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The Second Act Advantage · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: Welcome back to Systems of Scale. I'm Ian Gatsky. Today I'm joined by Jay Sammet. Jay has spent his career around disruption. But what this conversation is about is what happens when your current path stops working and you have to build what comes next, AKA your second act. We talk about why reinvention starts with solving real problems, why accumulated experience can become an advantage instead of a liability, and why static content is no longer enough if you actually want people to apply what they learn. We also get into his AI companion, Jay Bilt, alongside his book and why he sees guided implementation as a necessary layer, not just a nice addition. If you're new here and you get value from this conversation, hit subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Jay Samit. Jay, thank you so much for being here. speaker-1: Hey, my pleasure. speaker-0: In your newest book that's coming out, The Second Act Advantage, you push back on the idea that reinvention is something that just happens to people or something that only shows up in time of retirement or where like it's going to be something that just naturally kind of occurs. But you describe it more like a process that someone can design and create at any point in their journey. And this is a very topical thing. The fact that there's going be a lot of disruption in the world and in people's lives coming up here due to AI and the rise of this technology. But when somebody reaches a moment. where their work no longer feels aligned with what they want their life to be, what does the architecture of reinvention actually look like? speaker-1: I'll take it broader, whether by choice or circumstance, everyone's career gets disrupted. If you're lucky, you get to pick the when and the how most of the time it hits you like a truck. And AI, as we've talked about, I was chairman of one of the public AI companies. AI will replace 30 % of the jobs. Whenever I say this, everybody thinks it's somebody else. When I said a 10 years ago, my first book, disrupt you, I'm a lunatic. When I said it at Davos before I got and gave my talk, the head of the International Monetary Fund was giving a talk saying 30 % of jobs will disappear in the next two years. It's happening folks. That's white collar jobs have blue collar jobs, everybody. Pay attention. Good thing you tuned in. What I believe is disruption, obstacles, or opportunities in disguise. If everything's humming along, great. Nobody needs you. world's working fine without you. They didn't wait for you to come along and say, do something. And I've run major corporations. I've worked at the white house, worked with Vatican. Nobody ever called me when they're having their best year. Matter of fact, everybody hired me when all the other opportunities, they said, ⁓ let's give Jay a shot. And that's how I became known as a disruptor. What you have to do is every new disruption, putting in different words, knocks the dinosaurs. unconscious, basically the big companies that just move on on momentum. And I've been the heads of companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. My last job as vice chairman, we did 44 billion a year. Want to know how many people in that company moved the needle? None. It just has momentum. What does this new change bring? And the first thing, you know, if I could stop somebody across the face through the screen, next three years, You're most likely not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody that's using AI better than you. Classic. It's much like I worked with Reid Hoffman to launch this startup called LinkedIn. Okay. Headhunters came and go like, ⁓ my God, my job's done for me. Look how fast I could do it. And then one day they woke up and go, ⁓ my job's done for me. Nobody needs me anymore. Okay. And I've done this again and again across industries. fast food, airlines, doesn't matter. They all follow the same pattern. And I started teaching it. And when I taught at the largest engineering school in the U S my best students did a hundred million dollars in a semester, not a hundred million in fantasy. Let's move stock market a hundred million in someone's pocket. So it can be taught. the way to look at it is what value do I bring? What's my unique superpower? What are things that I do differently? Because one of the things you have to realize, if you ever apply for a job, by definition that job exists, which means by definition, someone else has held that job, which means somebody is better qualified, better financed, probably better looking. And I hate that person. Okay. On the other hand, if you do something unique, you're the only person in the world doing it. So by definition, You're the best for the world or what you do. And I've been doing that for four decades. so whenever I go into a new thing at one point, I had seven of the top 10 best selling video games in the U S that sounds phenomenal. Except the video game market was this big. When Microsoft said they're coming in and going to spend a hundred million dollars, I turned into the blackjack dealer. I'm out of here onto the next new thing. And if you time it right. was a startup, we created a new ad unit. won't go into it for sake of argument, but 18 months later, News Corp, which owns Fox and all the television, bought it for $200 million. Why? We didn't even have a couple million in revenue. They needed a solution for a much larger problem. So entrepreneurs, people