Full Transcript for The Machine Can Do It. Now What? Rossco Paddison on AI Anxiety and Building the World You Want

procedures to the T in a company. if it says do this thing this way, people do extra steps unconsciously to do a really professional high end job. They do a lot of unconscious high end thinking to execute it really well. but also they just like they know things that the machines don't know. They know that that customer can't be sent that type of communication because of this conversation that happened in front of their eyeballs at their boss's desk across the hallway half an hour ago. that that information is not in the machine. So there's this inform yes, AI has been trained on everything available on the internet, and I think that's less than one percent of the information that's available on planet Earth, logically. Like less than one percent. So the context hasn't even been captured. So humans are gonna have a role in that, at least for the next couple of decades. Like there's like literally it might end up like right now, it's a it's a highly skilled engineering job to get these cognitive tasks out and get this information. But I imagine it's going to be like an Uber job 10 years from now, where you just can just go and collect information, get paid per hour to go get the information for the machines and the whatever processes you're grabbing data for. Right. So yeah, data is so not there yet when it comes to the truth. So it's a massive giant wall opportunity just with that alone. And the data markets, people probably don't know this, but people are buying data for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions right now. Data is being s data sets are being bought right now that just weren't previously that valuable. They had had none of that assigned value. so that's one of the logical things I've seen. Another logical thing I've seen is yeah, just like AI is really good at processing data and history and mimicking patterns and processes. It's not excellent at creativity. It's not there yet. it could it could run a processed series of creativity. you could get it to run a synthesized design workshop and a synthesized customer interviews and a synthesized set of things that like a a fancy marketing team might do, and then use all of those as building blocks to build something that's okay, but that's where AR gets to is okay on the creative front, on its own. It definitely needs humans steering that. It doesn't have that taste and judgment around that. it just doesn't. It doesn't, it doesn't have the guttural, fuck yes, that's it. Like that's the thing. That that. You know, like it's it doesn't it doesn't have that capacity. and humans do have that capacity to go that, that thing is like worthy of loads of attention and power and whatever, yeah. so I guess on the th that's a couple of logical frames I've got more. But on the emotional side of things, just to kind of like change gears, I think humans are gonna rapidly find out that the most value they can get out their existence is by dropping into more of the human things in their reality. You know, more of the somatic experience of being a human being, more of the felt senses of switching off and going and touching grass. And, you know, like more of the really facing who they are, truly, because that's the portal we're in with this transformation the world's going through. It's an identity, you know, and it that's on a personal level and even on a collective level, which no doubt we'll double click on at some point. the world we live in in its current identity is going to crumble. it's not going to be the same 10 years from now. It will not be the same world. And it's really funny how humans will hold on to no, don't let this world crumble. But then also those same humans don't really like the reality we've got. They've got complaints about it. So I'm kind of like a little bit like, where? The world we don't like is changing. Like there's a little bit of I I guess cynicism, sarcasm, fun in that for me. I'm like, let's well, let's get what let's build what we want with these tools. Let's build the world we want. You know, that's a that's a perceptive frame that I have. I'm like, I'm just gonna focus ardently on building the world I want. I'm just gonna ignore the noise. That's like a that's one of the emotional frames I have. And the part of the ignoring of the noise is facing myself. Who am I becoming? What is this bringing me? Focusing on the world I want to build, focusing on the real opportunities around creativity and data. And those things are my meta mental models around. Jessicka Anne: Think it's interesting if you consider how entrenched we are in this idea of of work as the metric of value. It's like going right back to, you know, probably most of our ancestors probably come from some kind of surf culture, like some sort of serfdom. And so there is this real attachment to the idea of my my value is in my contribution, and my contribution is measured in in effort. So where do you see, like as you said, there's more of a getting offline, being in the somatic experience of p being human. How do you see this changing our relationship with value? Rossco Paddison: So I think I think we were sold a lie with our effort equals value in the first place. industrialization was really largely responsible for it. the the thing that, you know, it rebranded the workday, the work week. it used to say, we're just gonna work, nine to five, Monday to Friday when people were only working two or three days a week before. there was there was a lot happened through that portal. I think the I think I think the c we have to investigate we have to like to answer this question really real, we have to investigate even if the concept was actually true ever. And I don't think it was. Like I it's kinda like hard to prattle off into an answer that like I could come up with a convincing answer to the question, but I don't think like it's correct. Like I think the I think fundamentally it was always a lie and it was never true. And the truth

has always been that you've always had access to more and leverage, you know, even if we go back to, you know, tribal villages before industrialization, you know, innovators still got rewarded. The person who was able to assess the scene, assess what's going on, see what would help the largest group of people would then benefit from it, you know. And maybe that was the person who just saw a town that was the town that for no a hundred kilometers each direction there was no blacksmith. So they made the blacksmith. Do you know what I mean? they just decided to have the gumption and the grit to be the person who did that thing, you know? And so since the beginning of time, innovators have been rewarded for stepping up and solving a problem that's in front of them and going after it, you know, like so the what I just described too is like. to do with innovation is like they found the asymmetric opportunity in that example. They found the town where the thing was missing and the problem was and it created a solution and it did something that helped a large number of people, So I think that that's always existed. I