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- [00:00]
Brian Romelli
How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount.
- [00:09]
Erica
How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodiscounts restrictions apply. All right, let's get going. Make sure everyone goes live.
- [00:19]
Owen Gregorian
I see locals.
- [00:21]
Erica
All right, Sergio, tell me when you see YouTube live.
- [00:25]
Owen Gregorian
I see Gracie. I see Montreal. Galaxy A.
- [00:28]
Erica
We love you. Good morning.
- [00:32]
Sergio
YouTube is live.
- [00:34]
Erica
YouTube's live rumble. You're in the house.
- [00:37]
Sergio
YouTube is not live.
- [00:39]
Erica
Oh, we're waiting for YouTube. We miss you, Paul Collider.
- [00:42]
Owen Gregorian
I see one YouTube user on.
- [00:44]
Brian Romelli
Oh, wait, wait.
- [00:45]
Sergio
No, we're live.
- [00:46]
Erica
We're good. Okay, good, you guys, welcome. Hi, it's me, Erica. I'm joined today by Owen Gregorian, the Voice. We have Sergio right there. And Marcella, our beautiful Marcella. We have returning guests today, one of our fan favorites, Brian Romelli. You guys, I just want to remind you, as always, this is the Scott Adams School, which is completely different than Coffee With Scott Adams, which lives on its own in thousands of hours of videos. Thank God he gave us all that wisdom. So please know that Coffee with Scott Adams. You can go back and watch as many streams as you want. Soak in the material. And we encourage you to subscribe to Scott Adams Locals channel, where we have some exclusive interviews lined up in the future. You're going to be very excited about some of them. You might even see this guy. Wait, how do I point next to me in one of them. Also, in an in depth conversation about something very important. So before we get to that, we're going to have a simultaneous sip. And I just want to say it's a little throwback to when things just don't always go right with Scott. So, Shelly, take it away for us. I'm sorry, Erica. I did not realize that you wanted me to do that. I didn't put it on. I didn't get one from you. Oh, okay, let. You know. What? See? How perfect. How apropos. Let me pull it up. That's so funny. See, things don't always go right, and that's what it was today. Let's go. So, in the meantime, let's get it here. Who wants to riff? Does everybody have their flask ready? Everybody's ready. Yay.
- [02:49]
Owen Gregorian
Somebody find some papers to bang on a desk.
- [02:51]
Erica
Yes. Someone bang some papers, I think. Okay. That's the book. Oh, my gosh. Okay, here we go. Let's search. No pressure. No pressure.
- [03:04]
Owen Gregorian
Eric.
- [03:05]
Erica
No, I don't feel any Pressure. No. Gmail just closed. It's all good, you guys. I feel like. Scott.
- [03:18]
Owen Gregorian
Brian, did you resist doing the simultaneous sip? Initially.
- [03:23]
Brian Romelli
Yes, but I got it.
- [03:26]
Owen Gregorian
I did, too, for a while.
- [03:28]
Brian Romelli
You did? Yeah. It's funny, a number of people have asked me about that, but I. I finally got it, I think maybe a couple of weeks in, because I wasn't sure where he was going with it. Same thing, Owen, for you.
- [03:43]
Owen Gregorian
Yeah, well, he kind of introduced it at least eventually as like, this is my way of hypnotizing you. And so I'm like, well, I'm not going for that. I just. I had that natural response, I think, that probably a lot of people had, were like, I'm not doing it. But I think there are probably at least a few people that just never did it, and I think they missed out.
- [04:02]
Brian Romelli
Yeah, it's neuro linguistic programming, and I detected it pretty early on. I always found it interesting.
- [04:12]
Erica
Okay, I got it, you guys. This is the perfect sip for what's happening right now. Okay, ready? I'll hit. You guys hit mute. And we're gonna play Scott. And here we go.
- [04:33]
Marcella
That's a terrible tattoo. Foreign. Did you just disappear? When I tapped my. When I tapped my papers, did the picture just disappear? Because it. It threw me out of the app. How could everything go wrong? How's that even possible? But all I did was this. I won't do it again. And it turned off the app. This is so beyond. This is so beyond possible. I mean, we're into some statistical impossible situation here. It can't be that all the apps died at the same time. They couldn't all be broken at once, could they? I know there's a massive incompetence problem, but that's pretty impressive. Anyway, if you'd like to take your experience today up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brain. None of it makes sense today, does it? The preamble doesn't make any sense because the starting assumption is that things went right. So the preamble does make sense. Let's just do the. Let's just do the simultaneous thing. Let's just surrender, shall we? Surrender to the fact that everything's just going to go wrong today. Just absolutely everything's going to go wrong. Sip to that. Sometimes it goes that way.
- [06:28]
Erica
How perfect was that for what happened just before? I thought, oh, my gosh, that's a little wink and a nod right there. But we did love. We did love when things went wrong, because it was just always funny. And I'll sip to that. So you guys, I did send a link out on X yesterday for Brian's series and a lot of you said that you have been reading it and enjoying it. Some of us are frightened and scared. And there is a whole special section on Scott also and in his influence. And I was just looking because I'm going to botch the name. It's 5,000 days to help me, Brian, to. I'm going to say it wrong to.
- [07:14]
Brian Romelli
The end of work as we know it.
- [07:15]
Marcella
No, wait.
- [07:16]
Erica
Okay. As you know it. Okay, so with that, we welcome back Brian and you guys. Sergio is going to be watching your comments and, and YouTube and Marcel is going to be watching locals to see if you have any questions for Brian as we talk. But you guys really loved him last time and everything he had to say. So we said you have to come back again and again and again. So, Owen, I'm going to let you start because I know you had something ready you wanted to ask Brian.
- [07:42]
Owen Gregorian
Well, my first question, I think relates to some of the earlier posts in the series where you're saying essentially a lot of what people need to do is work through grief and go through like rediscovering play. And it was all focused on emotional recovery, essentially like processing trauma and things like that. And that surprised me just because I guess as a technologist I kind of expected, okay, here's the plan. Here's what you need to do. Let's go do it. And instead you're kind of taking this left turn into. You can't really do anything until you've healed yourself. Can you talk a little bit about why you think that's so important?
