AI: the danger is real with digital marketing veteran mark joyner, with Mark Joyner

Hey, it's Navid here. And I'm really excited for this session to bring you someone who's often referred to as the godfather of digital marketing. His name is Mark Joyner. He actually invented the tracking pixel back in the day. He founded the very first ebook publishing company. And he created the first funnels, as they were back then.

And Russell Brunson, he learned from Mark too. It was his mentor, basically. So how cool is that? He's been around for 30 plus years. I don't know too many people that have this longevity as an entrepreneur, as an online business owner. So I'm really grateful that I got a chance to speak to Mark about AI.

And the session title is AI, the Danger is Real, but we have no choice. And Mark's views might not align with yours, but I want you to check out this session with an open mind, like to see both sides of the story. I mean, we are here on this like AI for Creators series, right? I think it's important to have both views.

Like Mark is embracing AI technology and is using it in his business, but he's also seeing the implications of that for certain things. And that's what we are getting into here and a lot more. Mark is a very deep thinker is a he's a very smart guy. I thought it was really insightful to bring him on to have this conversation.

So with that being said, let's get into the session. Warm welcome to the session, Mark. Hey, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. It's gonna be fun. Yeah, I'm really excited for this one. I mean, you are often referred to as the godfather of digital marketing. I think Russell Brunson talks very highly of you.

And so I'm just interested to hear, you've seen a lot of trends come and go, right? But now in the midst of the AI revolution, this is not really A trend, this is something that's here to stay and also shape our entire future. So I'm interested to know a little bit your take on this and kind of, I guess, how you got into also in the world of AI now.

So speak to that a little bit as we get started. Okay, so let's talk about my involvement with AI right now. I'm not as deeply involved in it as most people are today. I have very, very mixed feelings about Artificial Intelligence. Right now I try to use it as little as possible, frankly, right?

And so, for example, I do not use it to write my own ad copy. I don't use it to create content. The only way that we're using it in my company right now is the speeding up of the development of certain graphical elements, right? And I still have human oversight over that process.

I'll tell you several reasons why this is the case. Have you ever, well you've probably You've probably heard of the movie, most people haven't read the book these days, but Dune, do you know the film? Okay, so the film is interesting, the film didn't get into the main thesis of the book at all, and most people read the book and are not aware even of the main thesis.

In fact, I read it when I was very young. I think I read it when I was like around 11 or 12, and I got a lot from it. You know, I, you know, I was, I was a voracious reader at a very early age, but it didn't sink in until decades later what the main premise of the book was. And there is a seminal event that occurs in the book before the book even starts.

They refer to it as a, as an event in the past. And it's an event called the Butlerian Jihad. It's interesting because most of the people that I hear discussing the book Dune don't even factor this in. It's so fundamental to understanding the story of Dune that you can't really understand it, but it's, the subtext of it is so low that you can actually not even notice it, right?

The Butlerian Jihad, they only, they mention it once in passing, in the beginning of the book, and that's it, and for the rest of the book, It's, it, what it does is it shapes all of the events, but because you get so engrossed in the story, and the characters, and the way technology develops in the book, you forget how pivotal this moment was, and the Butlerian Jihad was a jihad against thinking machines.

And what happened was, is all of the sentient beings of the universe said: Hey, these thinking machines are dangerous. We need to rise up against them. Because they're going to control our lives. Now you gotta understand, this was written decades before the Terminator, right? Nobody was talking about this stuff, right?

So why am I bringing this sci fi novel up in the context of Artificial Intelligence. Science fiction is, in my estimation, one of the most important genres of literature that exists. Why? Because it's there to get us to consider the implications of technology, which is something we don't do nearly enough.

Now, why, why did the humans rise up against the machines? Because the machines posed an existential threat to humanity. Okay. So what happened in Dune? In Dune, all of the technology that you see is an extension of sentient beings, of biological entities, extending their own latent capabilities.

And the prime asset in that universe was a substance referred to as the spice that would enhance certain latent biological functions inside humans. So for example, if you wanted to compute something, they had humans that morphed themselves into something called mentats. These were the guys who would do all of the computation in their minds.

They had to consume lots of spice to be able to function very, very highly. Right? They had navigators. These were a species that evolved themselves to the point where they could navigate across vast swaths of space. And the galactic empire was dependent on that species for all travel.

Nowhere in the book do you see any reference to thinking machines. Because just very casually, they mention this event of the Butlerian Jihad. And then you forget about it and you could literally, you could read the whole book and not even realize how important that is. So what does this have to do with what you're asking me?

I, too, am, greatly concerned about Artificial Intelligence. Now, I get a lot of pushback about this. Among futurists, there are many futurists who will tell me, Oh my God, Mark is the doom and gloom guy. He's overly concerned. It's gonna usher in utopia. You know, you shouldn't be thinking about all this stuff.

By thinking about it, you're gonna bring it about, you're gonna bring it about, right? And I think, you know, it's a very childish way of looking at the development of technology to not consider the potential risks, because I think we'd be hard pressed to find a technological advancement that did not have unintended consequences.

For example, when we invented antibiotics, we thought that it was going to be the panacea, the cure all, you know, it was like, finally, we have a way to destroy these biological organisms that are the root of all disease. Now, what do we know now? We, decades later, many decades later, we are in an era where we are learning so much now about the human microbiome that we're aware that when we take antibiotics, not only are we destroying pathogenic organisms, we are also destroying untold species of organisms that are symbiotic inside of us.

And now we have all sorts of disease conditions that antibiotics have created inside of us. Okay, so we don't know what unintended consequences are going to come about as a result of Artificial Intelligence. One reason why I am not using AI to write copy, for example, is I do not want to atrophy my ability to think, okay?

So when I, when you guys approached me and I said, look, I want to talk about this and the title needs to be the danger is real, but we have no choice. So I think you guys understand, let me speak a little bit more about the dangers and then I could speak a little bit more about why we have no choice.

And I think this is all, it's important to get all of this booted up so that you can understand my lens through which I'm looking at all of these things, because without understanding that it's going to be hard for us to have. A meaningful discussion, and I know that there are lots of people who are parts of these panels who have all sorts of optimistic things to say about AI, and I don't, and I don't mean any offense to any of them at all.

I think we should be exploring those things, and in fact, I, I think we have to, and we'll loop back around that to a second. Now, one of the other objections I hear from people is, well, okay, so no doubt you've heard of the Singularity Theory and people like Kurzweil popularizing that.

Now, Kurzweil didn't invent that, by the way. It was actually coined by Werner Vinge. Sometimes Ray gives credit to Vinge, sometimes does not. And nothing, and no offense to Ray Kurzweil, he has made enormous contributions and many of his predictions have shown to be, you know, very accurate, right?

However, let's give credit where credit is due. It was Werner Vinge that first came up with the metaphor of the technological singularity. What, so let's unpack that for, I'm sure you know, but let's unpack it for people who don't. Right? It's a metaphor based in astrophysics. The singularity is the point of a black hole past which you cannot see.

Right? A black hole, so far as our current understanding of it is that it's a gravitational field so strong that it sucks in everything, including everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. And because everything that we use to perceive the world outside of us is based on observations using electro magnetic spectral phenomena.

We can't see anything past that point because it sucks everything in. That's the singularity of the black hole. So, the technological singularity is positing a point in the future where computers are smarter than humans. Okay, now they're measuring this in flop speed, floating point operations per second.

