🚨 Adapt or Get Left Behind: Why People Are Fighting AI Instead of Learning It

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

What is up everyone? This is Two Nobodies Who Know Nothing back again on the Shaping Success Network with myself and my friend Robert Watson. Robert, what's happening today?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Good morning. Happy Monday. It is a uh it is starting to get hot in Texas, which we, you know, adore.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

What is the what's the max heat there? Does it get pretty get pretty toasty?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

We can go over a hundred.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's about what it is here, but it's been kind of odd uh this year because we uh haven't been past kind of the well, we had some nineties like when we were supposed to have fifties, and now we have eighties when we're supposed to have hundreds. So I don't know what's going on, but it is what it is.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Totally understand. So I thought I'd talk about future, right? And the future, I love this phrase, the future belongs to the adaptive, right? To those who can adapt to changing environment. And I think one of the resistant things we find in society is people often get frustrated with change, right? And the change is what we all have. It's always changing. We get frustrated with change because somehow that makes us feel uncomfortable. And then people are trying to force change on us, which obviously is uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yeah, it's funny. It's it's a you know, uh, the place where I notice that the most is like with technology. Like I think that that is the biggest, most often time I don't know, the the the diarrhea of the mouth. Uh that's the biggest place I see it for the most of the time. Because you know, I look at I am so we're like we said, we're you know, you're a baby boomer, I'm Gen X. I got a little brother who is he calls himself Gen X. He's I would say he's millennial. I mean, because it's two years past, because like uh 1980 is where I see the cutoff, and sometimes they say 78 for Gen X, but he's either two years or four years removed from being Gen X, but he acts like he's a baby boomer. And so it's hilarious to see him talk about the way that uh that all goes down, and he just does not like the idea of having to have technology involved in everything. He refuses to use a computer, he won, but he wants to use his phone for everything, but then when his phone goes down, he doesn't know what to do. And it's just it's amazing to watch people fight to fight these types of things when if they don't adapt, they're never going to be able to, you know, move forward with a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yeah, I was showing my uh fiance my uh my military record, and my military record is pre-digital, meaning everything was literally typed. So you can see where you know they made mistakes or they double-typed over things. Because you remember how that key would double hit and it would create that kind of shadowy thing. So really, really interesting um um version of reality, but uh you know, it was the way it was. And I also told her when you know I was deployed, um, because I was deployed in Germany and Italy, um, we didn't call home because a call home cost like $25. It was hideously expensive. And $25, I know, doesn't sound like anything in today's terms, but back then, equivalent, it was um about spending $200 on a phone on a phone call.

unknown 3:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

So no one did it. So when you got forward deployed, what you'd send home is postcards.

unknown 3:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

And you just would like people are like, well, what did you do to communicate? We didn't do anything. We dropped off the edge of the world. We we would come back, you know, uh, you know, a little deployment a couple months, come back, and the world would have just moved on without us. Whatever happened or didn't happen, it didn't matter. We were kind of in a little time capsule for that short period of time. You know, now technology is uh people can leave a forward deployment with their cell phone in their hand and be talking to them as they're getting on the plane. On that end of the operation, they are literally in a war zone, and within less than 12 hours, they are back on the street in the United States. I mean, you talk about no time to decompress. Yeah. Back then, we had plenty of time. Yeah, somebody wrote, I wrote letters exactly.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy because just like you said, it I mean, some people are not old enough to remember that phone calls used to be charged by the minutes. They used to have minutes on on your on your cell phone where like you pay, you can still go out and buy minutes on it. You can go buy a cheap phone at like Walmart or something and pay for minutes, but literally your cell phone used to come with, hey, I got I get you know a hundred minutes of free, and then it costs this much more, and your bill would be way more if you did that. Or a collect call. I don't even know if that's a thing anymore because you don't even see a phone booth anymore, but there used to be these 1-800 collect 1-800 call collect or something like that, where you would call and the person who is on the other end would actually pay for your phone call because you didn't have any money to pay for it. It's it's a crazy thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Well, the reason the conversation started was because she looked over and said, Hey, Siri. And Siri said, Yeah. You know, I guess was the way that Siri responded. And I said, you know, I was a young boy watching Star Trek in the 1960s, right, with my my dad, when they would talk to the computer, and the computer would talk back and how revolutionary that was in the 60s to even conceive. And I just watched her do, hey Siri, you know, I mean, it the gap is is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Yeah, I'm waiting for them to figure out the beaming technology because I'd like to be beamed places, you know. Hopefully, like a distance, just beam me to like, I don't know, Washington, D.C. so I can see the monuments and stuff, and then beam me back home, like just like that.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Yeah, I mean, you know, um it and it's it's funny too because again, pulling a Star Trek reference, I think it was three or four movies in this is after the series, when the engineer Scotty was trying to talk to a computer, and the first thing he said is computer. And the guy says, You can't do that, you gotta use the mouse. So he picks the mouse up in his hands and starts talking to the mouse. No, no, no, you've got to actually type. And I think he said something like, He looked at the typewriter and went, ooh, how quaint.

