SPI 812: My Friend Quit the Internet. My Response.

SPI 812: SPI 812 My Friend Quit the Internet. My Response.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, He’s the kind of guy to get mad at you when you stop believing in yourself, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: I recently had a friend, let’s call him Tommy, his actual name is not Tommy, but just to respect him because I’m talking about him here, we’ll just call him Tommy. The funny thing is, he won’t know that I’m talking about him here, unless I tell him, because he quit the internet. And I wanted to talk about this. This is my response to Tommy quitting the internet. Because I had a, this friend of mine, he and I have been online acquaintances for quite a while.

And he just reached out to me and said, Pat, I’m done. I’m not going to be online anymore. I just can’t take it. And I’m going to tell you what he said and why he’s quitting. But I also wanted to share my response to this. Cause I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from this. And perhaps you even feel like you want to quit too.

Not just quit the online business that you might be attempting to do. We don’t want you to do that. In fact, SPI is here to help make sure that you don’t do that, but you actually thrive. And many people are, but at the same time, I also know it feels overwhelming. The state of the internet right now is, it just feels weird, right?

I’m reminded of the days when the internet first came about. This is before AI, before bots and all those kinds of things kind of took over when you first connected with somebody on the other side of the world or your friend who you hadn’t spoken to in a while and then you connected on Facebook and it was like you just could pick up where you left off or the communities that you were a part of who were about certain hobbies that you were into and you were discovering these new things and you were building friendships online and then that one day you were you meet that friend online in person, and it’s just mind blowing.

I feel like a lot of that kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore, or it’s just been shadowed over by just all the crap that’s out there right now. It doesn’t feel fun, the internet. I mean, we’re trying to do our best over here at SPI to create a fun and safe space for us to talk about entrepreneurship, but just the internet in general, and this is a part of the reason why Tommy wanted to quit.

He was over it. He was addicted, especially to TikTok, especially in a political year here in the U. S. There’s just a lot of things happening and he found himself getting forced to view things that yeah, we’re interesting, but he didn’t really ask for. He had watched a few political related things on TikTok and then just kind of got into a rabbit hole and nobody told him to quit.

He quit on his own, but he just wasn’t feeling it anymore. He just wasn’t having fun. He wasn’t having fun. And on one hand. I’m actually a little bit jealous. I mean, I would never quit online cause that’s where I connect with you. That’s where I connect with a lot of friends and thankfully I’ve learned how to manage the information that’s kind of bombarding me and trying to fight for my attention.

This is a little bit about what my book Lean Learning is about, coming next year, but in a way I’m a little jealous. I’m like, wow, it would actually be a little refreshing to just go back to how things used to be. I mean, I know I can’t have my cake and eat it too. I love my online businesses. I love producing videos on YouTube.

I love connecting with people on SPI. If we went to how things used to be that, you know, those things wouldn’t exist. But at the same time, there was just such a magic that came with the internet when it first came out. And that, that magic is gone. And I know there are new advancements in technology and things like AI artificial intelligence that in a way feel magic, but also it’s, it feels more dangerous.

It feels less authentic. It feels less like people are connecting because of this technology. Rather, people are using this technology to just add more noise. And it’s so hard to have a conversation with somebody else when there’s so much noise out there. It almost feels like you know, a club late at night where everybody’s talking about everything and the music’s loud and everybody’s chatting over each other.

And it’s just, you can’t really sit and relax and enjoy yourself anymore. And there are moments where I feel like, wow, what if I just move to, I don’t know, Minnesota or in fish all day, right? Cause it’s the land of a thousand lakes or go to Idaho and hang out with Nathan Berry. Get a farm next to his, build a pond, and still go fishing, but just be more in nature, and be disconnected, and live an Amish kind of life.

I don’t know. I have these thoughts every once in a while. My wife and I have these conversations late at night, when we hear about the news and the things that are happening in the world, and the things that are happening in the US, and, you know, we’ll drive downtown in San Diego or through LA and just see just poverty all over the place.

And I know I’m just kind of skipping around right now, but it’s just I like sharing these things open and out loud with you. But I wanted to share Tommy’s story a little bit here and him just quitting. So I’m actually, on one hand, just very proud of Tommy for just realizing that he was in a state of just not being happy and wanting to just remove himself from the internet.

And I honestly don’t even know what he’s up to right now. We weren’t super close. Like, we don’t text each other kind of close. I do have his number. I should reach out to him because I can’t connect with him online anymore. But on the other hand, I’m like, it’s kind of a shame because I think there are so many beautiful things that can happen when we utilize the internet in a way that can best serve others and serve ourselves.

And I wanted to share some talking points related to this with where we are at in the world today with where things seem to be headed and how we might be able to best find ourselves a home in the world of the internet right now.

Number one, there’s just an overload of information. We are at a buffet line of information. Information is not the problem anymore. And this is why I had a pretty controversial video go up on my YouTube channel that info marketing is dead. And the reason I said that is twofold. Number one, I had to capture people’s attention to have the start of this conversation. But in a way, it’s also information is alone, not valuable anymore, not as valuable as it once used to be.

It used to be if you owned an encyclopedia Britannica in your home, the encyclopedia from A to Z, all the things. You were almost seen as upper class because you could afford to have that information and other people did not. And now information is available in our pockets at all times. So it is what we do with this information.

It is the information that we let come in and what we do with it. And the information that we say no to that will determine our success, and in my book, Lean Learning, I talk about different kinds of things related to this, one of those being inspirations, because the more that is being fed into our feeds and our algorithms and the more that we go into the social media platforms, the more kind of inspired we get, right?