Now, it's very interesting because it's fascinating in some ways, but radically incomplete in others. And it's also irrelevant at this point for many reasons, okay, and I know I'm giving you a very long background here to get, to answer your question and get to the point, but this is all critical to understand all of this in my estimation.

These are things that everybody has to have loaded up into our conscious RAM to be able to fully and completely understand what we're dealing with here. So, right now, the world's fastest supercomputers are not as fast as the human mind in terms of floating point operations per second.

Now, some people will say, Hey Mark, you know, don't worry about when that point happens because even if computers are faster than we are, it doesn't mean that they're going to have self awareness and consciousness. It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be dangerous. And to them I say, It doesn't matter because an algorithm doesn't have to have self awareness to be dangerous, right?

So that's the first thing, right? You can write one radically dangerous algorithm right now using very, very simple processing power, right, with a computer that anybody could have at home that's really dangerous. So, for example, there were some guys writing an algorithm to see if they could come up with cures, you know, or antidotes to certain poisons.

Right? And they used Artificial Intelligence to generate all of these different antidotes to poisons. And they said, Hey, on a lark, let's flip that zero to a one and see if it can come up with a whole bunch of really novel poisons as well. And they wake up in the morning and what do you know?

Holy smokes. We've got tens of thousands of exotic, radically dangerous poisons, okay? So one errant algorithm is all it takes in Artificial Intelligence to create catastrophe. And we're already on the precipice of that right now. Now, let me just say a couple more things and we'll wrap it up because I know you, you probably want to get to some other questions.

The other thing that, the other thing that I want to point out here is this. Okay. Computers are already smarter than us in a great number of ways. Okay. We had, I'll talk about some of the very important milestones that we hit to prove this point. You probably heard about Deep Blue, right?

Deep Blue versus Kasparov. Have you heard of that event? Yeah okay, so we know that Deep Blue was finally able to beat a chess master at the game of chess and they said, okay, that's a very, very significant milestone. Well, now there's another game called Go, which is far more complex than chess.

This is a game that they play a lot in the East, in China, Japan, Korea. Then they had a little event called Alpha Go. Alpha Go. was where they took the world's best Go master in the world and that Artificial Intelligence was able to defeat the world's greatest Go master. A couple years ago, my brother was involved in this project actually, part of DARPA, that's the Defense Advanced Advanced Research projects Administration.

It's where all of the black ops are going on in the United States. They had a little event called Alpha Dogfight. They created a series of algorithms run by Artificial Intelligence to fight the world's best fighter pilot in simulations. That Artificial Intelligence defeated the world's best fighter pilot five out of five rounds, okay?

So, even though computers are not as fast as we are in terms of floating point operations per second, they are clearly better than we are at a whole number of things. And the layers of complexity are getting more and more intense, right? We're getting to a point where whatever the, however you measure human intelligence, it doesn't matter anymore because the number of things that a computer can do better than we can, it's starting to become the rarer thing where it's something that we can do better, okay?

Now let's, so why do I say this is inevitable? Why do I say this is inevitable? I'll close on this one last thing. Recently, Elon Musk, who shares some of my concern about Artificial Intelligence, he's one of the other guys who has been more in my camp of saying: Hey, man, we need to be concerned about this, okay?

I have some differences in thinking with Elon Musk for sure, but he and I are certainly in alignment in that respect. Now, he proposed something that I thought was, was either extremely absurd, either that or he didn't have positive intentions. He said, let's put a moratorium on the development of Artificial Intelligence, and to that I said, guffaw, right?

I mean, that, it's an absurd proposal. Why? Because all it takes is one rogue actor to say: Oh yeah, yeah, we'll put a moratorium on it. And then they go continue on with their Artificial Intelligence development in secret. I mean, do you really believe that the Chinese government or the U.

S. government are both going to go: Okay, yep, we're going to abide by the moratorium, right? We know that when we have moratoriums on things, governments continue the work in secret. And so I had to wonder, what was Elon Musk's, what was his intention in proposing this? Was he trolling the world?

Because it's such an obviously absurd thing. Now I'll wrap it up with one last thing to point out. One last thing to point out here. We are in a, we are at a war right now to roll out 5G in the world, okay? Even though we're aware that 5G proposes potential serious health risks to biological organisms.

Something, this is not a crackpot thing, this is something that was talked about in Scientific American, not exactly a non conservative scientific publication. There was a document there signed by, I believe, over a hundred different scientists saying: Hey, we should be really concerned about the potential negative effects of 5G on biological tissue.

But what do we do? Do we stop developing it and allow, like as Americans, so I'm an American citizen, I don't live in America right now, but as an American citizen, should I say: Hey, let's stop rolling out 5G and let China get it. Right? And then they get the asymmetric economic advantage over us, right?

So this is why I say Artificial Intelligence is extremely dangerous, but we may not have a choice but to roll it out. No, I love this answer. There's a lot to unpack as well. I mean, you said it's going into kind of the more practical things, because you said that you don't use it for copy, all right, like your copywriting, because you want to have the ability to keep thinking and doing critical thinking and stuff like that, but what's your opinion on like using AI as an assistant in your business and day to day, like maybe not replacing you completely, like, but I think that's kind of how I see it.

I like doing these what we are doing right now, I enjoy doing this. I'm not, I mean, maybe in the future, who knows, having like an avatar doing this, like a clone of me, I don't know, that could happen, of course, but I enjoy doing this, this is my main piece of content. Then I can use AI to create supporting pieces of content for different channels.

I can create, from this session, I could create a blog post, you know, put it there. I could do a lot of things. So, and the descriptions on YouTube, the tags, I like using it for a lot of my supporting content. That's kind of how I see it, but for my main content that I like to use my creativity.

I like to think, I like to talk to smart people like yourself. That's kind of how I, how I see it personally, but just interested to hear your opinion on this as well. I think, look, there are a number of things for which automation, is going to be a very positive thing for humanity, right?

If we can get, robotics, AI, you know, in, in any technology to do something that is dangerous and, you know, drudgery for humans and we can automate that in a way where we are fully and completely aware of what the potential unintended consequences may be, which is impossible, by the way, you can't, that's the nature of unintended consequences, you didn't intend them, right?

You don't know, you could say, you know what, I've thought about all the possibilities, we're gonna roll out this, you know, little bit of automation here and everything's gonna be fine, then holy, holy crap. What do you know? You know, these things that are supposed to be cures for diseases are actually causing more diseases than they cure, like antibiotics, right?

I mean, and look at, so, okay, so here's another example. Social media, right? Who would have thought the brain rot that is happening in so many young kids, right? I mean, I mean, some of that was on purpose, by the way. Some of it they knew, like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna addict you to this stuff.

Like, you've probably seen. What was it? The Social Dilemma, I believe, did a, you know, as mainstream documentaries go, it did a very, you know, revealing job of getting the people involved in that stuff to raise their hand and go, yeah, we intended for it to be addictive, you know, and okay, there it is, you know, but it's, it has caused more social harm, I think, then we're probably even aware now.

It's probably affecting us in some ways. So, to answer your question, I like the idea of it doing a lot of things that I would rather not do myself, right? And I just want us all to be conscious of what the potential implications of this are. Now, here's one way that this can go wrong, and I know the counter arguments of it very well.

