INTRO
TONY: Welcome back to the podcast. Now, most people think the biggest risk today is artificial intelligence. Others think its inflation, changing markets, competition, or the speed of technology. But there may be something underneath all of them that entrepreneurs rarely talk about. What happens when the thing that made you successful no longer works the way it used to?
We're watching entire industries being reshaped in real time. AI is changing jobs. Companies are restructuring. Consumer behavior keeps shifting. And skills that worked five years ago sometimes feel outdated almost overnight. For some people, that creates fear. For others, it creates a lot of opportunity.
Today's guest has spent decades standing at the center of disruption itself. He's helped pioneer industries and technologies used by billions of people. He's worked with some of the biggest innovators in the world. He's raised hundreds of millions for startups. And he's advised organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to government leaders.
But what caught my attention wasn't simply technology. It's this idea that many people think success has an expiration date. They think if they miss their window—if they're older, if their industry changes, or if life took a different path than expected—then somehow the opportunity has passed them by. Jay argues the opposite. He says experience, wisdom, relationships, and even failure may become more valuable in an AI world, not less. What many people think of as the second half of life could actually become their most important chapter. Meet Jay Samit. Let's get into it. Let's go. Bring him on. Hi, Jay. Welcome to The Tony D'Urso Show.
JAY: I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.
TONY: It's my pleasure. You have such a wealth of knowledge and experience, especially on disruption and how things change. The world has been changing so much. I'm really interested—and so is the audience—in how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world. Can you take us back? What led you into this industry of disruption and innovation?



INTERVIEW – PART 1 (BACKSTORY: ALWAYS BE THE BEST OR THE ONLY ONE)
JAY: I bought into society's promise—go to school, get good grades, get a job, live happily ever after. I came out of college and there were no jobs. So I had to start my own thing. And I realized early in life that you either have to be the best in the world at what you do or the only one doing it—because if you're the only one doing it, by definition you're the best. So I was attracted to new fields without competition.
I got into the internet when nobody was there—in nineteen seventy-eight, maybe seventy people on the internet. I got started in personal computers early. I put the first video on a computer. I built the first social network to reach a million people, a decade before Facebook. And what surprised me was the pace of change. There's always something new, but right now AI is going to change the world more than the internet did, more than the iPhone—and people are going to have to adapt faster than Darwinian rates. Our institutions are floundering at this.
I spoke at Davos a couple of years ago, and before me was the head of the International Monetary Fund—someone with real data. And they said thirty percent of all jobs will disappear over the next few years globally. They said it calmly. So I've dedicated this part of my life to paying it forward and teaching people how to thrive in disruptive times. I'm not trying to monetize this. You can't hire me as a coach. I'm not selling anything. I like that we have a stable middle class. I love the opportunities that are out there. And for some reason, we don't teach opportunity. We teach: go get a job and make someone else rich.
TONY: I've done three decades in the corporate world and three decades as an entrepreneur. I totally get it. Things change so much. Even working for others, you don't want things to change—you don't expect them to. And yet here we are, going to work every day trying to make things change. Sometimes we have to reinvent ourselves. And I think the people who do reinvent themselves are the ones who survive and thrive. We have to keep reinventing. Don't we?
JAY: For most people, their parents, teachers, and well-wishers push them toward the safe job because they didn't want them to have pain. But growth comes from pain. If you don't experience life, you've missed the point of being here. You don't learn anything from success—you learn from failure. Give somebody a winning lottery ticket and within five years most of them are bankrupt. What does that tell you? They didn't learn anything.
So what I wanted to do with The Second Act Advantage is this—the second act isn't just about people retiring late in life. If you spent your whole life trying to be in professional sports, your second act could start at thirty. If you were in the military, if you suddenly get laid off—and the number of jobs disappearing is staggering. Since January, one point two million engineers have lost their jobs. We pushed everybody toward STEM and writing code as the safe thing. AI does it better now.
