How To Be Smarter With Walter O’Brien

CEO of Scorpion Computer Services – Walter O’Brien

Here’s what you’ll learn about How To Be Smarter:

– How a “rent-a-brain” service helps you become smarter by allowing you to focus on your core competencies.

– How to unleash your potential for limitless possibilities.

– What it is like to have one of the highest IQ on the planet!

– The surprising reason why confidence (and not IQ) can help you solve almost any problem thrown at you.

– Why the best CEOs don’t have the highest IQs.

– The future of AI and how to leverage its power for your business.

– How outsourcing “upwards” can be jet-fuel for your business.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Tune in and listen: How To Be Smarter With Walter O’Brien

Walter’s Website:

ConciergeUp.com – A service, powered by Scorpion, that solves ANY funded problem. This rent-a-brain service provides intelligence on demand to your unique challenge.

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime Masters:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Masters. And today on the show, I've been waiting for this interview. This is with Walter O'Brien. He runs quite a few different companies, along with has an amazing background, which we'll get into in just a second. 

	You're on ScorpionComputerServices.com, also executive producer of Scorpion, a CBS TV show, which you should all check out and I have to also, and he also runs Concierge Up. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Walter O'Brien:	Oh, thanks for having me, appreciate it. 

Jaime Masters:	So, one of the things that I loved is that you were a hacker at the beginning, and I was a pretend little girl hacker at the beginning. But you've got a crazy story and trajectory. So, just catch us up in a few minutes of all the amazing things that you've done because what you're doing right now, you're calling intelligence on demand, which I thought was one of the best things to describe it. 

Walter O'Brien:	All right, sure, so dairy farmer's son from Ireland who didn't fit in at home or at school. Teachers complained I asked too many questions. By nine, they thought I was on the autistic scale, sent me for testing, tested out with the fifth highest IQ on the planet, 197; comparison, Einstein was 160. 

Jaime Masters:	He was dumb compared to you. That's amazing. 

Walter O'Brien:	Got my hands on a computer; through trial and error, taught myself programming. By 13, I'd hacked into NASA, stolen the shuttle blueprints, got busted by the NSA and Interpol, and turned them into my clients. So, I started working for the government in 1988. 

	I then started building and growing a computer company, kind of like Geek Squad, fixing whatever problems occurred back then. And the problem I ran into was I only hired the friends of mine who didn't bully me, which were primarily prodigies from the Gifted Children's Society, and they had IQs over 150. So, they were one in 10,000 each. 

	The problem with that is when I put two of them on the same project, they'd try and kill each other while insulting the customer. So, that led me to understanding the difference between EQ and IQ and the relationship between them, that often the higher the IQ, the lower the EQ. 

	And Carnegie Mellon released a report saying 85 percent of your success is your EQ; 15 percent's your IQ. So, I should have been screwed. 

	So, I went out, and I got single moms, elementary schoolteachers, psychologists who had high EQ scores, brought them in and called them the super nannies because they babysit the geniuses and the customers. 

	So, I now had the best thinkers working with the best communicators. And all the things they suck at, like branding, marketing, sales, accounting, taxes, legal, I outsourced to firms that were good at those things. So, I now had an incubator or what I call a home for the mentally enabled to work together. 

	And that worked, and the company grew. We grew to about 3,000 geniuses, 500 super nannies, and started solving problems all over the world. 

	Homeland Security then classified me as a national asset and transferred me to the US. That's how I got my Green Card over here. 

	And the company grew further, and we branched out and started helping Fortune 1000 companies, military command and control systems, ballistic missile defense, the war games in Afghanistan. And my degrees are in artificial intelligence and computer science, so anything with fuzzy logic in it, we ended up getting involved in, as well as cybersecurity. 

	So, then, sitting on a rock one day, I decided, well, I have this great think tank, and for 20 years, we solved only technical problems. What if I opened it up and said we could solve any kind of problem? 

	So, I opened a website called Concierge Up because normally you concierge down things that are too simple to do yourself. Our tagline was, "If you want to search something, type it in Google; if you want it to happen, type it in Concierge Up." 

	And, slowly but surely, people started typing in their requests. And it worked, and we started solving problems like someone's daughter had anorexia Someone's mom had throat cancer, but they didn't want to lose their jaw when they did the operation. Someone else had a book and they wanted to get it on the New York Times Bestseller List. Someone else had DNA on racehorses, seven years of winners and losers, wanted to find out what the winners had in common, so they could choose winning racehorses. 

	Any kind of crazy request, and the super nannies and the geniuses would wrestle it to the ground and try and solve it. And, nine out of ten times, we were able to solve it. 

	Finally, we ended up with too many requests coming in, up to 2,800 a month, and not enough geniuses to work on it. So, I went to my geniuses, and I said, "Now, I have a funded problem. How do I find more geniuses? They're one in 10,000." So, they analyzed it, like all the other problems, where they assume the customer's always wrong. 

	And they decided that, if I wrote a book, the millennials probably wouldn't read it. If I made a movie, they'd forget my name in six months. But if I replaced CSI as the No. 1 show on the air in the last ten years, the geniuses will come find us, and the 12-year-olds will grow up wanting to be scientists instead of wanting to be Kim Kardashian, and that could only be good for the country. 