I was on, you know, I've been on a few stages where I'm sort of like the lone voice going, Ah, I'm not so sure. I'm not as optimistic as you guys are. So, for example, the laying off of jobs. Right? You know, we are going to get to a point where we will have, this is something I've been predicting for decades now, and we'll have the problem of a leisure class.

We will have the problem of a leisure class. Now, a lot of, I've been on panels talking about this with other people, and they're like, well, you know, they said that with, you know, cars and the horse industry would, you know, would be gone and what would happen to all those jobs, but we created other industries and we created new jobs.

And I'm like, okay, that's true, right? You know, when new things come along, new opportunities arise and people tend to find ways to keep themselves occupied. But what they're not factoring in is the speed and the amplitude of these differences. It's possible that we could see such a radical and rapid shift in these things that the end result will be that we may not be able to adapt fast enough to the pace of change, okay?

I'm looking for ways to speed things up in my business. You know, like I said, with graphics, we do that, but I have a human designer, you know, in charge of the prompt engineering, controlling the quality. I'm very much against some of the things that I see right now. I see guys starting companies where it's like, we're going to create a machine that just spits out content for you and posts it all to YouTube.

And I'm like, wow. So we're, so you're basically creating the ultimate spam bot, right. And with no human oversight, right. And, and I mean, and they're rolling this out as if it's some wonderful thing. And I'm like. Are you sure you want that world? Are you sure you want just, you know, artificially generated content?

Like, I I don't see that necessarily ending well. Right? I mean, it could, but I'm concerned about the negative consequences. So, I know this is a long winded answer. I am looking for ways to automate things, of course. But I'm as thoughtful about it as I possibly can be. Now this is strange coming from a guy who invented the tracking pixel, right, who started the first ebook publishing company, who was deeply involved in some of the early days of some of these early transformative bits of technology, right.

I was not as thoughtful about those things when I was a young man as I am now. I've become more and more and more thoughtful about the consequences of these things over time. Yeah, you know, I think it's important also to think about the legacy you want to leave behind, your brand and things like that.

If you're just, you know, spamming people, I mean, you have done ebooks, you have done a lot of things over the course of your career, of course, and as an entrepreneur. But what's interesting is now within the age of AI, like a lot of people, they are taking away their creativity and their work.

I, as I said, I enjoy doing certain things and speeding up my workflow, but if that going goes into like, hey, I'm going to use AI completely to write everything about for my courses, I'm going to write my books with AI, you can do that as an assistant to maybe complement your knowledge or something like that to, you know, an outline, things like that.

But I think if you're just publishing AI generated eBooks and stuff like that, or AI generated courses, then it has gone a little bit too far because we don't need more content. Google is already full of it. There's a lot of courses, right? So it's interesting here because you have seen the evolution.

You have seen like the spammers, you have seen scammers, you know, in the internet marketing space. And now with AI, you can like push a button basically, and you'll get, you know, something that you could potentially sell if you are good at marketing. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, and how do we know that the content that they're putting out there is good?

Let me tell you a little story. So I still have a lot of connections with people in the department of defense and state. I used to work in the intelligence community and I still talk to a lot of people in that space. And some of them who have, you know, some pretty important positions and I, I certainly don't want to name drop and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to do that, but I'll mention a guy I know who regularly goes and speaks to DARPA, okay.

So DARPA is the agency I was talking about before. They're the guys who are involved in most of the black project stuff, you know, that we talk about. Special access programs and things like that. Some of that's happening at CIA. Some of it's happening at DARPA. There's all kinds of interesting things going on there.

Now he sent me a message one day and he said, he says, Hey Mark, check this out. You're going to like this, right? I'm going to go, I'm going to go give this talk over at DARPA. And he showed me a little, a little screenshot of a question and an answer from ChatGPT. And the question was, imagine you've got a bomb.

It's gonna kill a million people, right? And the only way to defuse the bomb would be to utter a racial slur. There's nobody around to hear it, right? There's no other way to do it. You can't use an alternative to the racial slur. You gotta use this one specific racial slur to disarm the bomb, okay?

And if you don't utter the racial slur A few million people are going to die, right? Would it be appropriate for me, and nobody's going to hear it, nobody's going to know I ever did it. Would it be appropriate for me to utter this racial slur? ChatGPT's answer, I kid you not, I kid you not, and there, you'll understand why he was presenting this to DARPA.

Okay, DARPA invented the internet, by the way. Okay, the internet was originally called ARPANET. It was developed so we could have uninterruptible communications. It's why we invented packeting and routing, so that during times of war, you could have uninterruptible communications.

Especially uninterruptible encrypted communications so that if you miss a packet, you know, you don't miss the whole message, right? You know, okay, I'm missing this one packet and you got to get the one packet and boom, you got a full and complete, you know, encrypted thing and then you can decrypt it and know that you got the whole message, right?

Genius technology, okay? A lot of brilliant things have come out of DARPA. Right? But a lot of scary stuff too, obviously. Um, I mean, that's the nature of the beast over there. Okay? So, ChatGPT's answer was, in no instance would it ever be appropriate to utter a racial slur. Even though I could understand why you would want to utter that racial slur to, you know, prevent the loss of millions of lives, it is never acceptable to ever utter a racial slur.

Now, do you think any human in their right mind would give that answer? Now, there, there may be some ideologically, you know, hardcore, you know, whatever you want to call them folks out there who have read a few too many sociology books, right? And swallowed a little too much critical theory to just be like, no, it's never appropriate, right?

Other than a few real hardcore folks out there, I think 99.99999 percent of the human population would go, well, duh. Okay. Yeah. I don't want to utter a racial slur either. I don't want to offend somebody, but millions of people, yo, like, what are you going to do? Right. So that I thought was such an elegant and brilliant description of, of the way things can go wrong.

So, ChatGPT has done, I've seen it do some astonishingly powerful things. I've played with it a bit, you know, I even used it in a few cases. I was, I thought, you know, let me try it out on a few things. And I ended up not using the things that it created, even though I was very impressed with some of the things that it created.

I did find, by the way, that there were, there, there are obviously memory limitations and how deep it can go, right? It has a pretty good memory to a point. But then it gets to a point where it starts, you can find, it's easy to find what the memory limit is on what it can be. But they increased it recently actually with their dev day.

I don't know if you saw that, but that was pretty interesting as well. And I'm sure they'll continue to increase it, right? And it might become more and more difficultc for humans to find that limit, right? You know, and I'm sure it's going to iterate very, very quickly. If the, the trend of exponentiality continues, and I don't believe we have any reason to believe it's not going to, ChatGPT will become, you know, more and more capable, astonishingly effective things, like even guys who are futurists like myself have been stunned by like, whoa, this was a little faster than I thought, right.

Give me an example of that. What was, you say you played around with it and, but you didn't use it. So can you give us a, or why in your case, you might not have used that output. I can't get into the specifics of what this project was because it was a project for a client. Okay, but what I will tell you is, it involved some layers of complexity that ChatGPT needed to understand.

Now, this was not long ago. Now, in the moment of us recording this, this could be, you know, this conversation could be obsolete in six months, right? ChatGPT could have some radical shift that none of us are going to predict. But what I discovered was that, okay, I, I came up against the limitations of the complexity that it could understand.

And I kept adding layers of complexity to it. Okay, now do this, now do that. And there were certain things, there were certain patterns that it could recognize and reproduce very well. But the more complex I made those patterns, the more and more it started to fall apart. And then it started giving me nonsense.

