Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - AI Is Lowering the Cost to Build Wealth—Here’s How to Take Advantage with Scott Clary

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford speaks with Scott Clary about the rapid rise of AI and its impact on business, careers, and opportunity. Scott shares why adopting AI is no longer optional and how these tools are enabling individuals to scale output, test ideas faster, and build businesses with fewer resources than ever before. They also discuss the mindset required to succeed, including self-belief, removing limiting assumptions, and adapting quickly to new technology. This episode provides practical insights for anyone looking to stay competitive in an AI-driven world. 🔑 Topics Covered AI’s impact on business and productivity One-person business models Execution speed as a competitive advantage Mindset and risk-taking AI-first thinking 🤝 Connect Ryan Alford 👉 https://www.ryanisright.com 👉 https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanalford Scott Clary 👉 https://www.instagram.com/scottdclary 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottclary 👉 https://successstorypodcast.com

That reframe of being scared of AI and being scared of getting excited about it is a super important one. And you're right, it has been discussed a lot. But I'm just hoping and praying that one person listens to this and it finally clicks. And that's why I say things. I don't think the future is going to be nice to people that don't adopt it. Maybe that's the line they have to hear. Maybe they don't have to hear from the CEO of Anthropic. Maybe they have to realize how this impacts them.

And if they do, that's a win for me because hopefully that'll light of fire. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network, production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys?

Welcome. Right about now. Hey, there's a lot of bad business advice out there. That's why it's right about now. And I actually have a friend on who I consider one of the top. top podcasters in the U.S. He's known, but we want them more known because when you hear him talk, you're going to get this soothing effect that I get when I'm listening to him. But then you're going to really listen to the words and go, this motherfucker's intelligent. And he knows what's going on.

And he is right about now. What's up, Scott? What's going on, Ryan? How's it going, dude? I appreciate the kind words and thank you for having me on. Hey, man, I told you that before you came on and had the pleasure to partnering and working with you getting to know you a little bit. I wish you lived closer or I got out more. I live in my bubble here with my kids and my family in South Carolina. I think that's beautiful. You're actually not that far, by the way. I'm in Miami.

You're not that far. No. Like you're in, you were in Dubai for a little while, I think. Yeah, yeah, but now I'm an hour away. Yeah, exactly. One flight away. So we'll have to make that happen.

I do appreciate you. And I mean, it's Scott Clary. He's got multiple shows. We'll hit all those deeds. He's a podcaster. He's an entrepreneur and just a good guy. That's what you'll learn here today. And more than anything, world's full of a lot of people.

Not a Mara. I don't know. I wonder where people are coming from with Scott. I never wonder about that. I appreciate you. Thank you. What's happening in Miami these days? Miami's beautiful. So I moved here from Toronto. So a little bit of a change in weather and taxes and basically everything else. A lot of my friends say you couldn't have picked a more different city to move to from Toronto. And I agree. But it's been really good to us. We moved here at the end of COVID. And this city and the work that we both do because both of these things happened almost around the same time.

Started the podcast, Success Story, which is my show. And that started right before I moved down here. I started it from the second bedroom in a condo that I had in Toronto. And we moved down here, built out a studio, and the podcast has absolutely changed my life. This is what I do for a living now. But I would say that Miami's been very, very good to us. So we were part of that post-COVID migration that everybody who's from Miami says cause a whole bunch of traffic and a whole bunch of expensive homes.

But here we are. Yeah, exactly. Happy to South Carolina, too. Had the influx from California, maybe Toronto, maybe parts of Canada. First of all, it definitely had some from Toronto because all Canadians wanted to move somewhere that wasn't locked down and wasn't cold. And I think, listen, Canadians can deal with the cold. I dealt with it for my whole life. But we were locked down for forever and we were just over it.

And we were obviously our situation allowed us the flexibility to switch countries and not worry about too much. We didn't have kids yet. Hopefully that'll be soon. We didn't have a business that required us to walk into an office anywhere in Toronto. So we were very fortunate. But I think you had a huge migration post-COVID out of Canada. We have Canadian friends from Toronto. This is funny, in Miami, who we didn't know in Toronto, who we met down here.

