Stop Building a Life That Looks Good But Feels Empty: Mark Shilensky on AI, Family & Real Success

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Hello there and welcome to to this episode of your ultimate life, the podcast dedicated to helping you create a life of purpose, prosperity and joy by serving with your life experience your gifts and talents.

Got a special guest today, Mark Shalinsky.

Mark, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks.

Great to be here.

So, you know you're an AI whiz and you were just telling me ahead of time about a potential way to create courses and I was interested in that.

And I think, you know, because this show's about helping people do what they want to do, I say see AI as a big boon in that way because it speeds up mundane things and eliminates a lot of it and allows us to get into more creative space where we can do good.

First of all, do you think so too?

And then tell me about that course creation thing you were talking about, because I think AI is going to change the nature of work and stuff.

So talk a little bit about that.

Sure.

So, yeah, AI is changing the landscape of everything.

I mean, the, the way we consume data, the way information is passed, you know, the, the, the phrase of, you know, let, oh, let me Google that has, is starting to go away.

And now, you know, let me ask chat.

GPT is becoming much more mainstream as a, as a search modality and that's really changing the way the way people impact with information and the way information gets out there, both to the good and the bad.

I mean, unfortunately, just like search engines, AI is biased based on the people who taught it.

So I think we'll see more biases coming in in certain areas and eventually somebody's going to create an unbiased AI LLM, if that's possible.

Although, I don't know, I think you and I both agree.

I don't think that's possible.

I don't know how you do that.

I know AI would have to create.

The AI and some of that is happening.

AI is writing software, AI is teaching itself.

But no, the platform we were talking about is actually, it's from Google, it's actually called Notebook lm.

And what it allows you to do is upload a library of resource information and then from that, the it's AI will create whatever you want.

You can tell it, use this information and create a course, Use this information and create a book.

Use this Information and create a workbook.

The one we were playing with yesterday was use this information and write the script for a podcast that is interview style, where we have two people speaking and one is asking questions and one is answering questions.

And then we can take that script and push it over into an audio generator AI and actually output a fully interactive two person conversation style newscast or podcast, 100% AI generated, which is just.

Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy.

Well, I know that's a weird way to start the show, but it was just follow on from what we did and I thought it would be fun to have it in there.

So you just told me something also that was really meaningful to me and you may not even have even known that.

You told me that you're up in Philly right now to go to a funeral for someone that meant a lot to you.

And the story about that was important.

And I'm going to tie it into.

Because this, you know, my approach to all this is, however intelligent we are, however much cool stuff we create, the real substance of life is the spiritual, the meaning, the relationships, you know, who we decide to be, how we show up in the world.

And your story about why you're there at this funeral, if you don't mind, tell me about that and tell me why that's.

It was important enough for you to fly from.

Where did you fly?

The South Pole?

Up to Philadelphia, from Tampa up to Philly.

Yeah, I was teasing about the penguins.

Yeah, we don't have any penguins down in Tampa.

So, you know, my, my father was a very, very instrumental figure in my life.

He, he taught me my work ethic.

He taught me so much as I was growing up and unfortunately we lost him way too young.

He's been gone actually a couple weeks ago.

He was 25 years and so.

But while I was growing up, my father was a New York City police officer and his partner from, I'll date him, it's mid-1960s to mid-1970s, actually just passed away.

And so I was on the phone with my sister and we both decided that he was, you know, he was an important enough figure in our lives that we wouldn't, we didn't hesitate, you know, just hopped on a plane and, and flew up because we're.

It's amazing how different characters, different people in our lives come and go over time, but the ones that stick the most and, and I have, you know, it's not somebody necessarily who you see every day, even in later years, but he was very instrumental in, in my life growing up and you know, it's just one of those figures that I, I wouldn't hesitate to hop on a plane to see and, and I fortunately got to see him last year and he was doing okay.

And now unfortunately we got the bad news, so I flew up here for this.

That's precious.

And I thank you for allowing me to ask you that question and for talking about that because it's easy to talk about other stuff and I wanted to just bring that in because it is so important for you as a listener and for Mark and for me, but for you to remember the things that are important, that make your life the ultimate life is your life purpose.

And the importance of that person is connected to that, our connection as human beings.