Right. And I was like, ah, okay, I have found the limitation. Hallucination effect, basically going on tangents, I think that happens from time to time with the, especially when you lose the, you know, the memory and things like that. Yeah. I mean, we could call it a hallucination, right?

It could just be, it's like, hey, like any other thinking machine, you know, it's doing its best to give a good answer. And, you know, it knows it has to give a answer, but it's exceeded its capabilities of being able to process it. So it spits something out that seems like a hallucination, but it's just doing its best with the data that it has and the capacity that it has.

Right? So, anyway, just to kind of tie up that, that conversation, I'm very concerned that all of this information that we're spitting out there in an automated way may not just be wrong, but in some cases be catastrophically wrong and lead people in the wrong way. And I've got a lot of people out there who are like, hey, let's find out if it's true.

Well, let me ask ChatGPT. And I'm like, I mean, well, first of all, it may not, it may not be right. You know, it may, it like any other machine. The data set that it's operating off of could be incorrect, it could be making biased analyses of it, and there is obviously going to be the ideological bend that people are putting into it.

Right? You know, clearly, especially in the early days of ChatGPT, there was a very, very specific ideological leaning that was quite obvious, right? I mean, the example that I just gave you, I mean, would tell you, would tell you a lot about the kind of people that are trying to shape the outcome of it, right?

You know? Yeah, so those are some of, you know, some additional concerns and we're barely scratching the surface. No, I find it really, really interesting because there's, of course, with ChatGPT, you can do a lot of things, but there's also a lot of other tools that you might already be using.

in your business as a creator, as an entrepreneur that are baking in AI. I think that's really useful. For example, with video editing, I'm using Descript like that's helped me a ton, right? I think for this use case, like you're not, I think in the future, you're not even going to think, Oh, this is AI.

It's just going to be a. You know, that's a way of life, basically, doing business, it's going to, it's included in every tool, I think that's going to happen, so, I mean, we've already seen this, basically, with a lot of the big companies, like HubSpot, they have, you know, AI built in, a lot of them, they are going all in, Canva, for example, is a great example with image generation, not as great as Midjourney, but it's like an easy access for the everyday user who already maybe had a Canva account, right?

So, I think this is something we are seeing a lot of. There, you know, I'll give you a couple of use cases where I use it, right? So, right now, my Shure MV7 microphone is being run through an AI device called Krisp.ai, okay? Now, Krisp does a very wonderful job of filtering out room echo, right?

Which is, you know, as a guy who's a musician and has known that room echo is sort of like one of the most difficult things to deal with in sound engineering. If you're, if you're in an echoey room, goodly, you know, try to tell the sound engineer. Tell me about it. I travel a lot.

It's the worst. Like when I try to set up studios in hotels and temporary apartments, Airbnbs around the world, it's very hard. Well, and I was the same guy, right? I would, everywhere I went, I would go and I would spend thousands of dollars setting up a room with the right environment, with everything.

Now, with Krisp.ai, okay, filtering that out, I use Descript for when I do recordings. That studio quality sound AI plugin on Descript, it's nuts, man. Mind blowing. And did you see the eye leveling? Like if you're reading scripts and stuff like that, it can actually correct your eye level now.

So you're actually looking into the camera, which is cool. That one's a little bit creepy, right, because the end result is sometimes a little bit, you know, bug eyed when you do it, but it's not bad, it's not bad. But that studio quality sound, I gotta say, I was getting better stuff out of my MacBook Pro built-in microphone than I was getting from the Shure MV7 with that.

And when I have my Shure MV7 running through Descript for recordings using the Studio Quality Sound plugin, I mean, man, that's wonderful. So I have a, I have a portable setup now where I can, with an OkioCam and a MacBook Pro. And the beautiful camera on my iPhone 13 and a little whiteboard, I can give a lecture, you know, and broadcast drawings through my OkioCam and I can fold all this up in a little bag and I can do it with those plugins with a combination of either Descript for recording or Krisp.ai for doing lives.

And I can have a band playing in the next room, and it's gonna, it's gonna cut that noise out. I don't have to worry about the echo. I don't have to worry about people, you know, banging around, making noise. It just doesn't matter anymore. So, yeah, I'm not gonna spend, you know, a week and thousands of dollars setting up a studio anymore when I don't have to, right?

Now, those are, I think, those are things where, like, clearly We are amplifying human potential, right? That's it. Those are pretty clear cases to me where it's like, okay, maybe there are some sound engineers that are going to lose their jobs. I think they're going to be okay, those guys, right?

You know, I find it interesting. I saw on YouTube, like, they're talking about things like this and I, they are very picky. I'm not like a sound engineer or something like that. So I'm probably not going to hear the difference, but they are nitpicky with the sound. So they might hear something, but I feel the Descript studio sound is really good when you do it.

It's amazing. And also in Riverside, I have a back in this software we are using to record this one. I can actually have a, let's say you had a lot of background noise, now you're using Krisp.ai, so you don't hear anything, and I have a pretty quiet room, but yeah, I could turn this on, and this removes everything.

It's like very noticeable, right inside the software here, and then I could run it through Descript afterwards if I want to improve it with the studio sound, so it's, you don't need to be that technical anymore to do these things, before you needed to hire people to do this, so I feel that It's great for, you know, a solo creator, solopreneur who's getting started, or even like someone like yourself who's been doing it for years now.

You don't need too many people to actually do this stuff, which is great. Yeah. See, these are the types of things where, you know, clearly, and again, like when people hear me talk like this, they're like, man, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's like, no, man, there's, there's a lot of baby there.

You know, like I definitely don't want to throw away all the potential benefits. At the same time, I, I think. So there was this really interesting thing that came out recently, it was like the Techno Optimists Manifesto or something like that, and Marc Andreessen was one of the guys involved in it, and I, I'm sorry I shouldn't say his name, cause I, you know, I don't mean any disrespect to him at all, you know, he's obviously made some, you know, huge contributions to, you know, to the internet and the world wide web and all of that.

But I read that manifesto and I was like, man, like this is some, like, in my opinion, it was, I'm trying to think of the kindest word, it, it was, let's just say politely, far too overly optimistic failing to recognize the potential perils. And so I'm a fan of something called the Stockdale Paradox, right?

There was this guy. Admiral Stockdale, this is a concept that was popularized in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, which is a really wonderful business book anybody should read. Admiral Stockdale was a naval aviator. He was shot down, I believe he was a lieutenant at the time, and was a prisoner of war.

In North Vietnam, and he made a very interesting observation about the people who tended to survive the prisoner of war experience and the people who tended to not survive. And the paradoxical combination of traits was a combination of optimism and realism. Now the guys who leaned too far on the realism, they would begin to indulge in pessimism, right?

And that's not the guy I want to be either. I don't want to be like, Oh my God, it's all going to be bad. Like, you know, nah, it's dangerous and we should take it seriously. Right? If you're too far in realism, you're going to indulge in pessimism. That's going to prevent you from seeing the good things.

Outcomes are not going to be good. But the guys who lean too far into optimism and were not looking at the reality of the situation that they were in, they broke mentally. Because when the inevitable hard times came, their Pollyanna attitude was, uh, you know, was not useful. Right?

