[00:00:00] It is a high time that I share with you some of the thoughts that I’ve been having about AI specifically about the generative AI tools that have been available in the market for a couple of months now.

And the implications that those tools have on building community and on my sort of humanistic perspective on what exactly those are gonna do to what we become as a species as we continue to roll out increasingly capable technology, technology that’s increasingly more capable of interacting with our understanding of the world.

So let me level set first and let me talk about sort of my idea where it is now and how that idea grows. So the first thing is, I look at the way that we exist in the world today, and you [00:01:00] are quite familiar with the way that I do this and the process that I go through in terms of understanding how the human animal exists and what that means to us.

So what I’m looking at right now, at least in the conversation of AI, is I’m looking at sort of how do we exist and how do we think about the way that we exist and how is it that these generative AI tools are going to interact with that and how are we gonna change a result of it. So the first thing is I’m gonna look at it from an economic perspective, cause I think that makes it easy to talk about.

It’s the right language for us to choose to enter into this conversation. It’s the right language for us to choose. See what I did there? I’m appreciating my joke. I hope you are too. So first, all of our society since the invention of farming. Has been what I’d like to call a task [00:02:00] based economy.

And by that I mean you complete a task and by completing that task, you store some value. And over time, the value that you have amassed can be traded inside of your community for some of the stored value that is elsewhere in your community. So letting that sink in a little bit. Let’s talk about that in a very specific way.

You go out into the fields and you till the fields, and by tilling the fields, you’ve stored some value. Now you can’t trade the stored value of a tilled field in your community. Or maybe you could, but let’s pretend that you can’t. I, you actually could. Let’s pretend that you can’t for this. So in order for that to be useful to you pretending that you can’t trade the stored value of a tilled field, you then have to make another step store additional value by completing another task.

What’s that task? Well, you have to go out and sow the field. You have to drop seeds into the [00:03:00] tilled earth, and then you have to store additional value. And over the course of the summer you’ll manage the field by protecting it from predators, like animals that want to eat the food that you’ve planted and maybe other predators as well. Bugs, you go out there and you manage the bugs somehow.

And then over the course of the summer, the work that you’ve done, the value that you’ve stored into that field starts to produce in a very little sense fruit. And towards the end of the summer, you get to the point where you get to read what you sew.

You get to harvest the stored value in your field. Now you’ve got this amassed value as a result of tasks that you have taken. And that’s what I mean when I say it’s a task economy. You take some tasks, you store some value. Once you’ve amassed some value, you can trade some of that amassed value for other value that is important to you.

For example, maybe you’re great at managing your field. You’re not so good at building your barn, so you’ve [00:04:00] amassed some value in terms of the field that you’ve managed, but you need to trade some of that value. In order to get help building your barn.

Now yes, this creates the opportunity for specialization and that’s fantastic because as you can specialize in a task, you can perform that task with a higher degree of quality and a higher degree of efficiency, and that means that you can store value more quickly and you can amass that value more quickly, and that makes it easier for you with that amassed value.

To be able to trade for the things that you want. So you take that as a basic starting point instead of looking at currency for the sake of currency. Now, let’s start from this perspective that you complete a task, you store some value. Currency is a representation of completed tasks and stored value as a result of the work that you have done.

And the more skilled your work, the more [00:05:00] quickly you amass that stored value, the more currency you have in your hand. I’m not trying to beat you over the head with basic economics, rather, I’m trying to reorient you into the idea that our economy is not a currency economy, but rather it is a task completion economy.

And this is really important as we start to look at why people are so reactive every single time a new technology comes out, including the current time that a new technology is coming out. So let’s look at some of the other technologies that have come out, some technologies that caused a huge stir, and let’s take a look at how that’s going to play out with this particular technology, or at least.

How I think it’s gonna play out with my specific community focus and humanistic bent. One of the reasons why you love listening to me. So the calculator [00:06:00] is a world changing technology. The calculator made complex math available to everybody. Now, the accounting. Industry, and you can go look up newspapers.