	So, how do you make a hit TV show? We don't know, so we went and got the people from our own favorite shows. So, the producers did Transformers, Spiderman, Star Trek; director did The Fast and the Furious; the writers from Sopranos, Prison Break, and Hostages, put them all together, got them funding, and that was three years ago. 

	We're now approved for Season 4 of Scorpion. We're in 188 countries, 26 million viewers just in the US. And we're getting letters and emails from 12-year-old boys and girls saying they didn't know they were allowed to be a cybersecurity engineer, or what laptop do I use, or what language should they study, or which college should they go to, which is a lot better than them studying basketball. And that kind of brings you up to date on where we are now. 

Jaime Masters:	Better than a movie. Your life is insane. I love that. It's like we have geniuses and nannies, right? You can do whatever you want with how smart you are and with the bank of talent that you have in general. 

	What do us non-geniuses technically do with this because I feel like people like you will rule the world. You'll own the robots, and then you'll take over, and all us other people will be, like, "Oh, whatever you need. Let me bow down to you," right? What can we do with what you've learned on this side, besides ? I mean, we can't take over. You have the geniuses on your side, not on ours. 

Walter O'Brien:	No, well, the truth of it is we have the ability to execute, which is the third leg on any stool. Someone has an idea, someone finds the money, but now someone has to have the discipline, education, and ability to execute as quickly as possible. 

	And our company of smart people is kind of like a rent-a-brain vending machine. And everyone we've found has a core competency. There's something you're better at than we'll ever be. But then there's a whole bunch of other stuff you have to do that's not your core competency. 

	So, let me give you a perfect example. Let's say you were an amazing hairdresser, and you wanted to open up a hair salon. But you're not amazing at figuring out merchant accounts, American Express, reject levels, whether you should use a square card or not, what security system you should have in place. 

	What's the best supplier of general liability insurance in case someone sues you? What's the best solution for what kind of lighting you wanna have in the salon? What tiles should you have that are gonna be low-maintenance? What point-of-sale system are you gonna use that integrates with QuickBooks to make your taxes easier? 

	You're just a hairdresser. Now, we can't do hair, but we can do all the other things. So, the 140 things you've got to do when you start your business, you're a smart person; you'll figure them out, but it might take you three years. Whereas, we start, we've already got the checklist. 

	So, if you wanna be up and running in three months and then use data analytics to find out which shopping mall has the largest attendance and the least number of hairdressers, then we can figure out your location and then use our lawyers to take all the gotchas out of your lease agreement. 

Jaime Masters:	This is why I started ? I've interviewed almost 400 millionaires. I should have just hired you guys. What the hell? I would have been set. 

Walter O'Brien:	See, now you get it. 

Jaime Masters:	Yeah, ta da, wish I knew about you a really long time ago. So, let me ask you this because you came from being a genius, right, so it seems like any opportunity in the world is available to you. Do you think that was innate, in terms of the opportunity that you have because I feel like what we do is we hold ourselves back as normal, quote, unquote, humans of what's possible for us. 

	You are probably the person out of everybody that I know ? and I have a great network of people ? that have the most possibility in the world because you have access to everything that most people don't have. 

	So, do you really feel like you could conquer anything pretty much on the planet, and do you think that's something, a skill that we normal people could learn? 

Walter O'Brien:	So, it's a great question, and there's a complex answer to it. 

Jaime Masters:	Of course there is. I love it. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, bear with me. First of all, I cannot conquer anything on the planet because I am extremely, almost totally left-brain. So, take all of the right-brain stuff on the planet, being a rock star, a singer, an actor, a poet, a writer, and take those off the table immediately because I do not have any of those kind of creative skills. That's why I stick with my engineering niche and the ability to engineer, plan, and execute things correctly. 

	Now, that doesn't mean I can't hire an actor and a singer and a songwriter if I want to get there, but it doesn't mean I can do anything. 

	Now, I was the last to believe that I was a genius because you have to take the context. First of all, I'm growing up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Ireland. If the people around me told me, "Wow, you're a genius at computers," it's because they're on typewriters, so I didn't have independent validation. 

	Because of that, I did high-speed programming conventions and won nationally for a few years. But, even then, I'm like, well, it's Ireland. It's a small country, and who knows if the other 50 contestants were sober? 

	So, then I did the world Olympics in informatics, and I ranked sixth. And that was the first time I was like, okay, well, this is 150 countries, top people from every country, and I had no training and no coach, so I guess this is a reasonable assessment of where I stand. 

	Now, I do believe I can solve any problem because of a mixture of a) you're right, the confidence that I've solved all the other problems. I don't approach something with any lack of confidence. I basically feel that I can't make it worse. That's kind of where I come from. 

	So, for example, the racehorse analogy I used earlier, that's a 200-plus-year-old sport where no technology has ever been used, and nobody's run the telemetry data from a horse or checked their DNA, so I can't make it worse. As it is, the choice is one out of 150 win. I only have to be right twice out of 150 to double my success. So, I love industries where nobody has used technology because I can't make it worse. 