And so thank you for that.

I'm going to move over to what you do from, for a little bit on in business.

And I know you talked, when you and I talked at the event where we spoke, you talked about AI agents and helping, you know, businesses create that micro employees and stuff.

In an earlier broadcast I did with someone else, we were talking about the progression when there used to be, when compute PCs first came into being.

And I was in corporate then and you know, somebody having a PC, that was a big deal.

And then there was rumors that pretty soon everybody's gonna have a PC on their desk and like, you know, those gasp of budgets and that'll never happen.

And, and then, you know, within a year or two everybody did and.

And then there was the story of senior management or executives or something would say, oh, you know, I'm not very techie out on any of that crap.

And for a while that was kind of, you know, okay.

And then it became kind of quaint and funny and of course anybody a few years later that said that was just like a dinosaur and stupid.

And I'm thinking the same kind of thing.

We were talking about the fear that people have with this kind of technology and with your expertise and thinking about that progression, which you probably saw too.

Tell me about how this AI adoption is going to take, including what you do with micro employees and helping people and anywhere you want to go with that, but just talk about this progression as you see how fast it's moving.

So the progression itself is actually very interesting.

I mean, AI from a concept standpoint has been around for decades.

I mean machine learning and, and algorithms and things like that.

I mean we've, we've seen it in all aspects of our lives and most people don't even realize how, how integral it is in every aspect of what they're doing.

I mean, I like using the example of, okay, if you've got an iPhone, you've got Siri.

Well, that's an AI.

You've got Alexa at home.

If you're, you know, if you've got an Amazon device, that's an AI.

But even, even more basic than that, any kind of software that you use that does any kind of predictive or recommendation algorithm.

So Amazon, Netflix, all the streaming services do this.

They analyze what your activities are.

Social media does the same thing.

They analyze what your activities are, and then an AI algorithm then makes recommendations for you based on that.

So the, the huge section of the population that are kind of AI resistant are really using it.

They just don't realize that they're using it.

But adoption rates as a whole are actually surprisingly low.

OpenAI released Chat GPT in November of 2022.

That's when it went live to the public.

I was watching an interview about three weeks ago with the founder of OpenAI, and he was saying that they only have only 500 million users globally in the last.

So in a little less than three years, they've brought on 500 million free user accounts.

So it's not people who are paying to use the service, it's free user accounts.

And only about 10 to 20% of those get used on a daily or weekly basis.

Wow.

So a lot of that is people who, as I speak on AI, one of the things that I hear all the time is, oh, yeah, I looked at that a year ago and it sucked.

And then I just put it away and I never went back to it because it sucked.

And you think about how much it's grown in the last month or two, let alone the last year.

And all those people who put it away and said, oh, it sucked, I'm not going to go back to it, are really completely oblivious to what's changed.

And anybody who spends any time on Facebook or any other social media watches these trends come and go.

The big ones, the image ones that were really popular a month or two ago, whereas everybody was making a version of themselves as the little toy, the action figure in the bubble wrap or the boxed toy or Funko Pop or whatever, and that was because image generation with AI had reached a tipping point where somebody found a really cool way of prompting it to do something that somebody was like, oh, I want to see myself as a, as an action figure.

Let me see that.

That's really cool.

And they would go down this rabbit hole and they would waste half a day playing with it, and they Got nothing tangible out of it except this really cool, you know, a few really cool images.

And in a lot of cases they were like, okay, so AI can make really cool images of action figures.

And now I'm going to go back to my job.

They didn't realize that it has grown that much.

There's the new, the newest trend that's coming out right now is Google released video software called VO3V03.

And you see all these videos on social media now of these, the yeti or the gorilla, that's like a little 5 second video clip of a gorilla, like doing a selfie cam and talking.

Those, those are, it's amazing to me what had.

People are saying, oh that's cool.

But they're not realizing the ramifications of that.

The entire video and movie industry was just turned upside down.

You know, when I'm a big fantasy sci fi kind of guy.

And I remember when Lord of the Rings, remember when Lord of the Rings came out, the movie.

Oh yeah.

So the director of Lord of the Rings, when they finished filming, he spent two years editing that movie to the final three hour cinematic release.

Two years of an editing team editing all that footage down to make the movie.