From the time back in the fifties and sixties, the accounting industry was terrified by the accountant, the calculator, because the accounting industry was certain that the calculator making complex math available to everyone was going to decimate the accounting industry. And in fact, that was a reasonable assumption.

But what happened? What actually happened as a result of the calculator? Well, here are some things. First because of the calculator, businesses expanded faster than ever before because of the calculator. Businesses were more and more interested in specializing. In specializing in the thing that they were great at and outsourcing the things that they were not necessarily [00:07:00] great at.

So even though businesses had a greater access to their capacity to be able to use complex math, they were actually less interested in doing so for the sake of reducing cost on accounting. The result of that is that the accounting industry actually exploded because of the calculator. An unforeseen consequence of the invention of the calculator.

A good consequence of the invention of the calculator. I would argue the same thing happened when we invented the word processor as a result of the invention of the word processor. We didn’t get fewer books. We got more. We didn’t get fewer authors, we got more. In fact, we democratized access to information sharing in a way that had never before been conceived.

And in fact, it actually reversed a trend and there were job losses as a result of this, but far more job creation than loss. We [00:08:00] reversed a trend that we’d spent 150 years making, go back 200 years ago, and look at the journalism industry. It’s interesting because about 200 years ago, there were not really professional journalists.

All of the journalists were relatively wealthy, successful business people who had an idea that they wanted to spread, and maybe the idea was germane to their business and maybe it wasn’t, and they spent their extra resources, their time, their money, to be able to put together that idea in a way that was consumable by an audience.

Kind of like podcasting today. So that the audience would be able to consume that idea. That was journalism. Now, somewhere between a hundred and 150 years ago, journalism became a profession, and for the last 150 years or so, we have built up the professional world of journalism in a wonderful way [00:09:00] as a result of it being a profession.

Journalists cared deeply about being an artist inside their profession, about making sure that they were deeply concerned and connected with the message that they were sharing, and level that up one level, the editors were even more concerned with making sure that they protected the brand of their periodical.

So journalism as a result became a very important part of the way that we share information for good reason. But the invention of the word processor exploded, the access to share information and social media. Beyond that even more. It also cut back on professional journalism. If anyone can share information, then I don’t necessarily need all of my information to be professionally [00:10:00] curated.

So it had a very big impact on one of the niche industries where the typewriter was an important tool. Those impacts are still being felt today. There are other impacts relative to the calculator that are also still being felt today. Ask yourself this. How many people who were in control of their checkbook in the 1950s were not capable of balancing their checkbook themselves?

Probably not very many. Most of them had really strong, basic, and even moderately advanced level math. Today, because of the calculator, we have the capacity to do exponentially more complex math, and in fact, we do and do amazing things with it. And the average person actually is not as good at math. [00:11:00] Today as a result of the word processor, we have the capacity to do exponentially more with the sharing of information.

And the average person is not as good at writing. They’re not as good at keeping in contact, they’re not as good at building relationships where contact is a part of that relationship. Unless it’s direct person to person, it’s an interesting thing that has happened. So in one sense, we’ve leveled up. The average person can now share information better and many do.

In one sense, we’ve leveled down because of the technology, because of our reliance on that technology. We actually are not as good. We’re not as proficient mathematicians, we’re not as proficient writers, we’re not as proficient connectors. As we used to be. This is a really powerful way to look at the way that we interact with technologies [00:12:00] as we roll them out.

So with that in mind and again, that the economy is a task-based economy. We complete a task, we store some value. It is the stored value as the result of the completed task that gives us spending power. We get to use that stored value to bring things into our life that is outside of our capacity to complete a task and or that’s easier to buy for us from somebody else than it is for us to do ourselves.

What’s AI going to do? A big question. I’m having so much fun with this. The ideas just make me bubble with excitement. What is AI gonna do? Well, just like the calculator, just like the word processor, there are going to be some industries that are going to explode as a result of AI. They’re gonna be [00:13:00] really powerful in ways that we can’t even possibly imagine right now.