- [08:24]
Brian Romelli
Oh, and thank you. Brilliant. And thank you for having me back. I'm so honored. I so miss Scott and I miss the audience. So, okay, so I don't believe that we can get through the next 5,000 days. I call it the interregrum. It's a Latin word. And this is when the old king dies and a new king needs to be crowned. And it's the only word I can find in this middle space where the endpoint is going to be abundance. It's not going to be utopia, but it's going to be abundance. And I'll just briefly touch upon it economically and philosophically. And then I'll get into the. The trauma philosophically. What's going to happen is there's going to be scaling of AI and robotics to such a level where AI is building AI and robots are building robots. Now let's get away from the terminator and negative side of it. Let's just look at the center line. The center line is everything's going to become inordinately less expensive, even the robot, right. At some point. And I know the initial reaction, mine, everybody is going to be. I'm never going to afford that. They are going to control it. It's going to be so inexpensive. There's no control anymore. Right. This is why we're seeing the wheels come off the cart. There's a lot of reasons why the world is the way it is and people in power are concerned because the control mechanisms are no longer there. That is scarcity. We live through a world of scarcity, but we had a world of abundance. At one time, most of human existence was abundance. And what I really mean by that is if you were hungry, you went to a tree and you pulled an apple off, right? If you're hungry, you pulled up a root. If you were thirsty, you went to the waterhole. Now, I'm not saying there wasn't adversity. Adversity is always going to exist. But we had a mentality of abundance. And it's very much if you go biblically and you go to the Garden of Eden, the story there is really about abundance. And the knowledge is what got you out of that abundance. Right. I don't want to go too deep into that, maybe at some point. But where we are heading is the things we thought that were really expensive are going to become less expensive, and this includes even energy. Because as AI continues to build more AI, it's going to solve many more of the problems with, or surface the answers that we already had. And either we didn't know it or it wasn't widely available for all of us to know it. And that's going to come whether or not people in power want that to happen. Because this is a democratization of cognitive intelligence and it's a democratization of robotics and labor. Now, is that going to happen tomorrow? No. We barely have a bipedal humanoid robot, but it will happen. And so a lot of people ask me, how do I know the future? It's very easy. You find the point in the future and you work your way backwards. You never work forward, so you're never looking in the rear view mirror. You're looking forward and then you're coming back. Okay. It's the middle point that is always going to be random. The end point is always going to be clear. We will get to that point. And a lot of people like me were raised on DYSTOPIAN movies. And so we always tend to look at the car crash. We slow down and say, oh, that's built into our programming. And Scott was really, you know, you read his books, very much into why we do that. Why are we fixated on certain things. When it comes down to our fear, our fear is the robot's going to take over. It's going to be Terminator. Yeah. That variations of that are going to happen. But the end result is there will be an equilibrium. It's that process of reaching equilibrium. Psychopaths and sociopaths are always going to exist. They are a very small portion of society. They tend to get into power. But the beautiful thing about where we're going is, is we are dethroning them by the democratization of these tools. That's why you don't shun the tools. You use them. And if they're using it as a hammer to bang people over the head, fine. If they're using the fire to burn people, fine. We, the majority, are going to use it to build a house, to build a structure. We use the hammer as a tool to let us not have to suffer the consequences of. Of what happens with weather. You know, we get a little cold and we want to be at home. So we build a home. We use tools to serve humanity. AI is a tool and it's a co collaborator. Now, there's a lot more to it than just a hammer. But again, anything can be formed into a weapon. Do not fall for the reframe that. This is something that's going to get you because your fear is your dispowerment. Now, why do I get into trauma? Because from 0 to 8, most of us have experienced some form of trauma. Some have it as external scars, some have it as internal scars. But everybody experiences that. It defines the trajectory of our life, whether we like it or not. And when you are going through trauma, you have to deal with the trauma you had first because that's the format you use to deal with the future and the traumatic period that we're going through right now. People are losing their jobs, people who have worked their entire careers to make a line that looks beautiful. That line can now be duplicated by an AI in 30 seconds. Who are you if you no longer are your job? You have to face that existential definition. We in the Industrial Revolution have defined ourselves by what we do. In fact, our very names were what we did. Cooper, A barrel maker. Right. All of these different, you know, blacksmith, goldsmith, all of these different professions literally were our name. What if all of a sudden you can't make a living from the things that you spent your life doing, that is a crisis. And nobody is talking about it. I chose to talk about it. And some of the people who are talking about it, unfortunately, are indoctrinating you into a system of medication and forever therapies. You know, come back for your next half hour therapy session. We'll work through this grief, and then we'll do it next week, and then next week and forever. That's not how you solve trauma. Trauma has to be dealt with by facing it full on. And I, in part one, I open up a series of books that you can use to face trauma. I think one of the most universal, and it's hard to take, is Teal Swan. Teal is a victim of trauma, and she's overcome her trauma tremendously. It's very apropos with what's going on with Epstein files and things of that nature. Her trauma was. Was tremendous. I've gotten to sit through seminars and I've gone through her training sessions to try to understand it. Let me tell you, it is not normal psychotherapy. It is about facing trauma head on. And what we do as humans is we encase our trauma into a little ball, and there are layers of onion, and we hold it deep inside and we don't look at it. And that's the ghost that's always going to chase you the rest of your life. A lot of us guys who choose technology, and mostly guys that do this, we want to rationalize an irrational world. I, as a kid, wanting to go to Princeton, wanting to become a subatomic particle physicist. I wanted the world to be black and white. I wanted it to be logical, one or zero. I wanted it to be very clear. Don't give me your fuzzy, stupid explanations of woo woo garbage. I want it to be factual. I thought I understood what a fact was and what the truth was. And when you really, really dive into subatomic particle physics and understand quantum mechanics, you realize you don't understand quantum mechanics and you don't understand physics. What you have is an observation of something, and your observation is only as good as the tools that you use to perform that observation. On my hand is trillions of creatures. Do you see them? No. If I went up to you in 1760 and I said, hey, guys, there's trillions of creatures on my hand, they'd lock me up. I might even have evidence that there are trillions of creatures on my hand. But it's not evidence that the crowd would approve of. And then an invention takes place. The invention of the microscope. And literally the person that discovered this almost committed suicide. The whole idea of pasteurization. The whole idea of a surgeon washing his hands before he goes and delivers a baby after dealing with gangrene. You got to remember, if you study history, a surgeon thought you were woo woo out of this earth crazy that you would dare to tell him to wash his hands after dealing with one patient and another. What are you talking about? There's nothing on my hands. Well, there's a little smear of blood. Let me take that off. That's fine. And. Oh, the pus. Okay, yeah, it's gone now. I'm good. Let's go deliver a baby. This is how dumb we are. When we become arrogant, we always think that this is a generation that knows everything and everything that is in the past. Well, they were just stupid and now we're smarter. Well, guess what? Everything that we think is a fact today is probably going to be laughed at in less than 50 years because new tools of observation will allow us. So that makes you humble. And that's the humbling prospect of it. Now getting back to the emotions. We think that we have our emotions in check. Look at me. I'm doing fine. Everything's okay. Just don't rub me the wrong way and everything. We become reactive because we have coping skills. Our coping skills are developed when we're children. It is not rocket science. We have to develop coping skills or we wouldn't be here right now. We are the definition of a survivor of coping with whatever we thought was trauma. Now your trauma and my trauma is going to be markedly different. My trauma might be I stuck my finger in the light socket and that really messed me up. But it doesn't matter to me. That trauma is just as big as the trauma of being tortured or parents that didn't care who were drug addicts, who put their cigarettes out on me. However bad you want to imagine that is trauma, but it's very real. It doesn't change in the context of the human body. And that's very important because we. Lifelock, how can I help?