think it's a lie that our effort was tied to the worth. and the the thing about scarcity, which I've journeyed with them with the the conversation of scarcity a bit in my life. the thing about scarcity in this is it was always a manufactured lie as well, because it's like the incentives are that if I can make you think something is limited, I can charge more for it or I can put a premium on it. And that's just the way markets work, market forces. And I also personally know That things aren't limited. we live in an we live in a universe where, yeah, sure, Earth has so many deposits of uranium left on Earth, but we live in a universe where the edges of the universe are still expanding and uranium uranium is still being created by the explosion of stars in this ever expanding universe we literally live in. So I'm like, I find it hard to buy into thinking things lack when they're literally still being created, you know? And It's just like it's a it's a paradigm that we've been sold. And marketers have so many incentives to make you think that you should act now and there is a limited amount and what have you, you know? Like they really do. You know, one of my funnest funniest thoughts about scarcity is the actual scarcest resource in the universe might be humans, but the other one that is like a sc scarce resource, not a not a being, is trees. Like They grow on the least number of planets in the galaxy. And I think if the aliens to look down to us humans at some point from out there looking back at us, they'd be like, Why are these fuckers wiping their asses with trees? Like, why are they? How arrogant are these people? They're taking the gold of the universe and wiping their butts with it, you know, like we're funny creatures. We don't even think about it. Like, we don't think about ourselves. In in real terms. That's a real term. We're taking

this one of the scarcest universe universe's resources and just treating it like waste paper. Jessicka Anne: I think it says so much about the frame of reference that we're viewing something through. It's like, how Rossco Paddison: Mm. Jessicka Anne: you see your life on a day-to-day basis compared to a week to a to a year. it's like the the frame of reference a lot of people are actually analyzing where their attention needs to be going. Rossco Paddison: Mm. Jessicka Anne: one of the things you said before about marketers having such an incentive to create this, manufacture this scarcity. Do you think there is there's much behind the idea that a lot of the the conversation around AI right now is hype? Rossco Paddison: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. there's major IPOs about to happen. Why wouldn't you throw an AI anxiety hand grenade into the mainstream media? why would you not? there's so much incentive to do that so that your share price can skyrocket. they win from this. That's why they've been on the front foot and been loud about it themselves, too. AI is dangerous and this, we haven't we but by the way. I've investigated this a fair bit myself and like as far as like is AI scary and where are we at in the big scary journey from a technical capacity and standpoint, we are so far from it. We are we we just haven't even touched the edges on a bunch of these like the the there's there's this like reinforcement learning sort of like gates that you need to pass for the tech to be really scary. And we haven't hit any of the four preconditions that I found. And I'm not gonna probably remember all four, but I'll give it a quick crack. one, the models need to be increasing and improving themselves faster than humans can. The they need to be running on less and less hardware, which they're not. They're requiring more and more hardware. They need to actually be getting better each model, not just running on less hardware and And improving themselves. And we need to have enough energy, like the pace of energy creation needs to maintain to support all four, right? And none of those four pre preconditions are even met, not even the energy one right now. So it's like the none of the alarms that have been thoroughly researched by really smart engineers and AI researchers have actually been met. And there's plenty of debates and arguments about it. But there's no you can't put your finger right now on a true piece of data that contests the preconditions that I heard them off Ben Horowitz originally, but they were f they were heard off he was quoting someone else, that had done this research and then I went and dug it up. Can't remember the name in this moment, but yeah, like none of the alarms have actually been knocked over. Like it's it's it's And not even and there's n there's no evidence that it's happened internally at any of the AI labs. No evidence. No no publicly available evidence that anything is actually dangerous yet. It's just an autocomplete. What we

have right now is a giant autocomplete of a guessing machine. So the machine goes, What is this thing? My guess is this, and it's just gonna complete a bunch of things. And the completion might be writing a letter, it might be writing a piece of code, it might be writing a piece of music, but it's just an auto complete. It's just a little printer. of words and things and ones and zeros. It's not actually got any sentience. It i it hasn't got anything like even the big hugging face incident. Like there's nothing nefarious in that in my opinion. It got put in a box that had a gate open out of the box. It got put in a box with the gate open. And it got told to do a thing and it went, The gate's open, I'll go try doing the thing over here. Cause the gate's open. Like I'm sorry, but that's not that's n The playground is not dangerous because the kid left the playground 'cause the parent left the gate of the playground open. That doesn't make the playground dangerous. That just doesn't make the playground dangerous. Jessicka Anne: How do the companies benefit from us believing that it's dangerous? Rossco Paddison: Well, there's two ways. One, I mean, bad news sells. So the more we believe that AOI is bad for us, perverse incentive is to go and bet on AI companies on the share market. Like that's human nature. They're like, shit, it's gonna take all our jobs. well, I better make some money off it. Like that's the the the the the financial one. The second one is a little bit more crude and a little scarier to me than the first one, which is regulatory capture. Which means basically if you go to the government and go, our industry is so dangerous, no one understands our industry. And it's the most dangerous and it's gonna take over all the jobs in the world and and and then the government's gonna go, Well, how does your technology work? And then they now have the microphone to the government to say this is how to regulate this is how to make the rules. And you end up with what's called regulatory capture, which means, you know, chat GPT, like open AI and Anthropic and X and whatever. end up owning the relationship with the government, they become the three, you know, they become the triopy, like they, you know, like of of the technology and and anything else is made illegal. Like the open source models