unknown 6:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

It's pretty crazy. It's amazing. You know, I mean, uh, one of the things I'm sitting here looking at this in my in my house, and I've got, you know, this mouse pad that you no longer need anymore, right? Because your mouse doesn't really there no one really uh where'd that go? No one really remembers the idea that you had the little ball on the bottom of the mouse that rolled around inside there and it tracked what was going on, and you'd have to clean that thing every once in a while. It's pretty amazing how far things have come, but then it's also amazing to see how much people are fighting it. I listened to my daughter talk about AI because AI is the big thing right now, and and she flips out, she gets really mad all the time when she hears about AI because she is disgusted with the fact that AI is creating art. And I understand where she's coming from, and I don't think that that type of art that she makes, you know, she does she likes to draw, is gonna go away. However, it's kind of leveling the playing field for people like us who cannot draw, who are not artistic, or have that thought process that we can think artistically, but we don't know how to put it on paper, and we can say, hey, draw this, you know. Um, it's helped with YouTube for me a lot because I'm able to create thumbnails and things like that. And then people will you'll have those hater type people who will go, well, you used AI to do that. And I'm like, Yeah, I did, you're right, because I needed to get it done and it did it for me. It's it's not like it's uh I hate drawing, it's like I can't do those things. I don't have those skills that we've created a tool that can do that, so why wouldn't we use the tool that is provided for us to create things that we need to create?

