It feels like there's been a big shift this month.
And I know that everyone talks about how everything is changing, and they have been for the past three or four years with AI and everything.
And most people even started to just tune that out.
Right.
We reached a point where all of this AI stuff, we kind of just became numb to it and we didn't believe the hype anymore.
But it really feels like something changed very recently.
And I'm not the type of person that likes to be sensationalist or say this stuff.
I'm the first person to call this out.
So when I'm saying stuff like this, you know it's kind of real, or maybe I'm just deluded, but we're here to talk about it.
The reason it feels this way, it's because the tools have been getting better and better and people have become angrier and angrier.
And last, the people who have been trying to find useful applications for AI are finally starting to find it in their own lives, and they're starting to pull ahead of everyone else.
And there hasn't been a day where I go on Twitter and see a post like this from this guy is just Robert.
This is one that I found.
It says the AI backlash is here.
This post has millions of views of someone saying that their unpopular opinion is that they actually do not desire to see technology advance any further.
People hate technology.
They hate innovation.
They see that it is coming for their jobs, coming for their way of life.
Innovation is asking them to do more work, to spend nights and weekends learning about AI, and then it goes on just to potentially replace themselves.
But that's just one of the few examples.
My feed is literally flooded with it.
I'm actually creating another video on that, called Why Artists Hate AI So Much.
To go through all of the arguments
But whenever there is a shift in how we do things, this pattern tends to emerge.
And the pattern is is that there's three different types of people.
The first are the resistors, and these are the people who attach their identity to the way that things used to be done.
They attach to the skill, like their art, or how they like to do things, or the things that they find meaningful in their life right now, when they don't realize that meaning can be generated from different things.
We're also going to talk about that in another video.
The resisters see any new tool as a threat to their sense of self, like the artists that are screaming that anyone who uses AI is a bad person, or the writers like myself saying that good writing can't be replicated by AI.
And, of course, the creatives that are rage, posting about the death of creativity while refusing to learn how the new tools work.
Now, if you can, avoid these people and avoid getting caught in their trap.
And if you are one of them, just please keep an open mind.
Now, the second type of people are the waiters.
So these people see that the change is happening, but they just wait for it to blow over.
They keep their heads down for most of their life because they are dependent on the job, the employer, the life direction and their ability to survive.
They don't know any other way of doing things and they don't have a mind that can see a and act on it by their own will, because they've been dependent on other people for so much of their life.
The problem with being a waiter is the penalty for starting late.
In previous technological shifts you could just wait for a few years and then you could play catch up, and that's okay.
The gap then was linear, but now With AI, it's different.
The gap is exponential.
The people who are experimenting today are pulling that much further ahead of everyone else.
So the people who are waiting are going to have to play that much more catch up.
And there's going to be such this huge gap between those who started early and those who didn't start at all.
Now again, i hate sounding sensationalist or making these claims, but i've personally experienced it right.
So i feel confident in saying that because i'm seeing it firsthand.
You really do not want to wake up in 2027 just to realize that the entry level has been eradicated, And then what are you going to do?
You're not going to have much leeway to actually learn these skills.
And who knows where you're going to end up then?
And you can hope that UBI becomes a thing or that you constantly get stimulus checks or other things like that.
But I don't see that as a way to live.
And if you're a part of my audience, I feel like you have a sense of agency and ambition.
So you're more likely to be the third person, which is the curious.
And these are the people that stay curious.
They experiment constantly, they build and they figure out how to adopt the new way in their own way, without romanticizing the past or fearing the future.
They understand that new things have a time lag before they become useful.
Right, you use chat gpt3 and you're like yeah, this isn't really useful at all, it can't do anything.
But now you use claude, opus 45, and you're like, oh my gosh, This is actually crazy.
But the other thing is that it's just like any other skill.
Not only does it have a time lag before the tool itself becomes useful, but it also has a time lag before you become useful with the tool.
So you have to just give it time.
You can't just try it once and then say it doesn't work.
Now, it's always been important.
It's been extremely important to become that third person, because the first and second people, they don't really go anywhere in life.
But it's important to be that third person because the main drivers of meaning are struggle, status and curiosity.
That's where you get your meaning from.