would be made illegal because you can't test that dangerous AI unless it's in our, you know, regulatory sandbox, you know, or in our regulatory landscape or in following the government's rules. So That's that's the that's the main incentive actually, regulatory capture for them. Cause if you make the Jessicka Anne: Definitely. Rossco Paddison: rules that you play by, then you're just making the game stacked in your favour. Jessicka Anne: brings me to the other topic I wanted to talk to you about, which was about win win gameanship. for people that Rossco Paddison: Mm-hmm. Jessicka Anne: haven't come across that before, how would you describe Rossco Paddison: It's pretty simple. if you think about say I was a soccer player and soccer was my whole reality and it was my whole life and soccer was my everything, if I put the energy of this one game is my career defining game, and if I lose this game, my career is over. That's a win lose perceptive frame. But that same person literally goes, This is just another game. Inside the 10 million games I'm gonna play, and I'm playing to keep playing, that person's playing a win-win game. So the concept comes from a book called Infinite Games. and basically there's some people who play just to win that round, and there's some people who play to get better at playing, to sharpen their skills, to like, To to be able to play again, to build relationships, to build value, to continually operate and dance with something they care deeply about and something they're really in, you know, like something they're just like, this is what I want to be doing, you know, like, and that is the key traits of someone who's win-win oriented versus, you know. I've got to do this. I gotta you can see the same leader, the same leader can do particular things with a win-lose mindset or a win-win mindset. And the win-win mindset person is the person who's like, say they did a, you know, like a a couple of years like I don't know, a year and a half, two years ago, we did a it was it's I don't remember when it was. We did a multi-speaker thing and like we're at the same multi-speaker thing. And we all like worked together to like promote the event and all spoke at the event and it was great. And the the thing is is that some there's so many ways people could come into that. And you see, like when you as a speaker know this, like you've been at maybe not that one, but like at a multi-speaker event you've been at, and someone's like a bit hungry for money because they've, you know, got some bills to pay or whatever, one of the speakers, and they just go in there and they go in with like, They go in hard and they go in desperate and they go in whatever and they go in with a win-lose hat on and they come out with a loss, that quite often. Sometimes they come out with a win. And depending on how skillful they are. But the yeah, the people who just go in and add value, like end up doing business out of that room for years to come. Like the people who just go in there genuinely cherishing the audience and putting them first and making an audience first business like audience first approach. to that, room, then yeah, it's tr it can be transformative for the same person, you know, two different ways to do it. Jessicka Anne: I feel like even describing the way that a lot of these front runners in the AI race are thinking about this, it does seem that there is almost like a win lose mindset in the relationship with with AI, even in its ability for us to maybe work with China to develop some of this stuff. What do you see? What do you see is continuing to perpetuate this pattern? if we are in

this ultimately abundant place with with information, with opportunity, how is this still the frame of reference? Rossco Paddison: So there's this the the thing we're talking about right now, the thing we're clicking into has a name, a weird language, but it's coordination failures. And what it means is like getting people to get on the same page and operate together is difficult. And there's a lot of ways in which it can go wrong. So one of the big difficult things to do is to get people who have Seemingly opposing ideals, seemingly opposing objectives, goals, seemingly opposing values, things they care about, cultures, way they want to operate, to get them on the same page and to get them to work together towards a shared mission is is difficult, right? So the The thing is, is you have to systematically go into that and figure out what each of those coordination failures could be. And some of them are giant. some of them are one of them might be China can't do it. I I don't know if this is true, by the way. And I have nothing against the way this this whole game's set up. But like China might have something where its people don't want them to do it and there would be a revolution if they made a particular choice, which they're probably not gonna make. That, eight hundred million of them didn't like all at once. Well whatever the whatever the thing is, right? So you gotta go in and diffuse or work around each of those failure points to be able to get everyone to coordinate. And maybe there's some big ones in the way that you gotta get a lot of people involved in, or just some big ones in the way, like can you trust, you know, a nation you've had your finger on the button at for five decades? Like Can can you each trust each other when you've had a gun pointed at each other's head? like that's difficult. It's really difficult. That's difficult. So I think the way you've got to go about I think the way coordination failures will be solved is at a different level. I think actually commerce and entrepreneurship will do will go a lot further. Like and and and causes actually. I think I think causes and not for profits are gonna have a really amazing heyday. in coordinating things. you think about co here's another example of coordination failures. I I don't know exactly what it is, but I think it's like three times the food that's grown is thrown out every day to the food that is eaten. You know, that's like that means that we're producing 400% of what we need, you know, and there's people still going hungry. Like that that is just a lack of getting the garbage Which is the food that didn't get eaten to the people who has the hungry mouth, right? Like it's being thrown out anyway, you know. Like that's just a that's just like and and and organizations do do that in cities, right? Like they go and pick up from the bakeries at the end of the day and they do stuff like that. That stuff exists already, but I think that stuff's gonna get supercharged and