Now he can take a picture of an actor, drop it into an AI software and say, have this character do this in this setting and say this in his voice and the AI will produce that and he'll have a five second or a seven second clip that he can then piece together with a whole lot of other 5 or 7 second clips and make an entire movie at cinematic quality.

Do we have any of a month?

Do we have any of those movies yet?

Not yet, but I think we're going to see them very soon.

A friend of mine, I thought you.

Were going to tell me and the name of it is, and I was going to go look it up, but.

A friend of mine just produced a 45 second TV commercial.

So it's like it's 12 different frames, it's 12 different scenes, about three to four seconds each because you got to have the fast cuts and everything.

So he produced a 45 second TV commercial to sell a product.

No studio, no actors.

He did the entire thing with AI in about an hour.

And that was only because he was learning it as he went.

So what do you think?

When do you, how fast do you think this is going to be before people adopt it?

Is it really going to take a long time or a short time?

What do you think?

I think things like that will be adopted by the fringe of the profession, like the video editing professions, the fringe is going to adopt it first because the hardliners are going to stick to their guns just like most people do.

They're too caught up in their stuff.

And I would say within a matter of two months, we're going to see fully created short movies or shorts or TV shows that are almost 100% AI generated.

I guess they're going to be trying to.

The actors that they use are going to be getting them to pay for, you know, the name, like likeness, image stuff.

Right.

Like they do with the sports.

Yeah, and that's.

And we're already seeing that.

I mean, you know, you've got audiobooks.

Amazon is.

Amazon's Audible has been the holdout in the audiobook industry for, for a couple of years now where they haven't allowed audio, they haven't allowed AI narrators, and they just changed that a couple months ago.

And now you could have the next.

You know, so you write a book and you want an, you want to release an audiobook, but version you literally click a button and it generates an AI narrator to read your book and it's up on Audible the next day.

Now, they're not as good as a human narrator.

They don't have all the tone and inflection and everything else, but it's good enough.

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

So maybe I need to do that.

I was going to clone my voice in elevenlabs and have it read the book.

11 Labs is still the best platform for that.

Absolutely.

You know what?

I did an 11 lab deep voice clone of mine and uploaded 3 hours of stuff and I didn't like it very much, so I must have done something wrong, so I'll have to go do it again.

You gotta have pick 10 of your closest friends and have them listen to it.

Don't you listen to it?

Okay.

You know, most people don't like the way their voice sounds in general, so.

Yeah, well, I noticed in the studio, right, when I'd have singers come over, they'd say, I don't sound like that.

The reason we do that is because half of what we hear of our own voice goes through the inside, the canal in the, you know, the inside.

And so we don't, we don't, we don't sound like we sound to anybody except us.

Like that's a true thing because of how we hear our stuff from the inside.

Nobody else does.

So this is all fascinating.

And it sounds like things are changing so quickly when you speak, when you go speak about this AI stuff, And it's business impact.

But the broader impact, what are two or three things that you tell people that are the most surprising to them?

Like it's like holy crap kind of stuff.

The growth, the, the really quantifying the growth curve for AI and how it's changing over time.

Most people don't realize how smart AI has become in the last, the, the, the most recent OpenAI model, O4 mini according to testing has an IQ of 157.

So it is smarter than 99.6% of the human population.

So we're actually approaching the, in technology.

There's this line where they say that the computer is smarter than the people and it, and it's, and it can think and learn on its own.

And we are that close to the cusp of that where AI models can train new AI models.

And once that happens, the growth is unlimited.

It really is.

And people are a little scared by that.

And it's a little bit of a wake up call.

Honestly.

The biggest thing that people are surprised by is how easy it is to use AI if you use it properly.

Everybody goes in and they say write me a story.

And you know, AI, it only knows what it knows.

So the creativity piece isn't really there.

It doesn't have a unique original thought.

It only knows what it knows.

And so you can't ask it to be creative because all it can do is mirror back to you some things that it learned that it thinks are creative and it's going to sound like one of them.

So getting AI to speak like other people is great.

Getting it to speak in their voice or their information is great.

It's still not there for getting it to think on its own.

Those are both really, really interesting points.

So how do you think this innovation and, and you know, you told me the other day that it's doubling in intelligence or capacity every few days.