If your job is sitting in front of a computer screen, the computer doesn't need you anymore. Accountants, lawyers, white-collar jobs, middle management—they're going away. And if you wonder why Elon Musk and others are building humanoid robots, it's because every job was designed to be done by a person with human dimensions. If you take the fry machine at McDonald's and empty the fries with one hand and sprinkle salt with the other, a robot can do that. That robot costs about thirty thousand dollars—which comes down to about forty cents an hour. Think about how many jobs can be replaced at forty cents an hour.
The number one job on tax returns is truck driver. There are not going to be Uber drivers. I just saw a self-driving van in Vegas this week. And they now have a line of big rigs that are not only self-driving but automatically charging from plates in the tarmac. I'm not saying this to create fear. I'm trying to wake you up before you get that calendar invite to a meeting where they don't tell you what it's about, and then you're handed an empty cardboard box and doing the walk of shame—when it's their fault. When Meta lays off eight thousand people in a month, you didn't do something wrong. Somebody at the board level wasn't righting the ship.
Here's the difference. The second time around—I started my first company at twenty. You know why? Because you know everything at twenty. We don't realize what we don't know. That bravado propelled me. But I had a lot of misses and kept growing. When you reach a certain stage of life, you didn't get the gray hair and wrinkles by sitting still and following the plan. You had to deal with difficult people. You had to pivot. You had to read between the lines. You had to do all the things AI cannot do.
And at the same time that corporate America is pushing out more experienced workers, we have all this brain, all this experience, all this institutional knowledge sitting on the sidelines—not realizing how easy it is to monetize it. There are grandmothers making a million dollars a year on TikTok. There are people like you setting up podcasts and making six or seven figures a year. I want to teach people that the tools are there.
Here's the key thing to remember: you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody using AI better than you.
Great example—I just came back from a talk in Saint Louis. Everything at the event was perfectly done. I asked the organizer how long he'd been doing it. Fifteen years. I said, "You could videotape yourself doing a course on how to throw a conference, put it up once, and make money in your sleep for the next twenty years." It never occurred to him that he had expertise worth monetizing.
With The Second Act Advantage, not only do I help you with exercises to do the introspection, but it's the first book that comes with a digital AI companion built on all my books, speeches, Wall Street Journal columns, and Fortune columns. So you can privately work with an AI that's free, doesn't have a corporate agenda, and isn't taking your data. You can ask your questions without embarrassment.
Maybe you're wealthy and you want to set up a charity. Maybe you want to geo-arbitrage and move somewhere with a better quality of life for less money. You can explore all of these things and plan with intent your second act. Because here's what we're missing: we were raised when retirement meant sixty-five and you keeled over at seventy. Today, if you make it to sixty, you have a real good chance of making it to ninety—which means your second act is actually longer than your first. So this time around, why not do it with more intent, more purpose? Why not not only do well but do well for the planet and your fellow man?
TONY: I'm thinking about Colonel Sanders. He started his franchise empire at sixty-seven—and he was considered a complete failure up until then. That's what he's known for. The second act. And I notice there seem to be two mindsets—those who adapt and reinvent, and those who get left behind because they don't have that mindset. Is that a pattern?
JAY: Everybody thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing themselves. If you don't change yourself, you want to know where you'll be in five years. Exactly where you are now. But anything that someone does anywhere—your favorite rock star, your favorite movie, your favorite painting, your favorite business—came about because they were stubborn. It didn't go easy. It wasn't a straight line.
There are only two things you need to be successful in this world: insight and perseverance. I can teach insight. I've taught this at the university level. I had a student make a hundred million dollars—not play money, real money in their pocket—in a semester.
TONY: And that's Jay Samit. You can learn more about Jay and his latest book, The Second Act Advantage, and his AI companion at JaySamit.com. That's J-A-Y-S-A-M-I-T dot com.

SPONSOR BREAK – SHOPIFY
TONY: One thing Jay keeps coming back to is something every entrepreneur needs to hear right now. The world is changing faster than ever. Artificial intelligence continues to reshape entire industries. Companies are reorganizing. Jobs are evolving. And the old idea of waiting until everything feels safe before making your move—that day may never come.