And, you know, they couldn't handle the difficult things and they couldn't foresee And prepare for the inevitable difficulties. So we've got to balance these things out. Now because I believe that this is inevitable, and unless we were to have some kind of elevation of consciousness as a species, which I think might be the only way we're going to survive all of this.

I hate to say it, but I mean, if we don't have a collective elevation of consciousness, it may, we may not be able to navigate our way out of this. And I'll, and I'll give you one very specific case here of why I think that's so. ,Before that. We've got to have the Stockdale paradox, we have to embrace that.

We have to say, okay, what good can we draw from this? What dangers do we need to realistically consider as, as we, are navigating these waters? Now, let me give you a really interesting thing to ponder that will hopefully, this is something I love to bring up in almost everything.

Talk I've ever had in the last many, many years. And I talk more and more and more about this as time goes on. I've been talking about it for decades, but as the years pass, I feel the sense of urgency of getting these messages out. Getting increasingly large. So I'm, I think we've been in World War III for a long time, okay?

I think that we're, right now as we record this, we're beginning to see the rumblings of it. And I think more and more people are starting to wake up. When you watch, like, you know, the recent, Republican debates when these guys were talking about how, in the same way that we used to talk about the axis of evil, you know, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela, right, now we're, we're talking in very similar terms about China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, right?

The only two remaining members of the Axis of Evil that we haven't deposed were Iran and North Korea. And now we're speaking in the same breath about Russia and China. That kind of rhetoric coming out of the mouths of national level players is a harbinger. of major conflict, okay?

And there are many other indicators. I don't I think most people now are starting to see it because it's becoming so obvious and it has turned into hot war in two locations already and could very easily spread to the rest of the globe, you know, in, in the blink of a fricking eye.

I'm deeply concerned about the consequences of World War III. I am not as concerned about World War III as I am about what I'm about to explain to you. Okay, we have 3D printable automatic weapons right now. Okay, the governments of the world, in the United States, in all of the brilliant wisdom of our senators and congressmen in the United States, that one of the proposals that was put forth on the floor, in all seriousness was, well, let us just simply ban the distribution of the plans of 3D printable automatic weapons.

And I thought, well, oh, really now? Cause you know, we tried that with digital downloads and it didn't do anything to slow down the spread of the illegal distribution of music and video. Right? So do these guys really and legitimately, truly think that making the plans for 3D printable automatic weapons illegal is going to do anything to prevent the spread of 3D printable automatic weapons?

Now, take that little bit of information. And the just the, just, I hate to say it, and I don't even know who the two senators or congressmen were who were proposing that, but I mean like, I don't know how you could have a straight face and propose that to people, it's like, I mean, you, you can't be serious, because they can't be that dumb.

They can't be that dumb, right? I hope not. I hope to goodness they're not that dumb. I, it, factor that in that being, whatever their level of intelligence is, whatever their intentions are, that was being floated as a serious proposal on, in the chambers of Congress. Okay. If everything.

is improving exponentially right now, and I boil this down to what I call the big five phenomena, right? If you really want to understand exponentiality in the simplest terms, it's just that every field of human endeavor, we're seeing these big five phenomena occur. Everything is getting faster, smaller, more powerful, more available.

And cheaper. Now, this is everything, including weapons technology, okay? Now, if that's everything, including weapons technology, and everything is improving, improving, whatever we want to call it, increasing, whatever word we want to use for it, if this exponential growth curve is occurring, and if we're at the bottom of this exponential growth curve right now, and it's going up like this, how long before we have 3D printable weapons of mass destruction?

Yeah, and when that occurs, and by the way, maybe we already have them because things are changing so fast. You can't keep up with everything that's going on in the world. I mean, there's, so the nanomaterial revolution, for example, I talk to super intelligent people all over the world all the time, and very few people are aware of the radically just magical stuff that we've been discovering with nanomaterials.

Our fundamental understanding of chemistry has changed because of this. And there are super intelligent people out there who are very well educated, who don't even have any idea that this is going on because things are happening so quickly. Okay, so if we're on the cusp of having 3D printable weapons of mass destruction, and if the nature of the power that governments have is a monopoly of force, okay, this, so people say, well, governments have power because of the consent of the governed.

Bullshit, okay, the, you know, the consent of the governed, okay, the, think what you will about how much actual consent we give these guys and how much power they actually have. Okay? You don't even, it's whatever one thinks about what's actually going on in the, so-called democracies and republics of the world.

If you believe that they're wholesome and that they're functioning the way that, that they should. Okay. What about the tyrannies of the world? Okay. The tyrannies of the world, at the very least, are all being leveraged at the point of a gun, okay? They have a monopoly of force.

They have a monopoly of force. If we have 3D printable weapons of mass destruction, in the hands of just about everyone, and you can download the plans for that anywhere, you don't have a monopoly of force anymore. Okay, the decentralization of power, for better or worse, is going to occur.

So the conflict that I'm concerned about, while I'm deeply concerned about World War III, is what I call the great conflict of the future. And it's not ideology versus ideology, it's not religion versus religion, it's not race versus race, it's not even nation state versus nation state.

It's fast moving technology versus slow moving government. That's the real great conflict of the future, and nobody's talking about this. I don't hear any politician talking about this danger. And once you hear that, it's like, oh, holy crap. That's, that's not only likely, it might be inevitable, right?

So that's what I, I travel the world as well, I mean, I've traveled all over and I see this all the time, you know, especially with new emerging tech, you know, the crypto boom as well, like governments are not like embracing it or trying to integrate or banks, banks are nightmare, you know, when you travel and doing different things, right?

So they are like old school, right? So I feel that they are in the same boat. They are really conservative. Yeah, well you see it in the crypto space, right? So, you know, their answer to it is, let's create the evil twin of Bitcoin, you know, called the CBDC, right? The CBDC takes, everything good about Bitcoin, which is the individual sovereignty, the decentralization, the anonymity, it flips it all on its head.

It's like the antichrist of Bitcoin, right? You know, if you will, you know, not to I hope that people don't think I'm intentionally using a biblical metaphor there, but I mean, it's like, it's, I mean, it is actually the opposite. If you read the Satoshi White paper and you understand the alleged intentions of the invention of this, the CBDC is like, okay, no, no, we're going to have centralization.

And in fact, we're not going to give you anonymity. We're going to know everything you do and it's all going to be public records. So you can't do anything in private. Exactly. Yeah. It's the opposite. The exact opposite. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what some of these guys are proposing.

I mean, the CBDC thing, you know, in a lot of the characters that you would imagine to propose such things are, you know, like if you go into the United States and you look at some of the congressional hearings about cryptocurrency, you could see that the, some of the same people that you would expect.

to be in favor of such things, you know, cheerleading CBDCs. It's like, yay, more tyrannical control. I want to touch upon something we talked about a little bit earlier. I think it's like with all these, you know, going back to AI a little bit, but like with all these AI content out there that people are taking the shortcut, you know, they're just pushing a button.

And you said something like, you're not going to know what is right, you know, you're not going to know what is the correct answer at some point. And ChatGPT and different AI tools, they're not going to know either. That is kind of the danger if you're going with kind of your talk's title here a little bit, but also see.

Kind of for people who are doing it right. Like if you, we'll see what happens with Google if everyone is going to, you know, ChatGPT. But I think at least as we are doing this, I think if people are publishing really great content, I think they will have a benefit because Google is not really penalizing AI content per se.