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Yeah, the the odd thing is, of course, you know, I use multiple AIs in however their large language model is constructed. And the funny one, of course, is I use one of them, it's Chinese. And so the only thing it won't talk about is when I start talking about issues with China. It always answers my question and says, can we talk about something else? So you you you have all those really interestingly human things going on, but one of the big interaction issues for AI, and I consult on one of the AIs, is trying to get what you tell it and you see to the AI, and the AI prints out like let's say PowerPoint presentation, right? And can the AI print on a PowerPoint presentation that matches your description and what you're trying to do? And that interactive user experience is still a problem for the AI. Even the large language model, remembering that we have a lot of words for things, like we say the things like up and down, right? Are real, real simple. But when you're talking about most of our language, it goes through shades of gray. And by going through shades of gray, it's very difficult for the AI to do that. And can you imagine multiple colors across the PowerPoint presentation? And is everything just perfect? And how do you get it to tweak? Um, when you're working on a presentation, for example, do you you say, you know, hey, listen, I want you to keep that horse graphic, but I want you to remove everything from behind that? And how does the AI actually interface? That's taking literally when I say this, millions of hours of interaction for the AI to get those little subtle distinctions down. And I and I can say this in all candor. You don't ever want to turn anything over to an AI as far as you know, kind of a black and white decision. Because every time it makes a mistake, it's laughable because I said, you do realize that's you know not the right thing. And he goes, Oh, sorry. And so it would be like turning the national defense system over. And I said, make sure that you don't go to nuclear weapons, and it's and then it goes to the screen says and just launched a nuclear weapon, and and and you say, You know, you're not supposed to do that. It's like, oh, sorry. Like, dude, no, we're not there yet.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Right. Yeah, and it's crazy. Nikki said, I have a problem with AI used for all types of art, good for research. And you know, I I think that you have to expand, and and maybe this is still the way you feel, but I'm just gonna kind of tell you how I feel about it. Like, you have to expand what you think art is. Like, I don't necessarily, I'm not gonna go tell it to create a Picasso and then print it and then send it out, right? I'm talking more about like the clip art like we have to do for thumbnails where you know YouTube requires you, doesn't require you, but is highly suggestive that you have a thumbnail for your video that you have. So when I get done with this, I'm gonna take a picture of us from the video, and then I'm gonna stick it into Chat GPT and say, hey, create a thumbnail for two nobodies who know nothing with myself and Robert. Please keep the people the way that they look, because you have to prompt it the right way in order to get it to do that, because it will change you or me in some way, unless I ask it to. Um and then it creates a thumbnail and it puts all the graphics over the top of it. And it does it in a matter of like 10-15 seconds, whereas I would have to, as the person designing that thumbnail, go into a program such as Adobe or something like that, take the picture, put it in there, manipulate the background, do all the things that I need to do to get it to disappear, put the text over the top of it. And it and for a person like me who's trying to do that, it could take me hours to create this one little thumbnail when I can just have AI do it and just it's it's done in minutes, you know, or in second, you know. And I I think that that's the point where I'm at. Like my daughter's talking about like original art, you know. To me, that's not original art. This is the original art right here, you and me talking, because I consider this art as well, and we're just creating a graphic for the original art in order to put it with the video.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Right, and uh also to understanding that you understand doing social sciences in your background, that there's a difference between physical science and social science. Physical science is like gravity and aerodynamics, meaning it's repeatable, it's repeatable to 0.99%. It's you know, you you don't have to worry about precision. When you get into social science, predictability and provability and causation become wildly skewed. You you you cannot look at the human experience like you do like a physical experience. They are very, very different. And so human beings are always creating the new, and LLMs will tell you straight up, if you just ask them, what can you not do? And it says, I cannot be creative. And so you'll talk to it about something and you'll say, Well, have you thought about, you know, consider it this way. And it goes, that's very original and unique. It can't do that. Yep. And so we don't really have to worry about that side of it.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Well, and I I want to put a little asterisk on that because it can't do that yet, right? Like, there's a possibility that a lot of things are gonna become what they are. I think the biggest problem, and I was talking to my daughter about this a little bit more too, and she's obviously 12 and she has lots of questions about a lot of things. But if you think about like the space race, like back in the 70s when we were trying to be the first to the moon, right? There was all these other countries about Russia, China, were trying to get there before we did, and we're like, we want to be the first one there. Well, this is the way that the AI race is, and we're uh we are, believe it or not, behind other countries such as China, who is building enough power in order to source this AI because it takes a lot of compute, right? So everyone's complaining about all these data centers popping up. Well, China doesn't care. They do whatever they can because they want to get ahead. They want to beat us to everything, they want to be better than us, just like we want to be better than them. And that's the goal is to have you know the most be the most technologically s savvy country, have the most of everything so that we can be the ones who are in control of it, right? So we have all this regulation around what we're doing, and there is not enough power to power these data centers, and there's not enough of these data centers in the US to keep it going. It's kind of like oil, it's the same thing. It's like all these other countries have all these oil wells that are drilling wells, and their oil is cheaper, right? And it's because they have a lot more of that in their country. Well, we have plenty of oil here, we just don't drill it because we have all these regulations to keep it safe. Well, one of the best ways to create the amount of power that you need is to do a nuclear reactor, which is one of the cleanest forms of energy, and people don't understand that, just heard the word nuclear and they think all of a sudden, oh, it's gonna blow up, it's gonna kill everything. Well, it has in the past. But they've created these mini reactors that can power a lot more, they're a lot cleaner, they're a lot safer, and China is putting them in very fast, very quickly, and the US is behind because we have these regulations that say, no, you can't do this, you can't do that. It costs billions and billions of dollars in order for us to do this, and we still can't get these reactors on the ground. And then you have places like California talking about everything needs to be electric, but they have no power to power that. So, where are they gonna get the power from? To to charge Teslas, to have you know this solar energy. They're forcing all these people and they have all these regulations, yet they don't have the infrastructure to keep it going. So, what do they do? They buy power from other states like Idaho, and so we end up having to send our power to somewhere else so that they can survive. And you know, it's just a vicious circle when all we need to do is safely build these reactors that are great and clean and expand that so that we can be in front of this. But I have a feeling that we can't build power fast enough, and China's gonna win it because they're the ones who are just doing it.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Well, the the the challenge that China has is they they they they're not a source of their own energy. And so no matter how fast they try to go green, um they're you know, the the idea is they're just gonna be way behind the curve on their ability to produce their own energy. So this has been kind of the pushback that's been going on with uh Venezuela and Iran, is the pushback everybody's thinking in terms of how it affects global prices. But the person that's really or the country that's really being most negatively affected is China. And this is kind of a pushback to remind everybody that if you're not self-sufficient, and your point is well taken, we are self-sufficient at this current usage level. But the reality is these AIs are requiring a usage level. And again, I'm not gonna quote numbers, but say 50% higher than we were before, or 500% higher. It doesn't matter. We have to evolve, and I think you're speaking about now laws and nuclear technology that has evolved since Trinity in 1945. Since the Trinity test things have evolved, our laws may not have evolved as fast. And like you're suggesting, our laws need to evolve because of the many reactors. You are looking at something that is relatively compared to where we were with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the other situations we had earlier. We have evolved immensely. The question we have to have is how does the our laws evolve with it?

