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Artificial Intelligence (AI):
Reflections and Observations |
04/27/2026 - Reflection on Tony Robbins' "AI Summit" of April 23-25
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Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi's three day, nine hour AI Summit was a marketing funnel for their six week, $995 "boot camp" that focuses on helping participants create a working "clone" of themselves in Claude.
I appreciate and respect Tony Robbins. Before I began my Economics practice, in December 1991, I bought his "Unlimited Power" course on cassette tape, listened attentively, and took careful notes that I still have today. From that course I still remember things like the importance of State, of "running your own brain", of designing your ideal life, day, and environment; and how the quality of your life is the quality of your communication. From it I learned about a (supposed) 1953 Yale study that found that less than three percent of those in the study had a written plan for their lives. Twenty years later, they were (allegedly) worth more than the other 97% combined. This influenced me to develop my signature Lifetime Savings Plan five years later. I also bought, read, and reviewed his book Money: Master the Game. He understands people and does good work. He's emotionally intelligent. |
Chew the Meat, Spit Out the Bones. I spent three days and nine hours in the summit to study both the picture, and the frame. The picture was the content of the summit. The frame was how they presented and ran it, and how it turned out to be a marketing funnel, or sales pitch, for the $995 boot camp.
As I wrote in the review of his book, it worked the same way. It's a thick book, but it isn't a self-contained, end-to-end solution. It's a glorified brochure for his other businesses. There's always more. You can bet at the end of the six weeks and the $995, there will be more. That's how the "Coaching and Mastermind Industrial Complex" works.
So we have to chew the meat, and spit out the bones. What was the meat of the summit?
Emotion. First of all, they used fear as the lure: "AI is coming in hot, don't be left behind! AI is coming to steal your job and disrupt your life! You snooze, you lose!"
This is emotional manipulation, and I'm always wary of it.
True enough, all sales is emotional; people buy for emotional reasons, then rationalize after the fact. The challenge for the salesperson is to work with this basic reality, within ethical boundaries. The temptation to cross those boundaries is ever present. That was both a lesson, and a caution.
All AI promotional content I've seen scroll across my social media feed does the same thing. However, all the others I've noticed so far offer to teach you how to work with fifty different AI platforms. Tony's summit advocated working with one: Claude.
As a "One Thing" kind of guy, I really appreciated this. It was unique, distinctive, refreshing, humane, and a huge relief. That take-away alone was worth the cost of admission.
Depth. They talked about going "a mile wide and an inch deep" versus going "an inch wide and a mile deep." In advocating Claude, they explained that they were taking the latter approach. I respect that. It makes a lot of sense to me.
I myself have gone an inch wide and a mile deep in ChatGPT; so for me, the take-away was, keep doing what you've been doing, and migrate from it to Claude. Easy.
Why Claude? Because, according to them, it does a better job of connecting dots, of progressing from one level of sophistication to the next.
Stages. They explained how there are three stages of AI usage:
This breakdown alone was also worth the cost of admission; because before the summit, I had no way to even think about what AI is and what it can do for me. It was all a fog of uncertainty. Now I have the clarity of three simple stages.
Conditions. In Days One and Three, speaker Igor Pogany discussed what he calls the "Context Sandwich" which explains to AI:
A HUGE take-away for me, that they never mentioned explicitly, was how, to make the most of AI, one must be two things:
Why? Because to create a Clone, you have to know yourself. This self-knowledge comes through introspection. As Socrates once said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." So you have to examine yourself, examine your life, and be able to impart your findings about yourself to AI so that it can clone you.
And because AI is an LLM or Large Language Model, you have to be literary. You have to be able to communicate well in writing. That's how you create your clone and provide instructions that are precise enough so that AI can know how to do your work for you.
Are you introspective and literary?
Most people I know are not.
So there's the real challenge, and it has absolutely nothing to do with tech. It has to do with personal development, growth, and maturity. I suppose that is why the boot camp (and other things like it) is necessary. It may also be the reason why there is such a proliferation of other platforms: all attempts to break down the challenge of working with AI without having to be introspective or literary.