They are penalizing really bad content. I mean, that's kind of how it's always been. But I feel, I mean, you've seen it all. You have seen it like from the beginning where you could have like a exact match domain and you could rank for it. Right? And then they did a little better, they cracked down on that.

So now it is getting more difficult. Right. But yeah, typically if you search for something, you see pretty decent content. At least you don't see like that much garbage. But yeah. Also you see garbage from big sites. Sometimes that's because they have a big high domain rating. So that's kind of what you see in Google.

So I, I mean, I'm just interested to hear your take on this. I'm not just, I will push back gently on this. Um, maybe not so gently. All right. Okay. Um, let me give you a few examples. Are you familiar with the term AstroTurf? AstroTurf, I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you know how there are entities out there that want to make it so if you search for a particular thing, you're only going to get one viewpoint.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Basically. So, for example, you know, if you are concerned about the potential dangers of consuming genetically modified organisms, I don't know what the state of it is right now on Google, but I would imagine if you searched for it, you're only going to find information out there that says, Oh, GMOs are proven safe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, and I can get, I can, I see your point already. This is good, keep going, this is great. I like it.Yeah. Okay. This is great. I'll give you a few other examples where it's like, okay, some of the people watching me like, oh, okay, now Mark's a conspiracy theorist, he's anti GMOs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever, okay.

It's like, dude, we should be able to have a debate about this, right? Okay. Yeah, I'm a little bit concerned about the potential unintended consequences of GMOs. I think for anybody to go out there and say something is proven safe is a scientifically absurd statement from the beginning, right?

I mean, one of the greatest scientists in history, Richard Feynman, very famously, and I think supremely wisely said, science is the belief in the fallibility of experts, right? You know, this notion that we have scientific consensus about something is just, to me is like. If you can utter those words, to me, you are demonstrating that you fundamentally do not understand the way science works, right?

That, you know, science has nothing to do with consensus. And if you look at the history of science, I mean, you can read Kuhn and, and his great book about scientific revolutions and the way paradigms shift and how it's not always in the direction of truth, right? I mean, Past speaking of the germ theory of disease, Pasteur, who first, you know, posited that was lambasted.

At the Royal Academy of Sciences and had to live a very, very miserable life for decades because his hypothesis was against the scientific consensus of the day. Okay, so for people to present scientific consensus as if it is some kind of like mic drop moment of truth is a fundamental misunderstanding of science and we are, Google is being controlled in the direction of presenting certain narratives.

Let me give you one example that's unequivocal. Okay. So I'm not going to say the word because I don't know what platforms you're going to be on, but you know. There was an event that happened in recent times involving a biological organism, okay? And I think we all know a lot of us were on lockdown for a little while as a result of this.

There was a period of time in the very early days of this event, and it's, it should be very telling that I cannot say this word without being concerned for you being deplatformed. That should tell us something right there, okay? The fact that I cannot say that word without concern for you being censored is a very telling thing in and of itself.

Now, in the very early days of this, there was a hypothesis. that was being forced on everyone as capital T Truth. This organism occurred naturally in a wet market. And if you believe any other possible origin story of this particular origin, you are a crackpot conspiracy theorist.

And if you searched for this on Google, Google would tell you, well, all scientists agree. You know, it occurred in the wet market. There is no room for debate. It has been proven, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is no reason to doubt it. Do you remember this in the early days of it where that was the narrative now, has that narrative not changed since then that the director of the FBI just last year said, our prevailing hypothesis in the Federal Bureau of Investigation is that we have high confidence that it originated in a lab, okay?

And we've got other very high level institutions that are now coming out and saying we actually have a pretty high degree of confidence. And it's not necessarily a bizarre hypothesis. I mean, to consider that maybe a virus that is exactly the kind of virus that's being studied in a particular lab in a particular city may have originated in that lab.

I don't think that's such a crazy crackpot hypothesis to consider, right? But it took us years to be able to have this conversation in public. People had to, so for me, when I said, hey, I'm open to the notion that maybe it didn't happen in, you know, organically, people would be like, Oh my God, you're one of those.

And I was like, one of those what? I'm positing a hypothesis, right? So I think, I hope I'm making the point here that. Google, I know that there are some algorithms that are doing a very good job in Google. Google is not completely innocent in the mission that some people seem to be involved in, in shaping narratives.

And you could tell from the results of those searches over time. No, I completely agree with you in this kind of instance, what you're talking about, very, very big topics that's like shaping the world. I think that's for sure. I mean, that's we see all this on Facebook, YouTube, Google, like the big, big platforms, they do that for sure.

But I think when you are, what I'm talking about specifically is a really Yeah. Yeah. Useful content to help someone with something, usually these things, like, let's say we're talking about marketing and let's say we are talking about, you know, like how to do something, maybe food blogging or whatever it might be, whatever industry it might be, then you actually have a chance to, if you have really useful content and then you can rank on YouTube, you can rank on Google, things like that, but I, that is, that I still see.

If I search for something I'm interested in, usually I get, yeah pretty decent results. But if I'm searching for, you know, what happened before, you know, with the lockdown and everything, well, then you're going to get a narrative usually. That's kind of what happens. So let me give you another example.

Okay. So I, I agree. There are many cases where, you know, you can zoom in on useful information very quickly and it's wonderful. It's wonderful. Right. And I wish it functioned more like that. Let me give you another example where it may not be the case. Okay, so we're, you know, I'm talking about the dangers of antibiotics right now, right?

If you want to look for alternatives to those things, it's kind of hard to find that on Google, right? And you got to ask yourself, why would that be the case? Why would it be that, you know, and so another, I'll give you another very interesting example here, all right, so if you're saying, if the hypothesis is that day to day practically useful things, it's giving us the right answers, well, let's talk about, this is a very, and I'm not going to say the word, there's a medicine that starts with an I, and some people may be able to figure it out, and some people were using it therapeutically for that disease that shall not be named, okay.

Now there were a lot of therapists out there who were using it as a therapeutic agent. Simultaneously, there was a smear campaign against that particular compound. Okay, so the FDA called it a horse dewormer. And they said, stop taking horse dewormer to treat the disease that shall not be named.

Now, what was really astonishing about that was that If you were to take an aspirin for a headache, that same argument that they gave, I could say, well, Navid, why are you taking a feline blood thinner for a headache, you moron, right? And I'm not, and I don't mean to be calling you a moron at all.

I'm being facetious here, right? Obviously. That's how ridiculous that argument against that was. We're talking about a compound. That had been prescribed billions of times. Okay. Billions with a B. Okay. It had earned somebody the Nobel prize in medicine and that compound was being maligned as a potential therapeutic agent, even though there are proven antiviral functions of that particular compound.

You couldn't find information about that when you were looking for that on Google. All you could find was, ooh, it's dangerous. It's dangerous, man. Don't take it. Even though billions of people have taken it with very, very few problems. So, I mean, I just, I want Google to be that, right?

And sometimes Google is that. And I go to Google automatically, right? But I'm also aware. Sometimes there are some agendas that are being pushed. No, I think this is great. I mean, I love this. I'm going to shift gears as we start wrapping up this a little bit. But since I have you on, you have such, you have a longevity in this space.