	Secondly, now, my rolodex is pretty big. Whoever I call on the planet tends to call me back, and they wanna work on a cool project. So, smart projects and a good corporate culture attract smart people. 

	So, we definitely now have access. I'm trying to be the dumbest guy at my company, and we have access to some really, really good brains that do great things. And I know just enough to kind of hold them all together as the ringmaster. 

	Now, IQ is kind of like horsepower in a car. You get it hereditary. It's through your DNA. It's like your eye color. There's not much you can do, and it doesn't really change. 

	However, critical thinking skills, when you use your left brain versus your right brain, when you rely on others, how much you doublecheck stuff, how you use technology to augment your brain, these are all things that can be learned. 

	If you look at books like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, some of the most successful people on the planet were IQs of about 120, but they were well-rounded. 

	And if you walk into any big organization, the CEO is not the guy with the highest IQ; it's the guy with the highest EQ who's playing golf with the right people. So, the world doesn't work on, respect, or celebrate intelligence. It's not how it works. 

Jaime Masters:	But the fact that you have the confidence along with everything else and then can fit the pieces together for what you're lacking is also ridiculously smart, which is what we're trying to teach business owners in general. 

	We are not amazing at what we do - we're amazing at maybe one or two or three or four things at the most, and we just need to cobble together the rest of the people that are way better than we are. It's just ridiculously impressive to see what you've built over everything so far. 

	One thing that you said though, and I really wanna bring this up because this is one of the reasons why I have you here. You said we have the tech to augment your brain. So, do you really feel like - because I love technology. All my listeners know that I'm a little obsessed with some of this stuff. Because I'm not a genius, I wanna use every asset humanly possible, hopeful AI or whatever it is to try and make me smarter, better, faster, whatever it is. 

	Can you tell me what you see coming up and what maybe business owners should be paying attention to on the AI tech space to try and be the best of the best? 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, let's start with what's already there that people don't use enough. If it's not your core competency, you shouldn't be doing it. So, outsource your accounting; outsource your legal; outsource your contract management at work, your phone and call center stuff; outsource whatever you can to people who can do it cost-effectively, rather than trying to do it yourself. 

	The whole concept we brought up earlier about renting a brain is something only smarter people can really comprehend. It's one of the problems in our business because only one percent of people listening to this call will actually call us or hire us because the other 99 percent will go, "Well, that doesn't apply to me, and I could never use them, and I can't afford them," even though you don't know what we cost. 

Jaime Masters:	I love what you did just there. That is so good. Everyone's like, well, now, I wanna be with the one percent that I'm gonna call him. Go ahead. 

Walter O'Brien:	No, but they won't. They'll talk themselves out of it. But the one percent who call and say, "Look, I don't even know what's wrong with my business. Why don't you look at it for week and tell me?" or, "I just wanna be twice the size next year. Okay, smart guys, figure it out. How do you make us twice the size?" Some fuzzy, high-level requirement, which you can't do when you outsource downwards. 

	When you outsource downwards, you have to figure everything out yourself and then tell them, every inch of the way, what to do. With us, you can simply blurt out the problem and go, "I'm not happy," or, "I want to retire," or, "I hate my business partner," whatever it is, and that's it. That's all the instructions we get. From there on, we've got to figure it out. So, outsource is part of it. And let go of everything that's not your magic pixie dust, that's your particular skillset. 

	Now, there is technology coming up. One of the other simple things is Einstein didn't remember anything. He wrote everything down. He used his brain just for processing. I do the exact same thing. If you ask me what I was doing tomorrow morning, I have no idea till I look at my calendar. Everything is written down; everything is stored. 

	Even the simple things like getting your dry-cleaning or picking up milk, write it down, put it in your to-do list. Don't rely on it staying in your memory. 

	I'm just [inaudible] [00:24:01] free [inaudible] processing, keeping extremely good notes and journals and address books, properly backed up, so that that guy I met at that gas station who was driving the Ferrari three years ago who happens to be a chemical packaging expert, now I need a chemical packaging expert. And I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a Ferrari, and I met him a gas station. So, those keywords are good enough for me to find the person. 

Jaime Masters:	Wait, let me ask you this question then because I literally - I have so many journals because I love paper and tactile. What should I use to try and put this digital because I take pictures of it, and I make my assistant transcribe everything. It's kind of a pain in the butt. Since you're a genius, do you have any solutions for that? 

Walter O'Brien:	Yeah, there's pens you can get pretty cheaply on Amazon, and they track your motion. And they do actually write on a paper, but they also record the motion. [Inaudible] [00:24:56] into your USB, it transcribes everything up to your notes with cursive font and so on. 

	It's also - the smart software is searchable because, even though it hasn't OCR'd your text to turn it into actual text, it can search the graphical phrase of how you would write it. So, if you write your name, like the signature, it'll now look for your signature as a graphic. 

Jaime Masters:	Which I adore. Let's hope that my horrible handwriting can actually be seen on some of this stuff. But, yes, tech is getting better. That's an amazing idea. I definitely have to - I wrote it down. 