Fortunately for me, I am both of those things . . . obnoxiously so. I have always been a letter writer and diarist; and for the past 30-40 years, I've written digitally and kept everything. I back up my data weekly on a remote hard drive and carry all data forward from computer to computer when I switch machines. I haven't spilled a drop or skipped a beat. Since my son was born (1994) I've written letters to him that now fill seven volumes, the last of which was 484 pages.
I have all of this stuff in PDF format on my computer. Selectively, I've uploaded and shared some of it with ChatGPT. It reads the content in seconds and instantly "gets" me. Because I have this vast corpus of digital literature, I'm light years ahead of those who are not introspective or literary.
So there's the hidden personal growth challenge of benefiting from AI that has nothing to do with tech: become introspective and literary. If you do, you'll be able to clone yourself, to enjoy Stage Three. If not, you'll be stuck in Stages One and Two. Stage Three - which is where the money is - will remain beyond reach.
Playbooks. The first speaker on Day Three was an extremely bright young woman named Rachel Woods of AI Momentum Protocols. She explained the creation of step-by-step instructions for your clone, and shared this graphic:
As I wrote in the review of his book, it worked the same way. It's a thick book, but it isn't a self-contained, end-to-end solution. It's a glorified brochure for his other businesses. There's always more. You can bet at the end of the six weeks and the $995, there will be more. That's how the "Coaching and Mastermind Industrial Complex" works.
So we have to chew the meat, and spit out the bones. What was the meat of the summit?
Emotion. First of all, they used fear as the lure: "AI is coming in hot, don't be left behind! AI is coming to steal your job and disrupt your life! You snooze, you lose!"
This is emotional manipulation, and I'm always wary of it.
True enough, all sales is emotional; people buy for emotional reasons, then rationalize after the fact. The challenge for the salesperson is to work with this basic reality, within ethical boundaries. The temptation to cross those boundaries is ever present. That was both a lesson, and a caution.
All AI promotional content I've seen scroll across my social media feed does the same thing. However, all the others I've noticed so far offer to teach you how to work with fifty different AI platforms. Tony's summit advocated working with one: Claude.
As a "One Thing" kind of guy, I really appreciated this. It was unique, distinctive, refreshing, humane, and a huge relief. That take-away alone was worth the cost of admission.
Depth. They talked about going "a mile wide and an inch deep" versus going "an inch wide and a mile deep." In advocating Claude, they explained that they were taking the latter approach. I respect that. It makes a lot of sense to me.
I myself have gone an inch wide and a mile deep in ChatGPT; so for me, the take-away was, keep doing what you've been doing, and migrate from it to Claude. Easy.
Why Claude? Because, according to them, it does a better job of connecting dots, of progressing from one level of sophistication to the next.
Stages. They explained how there are three stages of AI usage:
- Oracle. We can use AI as an omniscient "oracle" to answer questions like, "Based on what you know about society, culture, and trends, what would you say are American citizens' top ten priorities in 2026?" ChatGPT gave me a very interesting answer to this question that I shared in my annual newsletter.
- Genie. We can use AI to create things quickly that we might not ever be able to create by ourselves, or if we did, would take a long time and wouldn't be as good. For example I used ChatGPT to add automatic appointment confirmations (like medical and dental offices) to my calendaring functionality in QuickBase. I never would have been able to figure that out on my own. It also helped me add recurring tasks and events, features that aren't native in the QuickBase calendar. Once I had these features, I was able to ditch all my other calendaring tools, centralize, integrate, and simplify. It has been marvelous. Other examples include the charts on this Fractional CFO page and the Churn Tax Calculator on this AppDev page.
- Clone. This was the new addition for 2026. In their 2025 summit, the technology to do this wasn't available yet. Now it is. With an AI Clone, you can duplicate yourself, creating a virtual version of yourself that looks, sounds, thinks, and works like you do, performing complex and otherwise time consuming tasks for you, while you sleep.
This breakdown alone was also worth the cost of admission; because before the summit, I had no way to even think about what AI is and what it can do for me. It was all a fog of uncertainty. Now I have the clarity of three simple stages.
Conditions. In Days One and Three, speaker Igor Pogany discussed what he calls the "Context Sandwich" which explains to AI:
- "Here's who I am",
- "Here's what I need", and
- "Here's what 'Good' looks like."
