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Somebody Bought Me Lunch To Steal My Idea (The Truth About AI And Idea Theft) · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Somebody bought me lunch once to steal my idea.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know it yet.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing about a good sandwich, it lowers your guard.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: So I sat there, I ate it and I talked and I gave him everything.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: A few months later my idea it was for sale to my competitors by the guy who paid for the sandwich.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: He didn't hack me, he didn't record me, he didn't need artificial intelligence.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: He had a much older technology.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: He let me talk, ramble on and on and on.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Today everybody is terrified the machine is going to do this to them.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: The AI is going to eat their idea and spit out a business.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Steal it, build it, sell it back with a monthly subscription.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you the truth about that fear because part of it is real, and part of it is a very expensive magic trick.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: Stay with me, because by the end of this, you're going to know exactly who is lying to you, why they are lying to you, and the one thing that actually protects your ideas, which is not what you think.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: And it costs you nothing, which is exactly why nobody is selling it.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Here's what we are covering.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: That lunch that cost me a business idea twenty years before AI, well, before ChatGPT entered the world, back when theft required a working knowledge of Applebee's, the guy who melted down an expensive car on camera, and the thing he was actually selling while you watched it burn.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: The three types of people screaming about the idea theft right now and how to tell which one is smiling at you, whether the AI labs are really reading your genius out of your chat box, or whether this is a bedtime story somebody needs you to believe.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: And the one thing that has protected every idea in history that no machine could touch that almost nobody actually does.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: The last one is going to sting a little.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Good.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: Let me take you back.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Real estate years ago, I had an idea.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: A real hardbound book.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: You print it, you present it to a homeowner when they're thinking about selling.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: It sits on their coffee table.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: It says this agent is different.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: The agent brought a gift, not a pitch.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: Cost me almost nothing to figure out.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: 15, 20 bucks a copy at a print shop I found.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: The math worked.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: The idea was clean.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And I made a mistake.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: I told the title guy.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're not in real estate, let me explain who this is.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: In every detail, there's a support crew.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: You have title people, escrow people, lenders, inspectors.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: None of them sell houses.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: They can't.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: If they could, they wouldn't be buying you lunch, and they would be at the lunch you're paying for.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: So they court you.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: They buy you the coffee, they send you the holiday card with the golden retriever on it.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: They want your business.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: And the way they get it is they make you feel like a friend.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Most of them are fine.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: Some are fantastic.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: I've worked with people in that crew I would trust with my life.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: But here's the part nobody says out loud.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: That lunch is an interview, and you're the one being interviewed.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: You just think you're the guest.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: So while you're talking about your kids and your weekend and your big new idea for a coffee table book, some of them are quietly taking inventory.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
3:15
SPEAKER_00: What is working?
3:16
SPEAKER_00: What have you got that they can use to give to the other agents so they can be their hero too?
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Well, I found out the hard way.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: A few months after I told him the title guy started offering the exact same book to agents.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: The same agents I'm competing against.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: My idea, but his name on the idea and the cover.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: He must have forgotten to give it back to me.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Twenty bucks worth of sandwich for an idea I paid years to have.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: A solid trade for him, no doubt.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: But here's is where the first hard truth comes today.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: That was not left in the legal sense, not really.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: Because an idea is not protected, it never was.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Not by law, not by handshake, not by common decency, which, by the way, was also not included with the sandwich.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: You cannot own an idea.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: You can own the expression of it, the specific words, the specific design, the specific invention if you patent it.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: But the raw idea coffee table book for sellers, the second that left my mouth, it belonged to the room.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: That's not an AI problem, it's a human problem.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: And it's older than electricity, it's older than the wheel.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere a caveman invented fire.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: And the next guy to him said, That's a great idea, and then opened up a franchise.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: The machine didn't invent idea theft.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: The machine just made the title guy faster.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: And it took away his lunch bill, which frankly is the only part of this story where the little guy actually saved money.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: Now let me let me sit in that for a second because it does matter.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Everybody panicking about AI stealing ideas is describing a thing that has been happening to every one of us our whole lives.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: At the water cooler, in the break room, over the sandwich.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: The idea walked out the door the day you shared it.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: AI didn't change the rules.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: AI just deleted the waiting period.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Now let me stitch worlds on you.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: Before real estate, I wore a different uniform.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Twenty years LAPD, two, three years as a correctional officer state of New Mexico and a couple wonderful sheriff's departments.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: And there's a thing that happens in that world that I have never seen anywhere else.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: And it's the exact opposite of the title guy.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: In police work, when some senior, somebody senior, some senior officer, somebody even your own rank or whatever, but has more time on the job, when they pull you aside to tell you something, they're not taking, they're giving.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: They tell you how the thing that keeps you alive keeps you alive.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: How do you approach the car?