Even the first people, the artists who are just constantly rage posting online right now, are getting their meaning from struggle and status.
They get status within their little artist tribe on social media by getting a lot of likes, getting a lot of engagement, and they're going through this artificial struggle that they've created for themselves.
That gives them a sense of meaning.
So when that's starting to be ripped away from them, they double down on it.
So in this video, I want to share four compelling ideas, what I think are very compelling, ideas that may change your mind on AI, what skills you should learn and what skills may become irrelevant, and the single decision that matters right now, so that you can take control of your life.
So the first idea is why this time is same-same but different.
Because people act like technological disruption is new.
It's not.
The printing press rendered scribes obsolete.
Before Gutenberg, bookmakers employed dozens of trained artisans to hand copy manuscripts.
This was a skill that took years to master, and before they knew it, that skillset was worthless.
A single printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday.
So the scribes who refused to adapt disappeared, and the ones who learned to operate the new machines thrived.
The scribes were replaced by people who learned to use machines.
Now the same pattern repeated in the Industrial Revolution.
Hand weavers protested and some smashed machines.
These were the Luddites.
Meanwhile, mechanized cotton spinning increased output per worker by 500x.
New jobs emerged like printers, typesetters, machine operators, and engineers.
So the nature of work changed, but work didn't disappear.
So the pattern here that continues to repeat, and is repeating right now in a slightly different way, is that skills abstract upward.
This is going to be a theme for the rest of the video, so just keep that in mind.
Skills abstract upward.
So the scribe became the editor.
The hand weaver became the machine operator.
The typesetter became the designer.
Each wave of technology pushed humans to operate at a higher level.
So this brings up the concept of being a universal explainer by David Deutsch.
So he believes that all humans are universal explainers who are capable of understanding anything within the realm of possibility.
We create knowledge through conjecture and criticism.
In other words, trial and error, guessing and correcting.
This is how we adapt.
So the people worried about AI think that it will just render human beings irrelevant.
But there is no limit to what humans can create, given the right knowledge.
And we talked about this two videos ago in the video about agency that was titled the most important skill to learn in the next ten years.
So in other words, the tools change, but the capacity to wield the tools does not change.
Humans are tool builders.
That's what we do.
That's how we thrive in every niche.
You've heard this before if you've watched any of my videos.
So the question is, why is this time different?
Why is the pattern repeating but in a different way?
Because the time scale at which it's happening is compressed.
The printing press alone took decades to spread across Europe.
The Industrial Revolution happened over a century.
AI is clearly moving faster than all of them.
And a lot of people still think that this is just speculation, because AI isn't useful for them, or that AI isn't that impressive.
But that's because most people still have, even though they deny it, they have this get rich quick cheap, dopamine addicted mindset.
They just want AI to solve every single one of their problems, because that's what was in the hype right.
That's what was promised.
AI is just going to solve all your problems.
It's going to be able to do everything for you.
So people expect that.
And then they go to use it and they type a sentence into it and get a mediocre result because they don't know how to use it.
And then they're like, oh, this isn't that good.
This doesn't live up to the promise.
But that doesn't mean it's useless or that doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn it, because there's obviously something here.
There's a reason why a lot of money is being poured into it.
And people are like oh well, the billionaires that are investing in all this are just stupid and they don't realize the payoff.
And that's coming from an average person who hasn't done much with their life.
Billionaires, at least i think, are quite smart.
I would say they are much smarter than the average person and they pay very close attention to the decisions they make in the investments they make.
They probably know something that you don't.
I know you like to view them as these big, dumb people who were just born into money, when it doesn't work that way.
Now one more example to just hammer this home is that, in 2020, DeepMinds from Google, their AlphaFold, solved the protein folding problem that stumped biologists for 50 years.
Proteins are the molecular machines of life.
Their shape determines their function.
So knowing how a protein folds means understanding how diseases work and how drugs can target them.
So what used to take a PhD student months of lab work now takes decades. minutes.
That's insane.
So for those arguing that there isn't a real use case for it...
That happened five years ago.
So the gap between those who adopt and those who wait is compounding every month.
The person who starts experimenting today will be unrecognizable in like one to two years.
But that's too long for most people.
It has to happen in two weeks or else they quit.
Two years is still an extremely short amount of time.