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah. Yeah, it's I mean, you think about it, if you guys want to know what's going on with anything, just look. I always say this, always look at the big places first. Look at California, look at New York, look at what's going on there, and that's gonna expand to the rest of the country, right? Like it used to be that way with HR things. I worked for a company called Leshwab for a very long time. We had different things in place. Idaho is a right-to-work state, California is not. If something went wrong in California, then they passed all of those HR things, like you can't do this, you can't do that, whatever. It gets passed on to Idaho and Oregon and all the rest of the states that this has it in there or has that law or whatever it is, because they got sued in California, they're not gonna get sued in these other states. And things happen in California that don't happen here. You look at um this big thing right now is the Palisades fire, right? So you go in there and they burned all this place down, they're not allowing people to rebuild their homes in the same way that they were constructed before. They're having to do way more stuff, they're regulating way more. So a house that was built, you know, in the 80s or 70s for three, four hundred thousand dollars is now a two million dollar just in concrete to build it so that it's stronger, so that it doesn't, you know, it's earthquake proof or whatever it is. Like you add all these regulations and you basically are pushing all these people out because they can't afford to do what you want, and very few people are really building. So the regulation is is they've gone too far in my thought process with it, because you can't regulate so hard that it's like 10 times overkill that you don't really need that, and that's what's going on. It's like in Idaho you gotta have a stud every 16 inches, in California you gotta have one every 12 inches. You know, it's like how at what point do we stop this overkill and regulation in order to keep moving forward? I understand you look at like Chi you look at China and they're like they don't have any regulation, they don't care, so they may not be doing it the correct way, and that's why they're burning coal everywhere, you know, to get things going, which is an old thing, and they don't really care about the environment as much as we do. They don't have that type of regulation, but there's gotta be an in-between, a happy medium, and we have a real hard time finding that, I feel like.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, and that's that's the thing when you have this kind of path dependency, when you realize that you know you've done things a certain way, a status quo bias is also what you call it. The reality is it's really, really hard to evolve and to evolve correctly. And so what happens is sometimes when you build something new, right, out in wherever, away from uh uh a current city, you actually get it better. Why is it better? Because they've looked at everything, they're not path dependent, they're not doing things the old way. They can just pick the best of things and evolve. And that's one of the biggest challenges is evolution is what we do. We need to be adaptive. And we're slow to be adaptive. We're very, very slow to be adaptive. And that's really a curse, so to speak, that it's change is inevitable because things evolve. So the question you have to have is what's good, what's bad. That's tough because three people sitting in a room looking at change, two people declare it bad, one person declares it good. What do you do? That's the democratic way, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Yeah, and then you start running into things where people are just, I don't like this because so and so doesn't, you know, like you get your feelings in the way too. And I think that that's a big thing as well. It's like look at the actual data, you know, look at what's really going on, you know. Um not to say that like global warming is not a thing, but they have found recently that it's not as big as they thought it was, but we continue to hammer down on this and keep pushing and trying to make it, you know, put in the forefront and pretend just because someone said that it isn't as big as it is, now it's even bigger. You know, like we we have this thing in the US and we've talked about it before where it's like things go very hard one way and then they go very hard the other way and then they end up right in the middle. And it's just a fight no matter what. So it's amazing for us to see, you know, how this thing is evolving over time. But I don't know. At some point I hope that there's some sort of unity between between the two groups, because I think that it's ridiculous that we fight over dumb shit instead of trying to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Right. Well, we don't like let's pick up the global warming issue. Let's table that, but say that the environment is important. Everybody agrees the environment's important. We don't have to argue global warming. We can then say we all want clean water.

unknown 23:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Oh, okay, sure. I want clean water. Perfect. I want clean air. Okay, everybody agrees, right? Now, you stick with what you agree, the environment's important, water's important, air is important. Let's work toward those goals. Okay. Now, does that impact global warming? Of course it does.