It’s amazing. The things that AI are doing right now today that’s making it more possible for us to do cool things in the world is extraordinary. We’ve just invented, and there’s an AI now executing against this. We’ve invented an AI, generative AI, just like chat GPT, whose job is to predict the way that proteins will fold.

In a scientific endeavor now proteins are amazing. Proteins are the basis of all viruses. So if you can predict the way proteins are going to fold, you could actually predict the way that a virus will create itself and recreate itself under an infinite number of circumstances, including the circumstances that might exist inside a human body.

We could go through the process of creating and training a retrovirus entirely inside the [00:14:00] computer. To fix something that has gone on inside of us, like maybe long covid entirely inside the machine. With no access to an actual physical body. It’s extraordinary. And then we can print the thing. I mean, we all know we have 3D printers.

This is so amazing. We could go through the process of actually having a viable prototype that’s unlikely to cause significant damage to a living thing. We could cut back the amount of time that we need to take, cut back the number of lives that are affected by animal trials, and then human trials. On these retroviruses, on these fixes to things that have happened to us naturally.

It’s amazing. Now imagine the same thing, but we create a specific virus whose only job is to attack cancerous cells. Again, we [00:15:00] can run the simulations, add infinitum inside this machine until we get a really significantly viable prototype. Because of the fact that we can now predict the way that proteins will fold under certain circumstances using a generative AI tool.

It’s amazing, it’s amazing. It fills me with the light and. As a result of this, it’s going to reduce the animal trial industry. Is that a bad thing? That’s for you to decide, but it’s gonna happen. It’s going to increase the demand for quality thinkers in the scientific world who are going to think about the scenarios that we’re feeding into these tools so that we can get good outputs.

Because the big question is how good are your inputs to get a good output? I love it. [00:16:00] It’s also going to impact copywriting, and it’s gonna impact the algorithms that Facebook uses to serve the information that you’re interested in receiving, and each of those is going to reduce some jobs and increase others.

In ways that are somewhat predictable, but maybe only somewhat predictable. Now, here’s why I’m really, really excited about AI. Again, keep in mind the task-based economy. Now I’m gonna take another little detour. Keeping in mind the task-based economy. I’d like to take a detour to World War II. Yeah, world War II, and I’d like to take a look at what made Nazi Germany possible.

Now, there were some economic considerations and some political considerations. All of those were opportunities. But there was another thing that actually was really extraordinary, horrible, [00:17:00] but extraordinary that happened during that time. And I’d like to take a look at that. One other thing, and that is Joseph Gerbers.

Look him up. Joseph Gerber did something amazing, and I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna reframe it so that you can see why I think it’s amazing. What Joseph Gerber did is he literally said. In German, if you say a thing, anything, if you say it loud enough, often enough it becomes the truth.

Even if it wasn’t before. So let me rephrase that. If you tell a lie loud enough, and often enough it becomes the truth. That should be terrifying. I consider that idea terrifying. And when [00:18:00] that was rolled out in Germany with those opportunities in place, the economic opportunities, the political for opportunities, the result of that was creating a viral engine that was focused on one thing. The thing that was of the interest of the person who was passing out that new truth.

Amazing, incredibly powerful tool and it showed us something. And I’m gonna get to that. First I’d like to add, while it is amazing and an incredibly powerful tool. For all of you who have a little bit of trigger around this, I’m with you. I understand it is an amazing, incredibly powerful tool, and we got to witness the power of that tool through something that was horrible.

I am also horrified by that. I’m a community guy. I’m a humanist, and the result [00:19:00] of what Joseph Gerber did is terrible. Also, we get to learn from it. And in the process of learning, we can actually see the good that he brought to the world through that terrible vehicle. And here’s what I’d like to share with you from that perspective.

When you tell a lie loud enough and often enough it becomes the truth. If you look at that from a slightly different perspective, what that tells you is that there is no objective truth. Now what’s interesting is I brought up journalism intentionally. What’s interesting is that we’ve spent 150 years inside this professional journalism world, cultivating the idea that there is actually an objective truth, and it’s not just inside journalism that we talk about this.