- [20:13]
Erica
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [20:16]
Brian Romelli
One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
- [20:19]
Erica
What do I do?
- [20:20]
Brian Romelli
My refund though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. LifeLock fixes identity theft, guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage.
- [20:28]
Erica
I'm so relieved. No problem.
- [20:30]
Brian Romelli
I'll be with you Every step of the way. One in four was a fraud. Paying American.
- [20:35]
Owen Gregorian
Not anymore.
- [20:36]
Brian Romelli
Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply. We tend to be scorekeepers. When we look at somebody else's problems and we look at ours and say, well, mine's. Mine are worse. And then we find somebody in the street who has no legs and they're barely getting by and say, well, there's our worse. And yes, of course, there are different metrics that we use universally, but internally they're very real if you don't deal with them, and I mean really deal with them, when you face what we're facing. And I don't want to be doom and gloom, because it's not about that. It's just everything we thought was solid is going to change. And we, as we get older, resist change because it's the only thing that we can hold on to that makes sense of a crazy world. Like when I wanted the world to be one and zeros and be logical and, you know, come on, you guys. Up, down, strange quarks. What are you talking about? If I see it, it's there. And I don't see it's not there. And there's a collapse of a wave function. And an atom 12 billion miles away can be affected by an atom right here, faster than the speed of light. Superluminal is how they would term it. I try not to use nomenclature. What are you crazy? And then when you realize it is true, then you realize how much you don't know. And we don't know enough about the psyche. And the people who are in control of access to our psyche have a meter and a credit card slot. Folks like Scott democratized this. He democratized it in his books. He was showing us patterns to understand and ways to see the world, not by paying a turd gold, but by reframing things into the proper context. Because what your mind believes you conceive. Everything that ever was made was an imagination in somebody's mind before it was made. And this includes yourself. So part of the way you fix yourself is absolutely accepting the fact that you face some sort of trauma. Now, that doesn't mean you victimize and label yourself. I am diametrically opposed to victimizing and labeling. I don't think anybody is a whatever. I think you have those tendencies which you can change. Labeling is a disempowering system and tool that I think Scott would reframe into saying, well, no, that's how I make myself stronger. By I had this impediment with my voice. Well, I found a way to reframe it so that now I can speak. And we're going to all have to face that. But what's different this time than any other point in history and myself and Owen, I'm sure all you guys study history quite a bit, is we've never had this happen at such a massive scale all at once with the backdrop of absolutely chaotic economics philosophies and just direction of life. So the only thing that most people had to hold on to that they thought was solid was their career or their skill set. And I'm going to tell you very clearly, you need to hear it. It's still extremely valuable. And I don't care if an AI can do it 10 times better, it can't do it like you. Right? And the metric that you're using is wrong. Right? I did not fall apart when my slide rule. I learned to use a slide rule, right? I can do differential, I can do any type of equation on slide rule. Within reason. I need a chalkboard too. When a calculator and the spreadsheet came along, I didn't fall to pieces. I had a skill set that I learned mechanical. I had a round slide rule I like to use. And I said to myself, well, I don't need to use this anymore, but I still have that skill. And there was some value that was achieved by me by learning that skill. In the post, in the post scarcity world, in the abundance world, which we are going to get to, I say it's 5,000 days when we finally see that, approximately 20, 40. I pick 5,000 days because I'm a marketer and it sounds cool now, it's the best that one could imagine. And it's designed for people to actually focus on the fact that no matter how many hand grenades are going off around them, because you're going to see people in power freak out. They're going to. Because freedom of speech, control of information, hierarchies of ivy towers, you can't pronounce that we have control over the information flow. That's what's breaking down. I have local AIs that I can. If the whole Internet comes down, I can still solve most of the world's problems within a model that fits into my laptop. And very soon a Raspberry PI that cost me 60 bucks. So the world can end and I still have the sum total of knowledge. But that doesn't necessarily solve all the problems. Guess what? You and I, for at least 25 years, had access to all the information in the world. It was called the Internet and when I was a kid, and if you were to look at all of the people we stand on their shoulders that built knowledge. They prayed for the day that they could have access to all the information and abundance we have access to right now. Why hasn't it changed? In fact, if you really want to look at the world, it's gotten worse over the last 30 years. With all of this information and all of this connectivity and all this socialization electronically, society has gotten by every metric worse.
- [26:41]
Erica
I thought you said not to be scared about that.