That's my irony. It is. Took the meet up in Florida and Miami to bring you Canadians together. Exactly. Canada in the U.S., number one, with like, on top of each other, you're on top of us, I guess, north to south. What's the biggest difference between Canada in the U.S.? Mentality, business? I don't know if I've already asked a Canadian that before.

I don't know, are you still a Canadian? Are you now, how does that work? I'm still a Canadian. I'm still a Canadian citizen. I have my green card down here. Okay. But I'm still a Canadian citizen. I still have my passport. I think the biggest mentality that I've noticed from a business perspective, and this is something that I think a lot of Canadians will agree with. We're more risk adverse. We don't take as many shots and chances as I see American entrepreneurs take. Even in investing in startups, there's a startup incubator, like a Y combinator. And if people don't know what Y Combinator is, it's an incubator out of SF, San Francisco. And it's one of the most

famous incubators, they've invested in some of the biggest tech companies in the world that have gone through Y Combinator. And they invest in companies knowing that probably nine of the companies they invest in are going to fail. But the one company that's going to do well is going to turn into an Airbnb or a Uber or whatever or the next Facebook. And that takes a certain amount of risk. So whether or not you're the entrepreneur taking risk and betting on yourself or you're the investor betting on a company, Americans are totally okay with risk. And I think that's why you see a lot of really big companies outside of just pure size of the country. Obviously, the U.S. is way bigger than Canada. But outside of just the size of the country, this being okay with risk, I think is a very important

entrepreneurial mindset. And I wish more Canadians were okay with taking chances and taking risk, because I think it would create some more incredible companies coming out of Canada. And there are some, but there's not as many because people are a little bit more hesitant to take bets. That's what I've noticed. Yeah, that's well said. I noticed that in almost maybe European countries and stuff too, I think so. I don't know. I'm probably painting it with too wide of a brush, but whether I'm successful or not

or whatever you want to strike it up as, I am probably the least risk tolerance. You take chances. You bet on yourself. I don't even think about it. It's innate me. I think it's some of it's, you know, nature, nurture.

I don't know which one it is. I think I'm fully aware I've got one life to live and that no failure is going to kill me. I'm not jumping out of airplanes with no parachute. That's different. That's life or death. But I don't know. I think everybody thinks there's a boogey man

behind the curtain. Yeah, but U.S. was built on taking chances. U.S. was built on fighting for your beliefs. Like, U.S. was built on no one's coming to save us. We got to figure out our shit. That's like the mentality of the whole country. I think it creates a culture that is super conducive to a successful entrepreneur when you think that no one's coming to save you.

Aversion to risk is something you see in Europe. There's always outliers. Great entrepreneurs in every country. But I think in general, if the average person feels someone else can support you and come take care of you and protect you in some countries depend on the government more than the average person does in the U.S., I think that you don't feel like you have to take as much risk to live a good life. Whereas in the U.S., your healthcare system is so fucked. If you, God forbid, have anything negative happened to you, I can't remember the actor's name. There was a post on

Instagram about this famous actor. Basically, he's coming back to acting after spending about $540,000 to beat cancer. That was the post. And I'm just looking at that thinking, the average person does not have $540,000 to beat cancer. No. When that's a potential reality, that you face, you're like, you know what? Maybe I just got to take a shot on myself and find a way to make money because the government's not coming to save me. And my W-2-9-5 making $80,000 a year before tax is definitely not going to come to save me. That's what I think pushes people to take chances, which allows them the ones that are successful,

because not all of them are, but the ones that are successful to eventually build something big. That's what I see anyways. You see the positives and negatives of both. The health care system being a prime example of a negative. And then, but you have the American spirit, that drives innovation, the drive, it's like, it's hard. Nothing is perfect. You know, it's like you can't have everything. If we had perfect health care and everything else, we wouldn't probably have the American engine and belief system.