It’s politically expedient to use the notion of an objective truth. It’s also expedient from an economics perspective and. From a [00:20:00] religious perspective, there is an objective truth, and Gobel proved to us absolutely definitively that there is not an objective truth. I’m gonna twist that just a little bit further.

Instead of there being an objective truth, what you can conclude from that. And as I say this, you’re gonna be like, oh, I hope if you’re still with me, what you can conclude from what we learned there is that truth rather than being objective. And of course, the obvious opposite of objective is subjective.

Rather, what I’d like to say is rather than saying that truth is objective and it is not, it is clearly not. What we can see is that truth is co-created. It’s not [00:21:00] subjective. It is co-created. It’s a thing that you create within yourself and a thing that you create in coordination with your community.

And it was that. That specific thing. That’s the thing that I’m gonna talk about more here. It’s that gift that Joseph Gerber brought to us, and I don’t believe he was intending to give us that gift, but that’s what I get here. Truth is co-created. How powerful is that? If that’s true, imagine how much more powerful it will be if a cancer patient.

Is sitting there trying to heal and there are 3, 4, 5, 6 people around that cancer patient that are supporting the healing process. And I don’t mean physically or technologically, but praying with them, hugging them, supporting them, loving them, truth is co-created. [00:22:00] Your path to healing is more probable if your truth is supported by your community.

Oh, beautiful thing that is really actually giving me shivers right now. I’m so delighted by this. This is the gift that Joseph Gerber brought to us. How else can we use this? Imagine people who are trying to manifest and they’re doing it themselves inside a little spell circle or something.

And I’m not saying this tongue in cheek. This is a very real reality in the world today. How much more powerful is that person’s manifestation? And don’t roll your eyes. Manifestation is in every single religious book that has ever been written. Manifestation is a reality to humanity. Whether you believe it or not, is irrelevant. How much more powerful is that manifestation if it’s six people that are all working together to manifest one [00:23:00] idea than just one.

If truth is co-created, then your manifestation is six times more powerful with six people than just with one, maybe not six times more powerful. Maybe it’s 12 times more powerful. Maybe it’s 20 times more powerful. I think we should find out.

Let that settle in for a minute as that settles in, draw in the mental health crisis. It’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Lucas? Yeah, but here I am sharing this idea that Joseph Gerbers gave to us as a gift through a terrible medium. The idea is that our path to health could very well be a co-created process if people are having mental health crises.

The [00:24:00] path to health is co-created. They can’t do it alone. They need your health. And it’s more powerful with six people that are saying, I got you. I’m here with you. We are gonna succeed together. We’re gonna kick your alcoholism together. We’re going to move through your depression together. You are not alone.

You’re not alone right now. You’re not alone in five minutes. You’re not alone in an hour, and you will not be alone tomorrow. All of us are in this journey together.

Let the power of that settle in. If truth is co-created, then that is real. If truth is co-created, then that is how you can best serve and support the people who are already standing by your [00:25:00] side. Make their needs part of your truth and invite them to do the same with you. Make their needs part of your mission.

And invite them to do the same with you and make the success of the person next to you part of your own success, and invite them to do the same with you. Because truth is co-created, you’ll both succeed better, faster. You’ll both be happier doing it mental health, and you’ll be able to spread the joy and the success of that wider faster in every aspect of your life because your truth is co-created.[00:26:00]

It actually gives me a little bit of tears to really let that settle in, let it become part of my reality. It gives me tears of joy because that means that the best and the least that I can do for my brothers and my sisters that are standing by my shoulders is to make their success in everything that’s important to them.

Part of my success, part of my mission, it also gives me a little tears of sadness because I’ve spent 20 years as an adult in this society, not doing that. Now let’s not get caught up in fomo. A fear of missing out on 20 years of really truly supporting people. So I’m gonna move on. I’m gonna go back to AI in a second.

But first, I have an invitation to you make my success, your success. Share this episode [00:27:00] because if this episode is as important to you as it is to me, if this episode is as important to you as it is to the growth of the ideal of community, the best thing that you can do and the least that you can do is to share this episode and encourage everyone in your life, or at least everyone who you care about, to really let this settle in.