That's not even going through four years of college.
People just have this like insanely distorted view of how long it takes to actually achieve something.
So that leads to idea number two, which is that the skill has moved up a level.
Now, to illustrate this, I said before that I'd never use AI to write.
And then I caveated that with like I use it to research.
I use it to, sometimes use as a thought partner and other things of that nature, but I never would let it write for me.
And I meant that.
Writing is my craft.
That's what I love to do.
It's how I think.
And so outsourcing my writing to it felt like that I was outsourcing my thinking.
And that's still largely the case.
But something has changed as I've started using it more and I've started acquiring the skill right.
Because the more skill you have with something, the more you can do with it and the more you can see the potential of it right.
Like if you're just starting to play basketball, obviously you can't do much.
You can't really do anything until you practice.
But then you look at a NBA player and they can do so much.
They're just super skilled and they don't even have to think about it.
Now, of course, having the AI just generate an entire piece of writing like a social post or a newsletter or a video script, without any of my ideas or my guidance or my direction, that still gives me the chills, right.
I don't think that is what you should do with AI at all.
But I've started to find a process that allows me to outsource some of the labor of writing so that I can focus more on what matters about the writing, which is the thinking.
And personally I think that's the future of writing as a whole, or future of other skills allows the creative or the artist or whoever it may be focus on the thing that actually matters rather than the tool to achieve the thing.
Now, it'll take me an entire video to explain this, so subscribe for that because I'll talk about it at some point once I really have the process down, but I'm enjoying writing so much more. now because it's less about like it's less about the labor of putting words on a screen and more about focusing on the ideas i get to think from a higher level about what i want the impact of the writing to be now as a brief explanation that doesn't do this process much justice i start with an outline of the points and ideas i want to write about and this can get pretty extensive i practically write the piece without worrying about grammar I feed my books and past content into context so that the AI understands how I think and has my core worldview and philosophy, because when I'm writing, what am I doing?
I don't know if other writers are the same as me, but I have like Maybe 20 to 30 really big ideas that shape my worldview and how I write and they influence how I think about writing.
And I put all of those ideas in my books so that they kind of live on in time and so that they're set in stone.
Right.
So that I can go back and they're like my own personal thing. research mechanisms.
I look to those when I need the ideas to illustrate a point that I'm trying to make in a unique way.
And then I flesh out the ideas while the AI researches alongside me.
So it pulls information and surfaces patterns I know and understand.
It's not generating things just randomly, but finding those things would take me hours because I can't just remember textbooks of information.
This is why you write in the first place to have something that you can reference in your writing.
Again, it's an iterative process.
And this is actually becoming the foundation of our search or research feature inside of Eden, which is the software that we're building, that you do creative work in.
So you capture ideas to it, you store your files in it.
It's like an intelligent drive that transcribes Every single link, like a YouTube video, all of that stuff that you put into it.
You can search by video frame and then you can put those things inside of a project or on a canvas so that you can work in a more intimate way with AI.
If you've been using Eden so far, you kind of understand this.
We're still waitlisted and we still have a lot to build.
So if you want to get in on that, join the waitlist.
Link in the description.
But after that, I comb through the drafts.
I make cuts.
I redirect when something feels dead.
I push harder when something feels alive.
And I give my commentary on places that feel like they're lacking, which helps me think deeper about the subject.
I'm writing more and reading more. than I ever have before.
The words on the page are still mine, but my job changed.
The amount of labor, physical labor that I do has changed.
The amount of mental labor that I do has increased.
That reminds me of the Naval quote about earn with your mind, not your time, because that's a higher leverage thing you can do.
And I'll throw this in here as well for those under where I've created a mini course on how I systemize my life with AI.
That doesn't contain this process.
But if you haven't gone through that already, I think it'll kind of blow your mind as to what's possible with AI, especially if you haven't really dove into AI much yet.
So link to that is in the description as well.
But back to the point.
This is the same pattern that happens during every technological shift.
The scribe copied letters.
Then the printing press made copying irrelevant and the job of the editor emerged, who is someone whose job was deciding what's worth printing in the first place.
The skill abstracted up a layer, but the craft remained.
Writing programming art maybe is going through this same shift.
Right now anyone can generate 2 000 words in 30 seconds.