We get a lot of inspiration from a lot of different things. And on one hand, that’s great. But on the other hand, it’s so much inspiration that we kind of go this way and then we go that way and then we go this way. It’s so much overload. And I call these junk sparks in the book, right? It’s like a spark that ignites you, but it’s, it’s a junk.

It’s not related to any goals that you have. You see somebody else doing something, you want to do it too. And now you’re getting caught pulled into a different direction and you’re saying yes to this new thing where you once said yes to something before that and you’re now saying no to because you’re dedicating your time and energy and effort and thoughts into this new thing and it’s just, it’s definitely a challenge.

So this is why I’m called to write this book, Lean Learning, how to achieve more by learning less. I’m not saying learning is bad, but it is, it is tough out there right now to learn the right things, to get the right help, to get to where you want to go. It’s saturated, right? So in the future, we need to have selective curiosity, right?

We need to understand what it is that our goals are, our priorities are, and control what is controlling us. We need to control the intake of information. And this isn’t just like getting distracted. It’s actually the inspirations that we feel a little bit of an adrenaline rush or some endorphins running through us when we see somebody do something cool.

If we’re not aligned with who we are and what we want and where we’re going, then it’s just going to be a distraction. And it’s just going to pull us away from the things that we once said yes to. So again, I’m not going to go into the details of the book and how to solve this problem right now. I just wanted to share these things.

But the information overload and the distractions and the junk sparks that are out there are killing us. We don’t go deep anymore with things, right? It’s all surface level. Number two, AI, AI is here. It’s going to continue to infiltrate our internet. Our feeds are like, how do we know what’s even real or not anymore?

I saw some more announcements today from different companies, not just Chat GPT, but other companies, Sora and many others who are creating these very lifelike images that are just based on text prompts. And it’s like, how do we even know what’s real or not anymore? Right, there’s Campaign ads that are all AI generated and fakes and deep fakes and the stuff and so there’s two things that go along with this number one AI is here.

It’s not going anywhere. We cannot avoid it, but we can utilize it. We can use it as a tool. Use it as a partner as a brainstorming tool where the problem lies is a lot of people who see AI and how easy it is to create things, they just create and create and create and add more noise and add more to that information overload and distraction.

Like I talked about, that’s bad. That is not providing anybody, any service that is not of value. And it’s all again, very surface level. When we utilize these tools to help us become more creative, where we provided seed ideas that we have and bounce ideas back and forth, it becomes almost like an extra person in the room where you can brainstorm off of, and that is where I have found the most use and leverage within the world of AI right now to help and brainstorm and almost be a first set of ears, if you want to call it that, or eyes to listen to or watch something before I share it with others, just to make sure that it is hitting home and that it’s supporting the right audience and those kinds of things.

The second part of this AI and fakes and deep fakes, especially is there is an opportunity for us as things get less and less human, less and less real, more and more doubtful, more and more is that what he really said or what he really meant or is that even real life anymore the more human and authentic you can be the better. And I’ve always preached being Authentic and transparent all along the way ever since I started this thing in 2008 and now it is more important than ever. So if you’ve heard me talk about that before and you haven’t yet gone on the and I think maybe I’m preaching to the choir here.

I know, you know, it’s important to be transparent, but I mean, it needs to be so apparent that you are a real person, that you have these emotions that people can connect with, that people can relate to. Emotion and sharing real life things in this world of deep fakes is going to be extremely important.

Storytelling, owning up to mistakes, imperfection, these are the things that are going to help us connect with an audience more. And this is why I love community because community is real. Community, it’s very difficult to feel a real connection, even if it’s online with a bot or something that’s AI, but when you’re in a community with real people, with real feelings and real emotions, telling real stories, making real connections, collaborating.

You can’t compete with that. This is why our focus into community and why we’re driving hard into community and trying to build the best dang entrepreneur community online. That’s why it’s so important to us. And we want you to be a part of that at SmartPassiveIncome.com/community.

The last thing is, you know, create spectacular content. I mean, we’re past that point. This ties back to the number one that I was talking about. Just all this bland surface level content. We have to go deeper. Now we’re starting to see trends now on YouTube about deeper content, getting more love. Right before it was all the surface level stuff, just like the quickness, the explosions, the cocomelon style kind of content creation.

Now, slowing down, going deeper because this is real life. This is storytelling and emotion and connection. These are the things that are going to be extremely important. And I guarantee that there’s going to be people saying, Pat, you were right. And I don’t want you to be one who regrets not making decisions now based on all of this kind of stuff, because this is the world we live in right now.

And maybe you do choose to escape and drop everything for a while because it’s just too much, and I understand that, and I respect that, and I respect Tommy and his decision to quit the internet. Will he quit forever? I don’t know. I always hypothesize that when somebody says forever for something, they’re gonna come back, especially if they had once experienced enjoyment.

And perhaps they just need some time to reset, but I do maintain the position that the internet, it is an incredibly wonderful place for people to connect, but the way that it has to happen now is through authenticity, through storytelling, through engagement, and through community. And if you’re building a business, keep those things in mind, or even if you’re not, and you’re just listening to this and.

Kind of nodding your head as we go. Let’s stay together. Let’s stay together. Thank you, Tommy, for making the big move and for inspiring this particular podcast episode.

And thank you for listening, And I look forward to serving you in the next episode as always. I appreciate you.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!