unknown 23:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

You know, clean air, clean air, clean water impacts global warming. Of course. Okay, there you go. Let's work on what we can agree to instead of looking at it like, okay, let's go chase that metric way down the road. And my point is that's kind of like we were talking about before with um kids and their testing at the level in um high school and junior high and elementary. You have these testing levels of what you ended up doing was chasing metrics. And we didn't, and what we should have agreed on was education was important, reading and writing was important, and the ability to do math and science are important. If we would have stuck with that, what would we have done? We would have we would have driven the right metric over here, right? Instead, what we did was we created a test, and then when our students could pass it, we dumbed the test down. Yeah. I was like, no, no, no, folks, let's go back to the basics. That you and I both appreciate this. When Jimmy Johnson took over the Cowboys, I think he's he said something to the fact of we can't run, we can't tackle, and we can't hold on to the ball. He said, So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna emphasize for the next couple years, I'm gonna emphasize running, tackling, and being able to hold on to the ball.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

What was the impact? A couple Super Bowls.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Why? Because you nailed the fundamentals.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, and it's crazy, um, you know, bringing up the education standpoint of this whole deal, like I've I've seen both sides of it, you know, like I understand completely that they need to have some sort of metric to measure the ability of these children to make sure that they get what they get and they know what they know. But we you and I grew up where we failed, we failed. You know, we got the we got the the paper, we did the test, we failed the test, we failed, you know, we failed it enough times, you failed the class. You have to take it over again. And what they're doing now, and I talked to a teacher friend of mine about this, you know, when I first started teaching, and I'm like, I just don't get this. I never got to retake anything. I never got to get anything better. Well, what way is the better? You know, because I ended up taking the same math class two or three times because I couldn't pass the first one, right? And so you go and retake it. Well, in their mind, they think that they would rather the student, so they give the student a second chance, which I don't mind giving a second chance, but the way that they have to do it is, well, we'll adjust your grade if you redo the homework or if you redo the paper. Because we need to make sure that you've grasped the concept so that we can move forward and you can learn the next one. So I understand that, but I also kind of wonder how big of a detriment is that to our children because now they don't learn that they can fail, they're learning that we can redo it and failure is not gonna happen because I can over and over again do this until I get it right, just so that I know. So it's kind of a catch-22 about what's gonna work and what's gonna help. But tying that to a teacher's salary is insane to me that you don't pass 20 kids and you don't get a raise. You know, it's it's I don't know, it's it's a tough thing.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Well, I mean, we all know that that playing sports, for example, there are winners and losers, there's a scoreboard. Um nothing is perfect, referees are not perfect. Um, people are always arguing about one thing or another. But I will remember one coach, and this was early on, and the coach said the same thing after you know a ref made a call and it looked like it swayed the game one way or another. And what the coach said was really important. He says you should play hard enough where you take the ref out of the game. What does that mean? He said, you know, if you're if you're playing on a Razor 10 Martian, yes, a ref can can uh you know sway the game. But if you play hard and you're, you know, let's say basketball and you're headed by 30 points, do you really think that the ref's going to sway the game? Of course not. In other words, put yourself in a position. All that is is saying to you, things happen, it's the way it goes. People, they're humans, they blow calls. Don't put yourself in a position where that blown call can shift the game.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yep. Yeah. I mean, and that's a that that's very true. It's like work as hard as you possibly can so that you don't have to really worry about what the outcome because you know that you've done everything you possibly can to have the best outcome possible.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, and just realize and and accept the fact that if nothing is perfect and that you're gonna lose, you're gonna a call's gonna be blown, and you're gonna you're gonna lose a bunch of calls. Now, the question for you is hey, did you lose the game because of the calls or did you just lose the calls?

unknown 28:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

That's the difference.

unknown 28:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

Well, Robert, great conversation as always. We appreciate you guys being here. Joel and Nicky are in the chat room. I'm sure there's other people there, but for some reason YouTube's the only one that shows up right now, and that is what it is. We appreciate you guys being here. Robert, what do you have going on? Where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Um still writing at uh Global Strategy Institute.substack.com. Come join, uh comment. Love to see you there.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Showed everyone I showed someone the book the other day, ours Victorious. Go check that out. That's Robert's book. We started this podcast based on that book going through it. You can check out Shaping Success and Shaping Success Trous Your Valley. Just had a new episode out with Chad Stewart that is on the channel as well as um I've got David Mannory coming on next week, too, Thursday. That episode is live on YouTube. If you want to support the show, go to uh patreon.com slash West Tankerslews for as little as three dollars a month. You can help us to keep this going. And uh thanks again, Robert, and we will see y'all next week.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Hope y'all have a great week.