Walter O'Brien:	The other thing is keep moving things around. I have a schedule where I've got the seven days of the week, and then if I have five things I wanna get done today and I don't get them done, I've got to move the ones I don't get done to tomorrow, physically, and go, okay, now they're on my list for tomorrow. 

	That is very helpful because if you just stick it in a journal, and now you're seven pages further on, you're never going back, and you don't know what you missed because you don't have to - there's no way of physically moving it each time. You also can't back it up. You can't look it up on your phone remotely. You can't Dropbox it. So, as much as you love it, you're going to have to get off paper. 

Jaime Masters:	So, these are only for separate - these are for brain thoughts where I want to get away from my computer. My computer and my actual thing that I go over everything for schedules is all there because, you're right, I can't do that, not current data, not current information. That being said, I'm sure I have better ways that I could do what I'm doing now, too. 

	So, when you talk about systems, it sounds like you're really, really refined in the systems that you know that work for you. No. 1, did you have your geniuses figure that out for you? But, No. 2, what are some of your systems that you abide by, like, one of the pieces of writing everything down? What else do you do? 

Walter O'Brien:	There's a few great tips. One of them is ? and this happens a lot ? one of the problems with the world is that the confident people aren't very smart, and the smart people are underconfident. 

Jaime Masters:	Yes. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, a lot of the smarter people are introverts pretending to be extroverts. And what happens is, you start reading an email, and it's awkward. Your response is awkward. You're turning someone down, or you're telling them you're not interested or whatever. And you want to avoid that awkwardness; it's human nature. So, you answer the next email, or you carry on. 

	And then you'll read it again tomorrow, and you're like, "Oh, it's still awkward, and I'm not sure how to phrase it," and I'll move on. In the end, you've read the frigging email seven times, and you still haven't answered it. 

	So, deal with things now. Deal with them the first time you come across them. Force yourself to clear your plate out, clear your inboxes out, and just deal with stuff as it comes up, awkward or not. 

	Embrace the uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable just means you're learning. If you're completely comfortable, you're not learning anything. So, being uncomfortable, you have to start seeing that as a good thing. 

	Then prioritizing brutally, knowing your ? they say happiness is living a purpose-filled life. So, figuring out your self-actualization, what is your purpose on the planet, and then everything that pops up to distract you, you look at it and go, does this get me to my purpose on the planet? And if it doesn't, brutally ignore it. Shut it down. Spam it. Delete it. 

	If you don't wanna do that consciously, the unconscious way of doing it is you take your to-do list, and you go through everything, and at the beginning of it, you put H, M, or L, high, medium, or low priority, and then you sort by those letters. 

	And what you'll find after a couple of months is you only get your highs that you're working on, and everything that's medium and low, you're never getting around to. And when you look at them six months later, you realize, oh, they weren't that important anyway. So, you end up not needing to do those things or giving them to a personal assistant. 

Jaime Masters:	I love it, though we say this, and then people will be like, "That's genius, awesome. I should do it," and then nobody every does it. So, you guys help with execution. How can we make ourselves do this? 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, this is part of the thing. We're kind of like a personal trainer for an entrepreneur. We're gonna drag you out of bed on a Tuesday morning and make you do the stuff you don't wanna do. 

Jaime Masters:	Sweet. 

Walter O'Brien:	We're gonna hold you accountable. We're gonna sit there and go, okay, you just gave us 12 pieces of homework. Think of us like the smart kids in high school that you used to copy from. We now do your homework. So, next Tuesday, we're gonna talk to you again. We will have our homework done. You better have your homework done, and then we'll talk about what we're gonna do next week. 

	So, especially for entrepreneurs who have been pretty much working alone or just them with an assistant, they find it very useful that, now, their big project that they've been talking about for three years is actually gonna start on Monday, and we're gonna make sure it starts on Monday because we have to deliver results every week. 

	And we're gonna work with you and make sure, and there's stuff you're gonna have to do and stuff we're gonna have to do. And it really gets them going, kind of like a personal trainer would at a gym. They don't wanna disappoint us. 

Jaime Masters:	So, [inaudible] [00:29:50] consultant and coaching, so it's even longer-term things, not necessarily just solve this problem, you give the checklist, and then they have to go implement. You're actually making sure it gets done. 

Walter O'Brien:	Yeah, well, look, you've got to think of us as like a super butler where the good clients of ours call us every three days with a new wacky problem. And they're almost testing us out, some of them. They're like, "Okay. Let's see if you can solve this one or figure this out," and we love that. 

	We'll have clients that have all kinds of problems. "My son fell in love with a Ukrainian gold digger. Break them up before the wedding, but don't let him know we interfered." 

Jaime Masters:	What? Oh, my gosh, this is so awesome. 

Walter O'Brien:	"I'm retiring and moving to Hawaii, but I have a collection of rare Porsches I'm bringing with me, and I'm worried they're all gonna be corroded by the saltwater. So, find a chemical bonding spray that protects them underneath." Whatever it is, "Make my daughter the next Britney Spears," whatever the request is, we'll dig into it. 

	And surprisingly, the ones you think are impossible are actually doable. And some of the other ones, we'll come back to the person and say, "Look, this is doable, but it's gonna cost a billion dollars. Your budget's 100 grand, so it ain't gonna happen." 