- [26:44]
Brian Romelli
It's not. It's an observation. Because we're like the cats with infinite lives. We're always going to land on our feet. Humanity is always going to overcome the trauma that's in front of us. That is an absolute certainty. That's my guiding light working backwards. I can go into hours of explaining why that's true. Give me some grace to say, maybe he's right, but that's the end point. And I believe that with every fiber of my being. I'm talking about the grand arc of humanity. I'm not saying that everything in between will work. And I will say at least this. Are you here right now?
- [27:26]
Marcella
Yes.
- [27:27]
Brian Romelli
You're the sum, total product of all of your ancestors that have gone through unimaginable traumas to make sure that you are here right now, at this moment. So whenever somebody gets a little banged up and a little depressed, look backwards at all those people that made you become here right now. Now they might not know you, but they knew that that was what they were sacrificing for. That is humanity. Right? And we can sit here and we can get so angry at the world saying look how bad it is, look how ugly. You want to know something? That is a small minority. The majority of us love each other, care about each other. We might speak different languages, we might have a minor 1% difference in the way we might view the world. But we all want to be left alone, to live a happy, healthy life, to raise children and to let them live a happy, healthy life. And that's the universal directive, if you will. And that's how we got here and that's how we get there. That's not going to change. No matter how many eugenicists or cyborg loving people think that they're going to slap themselves 5050 with a computer and human biology. Guess what? We don't even know what the brain is. We don't know where consciousness comes from. And you're going to tell me you're going to cyborg yourself into the singularity and you don't even understand what that is. I tell you what, being locked up, locked up inside a robotic silicone world is the very definition of hell. If you want to get biblical, that's what hell looks like. And I can get into the reasoning of that. So coming back, trying to reel myself in. We have to deal with our trauma. And the way we're dealing with the world right now is a direct reflection of how we dealt with our childhood. And again, you're not a victim. But you must start looking at the structures you use to solve crises that are in front of you, how not to become so reactive.
- [29:42]
Erica
Meaning do you shrivel up in a ball and cry or do you say, I need to adjust the way I think about this to move forward?
- [29:48]
Brian Romelli
Exactly. All of the above. And look what social media has done to us. It's made us become so hyper reactive that, oh, I'm going to make this comment right now. This lib tart or this right wing whatever your flavor is, right? That is a disempowering state of mind. That's a reptilian state of mind. And you don't ever achieve anything but a slight hit off your crack pipe. Because what it's doing is it's a neurotransmitter cascade that's dealing with a fear that you have and you're projecting it outward to something very real. I mean, there are incredibly bad things going on and we're finding more and more every couple of hours, right? You know, oh, wow, they did that. Okay. You know, this is hard to deal with. I don't think we're ready to really know what really was going on. Right. And if you don't adjust your ability to cope with this, I'm not saying accept it, I'm not saying nullify it. I'm not saying don't get mad. I'm saying channel your energy. Understand why it's disempowering for you to fly off the handle, Understand why you see a news program having all these blinking lights and banners going by and special alert, why is it like that? Why is it today? If you go back, I'm an archivist, I have probably more vhs.
- [31:18]
Erica
You're the best.
- [31:20]
Brian Romelli
I'm trying to do the best I can. I have more VHS types of news programs than probably anybody. And you know, it wasn't until Ted Koppel's Nightline, the Iranian crisis, that we ever had these urgent every night, day 200 of the hostage crisis and it became a serial addictive doom loop cycle and it became the archetype of what all CNN and all news programs have become to constantly have us in the most disempowered state. And that is a reactive state, right? Always reacting, not acting, always reacting, always stumbling into something from one crisis to the next. We are all guilty of it. If you're thinking, oh my God, what's Brian saying? I am guilty. We are all guilty of it. So that's one of the elephants in the room. How do we stop doing that? Well, AI is going to help us do that because it's going to help us create again. It's the right AI. I am more into local AI but at the very least use GROK more than any other platform because it comes closer to whatever you would want with a truth seeking AI platform coming from a corporation. But we'll have these tools that are going to empower you and we'll detect the different techniques that are being used to excite your neurotropic release of urgent, you know, oh, serotonin, you know, what am I doing here? Aggression, you know, all of these different things. If we don't get out of that state, we will never make rational decisions in our life. And we've been victimized of it for quite a long time. Most definitely last five years. We're a chemistry experiment and we've proven that that experiment works. When you look at people that you objectively can say are hypnotized, they are right, they are, they are. They are reading into something and de rationalizing it to fit a narrative for a team. And we've been bifurcated into two teams. And that's not how the world works. Just like I rejected physics initially because I wanted everything to be black and white, 1 or 0. The same is true with human personality and human goals. When we were growing up, probably everybody here, when we had political discussions, we had different opinions. You got some liberal opinion there buddy? Or you sound like a curmudgeon conservative cigar chomper. Today you're ready to go to war. And there's reasons for that because the teams have been co opted by people in power to obscure what they're actually doing right. And the people who are victimized of it on all sides are playing the part to make sure that the dust is going back and forth and you don't see the left hand of the magician while the right hand is playing upon it. So those are the things that we're going to be facing.
- [34:31]
Owen Gregorian
I Want to get to the good part at the end, or at least what you think the path forward really looks like for people. But, you know, the next part, I think that I remember is the going through the stages of grief. And as I. Yeah. What I took away was that you think we all need to go through that in the sense of losing our identity as it relates to having a career or having work be a core part of what our value is. And, you know, both dealing with trauma and going through the stages of grief, I think, are difficult things. So you're asking a lot of people. Yeah, but let's. Let's assume we do that, you know, and we come out the other side. We've dealt with it and we've gotten to acceptance. And by that, I think what you were saying is you need to accept that work isn't your purpose anymore and that, you know, there's. You have to find a different purpose, essentially, but that you can't depend on your contribution, at least as you knew it before, in the sense of doing your routine tasks or that your production was kind of your measure of value, that that's going to be gone. But let's say we do accept that. Where do we go from there?
- [35:51]
Erica
And then we'll take some questions.