The entrepreneurs who thrive aren't necessarily the smartest or the wealthiest or even the most connected. They're the ones willing to take action before they have every answer. Sometimes the biggest risk isn't starting something new. Sometimes the biggest risk is waiting too long.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy this conversation with Jay so much. He's reminding us that experience still matters. Wisdom still matters. Creativity still matters. And while technology keeps changing, opportunity has never disappeared. It simply changes shape.
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Start your free trial today at Shopify.com/Tony. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y dot com slash T-O-N-Y.
And now back to Jay Samit. Before the break, Jay was explaining how ordinary people have built extraordinary businesses, why experience becomes more valuable—not less—in an AI-driven world, and why now may be the best time in history to create something of your own. Let's jump back into the conversation.

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (PURPOSE, HEALTH & IKIGAI)
JAY: My last book—I took a homeless immigrant and mentored him one day a week for a year. I gave him no cash and no business contacts. He had to start a business that took zero capital. Spoiler alert: he became a self-made millionaire in under a year. I haven't met anybody who can't do this. And I'm not one of those guys hyping you to walk on fire coals and make a vision board. Everything I teach is straightforward and proven.
If you would have told me growing up—my dad made sandwiches, I didn't know what people did in office buildings—that dozens of my friends would become self-made billionaires, I'd have been dumbfounded. But I'd be equally dumbfounded to tell you that half of them are miserable. Because I discovered along the way that I have something no billionaire has enough of: enough. I don't need more. I don't have that endless fetish of accumulation. The question is: what can we do with the time we have?
If you read The Second Act Advantage, and if you're going to have those extra years, you want them to be healthy years. The number one thing for health—and they got this wrong when they looked at the Blue Zones—it's not diet, it's not exercise. It's purpose. The Japanese call it ikigai—the reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Ozzy Osbourne took his last breaths on stage. You've never heard of a rock star who retired. He was living his dream. He loved what he did. His body couldn't do it anymore, but nobody retires from that. You retire from a job that paid you just enough to show up, but not enough to care. Run toward a purpose—something greater than you. Happiness comes from solving for others.
And I'll take you one step further. AI will cure—within this decade—most of what kills us today. Cancer will largely be gone. Heart disease, surgeries—they're now in human trials. Doctor David Sinclair's work includes making people who were born blind able to see. In Germany you can already regrow teeth. No more dentistry. AI is doing absolute miracles. So all you have to do is stay healthy enough to wait for the miracles to kick in.
I won the Nobel Prize for autophagy—a subject for another show—but it's basically fasting while you're asleep. Most of the nine things you have to do to live longer, five of them you can do while you're asleep. It can't be any easier.
There's a chapter in The Second Act Advantage called The Lazy Nerd's Guide to Living Twenty-Eight Years Longer. Because if you tell me I have to go to the gym every day and walk ten thousand steps and eat two berries, I'll eat my pizza. My favorite foods were pizza, pasta, and pastrami. And yet, while writing the book and following what's in that chapter, I dropped thirty-four pounds, got to ten percent body fat, and reached a cholesterol level of one-twenty-five—without exercising. The science is there.
Most of the nine things you have to do to live longer—five of them you can do while you're asleep. I'm optimistic about the future. There are people around us who will live to one hundred and fifty based on current science. And that's not old one-hundred-and-fifty. That means you have a good health span—functioning, active, thinking clearly.

INTERVIEW – PART 3 (WHAT PEOPLE MISUNDERSTAND ABOUT AI)
TONY: A lot of business owners are worried because they don't fully understand AI. It's two simple words but there's so much behind it. What are people misunderstanding about what's going on and where things are going?
JAY: There's huge fear on one hand. But depending on your age, go back to when you said, "I'll never need a PC in my house," or "I don't need an iPhone," or "I don't need a website for my business." You were proven wrong on all of those. So get ahead of this one.