That your mission is their mission. That your success is their success, and you will be the same for them as they are for you. That their mission is yours and their success is yours. You’re never going to leave their side. You’re gonna be with them tomorrow. You’re gonna be with them in a week. You’re gonna be with them in a month no matter what, because their success is your success.

Share this. Now back to AI. [00:28:00] As these amazing technologies come into play in the world, they’re absolutely gonna take over some of the things that we do more and more as they become more and more capable, just like we’ve seen with all technologies that we’ve rolled out. The question is why. This is where real beauty starts to show up.

The question is why. You see, every time we come out with a technology, it comes out and it plays around for a little while, and then a whole bunch of really smart people start to iterate on that technology. They make it a little better. They make it a little bit more efficient. They make it a little bit cheaper. They find new ways to do it. They find new ways to bring it to market. They find new markets to bring it to iterations.

In order for AI to make humans [00:29:00] irrelevant, AI needs to take away the things that we are great at now back to the economy. We’ve spent 10,000 years, there are abouts building our entire iid. Around the idea that our path to success is by completing tasks. That’s why I started this entire conversation with an understanding of what the economy is.

It’s not money. It’s actually stored value in task completion. We’ve spent the entire last 10,000 years or so building this idea, this id. That our value is in completing tasks. Everything everywhere is based on that. Even technology leverage. The richest people in the world, they’re rich, not because they complete more tasks, they’re rich, because they’ve been [00:30:00] excellent at leveraging task completion to create stored value for themselves.

Again, this is not an indictment by any stretch. This is simply the truth of where we are. Task completion economy. Now, as AI comes into play, it’s going to take over those tasks, which means the people who rely on the tasks for their income are going to lose their jobs. This is true. We know it’s gonna happen.

My question to you is this. If task completion goes away for all of humanity, do we become without value? Now, I’m hoping that your gut has an instant response. No, we are not without value. I hope if that’s true, I’m with you. If that’s true, that’s the message I’m here to share. We are not without [00:31:00] value even if we’re not completing tasks, but now that calls into question.

If we’re not without value, even if we’re not completing tasks, then we must have value somewhere else. There must be something about us that’s valuable, separate from our ability to complete a task. Now, ask yourself this. Do you love your grandmother even when she’s not baking cookies? For you? Hope the answer is yes.

Do you love her even if you know that she will never bake cookies for you ever again? Again, I hope the answer is yes. If that’s true, then there’s something about your grandmother specifically to you that has value outside of the completion of that task. Is that true for the completion of all tasks? Do you continue to love [00:32:00] her when she’s no longer able to do anything. Nothing.

She’s completely void of capacity to complete a task. Maybe she sits in a wheelchair. Maybe she actually has a full-time attendant to make sure that she lives a healthy, happy life for as long as she’s got left. Do you still love her then? It’s not rhetorical. Of course, the answer is yes, or at least of course. I hope the answer is yes.

In so doing that elevates this notion that there is value outside of task completion. Now the question is what is the value? You might, of course, based on the example, you might of course conclude that the value is love itself. I love that answer. Yes. Also, I touched on it elsewhere too.

You see, humans are valuable for love. They’re valuable for the relationship. They’re valuable for a few things. Love [00:33:00] relationship. You might say creativity, and I agree. These generative AI tools are not creative. They’re just generative. They’re automated intelligence. They’re automated. Your intelligence, not their own.

Which means their capacity to generate is only as good as the creativity that was fed into them. The intelligence that was fed into them in the creation of them as a tool, they’re not otherwise creative.

Creativity is part of it. But the amazing thing about humans is actually, of course you think, I’m gonna say community, and it’s true, but in a specific way. It’s what I like to call iterative collaboration. I talked about iteration, right? Some new thing comes out and then we spend some time iterating on it.

We find new ways to do. We find better ways to do. We find [00:34:00] ways that are more efficient. We combine them together. We iterate here, we iterate there, we iterate all of it. It is the iterative collaboration that makes humans amazing, and in fact, that is the thing that is shared among all of the grandmother species in the world. Iterative collaboration.