- [35:53]
Brian Romelli
Yeah. I urge everybody to read the Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It's very thick. It's a hard book. I know I told everybody to read the User Illusion. I hope some people are reading that. But Joseph Campbell is going to open up your mind about the archetypes that we all have in our. In our subconscious. They are called Jungian archetypes. They are across all generations, they're across all cultures. And Joseph Campbell looked at all the mythologies and myths of all these cultures and tied them together into the Monomyth and the Hero's Journey, which we are all on, whether we know it or not. And I've tied the 5000 days series to the Monomyth so that you can actually have a guide, a map. So Elizabeth Kubler Ross and the Five Stages of Grief is a really good mythology and a really good method, because it's been around before her, is that you have to understand that you're a caterpillar. And the caterpillar goes into a cocoon and its entire body is eaten alive by acid. And it comes out. It comes out as what? Comes out as a butterfly. And when you. When you actually look at that and you say, okay, that's the metamorphosis, that's a transformation, you know, Everybody goes through this in their life to some degree anyway, right? But this is happening across all cultures all at once. If you live in India right now and you were working at a data center, I just took your job and that was your, that was your leg up. Now none of us are living in India right now and we don't work at a data center, but a few hundred million people do. And right now Most of the AI, top line AI from Claude Code, iGrok, ChatGPT, they can code better than mid grade programmers in India. Boom, gone. Now that guy is going to go home one day to his wife and kids. Built his entire life on the narrative he was given. His job's gone. Now there's already our suicides in India because of this. It's going to climb. I have met people who have gone through this. I spent my life trying to study this. So it's not a new thing to me. It's one of the many themes that I've been studying because I knew we were going to get here. You have to grieve. I'm not saying you're not going to work. We're going to work for the rest of our lives, that's fine. We're going to choose the work that we do that is going to honor our existence. And if that means you're going to be a farmer, a plumber, because I also in the series talk about blue collar jobs taking off like a rocket. And people are going to choose to do that because they love doing it, not because it's putting food on their table. Now I have some friends who are in these trades and say I'm never going to love doing it until you really talk to them and then you realize that they love doing it and if they had to stop doing it, they would feel lost. But if you're doing a knowledge job, AI is going to replace you. And that's a reality.
- [39:17]
Erica
If you're Brian, I just want to say that that solves a problem. I mean, so maybe that's a weird way of solving.
- [39:26]
Brian Romelli
Oh, we lost.
- [39:26]
Erica
Whoops, there we go. Maybe that's. Are you back, Brian?
- [39:31]
Brian Romelli
Yeah.
- [39:32]
Erica
Okay. Maybe that's a way of like the universe solving a massive crisis we have where we don't have people doing blue collar and we can't build, we can't grow, the infrastructure, everything. So maybe it's gonna suck for a while for people, but maybe it will show people like, you better pick a different direction. Maybe college isn't the answer and maybe learning a trade is the way to go.
- [39:59]
Brian Romelli
You're absolutely right, Erica. Imagine. And this is going to suck. I have kids that are college age, right? You get on a train and you've spent a lot of money for the ticket, and you're going to go to this destination and that ticket's 100,000, 203, $400,000. And then while you're on the train, the destination disappears. Because law, radiology, medical, all of these jobs that as parents, oh, I can't wait till my kid becomes a doctor or a lawyer, whatever, that's gone. That is absolutely gone. And the people who are on that train right now, they're screwed. And there's nobody coming for them. Do we really want somebody to come for us, by the way? Do we want the government to come say, I'm sorry, I'll fix it? They're not going to fix it. They don't even. They don't know what we know right now. I'm being very plain with you. I have conversations with people in government who are saying they're in kindergarten. They're not even able to comprehend the economic impact of what this means, because the economic impact means money becomes worthless. And we don't have time to talk about that. But all the kings that are sitting on these great thrones of money, they realize that that money is going to become devalued much more than inflation ever did. And the levers of control are going to change whether we like it or not. It's happening. Now the question is, is it going to happen in the west or is it going to happen in China? That's the real question. So when you are becoming Ned Ludd at a Luddite and taking out your baseball bat to take the next Tesla robot because you don't want these clankers in your world, good. China just won another score because they are doing that. They are openly embracing this. And, oh, good for them. Well, when they send 20 million of these over clanking across America and yeah, I'm getting my shotgun out, I get empty. Fine, Whatever you think, man. The reality is, if you choose to become a Luddite, that means you choose your future. And the Luddites didn't make it through that future, right? They, they fell behind. The candle makers said, I'm not going to give up my candle. I'm going to candle light my house forever. Their house might have burned down when the Edison light came. We need to be able to face this. I'm not saying I love this, folks. I'm not saying that. Don't get mad at me that I'm giving some realities. The reality is the wave is coming. You choose. It's dawn patrol. You get on the surfboard or you wash out. I didn't choose the wave. I feel some guilt because I've always been in tech and I've been cheering on tech. But we're now facing the wave. So the question is, get out of the denial phase. The five stages of grief. Elizabeth Kubler Ross. We have to get out of the denial phases chronic, quickly as we can. I don't want anybody to grieve the wrong way. I mean, it's sad because I'm using that to deal with Scott leaving us. Right. It's a process. You don't need a professional. You might need a group. If you don't have a group, get a group. And not just online. I like the fact there are meetups. You need real people face to face that you can see and hang out with. Do it now, in your church, in your community. I don't care. I really think you need to align yourself into some philosophical system. If you don't, you know, All I know is anybody that gets deep enough in science becomes religious. That's a fact. They may not openly say that, but that's what happens. So if you're already there, thank you. If you're not, get there. You have to do this because it won't be done for you. Mother bird is not going to chew the food for you and feed you. And what is going to happen? A lot of our friends who are very conservative are going to beg for government intervention to stop this. Tax the heck out of those damn robots that will fix it. And somebody in China is laughing their ass off. Sorry. They're saying, oh yeah, it works. This is the world we're in now. We have to choose how we are going to deal with it. I'm giving you 5,000 days. I'm giving you the early warning. I rang the bell, I tried to do it 10 years ago and I look even more bizarre. But you guys are the early half of 1%. And it's incumbent upon you to help the people around you and to have grace. Because they're not ready for it, just like we aren't. But you are already expert in it, just in this conversation and than most people are because they just. They're in complete denial. They don't even know that the body is dead and it hasn't fallen over yet. They just think it's still alive and the worms are controlling and it's a zombie.