A HUGE take-away for me, that they never mentioned explicitly, was how, to make the most of AI, one must be two things:
- Introspective, and
- Literary. Digitally literary.
Why? Because to create a Clone, you have to know yourself. This self-knowledge comes through introspection. As Socrates once said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." So you have to examine yourself, examine your life, and be able to impart your findings about yourself to AI so that it can clone you.
And because AI is an LLM or Large Language Model, you have to be literary. You have to be able to communicate well in writing. That's how you create your clone and provide instructions that are precise enough so that AI can know how to do your work for you.
Are you introspective and literary?
Most people I know are not.
So there's the real challenge, and it has absolutely nothing to do with tech. It has to do with personal development, growth, and maturity. I suppose that is why the boot camp (and other things like it) is necessary. It may also be the reason why there is such a proliferation of other platforms: all attempts to break down the challenge of working with AI without having to be introspective or literary.
Fortunately for me, I am both of those things . . . obnoxiously so. I have always been a letter writer and diarist; and for the past 30-40 years, I've written digitally and kept everything. I back up my data weekly on a remote hard drive and carry all data forward from computer to computer when I switch machines. I haven't spilled a drop or skipped a beat. Since my son was born (1994) I've written letters to him that now fill seven volumes, the last of which was 484 pages.
I have all of this stuff in PDF format on my computer. Selectively, I've uploaded and shared some of it with ChatGPT. It reads the content in seconds and instantly "gets" me. Because I have this vast corpus of digital literature, I'm light years ahead of those who are not introspective or literary.
So there's the hidden personal growth challenge of benefiting from AI that has nothing to do with tech: become introspective and literary. If you do, you'll be able to clone yourself, to enjoy Stage Three. If not, you'll be stuck in Stages One and Two. Stage Three - which is where the money is - will remain beyond reach.
Playbooks. The first speaker on Day Three was an extremely bright young woman named Rachel Woods of AI Momentum Protocols. She explained the creation of step-by-step instructions for your clone, and shared this graphic:
As you can see, this smart lady has put a lot of effort into organizing herself. This is the prep. Because she did so, she is positioned to benefit profoundly from AI's advantages.
Each panel in this overview represents a long list of step-by-step instructions that she painstakingly worked out. Could you do that? Could I? There's the personal growth challenge.
Because she did, she's able to put so much of her life on autopilot. Wow!
She has built a whole business around helping people who can't do it themselves. That's what AI Momentum Protocols is all about: building playbooks.
It's All About Time. As you guys know, I'm a time keeping nut. Since 2015, I've been tracking my time in a QuickBase database as if it were money - all 5,840 annual waking hours.
Some people say time is money. Some say it's more valuable than money because money is somewhat replaceable, while time is absolutely not.
AI is about saving time: offloading tedious repetitive "left brain" activity so that we can spend more time living in our "right brains."
On Day Two, Dr. Arthur Brooks of Harvard University asserted that happiness isn't a feeling; it's a condition. He also asserted that time isn't money; it's love, insofar as we give our time to what we value the most.
So what is this summit about, really? Is it about saving time? Is it about making more money? Is it about increasing efficiency? What is the end game here?
As it turns out, it's about love. Does that seem squishy to you? Is it a boundary violation? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless, what I take away from all of this is the importance of time. Now that AI is within our grasp, being mindful of how we're spending our time becomes more important than ever. I'm so glad I'm in the habit of tracking mine, because I know that as I continue to refine my usage of AI, how and where I spend my time is going to change dramatically. I need to understand, manage, and work with that change.
Because you know . . . if we aren't mindful of how we're spending our time . . . if we aren't mindful of the end game . . . we'll just be (as Bill Clinton once described Americans) "working fools." If we use AI to save time over here, we'll just spend it working on something different over there.
Meanwhile what about those right brain activities like love, creativity, worship, time in nature (according to Brooks)?
What about them?
When - at what point - will we ever pause, step off the hamster wheel, and get around to them? Or will we remain creatures of habit, workaholics, just hopping from lily pad to lily pad of busyness for its own sake, like Mister Toad, merrily on our way to nowhere?
Those are the deeper questions that AI can't answer, but that it can liberate the time for us to answer, if we would so choose.