Jaime Masters:	Man, I wish you didn't throw that in. I had such a good idea for you, darn it. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, yeah, but it literally can be anything. And the good customers get used to this concept of outsourcing, you know, renting a brain for what they wanna do. 

Jaime Masters:	[Inaudible] [00:31:26] have 1,700 businesses underneath this, where you're like, "Oh, we just solved that problem. Oh, that's a new product. Oh, we just solved that problem. That's a new whatever." How do you not have all of those things? 

Walter O'Brien:	Focus. We stay focused on our core competency, which is gathering IQ as a precious commodity and leasing it out to those in need. And that's our core competency. It's not our job to own 100 startups. 

	Now, I do lecture at the Founders Institute, which has 1,000 startups a year, and I give them speeches on what not to do. Because we're adult supervision on startups, we see a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. 

Jaime Masters:	Okay. Please enlighten us because there's a lot of people in the first couple years right now that need to hear this. So, can you just give us one, two, three mistakes, so that way, we can save ourselves before we get hurt? 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, a lot of people, they wanna do an app or wanna do some software program, and they're not technical themselves, and they realize, hey, there's some guy in India, he'll do the whole thing for 10 grand. Well, one of the problems there is - 

Jaime Masters:	I'm sorry, yeah, I have issues with this, too. Go ahead. 

Walter O'Brien:	In a word, one of the problems is requirements because you don't know what you want, and you expect them to know what you want, and they're definitely not mind readers, and they're also not empowered to argue with you. 

	In our business, we assume the customer's always wrong, which the smarter customers will understand. So, if you come to us with an idea, we'll probably spend the first two meetings arguing with you or pushing back on you about, "What about this? What about that?" So, we're really partnering with you at the same level, rather than just doing what we're told blindly. 

	So, the good news about outsourcing is they'll do what you tell them, and the bad news is they'll do what you tell them. So, you better know what you're telling them. 

	And the truth is that all programmers are not equal. Some are worth 20 times what another programmer's worth. It's kind of like lawyers. What's the phrase? Experts are expensive, but amateurs are really expensive. And is the guy really cheaper if you ended up hiring him for two years to do something that could have been done in six months, and it's still full of bugs? So, it's very easy to be pennywise and pound-foolish in those situations. 

	And, unless you're a huge company with hundreds of employees, outsourcing rarely makes sense. You're much better off getting a CTO locally who speaks English, who believes in the vision, who has shares in the company, that you work with as a partner to develop the product because, since you don't know what you want, you're gonna change your mind 20 times anyway. And it's much easier to do that on paper on the requirements level than it is after it's been coded, and now you're doing what's called rapid prototyping, except it isn't because you don't actually throw away the prototype; you try to go live on it. 

Jaime Masters:	Oh, my gosh, I love this because people need to hear this times 1,000. I have a computer background, and you see so many people be like, "Well, SAS are cool, so I'm gonna -" I'm like, "You have no idea what you're getting into." And then, later, we'll come back and be like, "So, I spent a ridiculous amount of money," and I'm like, "Well, problem, don't know what to tell you, your own fault, lesson learned, won't do that again, right?" All right. What's another one? 

Walter O'Brien:	Another one is a thing called live escrow. Lawyers borrowed this from the real estate industry years ago, and somebody thought it was a good idea to put it in all contracts ever, that if you hire someone, you escrow the source code. So, if they go out of business, you get your source code back. 

	Well, getting [inaudible] [00:34:56] you didn't write that isn't common and probably isn't English is absolutely useless unless you have all the other information, like the configuration data, the IP addresses, the firewall settings, what tools you need, what you're gonna use to compile it, what libraries were used, all this other stuff that the entrepreneur hasn't even heard of. But he's got a gold disc in his safe - 

Jaime Masters:	That has something on it that's amazing and cost a lot of money. 

Walter O'Brien:	Exactly. So, what we tell people to do is, if you do outsource to work with another firm offshore or onshore, hire at least one person that's completely unrelated to them, and their job is to reproduce production once a month. Take all the source code, take the gold disc or whatever they give you, and in a separate environment that costs you 50 bucks on the Amazon Cloud, try to rebuild production. If that person can, then they've just proven that the other people can't hold you to ransom. 

	So, after your 10 grand budget gets blown, and you realize you're five percent into the project, and now, they're like, "Well, do you wanna throw it all away, or do you wanna keep going?" and they start blackmailing you over and over and over again to move forward, if you have live escrow, you can say, "No, thanks, I have the source code. I know how to compile it. I know how to reproduce production. So, now, I can safely move to another company." 

	And, yes, it'll take them some time to ramp up, but you're not doing a scavenger hunt and effectively hacking back into my own system just to try and figure out all the missing pieces. 

Jaime Masters:	That brings up a painful moment for me. I had a blog a long, long time ago before WordPress, and it got hacked, awesome. My backups, which I had, two different places, were corrupt because I never tested them. 