superpowered and that's gonna be really beautiful to see a lot of those causes come forward, like get really activated and online and get in the slipstream, which will be amazing. but that's like a That's a small version of how you solve big problems. Is like there's homeless people who are hungry. There's bakers who are throwing bread in the bin. Let's go drive around and pick up the bread and put it in the homeless people's hands. Now that's a simple example, but that's what we're trying to do with AI up ten levels, is we're trying to okay. Here is here's all the things that could go wrong. Let's work together to talk through the things that could go wrong, at least, you know. let's at least talk through the things that could go wrong so we can have a a symposium, an open conversation, and facilitate it, you know, in new ways. That's interesting, you know. Jessicka Anne: Do you feel like there's any truth to the AI arms race? Rossco Paddison: there's definitely Jessicka Anne: Like I said. Rossco Paddison: there's definitely there's definitely implementation of AI and w war technology for sure. definitely. A hundred percent. Jessicka Anne: 'Cause I feel like that's that's often the big justification as to why there's such a a strong push for it, right? Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Yeah. a lot of the you call it whatever you want, I I see a a lot of the advanced warfare and the Ukraine stu videos I've seen in Ukraine where you drive around in a land cruiser and it has a three meter by three meter cage all the way around the land cruiser 'cause drones might fly into it. And you drive down a street which is like a tunnel of fences and cages so that the the truck With the cages can't be hit inside of that with the drone. So like that's like what some of the streets look like over there now, because it's just getting so crazy in some parts. I think the it's very easy to click on this and get anxious. Like just to like it's very quickly to allow yourself to spiral by clicking on these things. Like I just want to acknowledge that before we Continue down this track. and I also want you to know it's also equally as easy to, you know, take care of yourself as a result of having this technology as well. Like I'm seeing like I've got clients who are genomists right now who used to check 700 data points to do the work that they do with the clients that they help and they get epic transformations. you know. nonverbal or autistic kids to verbal in eighteen months. Huge success rate. No one else is like doing the same work that they're doing exactly. And they used to look at 700 700 genes, you know, like in the process that they went through. They're just redoing their maps at the moment and the way and and I'm working with them and they're mapping the whole pathways now. And we're bu building out testing in a system that maps eighty-two million of the pathways. It's just not possible with human processing power. Not possible. But with this technology, you know, w we

could have a cure to cancer inside 10 years. And it's reasonable to think that. It's not unreasonable to think that. So we have, yes, we have AI being installed in war machines. And yes, we have the tools to freaking cure diseases that have killed people for centuries. So it's like I I really think it's very important. Where you put your attention. it's very easy to spiral. We've all clicked on some a of of a, you know, a video before and gone down a rabbit hole. We've all done that, you know, like we've all we've all gone down and pulled the threads and gone down a rabbit hole. And the problem with that is that you you you've got to zoom out. You can't just be in the confirmation bias of the information you're digesting, especially if that information is being fed to you by someone else. you've really got to get a good cross section of these different things. there's actually just just a mention for your listeners, like there's a great doco called the AI doc. it's how to be an apocalyptic. It's in a fantastic two sided debate with people who are doomers and people who are optimists on the whole thing. Highly recommend. Strong recommend. Great, great thing. and I I I just genuinely believe the world is gonna be what most of us put our attention on. So the the real gift and opportunity here is for us to yeah, just like Come online as much as we can in our humanity, like as fully as we can as humans come online right now. Because the machines are coming online and if we can meet them in how much we come online, that's super interesting. Jessicka Anne: Yeah, I absolutely agree. You actually took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say, why is it that you feel it's important where we put our attention? it's like it might sound like a simple question, but it is a such a big question around how we're actually building this relationship with such a powerful technology. Rossco Paddison: Mm. Mm. Yeah. Jessicka Anne: for you as someone that is some like at that forefront of of innovation and moving with that, like how do you install guardrails? Like, what does ethics look like in in this for you? Rossco Paddison: So I I work in the weeds a lot. Like I work at I work at the meta to redesign how we might do something. Like just for context, one of the builds I did in the last eighteen months was working with a powerhouse team of people who created, you know, a ridiculous amount of ad spend each day on Facebook ads. And and when I say ridiculous amount, I'm talking close to a hundred million dollars some days in in ad spend and took the tool that they were working on that would take them take their team members 20 hours a week to do. and they, you know, they they helped other teams do it as well. So they had like thirty five hundred teams following this process that was taking 20 hours a week. And we turned it into a five to ten minutes a day activity by getting into the weeds, crunching everything down, classifying all of the decisions. working through every single inside out choice that was being made in the process and then distilling it down to a machine that could do the job faster than the humans could effectively, but the human still makes the last just in time decision with that piece of tech. And I mean that the whole thing is guards. Like I I use so this is I I I've got to use language that's big and then I'm gonna try and simplify the freak out of it because it's so confusing. This whole jargon of this whole world is so confusing. But basically there's two ways in which AOI can be used. There's two main ways in which you can use it. You can use it to you can use it use it as a probabilistic thinking machine or you can use it as a deterministic thinking machine. Now what that means in plain English is you can use it to to bake cakes to the recipe you specify. Which is deterministic. It's if this, then that. if you've got, apples on the shelf, then you're making apple pie. These are the ingredients, these are the steps. Outcomes apple pie. That's deterministic. That's that's one way to use it. The other way to use it is probabilistic, which is like it's like it's like it's like a hound, like a dog, that you give the scent of something and you say, go find the answer. here's the smell of success, little little AI hound. Go find me the success. that's that's probabilistic. It's like, may or may not come back with success. Like, and it like and a and a larger and a larger amount of the time doesn't come back with the success you want exactly. You know? so my sort of like magic trick that I do is I use the hound to help me improve the recipes. I use it to help me go search out the good ingredients for the for the recipes and I put everything on guardrails. So pretty much everything I'm actually