Competent, forgettable writing is now available on tap as a 20 month chat gpt subscription.
So the baseline, the entry level, got flooded.
Blog writers are already out of a job.
I'm talking like seo blog writers, those ones, those who are hired for companies to write kind of meaningless blogs, not put out the ideas that's in their own mind.
So if you're writing or programming or whatever skill was already average, you're now competing with infinite average.
But the ceiling hasn't moved.
The baseline has gotten flooded.
The ceiling hasn't moved though.
What makes writing great hasn't changed.
And I want you to think of this through the skill that you do if you aren't a writer.
So for writing that's originality of thought, a voice that's unmistakably yours, and the ability to make someone see something they hadn't before.
None of that is tied to the labor of putting words on a page.
So the difference between average and great, therefore, is taste.
The future belongs to those who can filter signal from noise.
When anyone can produce anything, choosing what deserves to exist becomes the skill.
The thing here is that taste is harder to develop when the friction disappears.
So writing by hand was slow and the slowness of it forced you to think.
So yes, the argument that AI can stunt your thinking is very true, but that's usually because people go to AI so that they can write just shit faster.
They aren't doing it for the meaning of writing, and that's fine.
So if you are doing it for the meaning of writing because not everyone has to be a meaningful writer, some people are just trying to get information across you have to go about using it in a different way then
So when AI removes the friction, you have to consciously supply the judgment and discernment that the friction used to provide.
And that's exactly where the gap opens.
Now, I'm telling you this because, as I stated before, most people try AI, get a mediocre output and just decide it doesn't work.
But that's the same thing as like trying to ride a bike, falling off and then just deciding that bikes are useless.
AI has a skill curve, right?
If you hold the belief that everything is a skill issue, then apply that to yourself right here.
The barrier of entry looks low because anyone can type in a prompt and anyone can try GPT for free.
But using AI at peak capacity takes experimentation.
It's the same freaking thing across the board.
People just don't like AI for some reason.
Some people.
Other people are very pro-AI.
There's actually like a political formation happening and AI has become a religion.
But again with the basketball analogy, anyone can go and buy a basketball for 5 to 10 and start dribbling it and playing around.
That doesn't mean that you're any good at playing basketball.
That doesn't mean you're going to get into the NBA.
So it takes experimentation.
It takes failing, adjusting, trying again.
It takes iteration.
It takes intelligence, like we talked about two videos ago in the video on agency.
It takes experimenting until you find or create or discover a workflow that fits how you think and fits your workflow and what you want to put out into the world.
If you haven't thought about in the slightest, then yeah, your output is going to be quote unquote, slop.
So idea number three, what to actually learn in 2026.
And you have my permission here to just ignore, completely ignore, the best skills to learn lists for 2026, because no skill is going to save you.
But the ability to learn any skill fast will.
Again on the topic of specialists versus generalists.
A specialist identifies with the skill and once that skill is threatened, they're threatened and they don't want to change because they're all passionate about the skill itself rather than the essence of what's under the skill and what they're doing.
But a generalist, on the other hand, they have something they want to achieve.
They have this mission.
They have this vision and then they learn and adapt accordingly, and learn many things in order to achieve that.
They aren't held back, their learning isn't stunted because they decided to focus their mind on one skill and not see outside of that.
That's how the mind works.
That's very dangerous.
That was great during the Industrial Revolution, but I'm assuming most of you don't want the same lives as your parents.
This also brings up the topic from Devin Erickson, where he talks about the liberating arts as opposed to the liberal arts, which have just become like ideologically tainted
But the liberating arts are the skills that free people have always needed to act on their own behalf or to self liberate, govern or to have agency.
And those were logic, which is deriving truth from known facts.
Statistics, which is understanding the implications of data.
Rhetoric, which is persuading and spotting persuasion tactics.
Research, which is gathering information on unknown subjects.
Psychology, which is discerning the true motives of yourself and others.
Investment, which is managing and growing assets.
And agency, deciding what to pursue and acting without permission.
Now, these aren't necessarily skills, but they are capacities.
And you have to develop them by doing things that demand them.
You don't just study and think that you learn these things.
That is the huge separator between average and great.
Now, there are three things you can do that demand these all at once so that you can develop them.