starting. Why I did the second act advantage and what's different is for everybody that second act had started a different age. If you watch the Olympics, that guy that comes in fourth by two one hundredths of a second, he's been working since he's six years old. He's now done. Yeah. What's the second act going to be? He's 20. He's washed up a football player at 30, you know, a cop at 40. So it doesn't matter when you start, but you have an advantage. The second time you have a network of people. You have the experience and wisdom that you've gained from overcoming obstacles and dealing with problems and difficult people and everything that gave you the gray hair and wrinkles. And if you're somebody that is from the 20th century, the last non-native digital generation, I really wanted to give them an entree to all the things that could go and provide them with a digital mentor to help them. speaker-0: companion through the journey, which is something that I've been working on. And I love to see that you have incorporated that into this new project, into the second act advantage. I think that's so cool. We'll definitely want to dive deeper into that with you later on in this conversation. But if we could kind of circle back to that moment where somebody is starting their second act, right? You took fourth, you missed out on the medal, four one hundredths away, whatever that looks like in your life, right? And you have to start this second act. Your situation has been disrupted. What is kind of that? broad strokes, high level structure of reinvention. speaker-1: The very first thing that I taught people and taught my students and everything. Entrepreneurs don't sell things. They solve things. Solve for five people. You have friends, solve for a million, become wealthy, solve for a billion. You change the arc of humanity. People ask, how do you always predict the future? I'll reveal it now because I don't care. I hang out with people that have been coding it. I'm not some oracle. I just see what everybody's spending a hundred billion dollars to do and go. Hmm. Where else could that be used? First thing you should do is take out a little piece of paper, do it on your phone, write down three problems in your life today. Do that every day for a month. First couple of days, it's easy. We all have problems after two or three days. You don't see them anymore because you live most of your life on autopilot saying that's the way it's always been. And when you can identify those new problems, again, at end of the month, you got 90, sort them between two axes. What's the total addressable market? What's the biggest thing that's going to make the most money? And what are you passionate about? Because if you don't care about it, it's not worth the time. And that's basically everything that's out there. Will you fail? Absolutely. But when you fail, when you try anything, one of two outcomes, there's only two outcomes. You learn or you earn. So you always fail forward. And I can give you endless stories of businesses that failed that we all use now of billionaires whose first businesses failed. Simple question to anybody listening to this. Did you make a billion dollars yesterday? It's a simple question. There's a self-made billionaire every 22 hours. So if you didn't, you're a slacker. Okay. What are you doing wrong? What we were all taught to be employees. We're all taught to fall in line. I mean. The IQ test was invented by the military to say, who's cannon fodder and who's worth training. Morons run that way, okay? Everybody else that can read, work with ordinance. I look at this change that's about to happen and AI isn't evil and it's not good. It's a tool. Some will use it for evil, some will use it for good. It will in this decade cure virtually all forms of cancer. They figured out the folding of every known protein and invented new proteins. It's amazing what they can do. Okay. Don't you want to be alive through that? But at the same time, consolidation of wealthy evisceration of the middle class, you're not making six figures and struggling because there's something wrong with you. The game has changed and no one let you in on it. I will tell you for anybody that is getting into knowledge and is writing a book and reaching out the Unexpected joy that I got from disrupt you, my first book was I wrote it to pay forward to help people, but I didn't expect to get emails from people thanking me. call them love letters. Your worst day you wake up. I've run billion dollar companies, no member of a board ever, you know, send me an email. Hey Jay, thanks for the great job. don't know. But I've heard from 140 countries. I've heard from readers. My books are in 12 languages. A dentist in Pakistan. What do I know about dental practices in Pakistan? know, Lithuania, Ethiopia, I just heard from an amazing young person there. And so, in the second act advantage, I wanted to champion people that didn't start till 90. I mean, people that have less starting point than anybody reading the book. so that you'll be inspired to know that you can, or in my case, it makes me feel like I've wasted so much time. And if you think this is the hyperbole of people selling anything, I'm not here to sell anything. I let the publishers make money off books. It's a way to get my thoughts into airports because that's the only place people tend to read. The average American college graduate never reads another book. Let that sink in. But if you're on a 13 hour flight somewhere, you might just pick up a book instead of killing