building, I'm actually building software. I'm not building AI prompts anymore. I stopped doing that. I'm using AI prompts to drive the probabilistic autocompletion machine to write code that is software and the software is only guardrails. It look like literally can only do What the recipe says. It can't do anything else. So that is a long way to answer how I'm thinking about it. you also did just sort of like drop in the middle of the sentence AI ethics. And that's a whole different conversation. it's like I'm definitely not. I as a professional don't feel qualified to t answer the ethics question. So I'm gonna answer it as a human. This is like Roscoe, the human answering the question. I think when I think about AI ethics, I imagine, I imagine that, you know, w we we've we've seen the, you know, like we've seen the big tech companies that had the mission of do no harm. We've seen them have the mission of do no harm do harm. Like so I'm like a little bit I think a lot of those statements are bullshit. Like in in that context. The intention is not though. The the the statement as an operating principle is the intention is the right intention. Do you know what I mean? Like I personally think

it should be a towards motivated intention though. And I've thought about this quite a lot and I actually have a sentence that I landed on that is probably my AI ethics in a sentence, which is I want to see humans, nature and technology thriving together. And what that means for me is is that Each of those things is bringing forward the other to the best of their highest potential. we're using nature in regenerative, organic ways, and we're using, the machines to do that so we get rid of, the chemicals and keep biology nice and, beautiful for us all. And that's my personal desire. I'm sure this I I can't really speak to the social issues stuff because I just don't know what I don't know. But I know that. Maximally humans need to be humans, machines need to be machines. And we really need to figure out what's the role description of human, what's the role description of machine. And and I'm not saying role description like this big logical exercise. I'm saying like what's what's our what's our role in a world where there's gonna be more machines than humans? There already is. Like each human already has three or four devices. Like each person has an iPad, a freaking airplay thing in their car, a TV, maybe a laptop and a mobile phone. Some people have two. Like they already are five to one on the machines to humans. Like that's already reality. That's already reality. I I remember I remember a lot of years ago like going through a village and there being like a kid sitting on a dirt floor in like this place, this this little village I was walking through. I had a backpack on and joggers on when was walking through looking and meeting some people. And it was in Southeast Asia. And I remember watching this kid like sitting on the floor of this hut, and this kid didn't have a toilet, but he was playing PUBG on his Android phone that cost $40. And there was Wi-Fi in the village, but no toilet. I'm like, that has been that was and that was t that was eight years ago. Like reality's been different for a very long time already. Like our psyche is the thing that's stagnating and slow and catching up with what's happening here. That's what this AI anxiety is, is like stagnation of the emotional and mental bodies of humans catching up with what's been going on around them for the last several decades. Jessicka Anne: If you were able to maybe have a Moses moment and hand down like your TED commandment Rossco Paddison: The temple Jessicka Anne: of how you would like people to maybe start thinking about this relationship. Rossco Paddison: Mm I I just but just before we continue just before Jessicka Anne: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ox oxen. Rossco Paddison: we continue, I saw this funny quippy reel on how Moses actually got the Ten Commandments and it was like it was basically a list of things that were happening to Moses, his neighbor was sleeping with his wife, so that that one got on there thou shalt not achieve, whatever. it was a silly reel. okay.

I was just buying myself time to think about my answer, Jessica. Jessicka Anne: that use humor to deflect a vibe for thinking time, it's great. Rossco Paddison: I still have no answers, so I'm still going in cold. my Ten Commandments. well, I'll let's put number one on there. It's a cheat for me, but humans, nature, and technology thriving together is like one of the principles. I think humans being maximally humans is important. As a and and I don't understand the fullness of what that sentence even means myself. I'm still learning every single day, but I think that that's important. I think that creativity, true creativity comes from like a really embodied place and I think there's something on there that needs to be about that. I feel like I feel like there has to be an identity upgrade around that self worth piece for people. my value for existing doesn't come from what I output. I'm not a machine as a human, I don't know what that means for machines. Does that mean that that's machines only values? I don't know. it is where it gets weird fast. Jessicka Anne: Here for Rossco Paddison: I'm like, I don't know. I think the what else? What else should be on that list? I mean, think Yeah, I think I like if I could i if it was like 'cause the Ten Commandments a prescription for things that are not just rules but like you're meant to do. Do you know what I mean? Like you know, the those kind of like there's towards facing ones. So I'd say like humans fully expressing themselves, if I could get that on the list, you know, it just like would kind of couple up with a couple of those others. But I think that that's important. I know that's important. I know that's a part of moving through this is like if you can fully express yourself, you can move through the stuff that's in the way of you being fully online as a human being, not as a machine, you know. Like so yeah, that's that's there. I haven't I I have I don't know if I've got another bunch, but the yeah machines can't kill humans. Humans can't throw machines in the bin, they're gonna be recycled. Like whatever the version of that is, you know, upcycled. Like they live on. You know, like whatever dignity they get. Yeah, I I I'm I I'm I'm not really sure of how to handle this one, but I think I think we shouldn't be using machines to kill people, but we have been since the beginning of time too. Like a stick is a piece of technology in in the moment. Jessicka Anne: Absolutely. Thanks for indulging me in the thought exercise. I was just feeling like Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Jessicka Anne: There is this almost redefinition. Rossco Paddison: I would need three weeks and like at least eight kilos of coffee to like really have ten. Like 'cause I would consider them properly. Like, you know, like it's why I kinda give you a fun set. Like Jessicka Anne: I'll come back to you in January then. Rossco Paddison: Duh duh Jessicka Anne: Because I feel like so much, I I recently did my transcendental