I think you said, and, and I said something about it three months that I'd seen somewhere and you corrected me and said it's not every few days.

And I was blown away by that.

How do you think that's going to.

How rapidly and how much.

How do you think that's going to affect what we do for work?

Right.

I mean people are afraid of it and they're afraid it's going to take everybody's jobs.

And in some ways it is.

And I say yay.

Absolutely.

I'm like yay.

So talk a little bit about how that's going to affect work and maybe some ideas about how some listeners to this, who are thinking about saving time and being more productive, not more creative, because you said that's not there yet, but just more productive and therefore more free, more unburdened.

And you can tie it into what I know you do for some of what you do for businesses.

So the interesting thing is I wrote a book called Leverage or Die that's basically how to use AI Micro employees.

And what an AI micro employee is a very, very task specific AI.

So it's designed to answer the phone and tell people what your store hours are or tell them what your return policy is.

It's very, very specific functions.

And in the book, what I run the readers through an exercise where I ask them to watch, to record what they do, journal what they do in the course of a week or a month, depending upon what, how stable what they do is, how consistent it is.

And I ask them to divide every task into one of three buckets.

It's what does this task require me personally?

So let's say I'm the business owner.

Does this task require me and only me to do it?

Or does this task require a human being to do it, but not necessarily me?

I can outsource it.

I can have a hire an employee to do it, a human employee to do it.

And then there's the third bucket.

It's the repetitive, monotonous tasks that we all do as humans and how do we.

So the goal is to take all of those tasks, identify what they are and move them to an automation, move them to an AI and free up our individual's time to do more of what we, what we want to do, whether it be business or personal or growth.

I grew up, I grew up watching people do that, you know, 80 hour grind when they started their own business.

They worked 80, 100 hours a week and gave up their family time and gave up their free time.

And that's something that's near and dear to me.

I don't want to see people who strive to create their own business and then basically built themselves a job.

Part of what I teach is how to identify a task that doesn't have to be done by you, the business owner, and how to offload that to another person or to an AI and free back that time so you can spend time with your family, so you can be home at night to have dinner and watch a movie with your kids or go to a sporting event.

My daughter is a freshman in high school and I was amazed.

We went to an awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago.

So the end of the school year, we went to an ROTC awards ceremony.

And with 350 kids in the ROTC, there was less than 150 parents there.

And this is the end of year celebration.

This is the award ceremony for the whole year.

But people couldn't make the time to go watch their kid get an award and be celebrated as part of this community.

And it really broke my heart.

I was going to say, just hearing you tell the story, I'm sitting here gasping in pain for the heartache of all of those students.

Yeah.

And so I look at AI as a tool to help, whether it be a business owner or somebody who has a job, maybe they have a job that they like, but how to automate tasks within their job, that makes it easier on them and provides more growth and value to the company they work for.

Wow.

So that's at least one of the businesses that you have where you go into a business and help them make that analysis.

And then do you, do you help them get those micro employees created or do they have to go somewhere else to do that?

No, we do it all.

So I do both.

We have both a done for you service where we create them for them or we have a course that, where we walk them through the process and that way they can, you know, duplicate it as many times as they need.

You know, sometimes it's.

Sometimes a business needs 10 of them.

Sometimes a business needs 50, you know, AI, AI micro employees, depending upon how large they are.

And that way, you know, they can start offloading those tasks.

If I want to go find that course or talk to you about that, where do I go?

So to find information about the book, it's leverageordie.com and then to find information on everything else that's@markschelensky.com so it's M A R K S H I L e n s k-y.com so I know.

That you just released the book and when this episode goes out in the middle of July, it'll be a month or so out and I would really encourage people to go do it.

And no, Mark's not paying me a kickback for books sold.

But I know him and I know the work that he does, so I absolutely recommend that.

And if you're interested about getting some consulting.

Markshalinsky.com that's really good.

Tell me a little bit more about your, your, your own personal experience now that you've become not only an expert at this, but you help others do it.

What, what is it freed up for you that has, how has it made you closer to that life of purpose, prosperity and joy?

The goal that we have where every day you love, you love what you do and you don't do anything you don't want.

You know, that sort of ideal.

How has it moved you in that direction?