yourself. Okay? So that's... generated tons of book sales. What I realized, there were two flaws in writing these books. One, I don't know what you know, where you're coming from. It's a different story if you're a senior in college than somebody that just got laid off from a tool and die plant that never went to college. Digital J, the nickname my team gave it, the AI app, it is your mentor to work with you. Are you trying to figure out geo arbitrage, how to live more cheaply or enrichly better life in another country? Are you interested in setting up a nonprofit and have a legacy for generations? Are you just doing a side hustle? Digital J is there to go, yes, you can. And to cheer you on through the whole process. And it was based on not Twitter conversations that devolve into racist tirades, if you ask it the wrong thing. It was trained on all of my books. My hundreds of speeches, my columns for Wired and the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, the best knowledge. And here's the funny thing, during press tour right now, I'm not interviewing with the press. Not to be arrogant, I'm letting them ask Digital Jay. And here's the reason, when I ask Digital Jay the likely questions, I go, ⁓ my God, that's a good answer. I wish I could. That's not me patting myself on the back. That's, I don't remember everything I've ever said, every anecdote, every tidbit, every fact. That's what's good about digital. so if you are in the coaching and mentoring business, you're never going to be as good on one day as the sum of all your days. So why not put that out there as the best version of yourself. speaker-0: that's available at all times. speaker-1: I'm now at the age where I walk into a room and say, why am I here? Not for the existential dread of life and purpose. I don't remember why I walked in the room. Digital Jay get you there. And if you're this far into the podcast and you're trying to make a difference or learn how to do this in your own things, the first author and book to do this, reach out to me, go to JaySammet.com, find me on social media and tell me that you bought the book. I'll even trust you and I'll send you a link. So you can start using digital J right away. I'm doing this because I like society functioning. I like to be feeling safe in my home and to go out to a restaurant and to live and meet my fellow people around the world. You take away 30 % of the jobs with no safety net. What are you going to do when you need a gun to eat? I go that simple. I'm going to die. So until that day comes, what can I do to make the world better? How can I help? speaker-0: Right. How can you help prepare society to people that have a smooth landing to this? speaker-1: And I'll sum it up in a really simple thing. If you think you can, or you think you can, you're right. And to prove it, I did a book called Future Proofing You. I took a homeless immigrant, his name was Vin, mentored him one day a week for a year. I gave him no cash, no business contacts, didn't tell him what to do, but he had to start a business that took zero capital. So something in the digital ether, okay? He went from homeless to self-paid millionaire in under a year. Anyone is capable of doing this. I've worked with many people that became household names and self-made billionaires. If you would have told me growing up as a lower middle class kid that dozens of friends would become billionaires, I'm like, give me what you're smoking, right? I'd never met a millionaire. I didn't understand any of this. But I also realized that many of them are miserable because they don't have a purpose. And the one thing for longevity isn't diet or exercise is purpose. I wanted to address, if you're going to make it to 60, and I hope you do, you're most likely making it to 90 now, which means your second act is longer than your first career. So this time with all the advantage you have, maybe you want to do good. and do well at the same time? What problem do you want to solve? Who do you want to solve? How do you make the world better? And you can make money. So that was the purpose here. And no one seems to be focused on that for some reason. speaker-0: Like a lot of people are just worried about themselves and not worried about helping other people. speaker-1: And I'll admit, I had my two kids when I was very, very young. My motivation that got me through being an entrepreneur and the ups and downs and the, and the aggravation and the ulcers and all that. And I've done many successful startups, raised hundreds of millions for startups. But what pushed me every time I'm like, I'm a failure. can't go on. So I looked at their faces and they deserved a better life. And that was the greatest motivation. If you want to rent my kids, you can have them, but they're grown up now and they've done fine. And it's translated at least for one more generation. But I hope Digital J. works as that motivator. Because motivation's like a shower. You need it every couple of days. It doesn't last forever. And again, everything in my books is based on science, okay? Your brain doesn't know when you lie to yourself. Every morning, if you look in the mirror when you're shaving, put on your makeup, brushing your teeth, whatever you do, say two affirmations. Today can be better than yesterday. That's a fact. And I have the power to make it so. That's also a fact. But here's what your brain does. It lights up your synaptic nerves and releases oxytocin, know, dopamine, all these wonderful things that make you feel good. It makes you more popular. It makes