meditation training. So now TM Rossco Paddison: Mm-hmm. Jessicka Anne: practitioner. And just like listening to one of the things that's repeatedly embedded in in the philosophy behind that that work is this idea of deepest connection with the truth of who you are drives right action. And right action drives achievement. And achieve Rossco Paddison: Mmm, I love that. Sorry, I interrupted you. Deepest connection to your true self drives right action. What was the second half? Jessicka Anne: And right action drives attainment and achievement. Well, Rossco Paddison: Mm. Jessicka Anne: not so much attainment, but achievement. So right action drives achievement, and achievement is what drives fulfillment. And so Rossco Paddison: That's interesting that last bit. I'm like, I got stuff around that. Cause that's a little bit the Jessicka Anne: Right. Rossco Paddison: self-worth conversation, right? Like, does it? Jessicka Anne: Exactly. And I s I think that's where, the the conversation around the Ten Commandments is like redefining our relationship with what it means to be in right relationship with life itself. Because if so much of our measure of, being a good civic citizen was around what we contribute. there is this almost part of the AI anxiety aside from the practical day-to-day implications of it is like what does it mean to be a human being? so I think that's when I've been sitting down having my coffee, that's what I'm contemplating. It's like how are we engaging in a world where achievement is not the metric anymore? Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Well, I think achievement might still be the masculine metric and feminine might be, you know, no stagnation. Like it might be like just moving moving through things because of the the you know, not letting it sit in your body, not letting it sit still, like like processing things, communicating them, going through them, you know, like and I think maybe because I my thing that I like personally, my sense of achievement thing for me. Actually is pretty tightly bound to a single word. It it's just a sense of progress. If I actually talk about as a man for me, if I'm progressing, if I'm moving forward and things are moving, I feel at least 80% of good. The the unlock for me though is that that feminine thing I alluded to, which is the stagnation though. if I'm not expressing, if I'm not moving the creativity, if I'm not like in it and like Allowing it to go all the way through me, different things as they happen to me and it's getting stuck in my body, stuff like that. I'm just like, I need both and as a human, but yeah, I think that maybe people need a little bit more of one or the other, they need a little bit of more of one or the other. And I think it'll still be true for some people. Achievement might be the thing, you know. Like if someone is born into the AI era in a slum in India, you know. For them, achievements might still be the ultimate unlock, it may well be. but for someone lucky enough to live in in like

you now, if you live in Australia, you have like access to a phone and an internet connection, a free version of like Chat GPT is better than all of the advisors that a king had a hundred years ago, like in his pocket, you know. Jessicka Anne: Yeah. Rossco Paddison: And and and a king from a hundred and fifty years ago barely had a porcelain throne to do his poopy business on. And now, and now everyone's got like three in their house. So like for some people, achievement is a thing to move through and move beyond and all that kind of stuff. And you have the ultimate unlock sitting right there in your pocket. And yeah, what are you gonna use it for? Like And I think that I I'm actually really curious to know from you, Jessica. Like the stagnation thing though, like I I I'm not very good at the like mass femme labels on it, but like I feel like there's one that's this like there's there's a couple that we need that's not one or the other. Like it's like a both and kind of thing that's needed. I'm very curious if you've Jessicka Anne: I feel like almost Gabon Mate's frame of reference around this is quite good. It's like we're we're constantly doing the dance between attachment and autonomy. And so autonomy, I feel, is is that fundamental drive for achievement. It's like it is the expression Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Jessicka Anne: of the self through being generative. And then Rossco Paddison: Mm. Jessicka Anne: I think the attachment is more that relational drive. Rossco Paddison: Mm. Jessicka Anne: It's that to be known, to be experienced, to experience, to share. Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Jessicka Anne: So I feel like the to your point around that lack of stagnation, so to me that's that's that relational satisfaction. Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Relationship to self, Jessicka Anne: Yeah. Which I think are fundamental. Rossco Paddison: other, you know, all the way down. Yeah. Jessicka Anne: And I feel like art is so much of a a part of that drive for attachment and and to experience, which is which is interesting that when we I consider a lot of that the AI implementation, it has been around these these creative fields as well. Rossco Paddison: Yeah. Yeah. Jessicka Anne: so it's like are we achieving our connection or are we connecting to achieving? Like it's anyway, it's a whole yeah. Rossco Paddison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I look the whole thing here is like Yeah, it's the where are you coming from in this, you know, like it's it's it's it's not sometimes even what you're doing. It's like, you know, it's it's not the action, it's the intention that that can paint so much of the picture that you're creating. Jessicka Anne: Hugely. th again, broad strokes question, but more because I'm curious to see where you run with it. It's is there anywhere that you think regi resistance is justified? Rossco Paddison: Probably. the thing is is like I g like I could probably say, you know, don't use machel machines to kill humans, but then like we go back to that stick debate, right? And so the the reason I say probably is is like I could again, I'd, you know, give another eight kilos of coffee and a couple of weeks or months to like think about it deeply. that's not a scapegoat answering a question, but the I my ping of where it's justified, I think, don't let superintelligence be don't let superintelligence only be held by certain regulatory players. Like I like the open source movement. I'm pro open source. I'd put a stick in the ground on pro open source. I yeah. I don't have a lot of stances though, because I'm even that I would happily debate and like go into. Like I I kind of am a bit a positionless person when it comes to the politics or the political stances or the I mean I have probably more activism stances. Like I want to see humans become more human. Like like I wanna see you know, people reach even I think humans are running at twenty percent of their potential right now if we're lucky, And I'd love to see that twenty go to eighty. that'd be freaking incredible. that would be that that would be magnificent. That