- [45:03]
Owen Gregorian
You Know what I took away from your latest post, I think, was that one path is to become the conductor of the AI, to really embrace the tools, become an expert in using them, and also find focus on the human aspects that AIs are not good at. Meaning being a taste maker, being a curator, being able to maybe run the AI 10 times and say, that's the one out of the 10, that's the good one. You know, it's similar to what Scott would say about how he can just intuitively know when something's funny. And he might have a lot of ideas, but it was, you know, he would be the one that says, this is, this is the good one. And that's something that, you know, not everyone's good at, but you might have some natural talent in a particular field or in a particular area where you've developed that intuition and you can know what the right thing is. And if you have that expertise, then that may be a durable skill that you could leverage with AI and use a bunch of AI workers to go carry out your tasks. But you'd be the one making the conducting decisions, saying, okay, this is the task that should be done now, and these are the good results, these are the bad results, and becoming kind of the. The top of the top of the food chain. And then the other one was more of what I think of as kind of like just a bridge. But, you know, go, go become an electrician or a plumber, and then it's going to take longer for it to get there. But, you know, ultimately that may only last for another, let's say 30 years. But it's something that's also a lot harder for AI to do because they may never build a robot that can go under your sink and, you know, fix your particular sink because it's unique in the world. Are there other or are those the two primary ones you see?
- [46:46]
Brian Romelli
Oh, and you bring some great, great points. You know, again, we have to define our lives. That gives value in our life. You want to know what everybody can do right now? Become a better dad, become a better mom, become a better friend, become a better lover, spouse. These are human skills that you now are going to have more time to spend with it, because that's what humanity did for 99.9% of our existence before the Industrial Revolution. We were better parents, we were better spouses. We were better at being a village that cared for each other, not in some manifesto, Karl Marx, socialist type of way, but in a real loving way. Because love is the theme that has been the cohesive force that. That makes humanity stay together. And we just have hallmarked it and commercialized it to make it almost repulsive. Like a really bad perfume. It's like, ah, it would smell good in the drop. But, man, you know, this is what we need to be able to do. And it's going to be hard for some folks because they're so used to putting their nose to the grindstone. I got other things. I got my career. Well, you don't got a career anymore. Okay, now what? My legacy. Your legacy is how you touch people. Your legacy is how you interact. What time did you spend when you are in your bed in your last minutes, you're not going to. You're not going to care about that report that you did. You're not going to care about, you know, that gear that you made so perfect. You're going to care about the people that have touched you and you have touched. And do you want to be the richest person in the graveyard?
- [48:36]
Owen Gregorian
Cool.
- [48:38]
Brian Romelli
Big. That's great. Guess what? Everybody's name that you know today, that is famous will not be known a thousand years from now. So whatever we've been driven by to make ourselves, I'll show them because most of us guys, I'll show them because we have to prove our worth. It is our programming. When we're born, we pop out. We're not perfect, we're not beautiful. We got to go and prove our worth now. That's being taken away from a lot of men. This is going to be a crisis for a lot of guys because it's built into our DNA. I don't want to get into the sexist kind of thing, but it is the reality. It's built into the DNA. And all of a sudden you take our purpose for existence. We are lost souls. That means that our purpose was wrong. What was our purpose for 99% of our existence? Guess what? We're going to start rediscovering that. And Owen points out, can you become a plumber if you're a lawyer? Damn straight you can. Is it less honorable? No, no. The problem was that we made it dishonorable to begin with. It's honorable thing. And the ivory tower world, remember, they created this world where you have these hierarchies of you spend a few hundred thousand dollars, you get this credential. Now you get the gold ring. It's because it's a world that they created. It's their credit card system. You go in through it, then you get out of it and you get recognized. Guess what? For 99% of our existence, and that's not how we judged a hierarchy. We judged it by empirical results. How are our communities working? The communities that didn't work, they didn't get to reproduce, they didn't get to survive. We are the victors by the very reality that we exist. The ones that didn't have the right programming, they didn't exist. The ivory tower will tell you it's survival of the fittest. It is survival of the most able to adapt. That is what Charles Darwin said. And talk about reframing. We've been victimized by that concept. It is not dog eat dog. It is not the struggle. It is not, I'm going to elbow this guy and elbow this guy to get ahead. It is the ability to adapt to a changing environment. We are the only species that I know of that are born naked and really understand this. We are not of our environment. We are the changers of our environment. A rabbit is a rabbit. When it's born, it's already born into his environment. If we are born in most of the world and we don't find invention and creativity, we will either starve or freeze. We as humans are directive from God is to go out there and invent and to build safety. The very first thing we do is build a wall around ourselves to protect us from the outside. That is natural. Anybody telling you not to do that is anti human and does not understand history. You need protection because we are vulnerable because we are born naked. It is not rocket science, right? One of the very first things we did mostly guys first was get a loincloth for freak's sake. Because we could get ourselves in trouble running around the woods without a loincloth. So we built clothes. That was one of our first inventions. We didn't invent fire, we captured fire from the Prometheus story. We saw fire and said, oh, that keeps us warm. Oh, that makes our food taste a little better. Or maybe not have so many maggots in it, right? It makes flesh easier to eat. Or should we be eating flesh? I don't know. All these things were going on long before we ever came about, right? We're going back to that operating system. We're going back to our traditional roles, right? If the 1950s, really, it was World War II that brought the idea of breaking up the family unit as a solid structure. And that emergency we call World War II said, okay, Rosie the Riveter. Now I'm not talking about the philosophy of suffragism and Bernays and What he did with his freedom sticks. There's a sideline to this. I'm talking about the most solid unit that humanity has ever created was a family. And the thing that almost everybody in power wants to do is make sure the family doesn't work. And we're all hypnotized by that function. And all I'm doing is looking at the objective truth of how we got here. We did not get here by the philosophical systems that we're using today. In fact, it's objectively proven that those philosophies have failed because we are now going de evolution. We are going in reverse, right? When you start de evolving, you realize that the philosophical underpinnings that you're using are no longer valid. And somebody has to say, the emperor's naked, right? And that's where we are. AI is just going to magnify that. So redefine who you are. I can't tell you who you are, but I can tell you that there will never be another person like you ever born.
- [54:22]
Erica
Amen. Brian, I. We.