you sexier. It makes you better. It also makes your clothes more sales and it makes you see opportunity instead of problems. Or we've all worked with that person that has the cloud, like, you know, Charlie Brown cartoon where like, woe is me. My life sucks. Would not see opportunity right in front of you. And. We need to start teaching that your parents and your teachers didn't teach you this because they wanted to shield you from the pain of failing. Failing is part of the process. Failure giving up. And when you give up, you don't know how close you are. I'll give you a million stories, but my favorite, which also dates me, but it's about dating. speaker-0: Exactly. speaker-1: There was a time when it was on computers, but it was a still picture and you read about the person and you type something back and la dee da. But when broadband came, three guys came up with a brilliant idea. Let's put videos up so you can see the personality, hear their voice. First video was called tune in, up. The first video on the site was a guy in front of the Elfin cage at the zoo. What could be sexier? Well, turns out nobody wanted to date these losers and the site was a failure. But lesson number two. Anything you do digitally gives you data. Look at the data. Cause you're now farther down than anybody that had the brilliant idea and gave up. got feedback. And what they saw was nobody wanted to date these losers, but they sure wanted to show their friends, the losers that are out there and share those videos. So at the end of the first year, TuneIn HookUp changed their name to YouTube and sold for $2 billion. No revenues, game set match. The world's richest man has never had a business that made a profit. Hundreds of billions of dollars of worth. Never made a profit. So for all of you that are still under the zero sum game, I have to sell something to you that I buy for a dollar and sell for $2. Now I have your dollar. That's how money's made. With my track record, if I told you tomorrow I'm starting a company and I'll sell you 10 % for $100, would you give me $100? Okay, what do I now have? If have $100 in cash and $900. speaker-0: Absolutely. speaker-1: in equity that I can hire people with. I can buy things. I can trade things. I can do a role within another company. I've created $900 from the ether. That's how people create hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth. It is that simple. And I'm proof that it's that simple because I'm not the smartest guy. And some of these guys, they don't tie their own shoes. mean, they're not. Reed Hoffman, probably the brightest human being I've ever met. And I wish I would have slowed down when he offered me things and not thought on my own because I go, what are you investing in this week? Well, you stayed some people's house and they stayed your house. I'm not having anybody at my house. I don't want a piece of this Airbnb. The number of billions that I said no to because it wasn't presented in a way that my limited experience could understand. Somebody said, Jay, buy some Bitcoin. It's $10. It took me till a hundred to understand, but I'm telling you now you don't need to invent the anti-gravity shoes. You don't have to cure cancer. Somebody's already come up with things. In one of my books, I show you all the sites where the government has invented things for which the patents are publicly available for somebody to want to take and use. We went to the moon and somebody realized we want to bring back some dust on the moon. You don't get to just pick it up because guess what? There's no gravity. So we have to make a vacuum that doesn't need a cord because that's a long distance. Okay. A battery powered vacuum. Fast forward. What's that patent turned into? The dust buster. Right. There's always unintended uses. And most of my career was taking somebody else's great idea that is much smarter than me and pointing it where nobody bothered. speaker-0: Yeah, and I mean that's how all the great disruptive technologies are made. Like you told that story about YouTube, how it was originally started. I didn't realize that it was started as a dating platform to start. I knew the video, right? speaker-1: Twitter was a music site. can go on and on. I'll give you an example. One of my engineers was the son of a farmer who got Parkinson's from handling pesticides. And for the past hundred years, the best way that we figured out to grow food was let's put enough poison on it to kill every kind of plant, rodent, small bird and insect, but just not enough to kill humans this quarter. There's gotta be a better way. Turn over all the cards. Simple thing is for row crops, corn, soy, milo, what if we made little robots the size of an ice chest that go down and clip the weeds? Fast forward. One of the founders of Greenfield Robotics, they do this. Wow. What does this do? I did it because you know what? I want to eat food and not die. Okay. But the farmer now grows organic. He's not buying pesticides and all these expensive, he's making 40 % more per acre. thumbs up the birds, the insect and everything that have disappeared from our skies and the pollinators, the bees and everything they get to live thumbs up that extra poison doesn't run down the Mississippi and kill all the fish in the Gulf of Mexico. What's the downside? There is none. Okay. Why didn't anybody else think of this? Well, that's a really interesting question. And that gets back to your listeners because the 18 year old that Studied hard enough and went to the right private schools to be able to get to Stanford