	So, everybody, please go test things as much as humanly possible because you're like, "Oh, no, it's there. Oh, no, it's fine. That golden disc, oh, yeah, that's totally cool." Oh, wait, it means nothing. It's a hunk of lead that nobody cares about. Great. You're gonna not be able to sleep for a long period of time at night. 

	I love that also. And I know we have to start wrapping up in a just a second. So, I'm not gonna ask you for any more tips on that. 

	I do wanna go into - especially with Amazon Echo and the cool new stuff coming out tech-wise, both on the normal, nowadays side, and what you sort of see for the future, because I think most business owners don't look very far to the future. They do maybe in their own industry like this, but they don't see sort of the trends and where things are going and how exponential technology is. 

	I remember, way back when, when we built computers with 4-gig - you know what I mean, they were so small back then. And now, only 10, 15 years later, it's insane. 

	So, you be the man and predict, right, many years in the future. What should we know, as business owners, what's trending? 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, a couple of things. First of all, just on the last point briefly, because we were just stumbling into a beautiful point here, is we were talking about backups, rehearsing stuff, to rehearse your restores, having requirements, having clear specifications on what you want. 

	The reason I started Concierge Up separately from Scorpion was because that all applies to life, not just technology. If I was planning your wedding and your divorce the same day, I'd wanna do all that and have a disaster recovery plan in case it fails. So, all the terminology around how to manage technology and software to five nines of perfection, so it's 99.999 percent unlikely to have a mistake, is actually a good way to run your life, as well. 

	Now, to answer your question on future, although that's a whole other hour discussion - 

Jaime Masters:	Yeah, I know. 

Walter O'Brien:	- in the short term, virtual reality is here to stay. It's working. I've played around with it a lot now. And I started on it in 1991, and I was very excited about it then, but we didn't have the bandwidth, didn't have the network, didn't have the graphics, didn't have the horsepower. Now, we do. 

	So, it'll change everything, everything between from movies and books all the way to videogames [inaudible] [00:39:02] together and become some kind of hybrid. So, that's certainly a very interesting area of growth. 

	And I'd say anyone getting into entertainment needs to focus on that because it changes, just like when we used to have pantomimes on stage, and then we invented a camera. And what did we do? We put it in the front seat and just did a pantomime again, versus today, when we figured out cinematography and special effects and CGI and choreography and everything else. 

	So, now, it's the same thing. The leap from black-and-white pantomimes to today's movies is the same leap from today's movies to virtual reality, in terms of what's possible that we don't even know yet. We're still at the pantomime stage of figuring it out. 

	Artificial intelligence across the board - the robots that can do most of what blue-collar workers can do are now affordable and getting cheaper than a minimum-wage worker, especially if we raise the minimum wage. It accelerates that. 

	There's factories that have just published in February that the robots that they got replaced 80 percent of their workers. Productivity went up 250 percent. Defects went down 80 percent. It's not long before shareholders catch onto that. 

Jaime Masters:	No kidding, right? Oh, wait, why would I have something worse and more expensive? Awesome. 

Walter O'Brien:	The most obvious one for us to see is we have 160,000 Uber drivers in the US. Self-driving Ubers are already being tested in Pittsburgh. So, they'll be just switched off. Next is 1.6 million truck drivers, van drivers, FedEx drivers, delivery drivers. They're just big Ubers. Already, they're testing self-driving Uber trucks. 

	So, as that unemployment goes up, and we hit close to 30, maybe 34 percent, and one in three people can't feed their families, it changes the dynamic in the country completely. And not everyone can code and do AI suddenly. 

	Now, you're right about exponential growth, and people don't get the severity of this. So, I have a little stat here that helps. Everything is growing exponentially, but our brains naturally think linearly. So, from our agricultural revolution to industrial, it took us 120 years - sorry, took us 8,000 years; from industrial to lightbulb, 120; lightbulb to the moon, 90; from the moon to the web took us 22; and from the web to sequencing our own DNA took us nine years. 

	So, these revelations, like the self-driving Uber stuff, this isn't 50 years in the future. This is five years in the future, and it's just going to get faster. 

	And it's all then gonna be driven by advertising, extreme personalization. Ubers will probably be free because they'll have Netflix and HBO in the back, and they'll be personally advertising to you because they know your credit card; they know where you live; they know where you go; they know if you're male or female; and they know who you meet with. And Volvo that Uber's partnering with happens to be owned by the Chinese, so now they will know all of that. 

Jaime Masters:	Right. See, I'm glad you're scaring the crap out of people because I feel like they need to be, even just as a business owner, realizing how personalized things are gonna be in literally the next couple years in marketing, in AI and marketing. We're learning all this stuff, and no offense, I think it's gonna be obsolete for a lot of things later on. 

	And not that it's not good to learn some skillsets and stuff now because we're in the present day - you have to work with what you have now - but I also don't think, like you said, people understand how everything's getting squished and how much change, assuming we accept it of course, comes to fruition ridiculously fast because of the speed of technology. 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, I was exercising my EQ by talking about the fun stuff, but you see that as scaring the crap out of people. 

Jaime Masters:	I love it. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, I guess I better not get to the World War [inaudible] [00:42:54]. 

