott, this is how you write it, double T. And now it knows Scott, always double T. So when the experience Whisperflow, which in a way, it's such a simple tool. They're not being Jarvis, Iron Man, automating emails. They're just typing fast or something they've been using forever. They're like, oh, so this is AI. Like, that's it.
• 1:17:08
  It's not this monster that's gonna eat up my computer. It's also something as mundane as, are you typing fast enough? And then they get addicted because they're like, wait, I always write lazy prompts with Chad GPT because it's annoying to write a lot of context. And I'm like, don't do it, press a button, and now talk, it's a podcast. And guess what? People love to do it. They're like, wait a minute, I can just go on and talk and give as much context as possible?
• 1:17:37
  And this is how it compounds, because now they're giving much better context to chat GPT or Claude using Whisperflow so it's actually faster. And all of a sudden, they have this addictive experience
• 1:17:52
  of like, I can give a lot of context and what it answers. Now I know that I should challenge it and I should actually see more variation and then choose the one that I love, like choose your own adventure. And actually, if I have to follow up, I can use my voice instead of typing and typing. And all of a sudden you see them like being hooked
• 1:18:13
  on the idea that their brain, and you can see their brain is definitely functioning at that moment. They're like talking, typing, editing. And like, you see? Yes. That was AI. That was it. It was not a monster. No email automation. It was just voice to text, follow up, getting to your best work. But then it's made your life objectively much better. Yeah. And much more efficient. And this is how you start to move from just...
• 1:18:37
  Somebody who's scared of it or somebody who's just consuming information, not using it to somebody who found one application for it, used it. And then that's like the gateway drug. Exactly. And it's not everything. It's not perfect. You have to be on top of the wave, not after the wave, not before the wave, on top of the wave to actually make the most out of it.
• 1:19:00
  You were heckled at VidCon. A guy said AI is going to destroy our humanity. Yes. You said the opposite. Help me understand why AI is not going to destroy humanity. In the year 1000, the Pope wrote a letter and he said, the word's going to end.
• 1:19:23
  The word's going to end. And he was convinced. The reason why is because we invented at that moment something that was not, and here I only know the French world, but you know when you... Bow and arrow. Bow and arrow. So we invented the version that you can just... Crossbow. Crossbow. So they invented crossbow and the Pope was like, this is it.
• 1:19:44
  End of the word. Why? And he had good reasons to think about it. The Pope saw nations and himself as protected by knights. And knights were heavily religious. And they believed in all the narratives and the traditions that the Pope was sharing. And the Pope was just as strong, if not stronger, than a king. And so he was like, wait a minute. A peasant...
• 1:20:09
  can shoot a knight with a crossbow and it kills him, it means eventually peasants will all have crossbows. That's the end of the world. Like, it has to be, right? And this dumourism that we have inside of us is just very natural. This is like, we love to see the end of the world with us.
• 1:20:34
  Why? Because we're going to die. So doesn't it feel good that everything is dying with us? You know, like if I'm out, everyone's out. Like I, I don't want to know what's happening after. Nothing's happening after Terminator, the nuclear weapons. Like you have an endless, um,
• 1:20:53
  you have endless examples of dumerism. The Egyptians with like Ra, who's going to just blast the sun and then everyone's going to die. Like whatever it is, we just love dumerism. Now, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that there is no risks
• 1:21:06
  It's just a bit annoying that we always fall back to doomerism. We always fall back to the extremes. Like nuclear, for example, weapons is a threat. It's something we should be aware of, something we should discuss, something we should, you know, protect or not, this and that, and put laws and make sure that everyone is doing it right. But we invented it. The war didn't end. Everyone say nuclear apocalypse. Yeah.
• 1:21:34
  Okay, might happen, didn't happen. So it's always that you need to have a bit of balance and self-check your own doomerism, like everyone's going to die and no job's going to exist. Okay, if you went back 100 years from now and you said, you know, like 70% of the folks are farming...
• 1:21:57
  Yeah, so now we need some copywriter. There is a guy making a podcast. Oh yeah, because of the internet. Oh, because Netflix and Uber and Amazon. We went to space, the moon even. We went back recently. So the guy would be like, what are you talking about? I am farming, making potatoes. And why are we talking about this? So this is very hard in retrospect to see what's going to happen in the future.
• 1:22:28
  The last thing I want to, so first of all, Ruben, thank you for coming on. And I want to send people to your social. So where do you want to send people? How to AI is your newsletter. That's how you're most known. I have an even better line for you.
• 1:22:43
  You know what I tell people? What? They're like, so what should I do? I like what you're doing. I'm like, forget everything that I'm doing. Don't read the LinkedIn post. Don't read the Twitter and the Instagram and the Facebook or whatever, wherever I am. Watch the podcast with Scott. That's one. It's very important. But just read the newsletter. I made this newsletter on Substack because...
• 1:23:08
  I think twice a week is the right cadency to master AI before it masters you. I could have done it every day. You see my energy? I have enough to write every day. I could have done it once a week or once a month.
• 1:23:23
  I felt like twice a week is the right cadence. My idea is book a 15 minutes meeting with me and my newsletter. When you receive it, don't open it, it's okay. Just book a 15 minute meeting during the week and take 15 minutes to open the IKEA instructions. Try to build that piece of furniture. And for example, I wrote a newsletter on Cloud Connector, how to connect your Gmail, your note taker, Granola, and your Slack, and what can you do with it?
• 1:23:53
  It takes about 15 minutes to try it, implement it, set it up, and then experience it. And then, hey, you've experienced it for 15 minutes. Great. You're ahead. Instead of doomerism and AI news, you've done it for 15 minutes. You do this twice a week. In a year from now, you'll be mastering AI before it masters you.
• 1:24:16
  If you want to leave the audience with one last idea, if they read your content for twice a week, 15 minutes, that's it. Just to start. What's the most important idea about AI? Don't pick 27. The average will get better and better, but the average is average. It's mediocre. So your role, our role as human beings is to understand what is average, how good is average, how to be better than average.