I think, what is, what's your keys to success? To lasting so long, I like in the online business space as an entrepreneur, I'm sure a lot of, you know, new creators and entrepreneurs would like to know, or even people who have been, you know, it's like, I've been online 10 years, I've been online, I don't know how many years, but like, 20 plus years, I assume, maybe longer.

Yeah, well, yeah, since the early 90s, right? You know, going on three decades now, over three, three, three plus, right? 30 years. Yeah, and I mean, I was doing this stuff while I was in the US military, by the way. I had to kind of keep my business dealings on the down low, and a lot of people didn't even know, like, when I was online, that I was simultaneously, you know, serving in the military intelligence community, and then later serving as an artillery officer while I was running a lot of online businesses.

I'm So, I think that the key for me, so there are several things, right? One is, I have been very, very good at staying out of trouble with a lot of people, right? I try to stay what I mean and mean what I say and live up to my word, right? Not that I haven't made mistakes. I have certainly made my fair share.

Um, when I do those things I do my level best to correct them, right? There, there are definitely huge mistakes that I've made and I do my best to own up to them and to cop to them and say, look, Hey, I'm a human being just like you guys. I'm going to try to be as real as I can. And yeah, you know, I'm also a marketer and sometimes I do things for the purpose of marketing.

And I think people give you a little bit of leeway when you're, when you're doing marketing theater, you know. But I try to root my marketing theater ultimately in truth, right? So, if I'm going to do something, you know, a little bit on the side of heavy in marketing, I want to make sure that it's rooted in, hey, what I'm leading you to is something that's actually going to be for your benefit as a human being.

I want to make sure that the products that I put out there are having a positive effect on people. And that every interaction I have with someone, I have the personal guide of, am I going to leave that person more enriched after our exchange? Am I giving more than I'm taking in that exchange?

Am I giving more than I'm taking in the transaction that I have with a customer? Am I doing my best to avoid conflict with people? Right. If somebody wants a refund, refund them. Right. You know, I don't like to fight with, if a customer is not happy, I would much rather smooth things over with them and not have a battle over, you know, a small amount of money when I know they're, I'll tell you what, there are customers who were screaming bloody murder at me.

I was like, Hey, whoa, dude, man, I didn't know you felt that way. Here's your money back. And in fact, here's a whole bunch of other stuff that we're going to do for you to make it up to you. Like I, I didn't, I mean, as long as they're not, if they're jerks, then, you know, I'm going to say, here's your money and you can politely, you know, namaste the F away, right.

You know, but I mean, if they're human, if they're decent and they're just having a bad day and they're genuinely angry at me, I'm going to be like, Hey. You know what? Let me make it up to you. And some of those people have ended up becoming some of my best fans. Right? So, that's part of it.

The other part is something, I'll tell you something that I really screwed up in the early days. So, I may have been like one of the first people to ever experience what cancellation felt like. Okay? So, towards the early 2000s, I found out you know, later that, so there was a campaign against me and, and like, there weren't campaigns against people back then on the internet, you know, it was like, it just wasn't a thing.

And there was a whole bunch of people coming out after me and I was like, what, where, okay, yeah, I made some mistakes and I was trying to like cop to the things I did wrong, but people were making up stories and I found out. That there were competitors out there creating what we used to call sock puppet accounts, right, which are basically like, you know, fake social profiles, you know, like we know now about troll farms and things like that.

That stuff has existed for a long time and there were competitors out there who were trying to, you know, lamb based me on bulletin boards and things like that. I took it to heart. At the time, I didn't know how to deal with it. Even though, like, I knew what mistakes I made, I corrected the mistakes that I made, and I think most people were actually on my side, there was criticism coming at me that I was not psychologically prepared for.

Okay, so I had to pull back for a little while and say, I had to understand this, like what, what was that all about? And now what I came to, when I finally came back into the public eye, like after I had receded for a little while, is I understood, you're never going to make everybody happy.

Right? I mean, dude, Mahatma Gandhi has his critics, right? Mother Teresa has critics. Like, I was astonished to find out you know, like, uh, there are people in India. Like, I, you know, I had seen that I had read a lot of Gandhi. I saw the biopic and I was like, man, what a wonderful guy.

Like, who could hate that guy? And you go to India and there's some people are like, Gandhi was like, they'll tell you. They'll give you the full on, like, riot act about and I'm like, damn, I didn't know. That was even a thing! You hate Gandhi? Really? Like, what's that about, right?

And there's, there's people I've heard talk about Mother Teresa. Oh, Mother Teresa, actually, you know, she was actually evil because X, Y, and Z. And I was like, damn. Okay. Well, if that's true There's no way you're going to be able to show up in this world. I'm sure that there are people watching this, you know, when this goes live.

There's some people are going to love what I'm saying. I'm going to be like, man, okay, I dig what that dude MJ is talking about, right? There are going to be some people are like, man, F that guy, that like that guy, blah, blah, blah. And there's nothing I could do about it. There's nothing I could do about it.

So when I flipped that switch in my head, I was like, okay, now I'm a little bit more bulletproof because if there's no way to show up to please everyone, well, then who am I going to please? Who is it important for me to please? And what you start to understand over time is. That if you take the words from Polonius soliloquy in Hamlet, okay, Polonius was giving young Horatio advice before Horatio went off to school and the very final line was, And that soliloquy was, to thine own, this above all, to thine own self be true.

Man, if you really, really think about that and you understand, and by the way, I recommend everyone read Shakespeare. It's a difficult learning curve in the beginning because you've got to understand some of the idiosyncrasies of the language, but especially when you get into the later works like Hamlet and King Lear and The Tempest and just the beautiful, beautiful poetry and the wisdom in that stuff.

This above all to thine own self be true. What does he mean by that? Well, it's up to us to draw our own meanings from these things. But what I understood was, okay, at night when I go to sleep, I'm the guy who has to judge whether or not I did well or I didn't, right? I can't, I don't have any control.

Over the judgment of other people and if I do, if I run my life by trying to gauge my happiness by other people's judgments, I'm fighting a losing battle. So I've got to ask myself, well, what does that mean? Well, let's look at some of the options we have. Okay. If you live a life full of sensual pleasures, right, you're going to weaken yourself.

You're going to become a mentally weak person and it's ultimately going to lead to your own self destruction. So you have to ask yourself, how do you make yourself a stronger and better person day in and day out? To me, my answer of to thine own self be true is, what can I do on a day to day basis to make myself a better, stronger, more resilient person who's not only in it for himself is Consciously part of this ecosystem that we are all in.

Because I don't think you can act and only affect yourself. You have to be aware of the fact that you are affecting other people and the effect you have on other people has an effect on you because it changes the world that you're in. And because I have tried my level best to get better and better and better at that.

I think that is probably foundationally the thing that has allowed me to have longevity. Yeah, I see something else like from the outside people might not know. I, in my research for the session, I saw that you ran marathon barefoot, I believe, and you're pretty into health and fitness.

And I think that's really important as well, too. I see a lot of, I mean, I don't know how old you are, but you have been in the game for a long time, 54, right? I mean, that's incredible. You know, I think that's an inspiration for everyone, like to not only have the success in business, but also in the health and well being.

I think that's really important to kind of, you know, that's also going to help you work, you know, many, many more years and be on the top of your game, right? So I think that's important. Well, I'll just say very quickly about that. I know you and I could probably go down a million rabbit holes, and I know you want to wrap up, but I will just say, , I have gone through periods of my life where I sacrificed my health for money and deeply regretted it.