Each panel in this overview represents a long list of step-by-step instructions that she painstakingly worked out. Could you do that? Could I? There's the personal growth challenge.
Because she did, she's able to put so much of her life on autopilot. Wow!
She has built a whole business around helping people who can't do it themselves. That's what AI Momentum Protocols is all about: building playbooks.
It's All About Time. As you guys know, I'm a time keeping nut. Since 2015, I've been tracking my time in a QuickBase database as if it were money - all 5,840 annual waking hours.
Some people say time is money. Some say it's more valuable than money because money is somewhat replaceable, while time is absolutely not.
AI is about saving time: offloading tedious repetitive "left brain" activity so that we can spend more time living in our "right brains."
On Day Two, Dr. Arthur Brooks of Harvard University asserted that happiness isn't a feeling; it's a condition. He also asserted that time isn't money; it's love, insofar as we give our time to what we value the most.
So what is this summit about, really? Is it about saving time? Is it about making more money? Is it about increasing efficiency? What is the end game here?
As it turns out, it's about love. Does that seem squishy to you? Is it a boundary violation? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless, what I take away from all of this is the importance of time. Now that AI is within our grasp, being mindful of how we're spending our time becomes more important than ever. I'm so glad I'm in the habit of tracking mine, because I know that as I continue to refine my usage of AI, how and where I spend my time is going to change dramatically. I need to understand, manage, and work with that change.
Because you know . . . if we aren't mindful of how we're spending our time . . . if we aren't mindful of the end game . . . we'll just be (as Bill Clinton once described Americans) "working fools." If we use AI to save time over here, we'll just spend it working on something different over there.
Meanwhile what about those right brain activities like love, creativity, worship, time in nature (according to Brooks)?
What about them?
When - at what point - will we ever pause, step off the hamster wheel, and get around to them? Or will we remain creatures of habit, workaholics, just hopping from lily pad to lily pad of busyness for its own sake, like Mister Toad, merrily on our way to nowhere?
Those are the deeper questions that AI can't answer, but that it can liberate the time for us to answer, if we would so choose.
Life In Now-Or-Never Land
I've been thinking about this. A lot.
Despite the proliferation of options, most people I know do not have one trustworthy system for managing themselves professionally or personally. They're straddling, or juggling, a variety of tools ranging from SaaS subscription platforms to spreadsheets to paper notebooks, calendars, post it notes, and their own monkey minds, where thoughts and ideas are constantly popping or rolling around like corn in a popper, or clothes in a dryer.
Because they don't have one trustworthy system, they live in a place that I call "Now-Or-Never Land." In that place, because there's a danger that they might forget something, their feeling is, "If I don't do this right now, it'll never get done. I'll probably forget it. It'll probably fall through the cracks."
That's an agonizing, stressful way to live. But all too many of us live it every day: 24/7/365.
Tony Robbins is a pragmatic man. He knows this. That's why he's all about Action. Now. He captivates the inhabitants (I would say prisoners) of Now-Or-Never Land and works with their natural tendencies. "Buy my offering now. It's now or never."
And in a sense, he's right. Because that's how most people really are.
I'm about setting captives free.
I think about this all the time: since it's impossible to do everything now, we must be both reflective, and prospective. We must be in the habit of reflecting on the past, and planning the future.
I say, that is what makes us human. Beasts can't do that, but humans can. To reflect and plan, to stand outside of time like God does, to adopt a God's Eye View of time itself, is to be human, is to rise to the level of our own humanity; and to refuse to do so, to live in the moment, is beastly.
My dad was born in 1931. So was a fellow named Ram Dass. Both men were Psychologists, but they followed very different paths. My dad was a scientist. Ram Dass became a hippie.
He wrote a book entitled Be Here Now. It influenced the culture deeply. He had good intentions, I understand that; but there has been collateral damage that we're still suffering today; the effect being, massive hordes of people do not reflect or plan. They just live in the moment like impulsive beasts . . . prisoners of the Present . . . prisoners of Now-Or-Never Land.
And if you get the Peter Pan reference ("Neverland"), it is very much a state of arrested development, of failing to mature or grow up.