Jaime Masters:	Okay. But, see, I love this because I feel lots of resistance from people that don't pay attention to this because they'll most likely see the negative. They're usually like, "Oh, all that job loss." I see it as an evolution. I think that's really cool. I've had quite a few discussions on the show about that, assuming that we can keep up. 

	That being said, World War III and horrible things in singularity, this is why really, really smart people are debating this. Have you guys solved that yet? Are robots gonna take over? Has somebody asked you to solve that? 

Walter O'Brien:	Okay. How much time have we got? 

Jaime Masters:	I know. We have like ten minutes. Go. 

Walter O'Brien:	Like, what's the meaning of the universe? Go, ten minutes. 

Jaime Masters:	Yeah, you're welcome. 

Walter O'Brien:	All right. Well, I'll do my best. Look, the robots will take over. There is no doubt. Moore's law keeps kicking in where things get half as cheap and twice as fast every 18 months. Humans don't. It's very simple. 

	Now, in an ideal world, what would happen is we'd start with a robot tax or what we call a universal wage, like I think they pay in Norway, where the government is now having more abundance than it needs, so it starts cutting the citizens a check. 

	Elon Musk has talked about this a little bit as the universal wage, where basically if all the labor's being done by the robots, then all of our costs, our food, our fuel, our farming, everything should get cheaper for us, not more expensive. 

	So, ultimately, people get to start living either more freely, or the government cuts everyone a check for 25 grand a year, and for 25 grand a year, you can actually live the life of someone on 100 grand a year now. That would be the smart, clever, evolved, sophisticated way to do this. 

	However, that's now who we vote for. So, we are going to end up in a bit of bloodbath between now and when the greed takes over. And then when the greed doesn't work, and there's a civil revolution, and then everyone fights back, and then eventually we get to the point where [inaudible] [00:44:57] which we need to get to, which is trying to live in harmony. 

	And for those that are fans of Star Trek, the Next Generation, they never worried about money. Their accommodation was free. Their food was free. Their drink was free. You wanna be a doctor, be a doctor. You wanna be a security guard, be a security guard. 

	Today, 99 percent of humans are not allowed to be human. They're trapped in a cycle where they've got to do what they don't wanna do so they can pay the rent on Friday. They're not freed up to do what's called self-actualization, what's in their heart, what do they really wanna do, unless they're wealthy enough to get to a point of doing that. 

	And so, I see 99 percent of society as enslaved right now and that the technology will free them up to follow their vocation. But it's gonna be a bumpy ride between now and then. 

	Now, the other part of this, in my ten minutes, is we will and are working on downloading memories, uploading brains, backing up your brain like you back up your iPhone. 

Jaime Masters:	I was just going into the Matrix right after this. All right, continue, go ahead. 

Walter O'Brien:	[Inaudible] cloning your stem cells, adjusting your telemeters to control aging. So, if I can grow you a 20-year-old twin sister in four years, and when you're 70, put your brain back in a 20-year-old body, that's highly interesting. 

	 Side effects, you don't die; that's a nice one. No. 2, why solve all terminal diseases if you can throw them away with the old body? And, three, a neato side effect is teleportation because you can now call Hertz Rent-a-Body in New York, rent the Angelina Jolie special, email your brain over there. That body becomes your rental car, and your brain becomes the driver. You don't bring your car with you when you fall now. 

Jaime Masters:	Dollhouse, the show by Josh Whedon, anyway, yes. So, keep going. We want all of it. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, the idea then on the singularity side is that people think all of this will come together in 29 years, which will be the year 2045. It's been on the cover of Time magazine twice now. The concern is that I've studied AI. That's what my degree is in. I know how far away we are from real Terminator-level AI. [Inaudible] [00:47:13] worry that tomorrow, it's gonna take over all humans. 

	However, if we can upload brains, replicate them, play with them like an MRI scan, split them, slow them down, fast-forward them, and adjust them, we can reverse-engineer them. Then we'll figure out AI consciousness and memory within about two years. 

Jaime Masters:	Wow. 

Walter O'Brien:	It's kind of like dropping an iPhone into a tribe somewhere and letting them reverse-engineer it. They might eventually figure it out. So, if we do that, and we really have AI modeled on a human brain that escapes onto the internet, then the first thing it will do is kill us because we are the biggest threat to survival of its species. So, ironically, the thing that makes us live forever might be the thing that kills us. 

Jaime Masters:	My son, since he was three, has been saying he wants to create a live-forever machine. And now, he is torn because he doesn't want to because he thinks they're going to take over. I'm just like, the world we live in now is not the world I grew up in at all. 

	That being said, the bodies and all that fun stuff seems amazing. And what's tough is we aren't geniuses, and we can't predict - not that you can predict the future, but you can see a lot of pathways. And so, trying to head ourselves off when something smarter than us is coming, yeah, that's where the World War III scary shit comes in, in my opinion. 

	Hence, the reason why I like talking about this because I have kids. We kind of need to be paying attention, or at least more attention than we are right now, even though, like you said, it's not for a little while. It's gonna hit us sooner than we even think. 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, when head transplants become more popular, then you'll be able to sell more of those chokers. 