to be able to become a BC and an MBA from Harvard Most likely I'm not stereotyping but I am did not grow up on a farm in Kansas So not everybody has had your life experience not everybody will have the same problems that you see and so some of these problems are Massive and no one's paid attention to second example for somebody of the demographic of a second act. Buddy of mine is taking his medicine in the morning. Phone rings, does the phone call, gets off. Did I take my pill? I don't remember. If I take too much high overdose, that's not good. If I don't take it, have a heart attack, that's not good. Wait, I've got a problem for my thing. Fast forward, take a 25 cent Happy Meal watch, glue it on a lid. Every time you open it, it does the timer. ⁓ I opened it three minutes ago. I took the pill. Haven't opened it for eight hours. didn't add Bluetooth. ⁓ got an alert. Grandma didn't take her medicine. Call grandma. When she figures out how you are doing this, she'll stop making the medicine. So you call your grandmother. It's the least you can do. That was a multimillion dollar business called timer cap. So what everywhere give it to a doctor. He can unlock when you can get your opioids. So many simple things and the examples, again, this was a mom at home. You're a single mom trying to raise your kid and do whatever. And she comes to you, I got to make a poster for school tomorrow. It's a science fair. You run to the store, you get her a piece of paper. She does the thing. She messes it up. It's now late at night. You can't get another one. She's upset. You're upset. Everybody's upset. And then it dawns on you. Why don't they make poster board that has little lines on it? So he can write on it straight, you know, something you can barely see. She was smart enough to get patents for dummies or to think about it. And she went to the number two company and said, I'll give you my patent. You'll give me a royalty. We've all watched Shark Tank. You understand what a royalty is. You now compete against number one with a better product. She never had to hire employee, never had to raise any money. And she's a multimillionaire because her daughter messed up her science. project. I've also met people that are much better human beings than I could ever pretend to be. A guy's getting his oil changed. He's a retired civil engineer. He sees in an old National Geographic that's in the car, you know, the Jiffy Lube place, that when the Nile floods and rainy season, guys have to hang across a rope to get to town, to get to school, to get to the hospital. He's like, I can make an Indiana Jones rope bridge in like one day, whatever. And he decides. to fly to the middle of nowhere, explain what he can do, and build them a bridge. That'd be a great story. But then he set up a 501c3 nonprofit called Bridges to Prosperity, and he's built hundreds of these around the world, changed the lives of tens of millions of people. People figured out how to make prosthetics for kids that cost $15 instead of $100,000, where you have to wait till you're an adult to be able to imagine the difference between a kid that can Pick up a ball and be on a team and a kid that can't. What does that do to his mental or most of the world? People that should have wheelchairs can't afford for them. So they crawl on their bellies in the 21st century, or you can get one of those $5 stackable white plastic chairs from Walmart, put some bicycle wheels on it and started a charity. he sent millions of wheelchairs to people. speaker-0: What I'm hoping, well first, going back to the original start of the answer, every business starts by identifying a problem. You start first by identifying a problem because a business by nature is a, yeah, the second act advantage, right? That's where it starts. So you start by identifying a problem and then a business is just a problem solving machine. So you just figure out, you build a solution, whether that's a product or service, to solve that problem repeatedly. But one thing that I've been kind of banging the drum of over the last year is that I'm optimistic by nature. to a fault where I'm really excited about this transformation that's happening because I think it's going to force a lot of people into the position where they have to figure out how to create their own value in the world and AKA like start a business, become an entrepreneur, have their second act. And no matter what disruptions are happening out there, we're never running out of problems. There's always going to be problems out there, which means there's always going to be opportunities for somebody to step up and create a solution for whatever problem. And I love the point that you made that nobody has your life experience, right? There's people that have spent decades in school, know, the best researchers, investment banking, but they never saw what was happening out in the field. speaker-1: And by the way, in today's world where people are being replaced by AI, the first people that they're replacing are the ones with the gray hair because they cost more on the internet. No one knows you have gray hair. Okay. Your experience is of tremendous value. All that I'm showing you is how to monetize it. Okay. This is like so obvious to me, but I'll take a different thing. You and I both share a trait, which is we're both curious. And that drives me to think this way. I'm dyslexic. I connect dots differently. It's my superpower. Okay. But here's my other superpower. I'm lazy. Bill Gates once said early on, I only hire lazy people because they figure out