So just like I do with my clients, I go through this process in my own business.

I have an amazing team of assistants, human assistants who do, who do a lot of the stuff.

And we go through this process with every one of our projects about once a month where we look at things, we say, okay, what new things have become repetitive?

How do we outsource them, how do we, how do we delegate them to an AI?

What can we build to help make things better?

And it's just become an ongoing process.

So, you know, I can work if I, if I was willing to let it happen, I could easily work 80 hours a week.

But I don't, especially now that we're in the summertime.

You know, like I said, my daughter's, you know, on summer break, so we'll do some traveling and things like that.

That's always been my family time has always been an important part of my life.

A few years ago we took the summer off, went to Europe and, and I worked like two hours a day.

I was able to get online, do my two hours of consulting or calls or whatever and then the rest of the time was family time.

And because of that it, it's allowed me to grow a lot more as a person.

I've been doing this for a very long time.

I've been on, been doing the online marketing game for 27 years.

I was joking with somebody recently.

I launched my first revenue generating website in 1997.

Oh wow.

I'm an OG in the space.

And it's like, yeah, no question about that.

So I love that.

So in other words, it has impacted you in measurable, tangible ways that you can point to.

And I ask that because there's so many people saying, maybe in good faith do this and it'll fix your life and save the world.

And there's quite a bit less, like 150 parents, you know, quite a less number that can say.

And it really does.

And I experience it and it really has changed how I look at work, how I experience it, from this all consuming thing that I identify with to something that I do to make money and so forth.

Yeah, unfortunately there's a lot of people in a lot of, a lot of people in general who don't walk their talk and kind of Portray this Persona that's not who they are.

I joke that in certain parts of the country it's like the number of Lamborghinis and private jets that are available for one day rentals for photo shoots is, you know, is ridiculous.

And it's a shame.

It's a shame that people market that way.

It's a shame that people run their businesses that way.

I, I could never do it.

And Florida is one of those places, isn't it?

It is, it is.

Down in Miami, it's.

It's a little crazy.

I'm sure it is.

I have a story about Miami, but we're not going to do that right now.

Well, I went to Miami.

I will.

I went to Miami to buy a car I used to drive.

My favorite hot rod was a Dodge viper.

So I've had three of them over the years.

And one of them I souped up to 850 horsepower and you know, ridiculous.

But anyway, one of them I found in Miami.

So I flew from Edmonton, Alberta to Miami and then drove it home.

And it was funny because in the showroom where I went, well, I took several days and in fact I stopped in Phoenix on the way home and took a four day grand prix racing school at the bondurant racing thing.

Right.

Wow.

But anyway, when I went in the showroom there of this car, it was like, yeah, that.

Right.

Lamborghinis and Ferraris and all over the place.

And so that's why I said Florida's one of them because I was.

I saw one.

There it is.

Look at that.

Yeah.

All those things for rent.

Mark, I want you to tell me, you told me that family is really important to you.

You model that you believe it.

I can tell as you speak from your energy the truth of that, that belief.

We live in a world right now.

That is where we measure success by what we have.

You know, and if we somebody has more than somebody else, somehow they have a better crown or they're cooler, they have a, you know, a different color glow around them or something?

How did you get to a place where you've been in this Internet marketing world for 27 years and you know, all the characters and how many of them did whatever they did and went to jail and, you know, sold their souls and all of the rest.

And you have come through that.

And here you are as a model of someone who values the true things in life that are more important.

How did that happen?

Well, like I started this, like when we started this conversation, my dad was a very big role model.

In my life, he was somebody who really personified the honest, hard working, ethical, you know, model that I had the pleasure of learning at a young age.

And I, and I went through, I mean, I am nowhere near perfect in any way, shape or form.

I went through my, I went through my stages of things as a kid and I went through my stages of things in business.

I, I started doing the, oh, you know what?

I can sell this course even though it sucks, just because I can make money at it.

And when I wake up and I look in the mirror and I look at myself and I go, am I happy and proud of what I'm doing and who I am?

I need to be able to look at myself and say, yes, I am proud of who I become.

And when I talk to my daughter and her friends and I'm like, you know, I want to be a role model for them.

