TDC 075: How To Craft Your Worldview With AI

TDC 075: How To Craft Your Worldview With AI

What I learned at Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi's $250,000 private mastermind this week.

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Digital Contrarian, host Ryan Levesque dives into building a comprehensive worldview and why it's your hidden operating system.

You'll learn how to surface your existing beliefs, discover the three levels of reality that shape decisions, and explore a six-step AI-assisted process for crafting worldviews that drive real results.

Question of the Day 🗣️

What's one principle that deeply shapes how you see the world, and where did it come from?

Key Take-aways

• Your worldview is the combination of what you believe is true, patterns you notice, and how you act
• The world operates cyclically not linearly—learn the cycle and phase to predict what's next
• Energy is the base layer of everything; capitalism is just turning energy into useful stuff
• There are three levels of reality: objective, subjective, and inter-subjective
• Green fruit marketing focuses on nurturing prospects over time, not just picking ripe fruit

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 – Cold open & hook
00:39 – Your hidden operating system: why worldviews matter
02:38 – Deep convictions loosely held: three lenses
04:11 – The world operates cyclically, not linearly
06:47 – Energy is the base layer of human experience
07:52 – Three levels of reality: objective, subjective, inter-subjective
09:01 – Lessons from a $40 million product launch
11:23 – How to build your worldview with AI
11:52 – Step 1: Surface what you already have
12:33 – Step 2: Articulate 5-10 strong beliefs loosely held
13:26 – Step 3: Choose your faculty of thinkers
15:00 – Step 4: Stress test with dissonance
15:48 – Step 5: Connect worldview to real decisions
17:14 – Step 6: Create a review rhythm
18:24 – Your turn: one principle reshaping your worldview

Links & Resources 🔗

👉 Issue 046 of The Digital Contrarian: "Brace for Impact"

📄 https://ryanlevesque.net/brace-for-impact/ 

👉 Issue 022 of The Digital Contrarian: "How to See Hidden Patterns"

📄 https://ryanlevesque.net/hidden-patterns-others-completely-miss/ 

👉 Issue 028 of The Digital Contrarian: "The Return to Real Movement"

📄 https://ryanlevesque.net/the-return-to-real-movement/ 

👉 Issue 042 of The Digital Contrarian: "How to Keep Your Head Straight…"

📄 https://ryanlevesque.net/how-to-keep-your-head-straight/ 

👉 Get on the waitlist for "The Return to Real": https://ryanlevesque.net/return-to-real-book/ 

👉 Subscribe to The Digital Contrarian newsletter: https://thedigitalcontrarian.com 

Each week, I share frameworks and contrarian strategies for finding meaning and building resilience in both business and life.

Connect & CTA 🎯

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🎁 Join 100 000+ digital entrepreneurs who get Ryan's "Strategic Insights for Digital Entrepreneurs Who Think Differently" every weekend: https://ryanlevesque.net/join-the-digital-contrarian/

Credits

Host: Ryan Levesque
© 2025 RL & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript

How to craft your worldview with AI. What I learned at Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi's $250,000 private mastermind this week. Now, I'm just getting back to Vermont after spending this past week in Mexico. 

I was invited to deliver a talk at Tony and Dean's $250,000 private mastermind, which is a room filled with ultra successful eight and nine figure entrepreneurs, as well as several billionaires. Now, the event was held at a brand new Ritz-Carlton Reserve property on 900 plus acres, an hour outside of PBR, Mexico. And we were actually the first to ever stay at the property. 

I was the first person to ever sleep in the room that I was staying at. The group was amazing. And the venue was incredible. 

Think six star luxury, suites that start at $9,000 a night, $11 million private residences, and private Michelin star dinners on the beach at sunset each night. Yet in the keynote that I delivered, I discussed the sobering reality of the rising wealth inequality that we're experiencing that represents what I believe may be one of the most important forces to shape the next few decades. And after day one of the event was spent focused on the promise and possibilities of AI, I was asked to open day two with something a little different. 

Now, in my talk, I shared a contrarian worldview, surprise, surprise, that offered a slightly controversial perspective around what may be even more important than the AI story that's unfolding right now. And even more importantly, what to do about it. Which brings us to your hidden operating system, why building a comprehensive worldview is so important. 