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Where do you stand?
5:51
SPEAKER_00: What do you watch?
5:53
SPEAKER_00: What the hands are doing, what you should expect, what to look for, the small stuff that means you go home tonight.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: In the police academy, they gave you enough.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Just like in real estate school, they give you enough, but it's really the people that have been doing that, and especially in law enforcement, that share and make you even safer because they use it as a direct application.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: They give it to you for free, no lunch, no angle, no pitch, because the currency in that world is not money.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: The currency is showing up to roll call tomorrow.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: You surviving, you coming back.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: That's human to human.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Somebody hands you the secret to staying alive and ask for nothing because your life is worth more to them than the information or a book idea.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Now hold on to those two worlds and put those worlds next to each other.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: The cop who gives you the secret to survive and asks for nothing.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: The title guy who buys you a sandwich to take the secret you had.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Same species, two completely different codes.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: One of them would take a bullet for you, the other one would take your coffee table book and expense the appetizer.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: And the reason I'm telling you both is this when somebody comes at you with information or comes at you asking about yours, the only question that matters is which one of those two people are they?
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Are they handing you the secret to survive or are they buying you lunch?
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Most people can't tell in the moment because both of them smile, both of them are warm, both of them feel like a friend.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: The tell is not the smile, the tell is the direction of the flow, and that's the skill.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: And it's a skill nobody is teaching right now because everybody's too busy screaming about the robot.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the people screaming about the robot for a moment.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Right now there's a wave of fear telling you that if you type your idea into an AI, the company behind it will harvest it, build it, and steal your business by Tuesday.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to introduce you to the three kinds of people making that noise because once you can name them, you can never unsee them.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: It ruins the internet, but it ruins it in a good way.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: The first kind, the stunt seller.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: You have seen this person, they do something loud and expensive and shocking on camera.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: They destroy something, they burn something, they blend something, they melt something down.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: There was one recently a guy took an expensive car, supposedly melted it into a puddle, and made the whole a whole moment out of it.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: And people watched and people argued and people shared, and that was the entire point and cost him a lot less than the car was worth in attention.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: And I do not know the man's heart.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: Maybe he believes every word, maybe he was making a real point about something real.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: But I build content for a living now, so let me tell you the mechanics.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: The stunt is never the product.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: The stunt is the doorway.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Behind the shocking thing, there's almost always something for sale.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: A course, a service, a product, a worldview they need you to buy so the next thing lands.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: You're not supposed to notice the sale.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: You are supposed to feel the shock.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: The shock lowers your guard.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: The sale walks in behind it quietly and wiping its feet.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: That's not evil, that's marketing.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Old as the carnival.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: But when somebody destroys something valuable in front of you, ask one boring question.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: What are you selling behind that fire, behind that melting metal?
9:13
SPEAKER_00: There's always something behind the fire, behind the melting metal.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: Nobody melts a car for free.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: That's not a hobby, that's a funeral.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: The second kind, the lunch buyer.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: This is my title guy in a newer suit.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Warm, helpful, nice, wanting you to be your best to really survive in real estate or whatever the business is.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: And also quietly he's taking inventory.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: They're not loud.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: They do the opposite.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: They get close.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: They ask for loyalty.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: They ask such good questions.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: They seem to be so interested in what you are building and you feel flattered because finally somebody gets it.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: And maybe they do get it.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: And maybe they are your friend.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: But watch the direction of the flow.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: A real friend gives you the secret to survive.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: The lunch buyer extracts the secret you already have and picks up the check like it was a gift.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: The check was not a gift.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: That check was a receipt for your idea.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: The third kind, and this is the sneaky one, the panic merchant.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: This one does not steal your idea.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: This one sells you a very nice lock for a door nobody's going to be standing on.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: They make the video about how AI is coming for your business.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Then they sell you a course on how to protect your intellectual property from the machine.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: They run the service that shields you from the exact monster they built in your head 10 minutes ago.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: They need you scared.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Scared is the whole business model.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: A calm person does not buy the fear cure, so they can't let you be calm.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Your peace of mind is bad for their quarter.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be careful here because I'm about to say something that could sound like I'm one of them.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm not selling you fear today.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to take it off you.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: So let me prove it by telling you the boring truth about the actual AI question.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: The truth that it does not sell a single course.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Watch how unprofitable honesty is.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Are the AI labs stealing your ideas out of your chats?