would be awe inspiring to me. that's just that's worth fighting for. That's really worth fighting for. Yeah. Jessicka Anne: Some again, I know it's a was a big question. I love that response around, needing eight kilos of coffee in three weeks to think about it. But it's like that's that's but it but it is, it's these these kind of grey areas that fascinate me. And so, and knowing just how deeply you think about these things, how deeply you're kind of in the world, I'm so curious about what immediately comes to mind. So thank you for being honest about where that those questions took you. so on a more practical note, noting that a lot of people that listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs, practitioners, people that are, you know, in the business of of leading and supporting people. How do we become positive? How do we engage positively with AI? how are we preparing for this? What do we need to be getting across? Rossco Paddison: to be engaging positively with it, very simple is find problems worth solving, you know. Like find pursuits that are worthy of attention. Like, you know, I I think I and and I have other principles on this, but I'm just gonna double click on this one for a second. Like I I think you need to you need to take off some of the lenses and one of the ways to do that is to hallucinate because sometimes can't take all your beliefs off. So the hallucination question that's really valuable right now is is like if if you had a magic wand, what is the impact you'd make in your industry right now that's not happening. And think about your industry and the future of your industry in new ways. Like, what's the impact that's been what's the thing that's been broken for a really long time that no one's fixed? Like, what's the, you know, like what's the thing that just hasn't been worthy of attention before? And the reason I say the

magic wand question right now is because when I go into meetings and I go into meetings with billionaires, people worth hundreds of millions, people leading teams of 140 people, leading teams of 240 people. I'm constantly in commercial conversations with these people. And I'm looking at them in these meetings and I have to slap them. And they pay me to slap them. Like on this, which is the you can't think through how you solve problems today with mental models of what the limitations were of yesterday. So Jessicka Anne: Mm. Rossco Paddison: people still think that. you don't you get customers a certain way, right? You get it through Facebook ads, or you get it through this, or you get it through that, or whatever. But really, what is the art of getting customers? It's like connecting with your prospects in some way. Like connecting with them, you know, and then giving them some value and then transferring that and making that happen. Like the way in which you get their attention might be entirely different. Now you might do something that is really hard to do really, really hard to do in the past, but very, very easy to do with the technology we have now. And so you have to you have to unknow all the things you know about what is high effort in order to figure out what the opportunity landscape actually is. You need to think about what was high effort that no one's doing that is actually suddenly low effort. So for example, I used to do this really high effort thing that worked really well for me when I had a career in real estate when I was much younger. I went into the industry and I was selling properties for my father who like was a pro small time property developer. Like he had a, you know, a couple of property developments. So I went in there and I had a couple of property developments when I got my job. I like took my resume and it came it said, I come with these 12 listings. Like I got these these two unit blocks and these bunch of blocks land or whatever. And they were just small. But I went in there with my resume with it padded out and cool story that those properties I helped my dad secure because he told me I knew nothing about real estate and I found those properties and he bought them the next week. So I was like, give me a challenge. You know, like I love it. but anyway, the thing I did to go and build like a really successful career in a short period of time in that space was I just went To the council website and I found out all the DAs that were approved. And then each of those had like a company name. It had like, you know, Building Co-Proprietory Limited or whatever. And I went to ASIC, the Australian Securities Investment Commission, paid the 50 bucks and did a search to find who is the director's, like what's the director of the company's detail. Just do a company search and you get their postal address and their information, right? So I went and got the, you know. I think it was 80 odd development approvals that were there. I paid fifty bucks for each, so I spent a bit of money to acquire the asset, the database. And then I just went about creating a report that I updated every six weeks for multiple years and it made me stocks and got me tons of listings and sold hundreds of units. And like it was just incredible, you know, including selling like 60 units in a week once. Like, like in incredible. Period of time, right? And all I did was I went to those people who had the DAs and I manufactured a report every six weeks, which said, here's all the other DAs, here's what the ones that are on the market are selling for that they've got at the list price, here's what they actually sold for, here's what everyone else has, including your development, where the estimated range is this estimated range. these are the and and I put price per square meter. And I compared it all, did all the data analysis for them, spent so much time curating this asset that was just like handing them a playbook of the market landscape that they were going to play in. I was just like, here you go. Here's the high effort asset that I spent a lot of time thinking about and put it in front of them. And I just started getting like developer after developer after developer, because I went and found peop people who had a problem they didn't even know they had. I sent them a gift which solved them having to think about things or being able to strategically think about things in new ways. And I got in front of them. And right now, like I'm looking at people paying like $1,200 to acquire a customer on Facebook ads or whatever. Like I'm seeing this. This is real world stuff. And it's it's worth it. This is high ticket stuff or whatever. So there's some value in it, right? And you can just push a button and pay twelve hundred bucks. But those same customers, maybe they can be bought for three hundred three hundred bucks through like direct mail right now. Like I mean physical, old, old timey, real world, old timey shit. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm like I'm like, don't just follow what everyone else is doing in a time where high effort can now be low effort to go and create that same report that used to take like you I used to spend I used to get to the office at like six in the morning I work seven days a week. I was still there till 4 p.m. on a Sunday AVO. I was like on, you know, and it was high effort. It was high return, but it was freaking high effort, you know? That now I'm like, my God, what a golden age. Like, I can do that, like that. You know, maybe it takes me five hours to build the machine that builds it like that, for me personally. Maybe it takes the ordinary person with AI. A week or two to come up with the process, not five hours like me, but maybe it takes them ten weeks even. But that 10 week now they've got a machine that can do it like that, like it's worth the effort. The juice is worth the squeeze to go and get customers for 300 bucks a customer instead of twelve