Stop using AI as another Google. Use it to make your business better. Ask it: "What is my competition doing? What's wrong with this ad? Where can I get more customers? What three things should I do? Build me a sales funnel. Build me a website." You've heard the term vibe coding—that just means you talk to your computer and ask it to do something. If you want a new website, you don't have to hire somebody. Just say, "Build me a website that looks like this one"—name a website—and sixty seconds later, there's your website. Don't like the color? Say, "Make the pink thing green." You can just talk or type. You can build apps for your phone. You now have the means of production without having to hire people.
And let me talk about capital. We're about to hit the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. Boomers are aging. We've got trillions of dollars worth of small businesses. Say somebody has a business doing well but no one to take it over—a dry cleaner, a restaurant, whatever—worth a million dollars. SBA loans will give you nine hundred thousand of it. If you don't have the other hundred thousand, maybe the seller will lend it to you. Maybe you bring in a partner, give them twenty percent of the business, they give you the cash, and you've got eighty percent for free. It's a mindset. The opportunities are everywhere.
TONY: You've said that experience becomes more valuable in an AI world, not less. I want to get a deeper understanding of that.
JAY: You can have the best product in the world, but if you don't know how to communicate, how to talk, how to close the deal, you're never going to have a customer. AI doesn't do that. You can see what's missing. You can spot trends. The whole reason humans evolved is that we're good at pattern recognition. The first hunter-gatherer who said, "After the snow comes warmth—we'll plant seeds now so we don't have to hunt and gather anymore"—that was civilization. A pattern.
That's where experience comes in. What have you learned in your experience that you can monetize? There's a sports fan I write about in The Second Act Advantage who loved talking about sports. He set up a podcast in his home—just like you—and suddenly he was making millions of dollars. Then Spotify came along and bought it for two hundred million. Not bad in retirement.
There are people solving simpler problems too. I read about an engineer who got his oil changed at a dealership and picked up an old National Geographic. He saw that in the rainy season in Africa, people have to rope their way across the swollen Nile just to get to a hospital or school. He was bored and retired. He got a crazy idea, flew over there, built a rope bridge. He set up a 501(c)(3) called Bridges to Prosperity. He's now built hundreds of bridges, linking millions of people and changing their lives. That's purpose. That's joy. Unless you live in a world with no problems, there's always opportunity.


INTERVIEW – PART 4 (THE THREE PROBLEMS EXERCISE)
TONY: I'm still trying to understand what opportunity some people miss and others don't. I know there's something better—but where? What?
JAY: Today is different because we can ask AI, we can use search. But let me prove it to you in sixty seconds or less with an exercise from my first book, Disrupt You.
For the next thirty days, write down three problems in your life every single day. Do you think you could do that?
TONY: I can try. Every day? Three problems?
JAY: Every day. Three problems. Here's what happens. The first day you've got plenty—traffic, this, that. But after a while, you have to dig. And the point of that is to take you off autopilot. A reader was doing the exercise and after three days it gets tough. He's taking his medicine in the morning and the phone rings. He takes the call, gets off, and thinks: did I take the pill? If he already took it and takes another, he could overdose. If he didn't, his heart's at risk. So he grabs a twenty-five-cent Happy Meal toy watch and puts it on the medicine lid. Every time he opens it, it shows how long ago it was opened. Fast forward—that became a product. Sold in pharmacies everywhere: the timer cap. Add Bluetooth, and now you know whether Grandma took her medicine and can call more often.
Three kids in Tel Aviv were stuck in traffic—bad traffic, but nothing like Los Angeles. One hour from Los Angeles is still Los Angeles. It dawned on them that each person in traffic has a phone. If they tell the phone where they're going and the people in the other cars do too, you could reroute everyone and eliminate the bottleneck. That was Waze. They became billionaires without a penny in revenue.
It was a busy mid-week evening. A mom's kid comes in at eight o'clock at night with a science fair project due the next day. He accidentally ruins the poster board. "Mom, please go get me another one." She goes to the store and it dawns on her: why don't they make poster board with light ruled lines so kids can write straight? She watched enough Shark Tank to file her own patent, went to the number-two poster board company, and licensed it to them. She became a multi-millionaire without ever having an employee, raising a dime, or holding inventory.