To benefit from Artificial Intelligence, we have to depart Now-Or-Never Land, become both reflective and prospective, stand outside of time like God does, and develop those playbooks.
This is exactly what happened to Sam Carpenter, author of Work the System, who calls himself a reformed hippie. Before AI was a thing, he had mismanaged his business by running it in a Laissez Faire, hippified fashion. It was chaos. He ran out of cash.
One evening he could not sleep because he couldn't afford payroll. Insomnia.
In this state he had an out-of-body experience. He fell into a trance and looked down on his operations from a bird's (or God's) eye view; and he saw how everything that was done happened linearly, over time, in a step-by-step fashion.
He envisioned his business operations like a tangled plate of spaghetti noodles. In his vision he removed each noodle one by one and laid them out straight and parallel to one another. He began writing. By morning, he had written all essential procedures for his business step by step, each procedure on its own page.
This is what Rachel Woods does with AI in her Playbooks.
Do you want to be introspective and literary, that you might enjoy all that AI has to offer?
Are you a prisoner of Now-Or-Never Land? Do you want freedom?
I'm here to help. Please reach out.
Despite the proliferation of options, most people I know do not have one trustworthy system for managing themselves professionally or personally. They're straddling, or juggling, a variety of tools ranging from SaaS subscription platforms to spreadsheets to paper notebooks, calendars, post it notes, and their own monkey minds, where thoughts and ideas are constantly popping or rolling around like corn in a popper, or clothes in a dryer.
Because they don't have one trustworthy system, they live in a place that I call "Now-Or-Never Land." In that place, because there's a danger that they might forget something, their feeling is, "If I don't do this right now, it'll never get done. I'll probably forget it. It'll probably fall through the cracks."
That's an agonizing, stressful way to live. But all too many of us live it every day: 24/7/365.
Tony Robbins is a pragmatic man. He knows this. That's why he's all about Action. Now. He captivates the inhabitants (I would say prisoners) of Now-Or-Never Land and works with their natural tendencies. "Buy my offering now. It's now or never."
And in a sense, he's right. Because that's how most people really are.
I'm about setting captives free.
I think about this all the time: since it's impossible to do everything now, we must be both reflective, and prospective. We must be in the habit of reflecting on the past, and planning the future.
I say, that is what makes us human. Beasts can't do that, but humans can. To reflect and plan, to stand outside of time like God does, to adopt a God's Eye View of time itself, is to be human, is to rise to the level of our own humanity; and to refuse to do so, to live in the moment, is beastly.
My dad was born in 1931. So was a fellow named Ram Dass. Both men were Psychologists, but they followed very different paths. My dad was a scientist. Ram Dass became a hippie.
He wrote a book entitled Be Here Now. It influenced the culture deeply. He had good intentions, I understand that; but there has been collateral damage that we're still suffering today; the effect being, massive hordes of people do not reflect or plan. They just live in the moment like impulsive beasts . . . prisoners of the Present . . . prisoners of Now-Or-Never Land.
And if you get the Peter Pan reference ("Neverland"), it is very much a state of arrested development, of failing to mature or grow up.
To benefit from Artificial Intelligence, we have to depart Now-Or-Never Land, become both reflective and prospective, stand outside of time like God does, and develop those playbooks.
This is exactly what happened to Sam Carpenter, author of Work the System, who calls himself a reformed hippie. Before AI was a thing, he had mismanaged his business by running it in a Laissez Faire, hippified fashion. It was chaos. He ran out of cash.
One evening he could not sleep because he couldn't afford payroll. Insomnia.
In this state he had an out-of-body experience. He fell into a trance and looked down on his operations from a bird's (or God's) eye view; and he saw how everything that was done happened linearly, over time, in a step-by-step fashion.
He envisioned his business operations like a tangled plate of spaghetti noodles. In his vision he removed each noodle one by one and laid them out straight and parallel to one another. He began writing. By morning, he had written all essential procedures for his business step by step, each procedure on its own page.
This is what Rachel Woods does with AI in her Playbooks.
Do you want to be introspective and literary, that you might enjoy all that AI has to offer?
Are you a prisoner of Now-Or-Never Land? Do you want freedom?
I'm here to help. Please reach out.