- [54:25]
Brian Romelli
We only have absolute miracle.
- [54:28]
Erica
Oh, sorry, did I interrupt you?
- [54:31]
Brian Romelli
A hallmark.
- [54:35]
Erica
We only have a few minutes left, and we promised people we were going to ask questions, but you were just cooking so well, and we wanted to hear everything you said. I know Marcella said she wrote down questions for you for next time, and I think Sergio did too. And Sergio, Marcel, if you forgive me, I just want to ask Brian, because this is very important to Scott, his estate, to us, to our future, that we just take the last few moments to talk about something that's happening right now that a lot of you know, and that's about, you know, using somebody's likeness, intellectual property, intelligence, everything for AI that you don't own. So Brian can speak more eloquently about this, but I just wanted to use this last.
- [55:22]
Brian Romelli
Computer is dying.
- [55:23]
Erica
Okay, so you guys know that there's just been, you know, people across the board that want to make a clone of Scott or Scott's son or Scott's dog or whatever. And, and Brian has written about this and thought about this extensively. And I just think it's important to listen to someone who is on the forefront of this. And like he said, he already thought about the problem and worked it backwards. So he. He said he would speak to us about that for the last few minutes. And he's coming back again and again and again. And we're going to do a long form interview with Brian in on Locals exclusively. And that will be so much participation. Like we'll all be able to ask questions. Sergio, did you want to chime in at all before we get there? You're on mute. Still.
- [56:22]
Owen Gregorian
Sergio's mute is undefeated.
- [56:25]
Erica
You're on mute on Rumble. All right, he got it. Oh, Sergio, we don't hear you.
- [56:38]
Sergio
We have great questions on YouTube. Amazing questions from Annie.
- [56:44]
Erica
We have to ask them next time, though, but unfortunately.
- [56:47]
Sergio
Yeah, next time. But I'm gonna pass them to you guys. I just wanted to say that we have good questions, and I'll pass them on.
- [56:53]
Erica
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Sergio
So, yeah.
- [56:57]
Erica
Oh, you know what, too, you guys, everyone. Sergio, will you drop Brian's handle in the YouTube chat and we'll do it here. And please feel free to message Brian also, because maybe he can answer this and.
- [57:11]
Sergio
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna send him the questions, and I think I'm gonna interview him myself. I'm gonna have an interview just to ask him questions, you know, because. Because I have, like, so many questions.
- [57:20]
Erica
Oh, don't we all? Well, we're going to do a long form here on Scott's Locals.
- [57:25]
Sergio
I mean, I'm talking about the side, you know, maybe I don't.
- [57:28]
Erica
Okay, so. All right. We might not get Brian back, you guys, and I know he's bummed because he wants to talk about this, so why don't we have him on again? We could. Brian, I see your question. You know what? We. We want to make sure we can go long sometimes, and we'll set up for that, but we didn't do that today. And we like to make sure the guests know that they have an in and out time in case they need to plan the rest of their day. You know, for Scott, he could just go on as long as he wanted. But we will have Brian back on. Maybe he can come back on next week, and we'll start with your questions. And that way we could even just do, like, a question and answer show. Would that be fun for everybody? We'll just do questions and answers. Yeah, Brian's very interesting. Yeah, I think that would be great, too, because so many of us have questions. Oh, Brian, did you hear anything we just said? We're committing you to, like, extra long shows for questions and answers all over the place.
- [58:34]
Brian Romelli
I don't know what happened.
- [58:38]
Erica
So I was telling them we're going to do a longer.
- [58:40]
Marcella
Oh, we.
- [58:41]
Erica
We lost him again. That we're going to do a longer form interview. If you can hear me with you. And let's see if he comes back, you guys. Oh, good. Thanks for following him, y'.
- [58:51]
Owen Gregorian
All.
- [58:55]
Erica
Okay. Oh, Brian's, back. Okay. Brian. Oh, look at. He's our technological genius. There he is. Can you hear us?
- [59:05]
Brian Romelli
Did I crash this system? What's going on?
- [59:08]
Erica
I mean, it's your energy, it's your aura. I just wanted to let you know I committed you to a long form interview on locals specifically because we have so many questions. So we're gonna, we're gonna schedule you in for that. Okay. Because we're gonna just do questions and answers on locals. But if you could just take five minutes to talk about the AI, I'd be on it. Thank you. Okay, go ahead. Okay.
- [59:40]
Brian Romelli
So.
- [59:40]
Erica
Okay.
- [59:42]
Brian Romelli
Quite a long time ago. Can you hear me?
- [59:46]
Erica
Yeah. No.
- [59:52]
Brian Romelli
Hello?
- [59:53]
Erica
Oh, now we can. I know.
- [59:58]
Brian Romelli
Okay. Are we good?
- [60:01]
Erica
Yes. You appear to be frozen, but we can hear you. All right. Now you're moving. Okay, good.
- [60:09]
Brian Romelli
Okay. All right. I'm frozen a lot. I really think we as a society need to understand who owns our likeness, who owns our face, our body, our DNA, our voice, even our gut microbiome. I think it's vital that we have this conversation and do it as soon as possible, because if we don't own ourselves, then who are we otherwise? That's known as being a slave. You have to have self sovereignty, and if you don't have that and you don't have it organized within the structure of a legal system, you have immense chaos. And I think recent events with AI and likenesses are really important to start thinking in these terms. And I invite everybody to think in those terms, because the world doesn't get to own us. You own yourself. And if you want to do the math and the logic about it, any other way does not work. It does not serve society. It does not serve any single person. And that's. I think I can go into a lot more of it, but in a very short period of time. I wrote a declaration about five, six years ago. Who owns me? You can look in my Twitter feed, X feed, just type in who owns you? And you can kind of see my whole rant about that. I even, like I said, wrote a preamble and declaration of self ownership in the most ironic way. We got to really think about that. And it's really easy to use this cut and paste technology that we have right now with even just the last five years, let alone generative AI. You don't want that world ahead unless you can claim ownership and rights to your own, your own being.