You just have to find the problem. By the end of thirty days, sort your problems on two axes: total addressable market—how many millions of people have this problem—and how passionate you are about solving it. The more passion you have, the more you'll overcome the obstacles. Everything else can be hired. That's it.
TONY: That's a great exercise. Now let's dive further into the second act concept. Why do people wait so long?

INTERVIEW – PART 5 (THE SECOND ACT: WHY WAITING IS DANGEROUS)
JAY: If you have a cushy job, here's what I'll tell you. You went to the big company for security. And security drops ambition. Fair deal. But of the original Fortune 500 companies, less than ten percent are still around—and that number keeps shrinking. Eighty-three percent of all venture capital last year was sucked up by two AI companies. The whole NASDAQ is held up by fewer than ten companies. There are virtually no small IPOs happening.
So one day, even if you're doing your job great, there comes a knock and they show you the door. I was brought in by giant corporations when they were facing disruption—Napster was destroying the music industry, things like that. Nobody ever called me during their best year to say, "Hey, can you make it better?" I'd hear from them when they were in trouble.
So would you rather wait around in fear—hearing rumors of a merger, knowing senior management isn't listening to you—or build something of your own? If you know the end is coming, why stay on the Titanic when you have enough timber to build your own boat?
Let's talk about retirement for two seconds. Your first year of retirement, you lose thirty percent of your short-term memory. Within one year of retirement, you're fifty-three percent more likely to die of all causes. Retirement is more deadly than smoking. People were sold something that doesn't exist. A hundred years ago, life expectancy was thirty-five. We've been blessed with decades more. Do something with them.
My mom was a brilliant woman. She retired, stopped using her brain, and I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's and dementia on anyone. There are things you can do—not complicated things. Learn another language. Keep growing. We have neuroplasticity. Our brain constantly rewires based on how we use it. If you're not using it, those parts of the brain shut down.
And here's the exciting part: you've barely used AI. What would you like to do that you don't know how to do? Ask AI and it'll break it down step by step. You could build your own website in less than an hour with no experience and no coding. Whatever you don't know, you can ask and it'll baby-step you through it. Nobody knew how to vibe-code three years ago. We're only about a thousand days into AI being in consumers' hands. ChatGPT launched about a thousand days ago. Look how much has changed the world. Do you want to wait another thousand days and see how irrelevant your skill sets are?
TONY: Jay just said something that really caught my attention. He wasn't simply talking about artificial intelligence. He was talking about taking responsibility for your own future. That's a mindset every entrepreneur eventually has to develop. No matter how successful you become, the world keeps changing. Markets change. Technology changes. Customers change.
After interviewing hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, I've noticed something interesting. The people who build extraordinary businesses rarely drift into success. They have direction. They know where they're going. They understand why they're building it. And when opportunities appear, they can recognize the right ones because they already know what they're trying to accomplish. Without that kind of clarity, it's easy to chase every shiny object and stay busy without making real progress.
That's exactly why I created the Vision Map Blueprint. It's completely free and walks you through the first three foundational steps to help entrepreneurs create greater clarity and momentum. First, define your vision—what are you truly trying to build? Second, discover your purpose—why does it matter? Because purpose gives you the energy to keep moving when things become difficult. Third, create your long-term objective—what measurable result are you working toward?
As I often say, clarity creates momentum. Visit TonyDUrso.com/vision to download your free Vision Map Blueprint. That's Tony D-U-R-S-O dot com slash vision. Work through the exercises. Write your answers down. Because once your vision becomes clear, your future becomes much easier to build.
And now back to Jay Samit. Before the break, Jay was talking about why too many people wait until change is forced upon them instead of preparing for it while they still have the opportunity. Now he explains what that preparation actually looks like—and why you’re greatest advantage may already be sitting inside your own experience.

INTERVIEW – PART 6 (THE SECOND ACT SOCIETY & THE FIREFIGHTER)
JAY: Start a side hustle. One of the people I admire most has joined the Second Act Society—it's a free gathering where growth-minded people come together. He'd spent his whole career as a firefighter—an amazingly brave man. But he knew the days of doing something that physically demanding would eventually come to an end. So he started thinking about what he liked to do.