the quickest way to get things done. Most of what I try to do with solutions in life is something that just makes it easier for people. something makes your life easier. Where do you do? know, it's like, ⁓ we're paying the electric bill because you know, rubbing sticks together and fire. That's a lot of work. Okay. So how can you just make people's lives easier and better? And I added a chapter of this book, which is slightly off theme, but based on my laziness, which is if you're going to now live to 90, if you're going to have another 30 years than the prior generation, Don't you want to be healthy to enjoy it? Don't you want to have not just lifespan, but health span? I am not the person to tell you go to the gym every day and like Schwarzenegger and eat like a yogi. Okay. My favorite foods are pizza, pasta and pastrami. So I'm speaking as J average, but in doing this, I hundreds of medical studies of what are the nine minimum things to do. to live an extra 28 years. It's called the lazy nerd guide to longevity. It's one chapter. And I'll give you a hint. Five of them you can do while you're asleep. I can't make it any easier. And I'll just explain one. It's too long to go into all of them. Treat sleep like a job. If you had a job, you wouldn't show up one day at noon, the next day at one, one day at 10 a.m. You'd be fired. You'd be miserable. Go to sleep the same time. I don't care what time it is, but your body will get in habit. Don't eat in the few hours before. Don't doom scroll with the bright white light. You have circadian rhythm rhythms that, know, 400,000 years of humans or homo sapiens. The second you do that, you have changed most of your life. Most people I know and me during my career running global companies where I didn't know what time zone I'm in and da da, you're always just barely awake to function until you get to bed and then you're too wound up to go to sleep. speaker-0: Yep. Brian Armstrong, if anybody found has followed him or come across any of his content, I think his big project is called like Project Blueprint, but he's like trying to defeat death basically. speaker-1: And I don't trash anybody trying to help people. But are you willing to take 200 pills a day and get transfusions of blood from your child? speaker-0: Yeah, no chance. If you are speaker-1: I'm not one to judge. I'm just saying that kind of advice doesn't translate if I worked out like Schwarzenegger I'd look like Schwarzenegger. I kick his butt. I'm younger. Okay, I'm never going to so the second people Give me a bunch of advice that I can't do I Do nothing. I'll tell you another simple one. The only way I've tried meditation If you can't tell from my personality, it doesn't work. I can't shut off this mind. I wish I could. So the only thing that I can do is I paint. love painting. I go in a zone. It's my flow state. It's wonderful. But being in a flow state for eight hours, sitting on your butt, not moving, not good. So I use an old school secret technology, not known to the you young folks. I listen to CDs when I'm painting because the CD stops at less than an hour, which means I have to get up. Stretch, bend, do something, move around for five minutes and go back to it. Getting up once an hour, that's a huge change for your life. Yeah. 7,000 steps a day. That's all you have to do. There's not one piece of science that's beyond the 7,000 does anything for longevity and health. Great. Walk 10 miles, do the marathon. I'm impressed. It's good for you, but it ain't going to make you live any longer than my 7,000 steps. All so all science-based. speaker-0: The point that I was getting into with Brian Armstrong is like he's the most measured man on the planet. Like he does the most insane protocols, but like he was asked if he had to simplify everything down into one metric or one thing, he talks about sleep. He says like resting heart rate at bedtime is like the number one metric that he would optimize everything for. So just everything revolves around sleep. But then to continue on like, no matter what domain you're studying, whether it's health, science, whatever, you find this consistent theme that The basics, just doing the basic fundamentals, the simple things is really the... speaker-1: One of the nine things is probably basic. Your mom didn't tell you two orgasms a week. You live longer. I'll tell you the number one thing is not sleep. Again, by science, number one thing is not diet and it's not exercise. Studied the blue zones and the first people got it wrong. They thought it was the Mediterranean diet. Great diet. Definitely will help you live longer than the drive to a diet. Okay. Number one thing is what the Japanese called Ikigai. speaker-0: film. speaker-1: purpose or reason to get out of bed. Because if you're connected in community, if you feel others are counting on you, if you feel that you're making a difference, it could be starting a community garden. It could be whatever it is. It doesn't have to be, you know, ending war. Great thing. Sign me up if you know how. But if you have that purpose and that connection, not only makes you live longer, but it gives you joy. speaker-0: Yeah, you wanna get out. wanna do the work to live longer. speaker-1: He gets a put in 90 years. get to be happy years and healthy years. Here's the funny thing. I'm not charging for this. I'm not selling. Why wouldn't people want this? And you can learn about it all for about the price of a Frappuccino. Get the books out there for free. I would. speaker-0: Get the second-rate advantage. But with how popular