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Here's the honest answer.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Not the scary one, not the comforting one, the real one.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: The nightmare version where you type an idea into a box and some company spins up your exact business the next morning and crushes you.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: That is not how it works right now.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: This is a movie.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: That's a movie.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: It's a good one.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: It's a great thumbnail, not the actual mechanism.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: But there is a real thing underneath, and I'm not going to lie to you and say it's nothing.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: The real thing is not the theft.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: The real thing is that these systems learn from enormous amounts of what people feed them.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: And the rules about how your specific conversations get used vary and they change.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: And almost nobody reads a single word of them.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: So the honest move is not panic, the honest move is to check your settings.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: Read the policy for the tool you use.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: Some let you turn off training on your data.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: Some are private by default, some are not.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: It's a five-minute job, and it's something, and somehow, the one job nobody will do because it's not scary and there's no thumbnail for it.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: This is the actual vulnerability, not the robot.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: The settings page you've never once opened.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: The monster is a checkbox.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: You just never scroll down.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: But here's the deeper truth, the one that changes how you walk around every day.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: And this is the one panic merchants will never sell you because it ends their whole racket.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: The real threat was never the machine would steal your idea.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: The real threat is that your idea was never rare.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Sit with that.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: If you can type your idea into an AI and get a business plan back, so can ten thousand other people.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: On the same afternoon, probably during the same lunch.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: The machine did not steal your idea.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: The machine held up a mirror and showed you that your idea was standing in a crowd the whole time.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: The coffee table book was a good idea.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: The title guy proved it, and it was good by stealing it.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: But never the idea that had the value.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't that.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: The value was actually in who printed the book, who actually walked it into a living room, who actually followed up, who actually shipped it while I was still yakking about it, while everybody else was still describing it over an appetizer like I did.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: The idea is the cheap part.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: The idea was always the cheap part.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: The idea is the sizzle.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: Shipping is the stake.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: And most people are out here trying to sell the sizzle and then getting pissed off when somebody grills it first.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Execution, that's the moat.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Speed is the moat.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: You are your moat.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: You are your own moat.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Let me make this real for the people building something right now.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: You have an idea, it is good.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: You are excited.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: And you are scared to say it out loud because somebody might take it.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: I want to release you from half of that fear and hand you the other half as a weapon.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Be careful who you hand your full playbook to.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: The lunch buyer is real.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Do not lay out your entire operation for a warm smile and a free entree.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: That part of your caution is correct.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: Keep it and frame it.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: Do not let the fear of theft stop you from shipping, because that is the trap.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: That is where most people actually die, not from the theft, from hesitation wearing a citation costume or a caution costume.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: The title guy did not beat me because he was smart.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: He beat me because he moved first.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: I sat on my own ideal.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: It was an egg, and he fried it.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: The idea you're guarding in your drawer is worth absolutely nothing.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: It does not appreciate in there.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: It's not wine.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: An idea you ship is worth something the second it hits the world.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: And here's the beautiful part.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Once you ship it, once it's out there with your name on it, moving, real, in the market, now it is hard to take.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Now you're the only you are the one everybody's copying, and the copies always show up late, out of breath, holding a worse version.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: The person who ships owns the idea, not the person who thought of it, not the person who stole it over lunch, the person who put it in the world first and keeps moving.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: So let me bring the two worlds back together one more time, because this is the whole thing.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: The cop hands you the secret to survive because he literally wants you to make it.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: The title guy buys you lunch because he wants what you have.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: And the machine, the AI, the thing everybody is terrified of?
15:29
SPEAKER_00: The machine is neither.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: The machine doesn't want your idea.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't want your lunch, it doesn't want you to win or lose.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: It's a hammer.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: And a hammer in the hands of the title guy makes him faster.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: And a hammer in your hands makes you faster too.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: The hammer doesn't have a side, it just has a handle.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: The only question is who grabs it first.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: The people telling you to fear the hammer, ask what they're selling.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: The stunt seller needs your shock, the lunch buyer needs your trust.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: The panic merchant needs your fear.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: All three of them need you frozen.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Notice that.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Every one of them profits from you standing still.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: And the calm operator, the one who reads the settings, ship the idea, and stop nothing.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Stop guarding a drawer full of nothing.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: That person just keeps building while everybody else is at lunch.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: Be that person.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Guard your full playbook, check your settings, then get out of the drawer and ship the thing.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Because the idea was never the treasure you were.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: The wealthy already know this.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: They don't guard ideas, they guard execution and they move fast.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: They let the small operator sit in fear, guarding a single thought like a dragon on one coin, while they build in an open market and eat the market.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: We are done sitting in fear.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: We are done guarding the coin.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Check the settings, ship the work, move first.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole secret.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Same one the old timers handed me in a different uniform a long time ago.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: And I'm handing it to you now for free.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: No lunch required.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: That's how you survive, that's how we all survive.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: Be well, and thanks for watching.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: We will see you in the next one.