I want to because especially in this modern age of fast everything and overnight billionaires and all this crazy people on TikTok and influencers and the gray side of things with some of the websites that are out there, I want them to look at me and say, you know what?

I can be an ethical business person and I can model that and learn from that.

And that's one of the things that I hope to always portray in the world.

I want to be that model for others who say, you don't have to take shortcuts, you don't have to do the things that you don't feel proud of.

Thank you for saying that.

Because one of the things that I preach incessantly is that creating the life you want to live, which for me I use the words purpose, prosperity and joy and everybody uses their own words.

You can create that and you can, even in this crazy world of shortcuts, liars and everything else, you can have that kind of life and enjoy it every day and make good money and provide real value and so forth.

You, you agree with that?

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, I kind of, my business motto is, you know, if, if, if somebody hires me and I'm working with them a year down the road, if I can't go to them and say, are you truly happy with our business relationship and our relationship over the last year?

If they can't, if I, they can't say yes to that, that they're truly satisfied and happy, I'm just going to give them their money back because obviously I didn't achieve what I want, you know, what I set out to do, which was positively impact their business and their life you know, I don't have a return policy.

My return policy is if you're happy, if you're unhappy, I'll give you your money back.

Because I don't want to somebody to look at me and feel like, oh, there's just another marketer who was dishonest.

And I got, and I got taken advantage of.

Will it come back and bite me?

Has it come back and bite me?

Yes, there are people that will take advantage of that.

But you know what?

That's.

Karma's on them.

Thank you for saying that.

Because, you know, there are many who think that you gotta cut corners and you gotta cheat and you gotta do this, that and the other.

And I like what you said earlier about looking yourself in the eyes and you can't fool you.

You know, there's that old poem which I won't quote right now, but it's about the man in the glass.

You know, your final reward will be heartache and tears if you've cheated the man in the glass.

And it's talking about looking in the mirror.

And I just, I have lived in the not that and now in the that.

And so I appreciate you and your, your view and your, your heart about that.

What haven't I talked to you about?

What haven't I asked you that you think would be good for people to.

About this voice, this clarion call for ethical and truthful business or about the stuff that you do, or about the evolution of AI or about your book that you think would be fun for people to know.

Honestly, the biggest thing that I always ask of people is how are we passing it on that, you know, the, we live in an age of the absentee parent.

We live in an age where the young are more connected to an electronic device than they are a person.

I mean, we saw that during, we saw that during COVID when everybody was sequestered at home and they weren't allowed to socialize and they weren't allowed to have that human, not only the human to human interaction, but the human touch.

And we're only now starting to realize some of the impacts of that year of our children's lives.

And I'm gonna, I, I really ask people to, to look at their kids and see who they are, how they're, how they're growing, how they're becoming and try and connect with them.

I mean, I have a, I have a 14 year old teenage daughter talk about the, the, the, the.

The personification of not connecting.

And, and yet my daughter and I, that's one of the things that we do, we have a routine we follow where we connect.

Because I want to make sure that she knows no matter what happens in life, I'm there for her unconditionally.

And I want to.

I truly want to know what's going on in her life without any judgment, without any lessons, without any repercussions, what's going on so that we can stay connected.

And she knows that she can always come to me.

That's something that's really missing in parents today.

In spades.

Just completely in spades.

We've turned, you know, raising the kids over to the government, to schools and sort of washed our hands.

And half the time, parents are so broken, they can't do what's required anyway because they're so busy taking care of themselves.

But that's a social commentary thing, and we'll do that another day.

Yeah, Mark, that's a whole nother episode.

It is a whole nother episode.

So I thank you for your heart.

I thank you for sharing your wisdom, your knowledge, your encouragement, and your personal choices in becoming who you are.

So thanks for being here today with me.

Thank you, Kellen.

I really appreciate it.

You guys.

I want you to take time to listen to this again.

Mark's an example of someone who has come through his own set of difficult times and made the choices that you right now can make.

We talk every episode about creating your own life, sovereignty and ownership and doing that.

And that means you right now can go in any direction you want, consistent with what you truly believe and what you need to do and become to create your ultimate life right here, right now.

Your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you.

Every episode gives you practical, practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellenflukeigermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here YourUltimateLife.ca subscribe Share.

SAM.