Jaime Masters:	My friend has - he's gonna freeze his body, and I remember he wears one of those things, and way back when, it was so uncool. You're like, "Oh, my God, you're one of those freaks." And now, people are like, "Oh, well, we're gonna freeze our body and use the life insurance to pay for it," awesome, okay. I haven't done that yet. I have not done that yet. That being said, I would be okay with living forever. 

	I have so many more questions for you. I know we have to wrap up. I knew this was gonna happen. So, I'm gonna ask the last question, even though I wanna ask [inaudible] [00:49:18]. 

Walter O'Brien:	You've really got to watch the whole show. 

Jaime Masters:	I'm gonna have you on ten more - no, I have to pay rent-a-brain in order to have you on ten more times. 

Walter O'Brien:	By the way, do you wanna talk about how we're paid? 

Jaime Masters:	Oh, yeah, sure. 

Walter O'Brien:	Briefly? So, because you don't know how much your problem costs, and we don't know what your problem costs, instead of getting into this stupid thing of fixed-bidding stuff and then arguing with each other about those changing requirements, we work like a law firm. 

	You put down a 10 grand deposit, and then from that, our hours vary, but they average about 150 bucks an hour on average, so you get 66 hours of management for that. I don't charge for my time at all. And there's no tie-in, no long-term contracts. So, basically, you work with us week-to-week. 

	Anytime that we're not the smartest people you've worked with, you can fire us and then take your money back for any hours you haven't used because it's only a deposit. And the hours we used, you authorized anyway. So, every week, we're gonna say, "Here's what we did last week; here's what we're gonna do next week. Are you cool with that?" And if the pot runs out, you put more money in the pot, or we stop working. 

	So, because of that, in 30 years, we've never had a bad debt, an account receivable, a lawsuit. We've never sued anyone; no one's ever sued us. 

Jaime Masters:	Amazing. 

Walter O'Brien:	And it's a much nicer way to work. So, it really is augmented intelligence. 

Jaime Masters:	Well, what's so funny is, I actually charge $1,500.00 an hour. So, I'm just gonna take ten hours and have you guys solve all the problems that I'm gonna do, and therefore, I already have smarter people working on it. Outsource everything. I love this. I'm glad you explained that to me. That's amazing. 

	And that's way less expensive than I would assume because, like you said, when you go on, you're like, oh, assuming you're solving the freaking world's problems, military and other, of course it'll be a ridiculous amount. Great, I think this is amazing. 

	I know I still have to ask the last question. Okay. So, what's one action, one out of everything, that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? 

Walter O'Brien:	Well, they could log into Concierge Up and type in their Top 3 wishes, but that's my self-serving answer. 

Jaime Masters:	Go do that, right now, everybody go. 

Walter O'Brien:	They just met an affordable Santa Claus. They might as well use it. 

Jaime Masters:	An affordable Santa Claus. I'm sorry. Go ahead. 

Walter O'Brien:	All right. So, separately from that, focus on your core competency. Really identify what is it that's special about you that no one else can do, and don't waste your time on everything else. Outsource everything else, literally, to whoever. But just focus on your core competency because that is the only thing that's gonna differentiate you, as things get more personal, more niche, more directed, more data-oriented in the near future. 

	And the other thing is, I guess, protecting assets you've got. Make sure everything you've got is backed up, is protected against ransomware and cryptoware, which is hitting everybody now, and that you can actually restore from it. So, you don't wanna take a step back from where you're already at. 

Jaime Masters:	This is amazing. Everybody should solve all of their - call about your specific industry and go, "Where do I need to be in three years to head off all the crap that's coming? Where do I need to be in ten years?" And they'll solve that for you, ta da, problem solved. Now you can sleep well at night, knowing that things coming up aren't gonna be so bad. 

	Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Well, give us the links again, where we can find more about you, where we can watch the show, all that fun stuff. 

Walter O'Brien:	So, ConciergeUp.com to type in your wishes. That'll actually link you over to ScorpionComputerServices.com where you can learn all about us. Just click the Press page. CBS every Monday night at 10:00, the TV show's on, although we're just wrapping up Season 3 right now. But you can also see them all at CBS.com. Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy have all the boxed sets if you need to binge-watch. 

Jaime Masters:	That's what I'm gonna do. 

Walter O'Brien:	Be easy to find. But the show is not necessarily about technology or hackers or geniuses. It's actually all about EQ, the one thing we're all missing. So, it's a dysfunctional family of superheroes with OCD and germaphobia. You should all be able to relate to that. 

Jaime Masters:	Oh, my gosh, and we could have done a whole conversation on EQ also and getting better at that. So, maybe, maybe if I beg, you can come on the show, or if I pay - well, you said your time's free, so maybe I can have you back on the show again. You've been amazing, Walter. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. 

Walter O'Brien:	All right, thank you for having me, much appreciated.

Tags: business goals, business tools, entrepreneur podcast, future of AI, how to be a leader, jaime masters, millionaire entrepreneurs, millionaire habits, Outsourcing, strategic goals, top entrepreneurs, Walter O?Brien

Categories: All, Featured Millionaire Interview, Millionaire Interviews, Outsourcing, Productivity, Systems/Processes

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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