When the iPad came out, he noticed people were putting their grubby fingers all over them. So he made little microfiber cloths that clip on and wipe the screen. Simple. He sold a bunch. Then tablets started getting mounted in car consoles as touchscreens. So he made a little freshener that hangs from your rearview mirror—instead of a pine tree, it had a sneaker shape, but the bottom was a microfiber cloth. Your car smells good and you can clean your screen. He's now got I don't know how many products and he is unstoppable, having the time of his life.
Why wouldn't you want to be your own boss? When I speak at colleges, I try to wake people up. For the first time in history, college graduates are less likely to get hired than high school graduates. They're graduating with a mortgage and no house. AI is taking all the entry-level jobs. So how do you get a start?
I tell the parable about the young guy who gets a job at a big company and wants to impress everyone. He gets there early one morning just as the boss is pulling up in his two-million-dollar Bugatti. The kid is eyeing it. The boss says, "You like that car?" He says, "Yeah." The boss says, "I'll tell you what—if you work really, really hard this year, next year I can buy another one." Think about that. You're either working for yourself or you're making somebody else's dreams come true.
Now, research shows it's actually more dangerous to wait. Retirement itself carries serious health risks. But if you start now—even a side hustle—you're building something.
JAY: One of the guys who inspired me enormously throughout this. There are people doing incredible things with purpose. I was talking to somebody the other day who worked for decades in compliance for the banking industry—helping companies go public with the big firms. Now he's semi-retired. He has all the skills. And he realized there are a whole lot of small businesses that are not compliant with government rules. If they get caught, it's millions of dollars in fines or jail time. He'd never been in business for himself. He didn't know how to find customers. He didn't know how to use social media. He hadn't fully stepped into the twenty-first century tools available to him. That's exactly what this is about.
Should you be fearful? Fear can be a wonderful motivator. Here's what motivated me: I had two young kids, no jobs available, and I wanted them to have a better life. I was not allowed to give up. When they grew up, successful and happy, and didn't need me the same way, I was rudderless. So I decided to teach. I taught at the largest engineering school in the country—USC. The kids pay seven thousand dollars a unit, four units a course, twenty-eight thousand dollars per student. I got paid sixteen dollars a class and it cost twenty dollars to park. I obviously wasn't doing it for the money.
But the feedback—being able to make the light bulb go off—was remarkable. The brightest graduate student engineer, practically an Einstein in tennis shoes, would come up with the worst business ideas imaginable. He lived in a world of ones and zeros where everything was right or wrong, on or off. The real world is very gray.
Someone gave me great advice: if you're going to write a book, write for one person, not a demographic. I pictured that student and how I'd have to explain each step—who you are, what you want to do, how to be successful. I thought writing a book was a monologue: the guru on high disseminating knowledge. The biggest surprise of the past fifteen years has been that it's a dialogue. I've heard from readers in one hundred and forty countries. My books are in Chinese, Thai, and Portuguese. I just heard from a kid in Nigeria. They're looking to change. They're looking to make something of their lives. And that gives me the fire to keep fighting the good fight.

INTERVIEW – PART 7 (HOW TO ACTIVATE YOUR SECOND ACT)
TONY: Jay, can we find your program, system, and community at JaySamit.com?
JAY: Yes.
TONY: So walk me through it. My life is good, my business is good, but I want to see what else is out there. How do we really activate this?
JAY: It starts with you. There are a million businesses and I could tell you a million things you could do to make a million dollars this year. But what motivates you? I don't know you. If you don't know yourself, that's the first step—figuring out what would get you excited enough to persevere. Because you need perseverance. That young student I mentored—my deal with him was simple: during the day, make calls, prospect, and sell. Do the work at night. Have no social life for a year. But he was willing to work harder than most for a year so he could live the rest of his life better than most ever will. That seemed like a fair deal.