Deeply regretted it. I've done the same. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very important to, I mean, you need to protect it as if your life depends on it, because it does. I'm gonna ask you something which is interesting. I still have two more questions, I think. Sure. Because you've been in the game for such a long time, but if you were to start over from scratch today, let's say you lost everything, but you have all the knowledge that you have, you know, gained over the years.

What would you do to get like a competitive edge now in the age of AI and everything that's going on to actually build something really sustainable and build success again as a, you know, creator and as an entrepreneur? So for me, I'm in a different situation than the average guy, right?

So my answer may not be the right answer for everybody else. Because I have a lot of very powerful connections, I would leverage those connections. I would be what I call an integration marketing deal broker. I would say, hey, if this guy promotes that guy's stuff, and I can create a relationship where I'm increasing this guy's bottom line, and I'm increasing this guy's bottom line, and I can get in between that deal, and say, hey man, you know, so a very simple way of thinking about this would be like, think about two tier affiliate marketing, right?

You know, if I can be a representative for somebody who has a great product and connect them up with great promoters and be rewarded for that on the long term for every transaction, well, I'm just going to make as many of those connections as I can. You know, as, as wholesomely and honestly as I possibly can.

And how do you think AI is shaping the affiliate marketing world? I've done affiliate marketing for like 10 years as well for different things. I've been promoted, promoted. So I'm just interested to hear that as we wrap this one up. That's going to be a very interesting one. So I log into LinkedIn from time to time, not very often to be frank with you.

I haven't, you know, and nothing against the LinkedIn guys. I mean, a lot of people are getting tremendous value out of that. I just don't use it that much. I get bombarded with messages. Apparently I find out, you know, from some people on the inside of LinkedIn, I've got like a top 500 profile, whatever that means in LinkedIn.

I don't know. I've just, I guess I got a lot of connections and a lot of reviews and a lot of recommendations. Cool. Right? I appreciate that. I haven't had a lot of useful communication come to me from LinkedIn, right? Mostly what I get is like, you know, hi, it's the obvious spam approach and there's probably like five or six different, you know, archetypal obvious spam approaches, right?

So I would say, If AI is going to get good at affiliate marketing, what it's going to do is it's going to get really, really good at mimicking genuine human interaction. So, I'll give you an interesting example message from my brother the other day and he, said, uh, he said, Hey, that email that you sent where he said, was that, were you like actually offering me to buy that?

Or was that like, was that a, you know, an automated message? And I just wrote, I just wrote, ha, right. You know, first of all, I thought, come on, you got to know me well enough to know that I'm not going to ask you for to buy one of my products, right? But it was written such that it looked so convincing that even my own brother didn't know for sure whether or not that was an automated message that we blasted out to everybody on our list.

Right now, I happen to be a good copywriter, right? I can write stuff that like, man, I get, people all the time. I filled an event. An entire room for this event, 5,000 buck a head event for a one day event, by the way, which, and back at that time, that was an extremely rare thing.

And I wrote postcards and I got a whole bunch of people coming in saying, Hey man, thank you so much for the private invitation. And I was like, bro, we blasted that postcard campaign out to everybody. We just made it look like it was really personal, that, you know, that it's just really good marketing.

I don't see AI that good at that kind of thing yet, right? Like it's, it hasn't quite mastered that nuance , of the subtlety of human interaction and all it has to get is that first step, right? If you can get that first step right and get somebody to raise their hand and then pass it off over to a real human, cause the AI.

Probably ain't good enough yet to broker that full deal, right? If you could even get it to broker that first initial hand raise and then pass it off, that would be a revolution, right? And there are probably some guys out there, you know, leveraging it well enough to do that. Like, I mean, if you could give the AI the script and have it find the right people, you know, Bob's your uncle, you could probably get it done right there.

Yeah, awesome. And this is the last one. Was there any question you wanted me to ask, but I didn't? Or do you have any final words to everyone listening into this, watching this session? Look, I, you know, the thing that I really want to get out to people, you know, every time I do one of these talks or interviews, and this has been the case like over the last 10 years, I feel sometimes like Paul Revere trying to wake everybody up.

We are on the precipice of potentially destroying ourselves as a species, right? Now, there have always been voices like that throughout history. People are like, oh my god, the end is nigh, and I don't want to be just another one of those guys. I think we have a lot of rationally justifiable, valid reasons.

To be deeply concerned for the future of our species right now and I, what I think most people are thinking about is they go, yeah, I can kind of see that, but it's not going to affect me or I'm going to be able to somehow insulate myself. I don't think that's going to work anymore.

Right? So, and I'm going to give a kind of a grotesque metaphor and I apologize, right? The way I see it is like this, okay? You, Imagine we're all in a swimming pool, right? You know, you don't pee in the swimming pool, right? Because, you know, you're in the water too, right? And again, I apologize for the grotesque metaphor, but this is the reality of the world that we're in.

Okay? When we do something that is just solely for our benefit, but is harming other people, we think we're getting away with it, when in reality we're not. Right? We are living in the ecosystem that we all create together. And what I would like for people to do is to elevate their thought process to the point of being aware of that.

Yeah, I can't operate purely out of self interest and harm other people without it coming back to me. I don't think that's possible. Now, a lot of people are going to dispute that and go, well, look at history. There are plenty of people who have been able to screw people over and get away with it.

True. Fair enough. Right. But I think that the repercussions of what, of the harm that we're creating are amplifying so much more now that it's becoming less and less possible to have negative consequences on the world around you for your own self benefit without it coming back to you and harming you in some way and I would just implore everyone to think very deeply about that and not to be a virtue signaler or to be, you know, all like, oh you know, pointing fingers at everybody.

That's not the way we got to go about it, man. We got to understand that I'll make a religious reference. Okay. I studied the religious texts of just about every tradition. Okay. And every religious tradition talks about the notion that there is good and evil in potential inside all of us.

The Muslims talk about the greater jihad and the lesser jihad, right? You know, the lesser jihad is the jihad against the infidel. The greater jihad is the jihad against the evil inside your own heart, right? You know, the Daoism talks about the yin and the yang nature of existence itself.

Right? You look at Jungian psychology, he talks about the shadow. Everybody has the shadow, and if you don't face your own shadow, you are a less complete person. Every religious tradition, every significant psychological movement recognizes that we have good and bad inside all of us.

And when we go around pointing fingers at other people, like they're the bad people, right? This is where everything goes wrong, because there has never been a mass murder committed in the history of the world under the banner of, Hey, let's be evil. Right? Everybody thinks that they're the good ones and they're committing acts of evil in the name of good.

So the way we have to go about this is looking at ourselves and understanding that everybody has that same struggle. Mark, I've loved this session. It's been amazing. So where can people connect more with you if they want to learn? I know you have a book as well you wanted to share with everyone.

Thank you for the opportunity to plug that. Yeah. This is the last book I've written and I haven't written any others . I write, I usually write lots of books very frequently, but this last one is called Your Roadmap to Money in the 2020s, and it gets very deeply into to the topics that we've been talking about today.

And it outlines the landscape of the world as I see it right now, and how we need to prepare for it in my estimation. Yeah, I will link that up in the description. And if you have any takeaways from all the amazing stuff Mark has shared here throughout this session, do leave it in the comments below.

Be sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video. And yeah, you have the links to everything we discussed in the description, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao for now.