Humans do it particularly well as AI takes over task completion. We will still be tasked. There I go. Using the term wrong, we will still have the need for creativity and iterative collaboration. And what’s amazing about that is that as we switch out of an task completion economy, we’re gonna move into something that is entirely different, where you are inherently valuable for your creativity. That hasn’t happened yet.

You’re inherently valuable because you might be creative [00:35:00] tomorrow. You are inherently valuable because I might need you to be iterative collaborator with me tomorrow, and your value continues to be true forever because of the fact that I might need you tomorrow in order for the thing that we are working on together to explode to become amazing.

To serve my brothers and my sisters in new and more exceptional ways. And it is that iterative collaboration. It is the love that we share and the relationships that we create, both intellectual relationships and heart-centered relationships that are gonna continue to drive inherent value for all of humanity.

And we know this intuitively. But we haven’t had language for it until now. We haven’t even needed to create language for it until now because the task [00:36:00] completion economy was serving us perhaps not well, but well enough to get us to hear, and it’s been extraordinary. Maybe not beautiful but extraordinary and Gurgles has shown us.

The core of this argument is 100% true. Truth itself is co-created. Truth itself is collaborative, and truth itself can be iterated. And that’s why. I hope you’re seeing this all come together. That’s why I’m so excited about what these amazing tools are bringing to the market right now. That’s why I’m so excited to jump into conversations with different paid communities and corporations that are reaching out to me saying, I need you to share your message so that people can see the hope beyond the impending doom of AI taking over their jobs.

And [00:37:00] I’m here for it. Because I see the hope. I see nothing but the hope. What I see is absolutely extraordinary. What I see is us losing the distraction, the day-to-day distraction of showing up at your desk and pounding on your keyboard all day, just to keep you busy, and by giving up the distraction of busyness.

We get to move into the inherent value of humanity, collaborative truth, collaborative creation, collaborative iteration, collaborative relation.

So back to my invitation from before, I would like to invite you to share this video, I’d like you to share this podcast. I’d like you to share [00:38:00] this with all of the people that you love, that you want to collaborate with, that you want to collaborate with inside your relationships so that they can understand this idea that you’re starting to build inside your head about how beautiful you can collaborate together to build your relationships.

And then, how beautifully you can collaborate together to build your ideas and theirs, and then how you can collaborate together to build your success and theirs.

And as AI mercifully releases you from being a busy person. Now you’ve got the people around you that are gonna turn that freedom into the most beautiful gift that it ever could have been, because now [00:39:00] you can collaboratively create new and amazing things together that will drive value, not just for you and your pocketbook, but drive value for all of humanity because of your creativity.

Your relationship, your willingness inside yourself and your community to be iterative and collaborative towards the best good always.

I know that it sounds kind of like I’m painting rainbows and butterflies, and it’s hard for me not to look at this picture of the future and just be filled with delight. Because to me it is rainbows and butterflies. But I want to remind you that there’s going to be a period of change in between now and then, and that period of change might be decades inside, which things are not rainbows and butterflies.

They’ll be [00:40:00] challenging. They might be really, really challenging. And I’m here for it. And the sooner that we. All of us step into the reality of the beautiful inherent value of all of humanity, the easier it will be for us to move through the challenges that we’re facing. Those challenges are not created by AI.

Those challenges were created by the task completion economy. We’ve been playing with those challenges for 10,000 years. They were brought to a head by AI. And we have work, we have work ahead of us to move through the challenge of rebuilding humanity around our inherent value rather than just the test completion.

It’s gonna be hard work. It’s also gonna be beautiful work, and sometime in the future, people are gonna look back [00:41:00] and say, hopefully the same things about the work that we’re about to do. As I said about Joseph Gerbers. They’re gonna say that was challenging. They’re gonna say, I am glad that our forefathers, generations ago did the work that they did to rebuild humanity around the inherent value and away from task completion.

Thank you.