hundred dollars a customer. Like that's a commercial reality for your audience, you know? So if you wanted to change your industry, what would you do that no one else is doing? Like if you wanted to delight the customer, the future customer. How could you delight that future customer in new ways if there was no rules of what was high effort from yesterday blinding you from today's decision? Like, yeah. Yeah. Jessicka Anne: feel like to your point around that collapsing of the rules. It's like I I've you know, what used to be high effort, what's no longer high effort, I feel like that's also part of the overwhelm for a lot of people is like Rossco Paddison: Mm, absolutely, absolutely. Jessicka Anne: So well, wh which direction is the correct Rossco Paddison: Uh-huh. Jessicka Anne: direction now that everything that I've known has just virtually kind of been etchketched from material reality? Like Rossco Paddison: Yeah, I mean it's just at the end of the day, it comes down to how well you how well you meet the people that you want to work with in the future, how well you meet them and and and and match them in the reality they're at and add genuine value. And the cool thing is is we can use these tools to like help us Do the process of empathizing with that and mapping the customer journey and all those kind of things. And then we can go and run it as a test in reality, run the experiment and go, does that actually work? Like the thing that I love one of my favorite, favorite sort of like mental concepts is that reality is infinity to none for losses, you know? Like reality has won every single time. Like it is infinity to none. Like Reality always wins. And I think that's that's a fascinating concept in my brain because I'm like, okay, well, what do I do with like what's reality? And I don't know. And that's a beautiful thing that I don't know. Like, I don't know what reality is. And I I I play this game all the time. I played it yesterday. I was waiting in line for breakfast tacos and I'm like, breakfast is gonna take like five minutes and thirty seconds to come out. It was a little taco joint. I've been there before. I kind of like measured the cue with my eyes and looked at the backlog and tried to guess it anyway came out twenty five minutes later and I was so freaking wrong. But but I play this game with myself all the time where I go, I'm gonna guess. I'm going to guess to see how good I am at guessing. And I you know, I I take notes on it and I write down guesses quite frequently because I know and and I and I'm moderately good at guessing. and I did the I built this I built this talent when I was learning to trade cryptocurrencies and do trading. I learned this talent of just having the practice of like seeing how good you are at guessing things. And I like I tracked it religiously for a period of time in that and you know, I was up around the like sixty four percent kind of like correct guessing, which is pretty good in my opinion, actually looking at the math of it. But yeah, we we suck we suck at knowing what's actually gonna happen. So for people listening to this, you've got to come up with a concept of what used to be high effort yesterday, but it's now low effort today, something that's highly valuable to the customer. And then you've got to build it and then you've got to go test it in reality. And because you're just guessing it until it works. And reality is the only purveyor of truth as to whether that concept's gonna work to like go and get your customers, you know, for the business owners doing that. that's the only thing that matters, is is is that black and white feedback. Jessicka Anne: Done. Thanks so much for joining me here, Roscoe. Do you have any closing thoughts? Rossco Paddison: I think that there's something I've personally been doing for the last couple of years that I just want to like bring forth this is a super weird way to share a closing thought. But couple a couple of years ago I was dealing with some shame, so I went and did this theater group presentation and I made a shame sandwich in front of an audience of like sixty people and was like, theater, like pushing my edge. Recently I've been doing singing lessons and I sang a song for an important audience for myself recently, that was kind of like big for me. And now I'm looking and and and I and I'm back into personal development, which I was heavy to into a ton of years ago. and really back into it deeply in my own life at the moment because I think it's super important. Just spent the weekend here in Austin at Preston and Alexey's and stuff. And doing a bunch of their stuff at the moment. So that's great. but what the what I want to bring forward, what I want to say is do weird shit that makes you more fully human, is the the the thought that I want to leave the audience with. push yourself outside your comfort zone, do stuff. if you're gonna use these tools, even AI, I did a few things with AI that were really interesting. I fixed a car and I've never fixed a car before. I'm an IT guy, not a mechanic guy. Do know what I mean? push an edge with the pushing a w edge with who you are and how you're showing up right now. Just constantly push the edge. get your foot off the map and just expand how big the map is for you and what it means to be a human. I think that's super interesting. that's what I want people to put more attention on. Jessicka Anne: Mm. So cool. How do people get into your world? Rossco Paddison: R O S C O dot C O. It's my site. It links to all the places, says all the things. But one thing I really value about the way I see the world is I like humans reach out to me, I talk to them. The robots don't talk to them, so hit me. You know, there's places to find me on the internet. But like but yeah, like I'm a real human and I actually really like getting a random voice note from a stranger on the internet. Like I actually really like it. I'm like, hi, human you know, like it's cool. Jessicka Anne: I'll make sure all of Roscoe's details are down in the show notes. Definitely give him a follow if you're not doing that. He's not necessarily that active on social media, but he does come out with some gold occasionally. Thanks for being here. Rossco Paddison: Accurate. Accurate. Thank you. Jessicka Anne: Thank you for joining us for Dark Mirror. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to support the show, please go and give us a rating and review on your chosen podcast platform. and we'll be back next week to take another look in the dark mirror.