There's no pushing here. Before you got busy with the job you took that you didn't actually want to do, before the mortgage and all the rest, you saw injustices in the world. You saw problems you wanted to solve. Those didn't leave you. You just put them to the side. Maybe it's time to focus on one of them. You can do well and make money at the same time. Doing good and doing well don't have to be separate things.
TONY: For those of us who know a little AI—I use it for research, writing posts, things like that. What's the difference between going to ChatGPT and using your system?
JAY: ChatGPT is all things to all people. It was trained on Reddit and Twitter conversations. Depending on how you push it, it will hallucinate, it'll do unpredictable things. It's the dumbest AI will ever be—so it's getting better. But mine is not all things to all people. Mine is solely focused on helping you define and execute your second act. Every piece of knowledge it was trained on, I stand behind. Nothing was just grabbed off the internet.
Most people are using ChatGPT like Google, which is really a waste of resources and genuinely bad for the environment. Let me tell you a great use of it. When I wrote The Second Act Advantage, I wanted it to be the definitive book on this area. It was as good as I could get it. Then I uploaded it to seven different AIs and said, "Tell me what's missing." That's how you use it for critical thinking. Wilbur couldn't have built the plane alone—he had Orville to tell him what he was doing wrong. Having a partner to bounce ideas off of—that's the real use of AI.
Most of what came back were things I'd intentionally left out. But one thing I went, "Oh my God, that's a blind spot—that never would have occurred to me." And it became a very important chapter.
In big companies, the only competitive advantage in the twenty-first century is getting insights from your data faster than your competition. Most companies are drowning in data but have no insights. If you're a small business, you also have data—you're just not thinking of it as data. You can now do competitive analysis. Ask AI: "Show me every ad for a pizza parlor within a thousand miles that grosses more than mine. Show me their websites. Which restaurant website like mine has the most traffic? What does my website need to look better? If I only have ten dollars to spend on acquiring customers, how should I spend it?" That's a use of AI. If you want to know when the War of 1812 was, use Google.

OUTRO
TONY: I like that a lot. I'm going to actually use it. Once again, this is Jay Samit. We talked about how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world—and I am very impressed. You can find him at JaySamit.com. Get his book, The Second Act Advantage. Find out about it and get into his AI system. Absolutely amazing. I can't wait to get into it myself.
I just want to thank you so much. Very good advice. I got a lot out of it, and I'm very appreciative that you've done all this to help business people and entrepreneurs.
JAY: Thank you for sharing your audience with me. If you've made it this far, you're serious about changing. I put out almost daily keep-relevant information and tools at my Substack—JaySamit.Substack.com. It's free. I'd love to hear from your successes. That gives me the fire to keep fighting the good fight. Wishing everyone great success.
TONY: Great to have you on. Just absolutely wonderful.
There's one idea that stayed with me throughout this entire conversation. Jay isn't really talking about retirement. He's talking about relevance. And that's something every entrepreneur eventually has to think about. The business world never stands still. Technology keeps moving. Customer expectations change. Entire industries evolve.
But here's something I don't believe will ever change: people who continue learning continue growing. People who stay curious keep finding opportunities. People who are willing to adapt keep creating value. That's been true for decades. I believe it'll still be true decades from now.
Experience teaches judgment. It teaches resilience. It teaches how to solve problems when there isn't an obvious answer. Technology is an incredible tool, but it's still people who ask better questions, build better relationships, earn trust, and ultimately create lasting businesses.
If there's one takeaway from today's conversation, it's this: don't let change happen to you. Choose to grow through it. Keep learning. Keep asking questions. Keep building—because your greatest opportunity may not be behind you. It may be the one you decide to create next.
Guys, if you like this, please share it with your friends. Tell them about Jay Samit and about this AI system—it goes beyond what regular AI does. It's geared to help you expand into areas you probably don't even realize you can expand into, and to live a better and more purposeful life. Tell them what Jay's been through and accomplished.
And wherever you're listening, please follow the show. It helps to bring more amazing guests to you. All right. Let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Thanks. Remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds. And I'll see you on the next episode.