And I believe that doing these three things are critical when we're going into the age of job loss.
So the first is to build your own thing and put it in front of people.
A product, a project, a piece of work with your name on it.
This forces rhetoric because you have to persuade people to care.
It forces practical psychology, because you have to understand what others actually want, not what you think they should want.
And it forces agency because you have to act and especially iterate without permission.
You learn these by getting feedback from reality. not from books.
I personally believe we are witnessing the return of the artisan, but from a completely new point of view.
Now the second thing you can do is to write publicly consistently, even if you do it with AI, because writing is compressed thinking.
It forces logic because weak arguments collapse on the page.
It forces research because you can't fake depth.
It exposes where your ideas are thin and it builds an asset like an audience reputation, proof of work that compounds.
So if you don't want to be a specialist that is tied to a job for survival in an age where jobs are commodities, I guess you could say, then you have to build your own thing.
You have to build an audience.
You have to go where the attention is, which is right now is on social media.
You have to build digital assets.
You don't have to.
So to say, you can take another route, but a lot of the other routes with traditional assets take a lot of capital or connections to actually get into.
And I'm assuming you don't have a lot of cash flow.
You don't have a lot of capital.
So you need to build something that you have the opportunity to build.
We're going to talk about the best one person business. to start in 2026 in another video.
I'm putting a lot of videos out over the next week or so.
Now, on this point, I'm really not sure how I feel about this just yet, because a few months ago I felt pretty strong that most people are going to be writing with AI.
And I didn't really like that feeling because I was tied to my writing.
But the thing here is that there will still be skilled and unskilled writers.
That's a point that many people just don't realize or think about.
And AI itself.
If you just ask it to generate a newsletter or social post for you, it has a very distinct flavor.
And a lot of people are catching on to that.
Personally, I believe the distinction between skilled and unskilled writing lies in the density of ideas, the quality of argument, the synthesis of concepts and the novelty of perspective, rather than the labor of putting words on paper.
Now, the third thing you can do right now is to use AI to do things you couldn't do before, not just things you didn't want to do.
Because most people are using AI to avoid work, to work less, and that's usually because they aren't working on something meaningful.
Most of their work is occupied with utility-based tasks, not meaning-based tasks.
So the edge goes to people using AI to attempt work that was previously impossible for one person research that would have taken weeks, synthesis across dozens of sources.
The question isn't how do I do less?
It's what can I do now that I couldn't do before?
So for the utility based tasks, use AI all you want.
That makes sense.
You want to spend more time doing what you want to do.
But for meaning based tasks, the thing that you want to do, the thing that you want to spend your time doing.
Be very careful that you aren't using AI to avoid struggle or skill development, because that will quickly diminish the amount of meaning that you can derive from that thing.
Now, idea number four, which is the only questions that matter.
So after watching this, I want you to question three things.
I want you to question every skill you have, every habit you repeat without thought and every default way you spend your time.
Now, if you were to do those same things every day for the rest of your life, like you are set to do right now because it's human nature, is that going to lead to a future you want?
I want you to really Actually think about that in relation to how fast the world is changing.
Are you on the cutting edge or are you settling for the average life reserved for average people?
Because there is something you can do that won't be entirely replaced.
There is something.
There is some opportunity.
There is something you can discover and find, and you're not going to find it just by thinking about it for one day or trying things for one day.
The way of being a free or sovereign individual is to adopt this as a lifestyle.
It's like you're an explorer navigating through the jungle and you don't know where the treasure is.
You don't know where anything is.
You just have to slash your way and figure it out.
You have to completely detach from the way you've been doing things, which is probably the residue of industrial living.
So the thing that you can do is a combination of your taste and your judgment and your way of seeing problems.
Your job is to find that thing, and you're not going to find it by waiting or resisting.
You must experiment at the edge of what you know.
You must discover what your edge actually is.
And the people who figure this out over the next 12 to 36 months will be seen as like a different species.
The fruits of exponential progress are reserved for those who lean into the risk and figure it out along the way.
Resources that I mentioned for this video are available via the links in the description.
Make sure you like subscribe while you're here.
Videos, the videos I said that are going out, they're going to go out.
Thank you for watching.
I appreciate you being here.
Bye.