Now, in case you're wondering, this slightly controversial talk that I delivered received a standing ovation. And at least one person in the room came up to me afterward and said it was the best talk that she'd heard in her entire life. But all that said, after returning home from delivering a talk like this, in addition to processing all the feedback from the session that I deliver, I will often typically spend considerable time reviewing my pages and pages of notes from all the other sessions of the event to help organize my thinking so that I can deliver a debrief for my private clients and members of my strategic advisory group mastermind on all the takeaways that I believe are most important. 

And this is something I'll be doing this week, by the way. Now, I'll also spend time reflecting on how these new ideas may challenge or potentially reshape my personal current worldview and how it might influence key decisions I'm making in my business, with my family, and in my life. Which begs the question, what is a comprehensive worldview exactly? And why is it so important to have one? Well, in a nutshell, a comprehensive worldview is a set of assumptions that you use to answer three fundamental questions. 

Number one, what is true about how the world works? Number two, what pattern am I in right now? And number three, how should I position myself next? In other words, your worldview is the combination of one, what you believe is true about how the world fundamentally works, two, the patterns that you've learned to notice, and three, how you decide to act because of it. Now, a well-formed worldview drives every major thread in your life, including the business that you decide to build, where you invest your money, what you choose to study, how you parent your children, the food that you put in your body. Now, to be clear, most people sleepwalk their way through life, never mind operating on the basis of a comprehensive worldview, accepting whatever core belief, the algorithm, and their environment surreptitiously serves to their subconscious mind. 

Now, in contrast, a consciously formed comprehensive worldview requires both curation and intention. In other words, what you choose to pay attention to and who you choose to learn from matters a lot. Which brings us to deep convictions loosely held, three lenses that have shaped my own personal worldview. 

In my forthcoming book, Return to Real, I explore three colliding forces reshaping the world that combine to create what I believe is a singular moment in human history that is about to arrive at our doorstep. And as I first shared in issue number 46 of the Digital Contrarian, Brace for Impact, my thinking in this area, which continues to evolve, has been influenced by the work of Ray Dalio, Nate Hagans, and Yuval Noah Harari, among several others. In fact, each of these names, Dalio, Hagans, Harari, has contributed what I consider to be several of the first principles influencing my personal worldview at a fundamental level.

And by the way, first principles are the small number of key ideas that you're willing to treat as non-negotiably true about how the world works, and then use as your starting point for every important decision that you make in life. So for example, number one, the world operates cyclically, not linearly. This one's from Dalio. 

As a student of both history and biology, I believe that the world operates cyclically, not linearly. And when you can identify what type of repeating cycle that we're in and what phase of that repeating cycle we're in, you can make educated predictions about what's likely to happen next. For more on this topic, by the way, you can see issue number 22 of the Digital Contrarian, How to See Hidden Patterns Others Completely Miss.

Now, this applies not only to biological and natural cycles, like growth and decay, regeneration, repeat, but also economic and historical cycles, credit booms and busts, rise and decline of empires. Now, the short version is the world runs on cycles, not straight lines. So if you learn how to recognize the cycle and phase, then you can anticipate what's coming next. 

Which takes us to number two, energy is the base layer of the entire human experience. This one's from Higgins. Now, energy is the base layer of everything, every biological system on Earth and every economic system that humans have built. 

And I believe that beneath all the layers of abstraction, I'm talking about money and markets, technology, the quote-unquote economy, etc., etc., is a thermodynamic reality that we cannot ignore. Energy availability, quality and cost ultimately shape what's possible in our economies and in the human experience. And what we call capitalism is actually essentially the process of transforming energy into goods and services that humans find useful. 

And that's all that it is. For more on this topic, see issue number 28 of The Digital Contrarian, The Return to Real Movement Taking Shape in the World. But the short version is this. 

Energy is at the base layer of everything. Capitalism is just turning energy into useful stuff. And we ignore that thermodynamic reality at our peril. 

This takes us to number three, which is there are three levels of reality. Objective, subjective, and inter-subjective. This one comes from Harari. 

So there are actually three forms of what we describe as reality. Number one, you've got objective reality, which is things that are true regardless of what anybody believes, like gravity and viruses and CO2 levels on planet Earth. Number two, we have subjective reality, which is your inner world of feelings, thoughts, and personal experience. 

Then we have number three, inter-subjective reality. These are things that are real because many people believe in them. Things like money, nations, laws, companies, religions, brands, etc., etc. 