this is that speaker-1: infrastructure of bookstores and Amazon and whatever. Right. That's what I try to do. speaker-0: For sure. For anybody who's not familiar with the concept of Icky Guy, it's the overlap of what you love, what you're good at, and what you believe the world needs. I first came across that concept and it actually sparked me into doing what I'm doing now. So that's why I had that big reaction when you brought it up, because it's just, you know, the universe works in weird ways. But I first came across it when I was reading The Five Types of Wealth by Shaheel Bloom. I've always been a voracious reader. Like I love reading. I've never had any problem reading. When it came to doing the exercise, I'd be like, ⁓ nice, icky guy, that's a cool concept, like nice, and then I just turn the page and keep reading. Never stop to pause and actually do the exercise. Because it's like you're sitting there with an empty notebook page and it's like, what do I love? I don't know, what am I good at? I don't like compliment myself, maybe there's something deeper there. What do I think the world needs? You know, that's a complicated question. So it's just like a lot of friction to doing these exercises. So what I did, and this was the first time I built this for myself, I discovered this problem for myself, I solved it for me, I built a... custom AI tool that was trained to guide me through that process of helping me to uncover what my Icky Guy was, right? It helped ask me bite-sized questions, reflecting questions to uncover what are the things that I love? What are the things that I'm good at? What are the things that I believe the world needs? And then help me find that overlap to help me uncover what my Icky Guy was. And that kind of sparked me into doing what I'm doing today. speaker-1: else might have done that? I didn't want to make people get a course in philosophy, but we have on the website, jsamet.com and digital J ways for people to answer questions that have no right or wrong, not for the sake of us gathering any knowledge, but most of us are not self-aware. I wasn't self-aware in so many ways when I did my first book. My editor came back and said, you're really competitive. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I've never played a sport in my life. I'm like, I'm competitive with me. My personal best is the starting point. If I can't outdo, I don't really have a reason to do. And you can't win that race, which keeps me going. But yeah, to help people figure out, do you like teaching? Do you like doing things as a team? All of those types of stuff. so they're very open-ended type statements that you rate on a continuum, counts up the points and says, Hey, you might like pursuing a knowledge business online. You might want to do an Etsy type business, know, all those types of things. speaker-0: Sounds like we both kind of tried to solve a similar problem there. I really share it with you. Yeah, right. I love it. But I think the cool thing about like using generative AI, is there generative AI involved in that process in that sequence? Okay. Cool. So then it probably can get a lot more specific in its recommendations to what it has you do. And like for me, the recommendation that it spit out for me is exactly what I'm doing now. That problem that I experienced with my books, my courses that I purchased of having no problem consuming, right, reading, watching the videos, showing up to the coaching calls, but then struggling to take action and apply the frameworks, the things that I was learning to my own situation, right? You as the author of the second act advantage, you're writing for billions of readers, right? You don't have context on my situation, right? But you have done the hard work of formulating these timeless principles and frameworks that if applied to your situation will work and will get you results. But that's what the digital J, it helps bridge that gap of your timeless wisdom and the principles that you've created to my situation. It helps guide me through doing the work and applying things to my situation. speaker-1: Well, to both ends of the arc, to where you're starting from and what motivates you, what will get you excited, what to do, and to what your goal is. Right. It's a radically different journey of, got to find a less expensive place to live. I don't say cheaper because the point I make is we're 67th in healthcare in the world and climate and crime and all kinds of, I love America. There are other places where you may have better life. So how to figure that stuff out and make sure if any details change, that digital J is up to date as opposed to a printed book. know, that was really a key of, of what I think will transform the way knowledge is packaged. The second thing is every other AI, the giant AIs with the giant LLMs have more knowledge than digital J. I'm not trying to Solve all things for all people I'm trying to help you but I also I also realize that as good as I can do and as far as I can get you I believe we all need real mentors and real like-minded people so the secret at the end of the book is To help you and show you how to create a second-act society how to connect with other people in your physical community and virtual community that are like-minded speaker-0: right. speaker-1: wanting to do similar great things. I created the first social network to hit a million people a decade before Facebook. I was thinking of all the benefits that connecting people could bring. There was a downside of having algorithms run 6 billion people into being miserable. I bear responsibility for not always seeing the negative side of what happens when people use technology. But if I can help people that are on a positive journey to make themselves, their family, their community in the world better. How much better and more successful you'd be if you're hanging out with other people of that ilk. And you can find that as opposed to getting agitated by an algorithm that knows it'll get more engagement if it pisses you off and has bots yelling hate speech at you. Can we make that happen? I believe we can. Can I do it without everybody listening? No. Ergo, here we are. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, that's like one of the biggest things that I'm trying to build in my own life. So I'm to get the book. I'm going to go check out and see how you advise building that kind of community for yourself and community of other people. Because once you do embark on this journey of your second act of building something for yourself, it'll, you know, the people in your life that were around you in that first act. speaker-1: People that are in the book that do these amazing things at 90 years old. I mean, I tell this one story. A woman gets in her car, drives across Kansas and moves into the dorm. She graduated high school in 1926 and she's a freshman in college at 90 in the dorms. She also graduated. She also went on and got a master's. Why? Think of the inspiration that is for her grandchildren and great grandchildren. Think of the role model. Think of the legacy that your actions can do. Most of us are not going to be able to leave a Rockefeller, know, here's enough money for the next hundred years for do nothings to do nothing with. Okay. But think of the inspiring thing that you can do. Woman in Hawaii, they ran her first marathon in like 84 and kept on running marathons into her nineties. I mean, nobody adopting dogs at the dog shelter cause they were old. So she did two things. She started a program. just for adopting, getting old dogs placed. And then until they get placed, she takes them to old age homes. So one day a week, the old people can play with dogs. Nothing releases, you know, oxytocin like a puppy, okay? Like a dog. So these are people that just are changing the world and making it a better place. And we all want to do that. And I'm here to show you that it's possible. And if you hear my voice right now, I'm speaking directly just to you. I believe in you. I believe you can do it. And I look forward to hearing and learning from you what you achieve so I can share it with others. speaker-0: You're never too old to make a difference or be an inspiration. love it. Jay, if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-1: If you see someone without a smile, give them yours. Because I think people will smile when they see that and they'll respond. speaker-0: One smile at a time, one person at a time. That's the only way to sustainably get through. speaker-1: Your favorite rock song, your favorite concert, your favorite book, your favorite painting, your favorite building, your favorite anything was done by a stubborn person that didn't give up. They weren't born a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. They're no different. higher IQs doesn't equal success. I've read those studies. Better education definitely doesn't. Why not learn? what other people figured out that'll help you help others. speaker-0: So yeah, maybe in parentheses underneath there, it's just go for it and don't give up. speaker-1: Thank you for sharing your time with me and your audience. speaker-0: Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for listening. Here are my three main takeaways from the conversation. Number one, you need to learn how to create your own value. The direction is clear. More people are going to need to create their own income, opportunities, and stability in this new world. That starts with solving a real problem. Not hypothetically, not someday, but something concrete that exists right now. Number two, your advantages in the problems you've personally seen. The most valuable problems are usually the ones tied to your own experience. Things you've dealt with, noticed, or struggled through that others have not. Right, so his exercise of identify three problems that you experienced in your day to day life for a month, and by the end of it, you have 90 problems that you've experienced, and you find the one that you're uniquely qualified to solve, or you know how to solve, and then go do that for others. Number three, execution is the bottleneck with info products. Most people already have enough information. They know what they need to do. The gap is in applying it and taking action. That is why the idea of pairing knowledge with guidance, like what Jay did with Digital Jay, matters. The people who win are going to be the ones who actually do something with what they know. And info products, I believe it's going to become the standard. Like what Jay's doing with his book is just going to become the standard with every single book. If you want to get connected with Jay, you can find his links in the description of this episode, including his website and the link to purchase his new book, The Second Act Advantage. If you run a coaching program course or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work, download the free program execution system toolkit. in the description. It shows you how to install execution infrastructure like DigitalJ so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.