- [62:12]
Erica
I think it's important for people to understand that these are. These are just puppets. There are puppets that look and sound like someone, but there's a puppet master feeding it words, okay? It's not the words of the person. And that is very dangerous. Imagine, imagine Brian isn't with us one day and think how brilliant Brian is and all the work and energy he put into creating all of this. And, and then he's not with us one day and someone's like, well, there's, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of him and I've got his voice cloned and I'm just going to make him say what I want. And what if it changes everything Brian's ever worked for, you know, that, that just cannot be allowed to stand. It has to be illegal.
- [62:55]
Brian Romelli
Such an important thing, because our likeness is going to be used whether we like it or not. But there needs to be a structure that allows us to address this. And it has to be very clearly defined. I mean, there are some laws where people make pornography into people and you know, their legal repercussions. That's not enough. It's got to go into detail. We form governments to protect individuals from groups and groups from individuals. Right? That's why we do that. So I'm not asking for an oppressive government, I'm not asking for oppressive laws. I'm asking for the reason why we organize as a government to do these things and for somebody to commercialize it. Number one, that's a big problem, especially a well known individual, for somebody to have editorial control. Because I can tell you right now, AI is good. But unless you are really good at training an AI, it's going to say stuff that a person would never actually say. And I'll leave you with this one notion. I have something called savewisdom.org this is a thousand questions. It's a monumental thing where you just are saying your answers in your own voice into your own recorder. That never goes on the Internet. I urge everybody to start doing that today. Because your wisdom is valuable, the ownership of your wisdom is valuable. And I say it's time to not give it to social media and anybody else record it. And at the very least, if you don't use it in an AI project that's local, you could share it with your loved ones, you could share it with your family. I wouldn't share it while you're doing it because I want you to really answer those questions with all the intensity and emotions that you should, because that's what you're trying to capture. And in the process of doing that you discover yourself and it's very important and it's apropos to the 5,000 days. Because you really got to get to know who the heck you are. Because we're so busy trying to put food in our belly and a roof over our head, we lost the compass of who we really are. And we need to get back to that.
- [65:13]
Erica
Yes, I agree. Thank you.
- [65:15]
Brian Romelli
Those two things are interconnected, and I hope maybe in the future we could talk about the implications of somebody stealing the likeness of an individual and what it really means for all of us.
- [65:27]
Erica
And we also need to discuss that, you know, somebody could be paying somebody who knows how to do it to put words in that person's mouth and to change the course of history of the future and what their thoughts were. So, you know, you said it perfectly before when we were speaking. You know, I said this also on here that, you know, oh, it starts with, oh, isn't this fun? And I miss this person and is making jokes and, oh, I like, you know, I like hearing it and, oh, look, it's talking to me and whatever. And then the next thing you know, it starts talking about elections or talking about wars or talking about politics. And now you're so used to this thing that you're thinking that this is really that person's opinion. And it's easy how quickly you can become brainwashed.
- [66:19]
Brian Romelli
It is instantaneous. And I think somebody like Scott actually knew this very well.
- [66:26]
Erica
Yes.
- [66:26]
Brian Romelli
If you read enough of his books, you realize that you can get hypnotized into believing this. And I believe if you look at the nuances of what he said in the past, he was predicting that this is going to be somewhat of a crisis. And my interactions with him over X and such with AI, he was very concerned over what this really means. Sometimes you just throw your hands up and you say, oh, well. But I think deep down inside, all of us have to start thinking, well, we don't want to be victimized by this. We need to start making decisions. And again, I really think we need to, as a group, be very thoughtful in the way this is composed. You know, listen, parity and things like that. Yeah, there are provisions that allow that already. But for outright ownership and the outright redoing of what somebody has done in their life and slightly shifting the words to the point they are 180 degrees from where they started, because that's what happened. It's a slow drift unless the people really care about it have been entrusted. Like if you entrust Disney entrusted his legacy, look what happened to Disney. Do you think Walt Disney would be very happy with the Disney he sees today. No matter what you may think of Disney in the past, he is a very interesting character, but he certainly is not The Disney of 1960 is not the Disney of 2026.
- [67:54]
Erica
That's right.
- [67:54]
Brian Romelli
Right. So that. Look at what happened there. This is going to happen magnified by a thousand as AI likenesses start taking over. So we really understand it.
- [68:07]
Erica
Thank you for taking the extra time to talk about that. And we'll definitely get into it more as we go on. And we get. We have a. Oh, where do we find the thousand questions? Okay. Marcella put it in the comments. So that's something to consider. You guys take the time to do that. Yeah, it'll be interesting to really get to know yourself. You think you know, but do you? So, Brian, thank you so, so much. And we. We are forever grateful to you. And it's been so. It's been so. I can't even think of the word. Like, even more enlightening than everything I knew about you. And over the years, you know, I've. I've always communicated with you on X and, you know, it's just so fun getting to talk to you now and getting to know you better. And I think this chat is learning a lot. Like, there are such small, smart people and they're always craving knowledge and to know more. And you're really bringing that to this group. And we're so thankful. And we're so thankful that you're willing and agreeable to come back again and again and again.
- [69:14]
Brian Romelli
Well, Erica, I'm honored. I love you guys. I love Scott's audience. I think we're all part of a really big group. Let's call it Scots Tribe. I don't know.
- [69:26]
Erica
Yeah. The bottom line, Scott's debris, we've been saying.
- [69:29]
Brian Romelli
Yeah, our debris. Right. So I really got to thank you guys because I don't know what the world would look like if this group didn't exist, if what Scott did and the group that surrounded him did not exist. Because sometimes, well, always it takes a single light to make a dark room. Them have a light. And all the darkness in the world can't put that light out. You guys are the light. And I really appreciate it.
- [69:57]
Erica
Thank you. And to you as well. Same thing. Same exact thing. Well, we will schedule our next one soon because we do want to do a Q and A with you. And until then, I'll be chatting with you, but thank you so much, Brian and everybody. Like Brian and I will do a closing sip and please go out there and be useful. Take the thousand question quiz, get to know yourself. And then be prepared to be patient while you help teach other people what's coming in 5,000 days or less now. All right, you guys. To Scott. Thank you, Shelly, and we will see you guys tomorrow. To Scott.
- [70:39]
Brian Romelli
To Scott. Thank you.
- [70:41]
Erica
Thanks, Brian.