And I believe that everything underlying truth needs to be understood first through the lens of which kind of reality are you dealing with. This is where we have be curious, ask questions, seek truth as our mantra. Now, confusing these three levels is often where a lot of bad thinking and bad decisions come from. 

So the short version is this. There are actually three kinds of so-called real. You've got objective, subjective, and inter-subjective. 

And you have to know which one that you're looking at before you decide what's true. So are you starting to see how these first principles work? Now, the reason why I'm a big believer in deep convictions loosely held is because there is a danger in treating any core belief around how you see the world as final and forever. Instead, when you treat everything as your current best attempt to make sense of the world, you give yourself permission to evolve and potentially even change your mind. 

I know, that's shocking, right? In other words, deep convictions loosely held, which is another one of my first principles, by the way, means the courage to act as if something is true today, but the humility to update when better data or deeper wisdom emerges. So when you look back at what you wrote or built decades ago and you find yourself cringing, just know that that is a sign of your growth, which brings us to how all this applies to business. Lessons learned from a $40 million product launch. 

So back to the Tony and Dean mastermind. At the Tony and Dean 250k mastermind, there were a number of incredible speakers and sessions, but the session that I'll highlight here today is the one that Dean Graziosi himself delivered, where he shared some of the biggest lessons learned from his company's most recent $40 million product launch. Now, there were a hundred different things that Tony and Dean did to make their launch the massive success that it was. 

But if there was just one overarching core idea that I took away from Dean's worldview on marketing, it was this. Ripe fruit versus green fruit. Let me explain. 

So most marketers spend their entire lives focused on identifying and picking ripe fruit, i.e. people most ready to buy. But few ever develop both the patience to pick fruits that are still green and the skill to ripen that fruit over time. But green fruit is where almost all the opportunity is in every market.

And focusing on green fruit is the key to doing a $40 million product launch. So a single core idea like this, shaped by a comprehensive worldview, can serve as the foundation for an entire product launch, or an entire brand, or even an entire business. For example, when we launched the Ask Method company many years ago, it was built upon the following core idea, shaped by my own worldview at the time, influenced by my business mentor, Dr. Glenn Livingston, which is message from your market, not from your mind. 

In other words, by asking people the right questions, you can not only understand the problems and pain that they're facing, but the exact language that they use to describe those problems and that pain. This insight in turn tells you not only what products to create and sell, but also the exact language to use in your messaging to sell those products. Now, as an aside, my thinking on this topic has evolved somewhat since then, but that's a topic for another day. 

But getting back to core ideas, this idea of having a core idea based on your comprehensive worldview, this is pretty simple, right? Starting to make sense? Well, this in turn brings us the next question, which is, how do you build or update your own comprehensive worldview? And where might AI be able to help? So if a comprehensive worldview is so important, how do you actually build one? Or if you already have one, you do, by the way, how do you make it more explicit and useful instead of it just letting it run silently in the background? Well, I asked ChatGPT for a little help to help us operationalize this. And what follows is a six step process that you can run on yourself to start documenting or expand upon your own comprehensive worldview. Beginning with step one, surface the worldview that you already have. 

Now, before you build anything new, you have to see what's already there, because here's the truth. You probably already have somewhat of a worldview. You probably just don't have it articulated all in one place. 

If you want to surface it, start with a few simple prompts in a journal or on a blank doc like the following. What do I assume about the future of the economy? What do I assume about technology and AI? What do I assume about human nature? What do I assume about the planet and our ecological future? Don't overthink your answers. Just write what you actually believe in your gut, not what you think you're supposed to believe. 

That takes us to step two, which is articulating five to 10 strong beliefs loosely held. So the next step is to start turning these vague assumptions, these vague ideas that you have into actual statements. And you can use a simple starting point for each of these statements.

Begin each one with, I believe. So for example, I believe the world operates cyclically, not linearly. I believe energy is the base layer of the human experience.

I believe the best things in life don't scale. I believe the only business worth building is a category of one. These don't have to be perfect. 

And yes, this is exactly the kind of thing that you can ask AI to help you wordsmith once you've got your rough draft down. The key here is to get five to 10 strong beliefs loosely held out of your head and onto the page, which takes us to step three. Choose your so-called faculty of thinkers. 

You don't have to build your entire worldview from scratch. Other smart people have spent entire lifetimes wrestling with the same questions that you're asking right now. So an underrated move is to consciously select a faculty of thinkers. 

These can be dead or alive that you want to learn from, almost like you're building your own personal advisory board. So for example, you might choose for macro cycles, Ray Dalio, Howard Marx, energy and ecology, Nate Higgins, Dinella Meadows, the human story, Yuval Noah Harari, Joseph Campbell, embodiment, nature, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Wendell Berry. Now, by the way, these are just example names. 

These are some of the names on my list, but don't limit yourself to these names or even these categories. These are just here to give you a few thought starters to kind of get your mind going. You should focus on the areas that are most relevant and meaningful to you and your work.

So for example, if you are a commercial real estate investor, you should have deep convictions loosely held and a faculty of thinkers specifically focused in the area of commercial real estate investing, for example. Now, the goal here isn't blind agreement with everything that a particular thinker believes. The goal is triangulation. 

In other words, if multiple thinkers like Dalio, Higgins, Harari are all looking at the same world from very different angles where their views overlap and where they overlap with yours, this may offer clues as to where the deep truth lives. Which brings us to step four, stress test with dissonance. So once you've got your initial set of beliefs and your faculty in place, now comes the uncomfortable part. 

Now you want to actively expose your worldview to things that contradict it. That means read people that you actively disagree with. Listen to the smartest version of the argument that you think is wrong.

Invite your friends, clients, mentors to say, here's where I think you're missing something. So my friend Jake Cohen recently did this with a core thesis that he's developing right now on how to think about and how to invest in AI over the next decade. Now, most people would avoid this because it feels threatening. 

But if you're serious about deep convictions loosely held, this is how you discover where your worldview has holes and is oversimplified. That takes us to step five, which is to connect your worldview with real decisions. Now, a worldview is only useful if it shows up in the actual decisions that you're making in life. 

Otherwise, it's just a pointless intellectual exercise. This is where you trace the link worldview to business investment thesis, to concrete decisions, i.e. what you build, what you buy, where you live, who you serve. For example, in my own life, a Dalio-style belief that the world runs in long debt and empire cycles, a Hagen-style belief that energy is the base layer of everything, and a Harari-style lens on objective, subjective, and intersubjective reality, these beliefs combined with several others led me to sell my last company at the time that I did, move my family from Texas to a farm in the green mountains of Vermont, build a business aligned with the return to real movement, invest in assets, skills, and relationships that I believe will matter 10 to 20 years from now. 

Now, a different worldview leads to a different life, and the same thing is true for you. When you look at your business, your model that you have, the pricing that you have in place, your offers, your hiring, marketing, and even where you choose to live, you should be able to say, this choice makes sense because of how I see the world. And if you can't connect those dots, either the choice or the worldview needs another look.

This takes us to our sixth and final step, which is create a review rhythm. Finally, you want to be able to build a simple review cadence into this process. I recommend treating your worldview a bit like the investment policy statement discussion from issue 42, how to keep your head straight when the world goes sideways. 

So once a year, I sit down and ask, what do I still believe is true? What no longer matches the world that I'm actually seeing? And what have I learned this year that should update my beliefs? In other words, this is not about rebuilding your beliefs from scratch each and every year, but you are refining and recalibrating, just like you'd rebalance a portfolio when certain positions drift out of alignment. You rebalance your worldview when, for example, new data appears, old assumptions stop working, or real life experience delivers you feedback that you just can't ignore, that you have to pay attention to. This is how you avoid becoming the person clinging on to a 2010s worldview in a 2030s world.

Now, sadly, by the way, I'm seeing many entrepreneurs who are struggling with this as they continue to operate their business in an old economy paradigm. Which brings me to my invitation for you this week. So now it's your turn. 

What's one principle reshaping your worldview? So if you're willing, I'd love to hear from you. Simply leave a comment and share, number one, one principle that has deeply shaped how you are seeing the world. And number two, where that principle came from. 

It could be a book, it could be a mentor, it could be a personal experience, et cetera. Now you don't need to write an essay, even just two or three sentences would be great. I read every single comment and with your permission, I may even share a few of these with attribution or anonymously if you prefer in a future issue or debrief. 

Because my hunch is, if there are questions right now that you are thinking deeply about, there's a good chance that I and probably others are thinking deeply about these same issues as well. Okay, I'll leave you with that for now. Have a great rest of your weekend. 

Remember to hug the ones that you love. And until next week, I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and talk soon.