You talk to people all the time that are successful. One of the first thing I want to say is like, okay, you've done this show. You've got a super popular show. Even more popular as I keep talking about it because it really is that good. What's that formula? It's like A squared plus B squared. I know it's different and we can do all that, but you have to, your practitioner, you're the Canadian risk taker, I know, but that's your new title.

Scott, the Canadian risk taker. Oh, he's the CRT, CRT. There's got to be two, three, four, five traits, things that are starting to just totally manifest through all those talks you've had. Definitely. And you mentioned that there's some differences in person A, person B. There's not that many differences in the personality traits that make somebody. successful. I've had the pleasure of sitting down with some really incredible entrepreneurs. I'll drop names,

not to do anything, but just help you understand the level that some of these people play at. Like, I've had co-founder of Netflix, founder of Reebok on, a few billionaires, Gary Vee and Ryan Sirhan. So some people that have figured shit out in life. They may call these things different, whatever the personality traits they embody, but they're all very similar in how they act. So I'd say the first thing is almost a delusional amount of self-belief. You have to be able to believe that you can actually do the thing that you're going out to do. And I think that more often than not, what trips people up is not knowing the strategy or not having the resources or not having the connections because we can find all that stuff if we're ambitious entrepreneurs. I can go figure out how to

run Facebook ads or I can go figure out how to raise money or I can, if I talk to 100 people and ask them for connections to somebody who can help me start my business, I'm going to get an answer because people like helping you. I think that it's the belief that we can actually do it. And you mentioned before you take risks and you take bets on yourself. I do too. So do probably a lot of people that are listening to this and you may think that's overly simple advice, but the majority of people on this earth do not believe they can do anything outside of what they're doing right now. That's the truth. This is the ceiling in their life. And I think that that belief system, it usually comes from all these external factors, these outside voices. And it

comes from a very early age too. What we believe we can accomplish, say we want to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, it comes from when we're very young, all these ideas and these limitations that are placed on us by like very well-meaning people. You're influenced very early from your parents, your peers, your teachers, whatever. A lot of that influence is meant to protect us. So we'll say like, hey, don't go start a business. Go get a job because that's safe and that's secure. I don't think we realize how powerful those ideas are and how ingrained in our subconscious

those ideas are. And those ideas are not meant to hurt us more often than not unless we have an entrepreneurial parent or uncle or some other influence. Most of us, our parents are working a nine to five, which is nothing wrong with that, but they're telling us what we should do based on their reality, based on the fact that they never took risks and they never built businesses themselves. They work nine to fives. This is what they knew. This is what afforded them a good life. They want you to have a good life and they want you to feel safe and secure. So they're not telling you to do that much more than what they did because they don't really know how it's going to end up. Or maybe they do want you to go above and beyond what they did, but above and beyond is never start a business. and figure it out. It's go become a lawyer, go become a doctor, go become an engineer. Because these again are safe and secure. So all these ideas that are taught to us at a young age, they stick with us. And we don't even understand, but all these ideas in our subconscious, they're running on repeat in the background without us even thinking of them almost our entire lives. And how that plays out when

you're older is the job you take, the city you live in, the risk you take, the person you marry, the friends you have. All these parts of your life are basically chosen because of someone else's belief system that has been implanted into you. And I think that sometimes we don't even realize that we didn't really consciously choose the job that we're doing, the person we're with, the hobbies that we have. We've just sort of understood that these are the things that we should do. All the people bring you back to your question who are successful, they have belief in themselves, but they also make sure that the dream that they're chasing is truly theirs, not like a dream that their parents put into their head when they were very young. And when they realize that

the dream that they actually want to go after is theirs and theirs alone. And they have this delusional self-belief. And they can pursue this dream with just 100% conviction. Does that make sense? 100%. They almost like reprogram themselves to remove any kind of limitations, which allows them to do whatever the hell they want to do. Because nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to build Netflix. I feel like I know with 100% certainty I can go build Netflix. No, but that's absurd. It's never existed before. How would you know how to build it? So it's not about knowing everything. In fact, more often than not, the people that are successful that you listen to on podcast, they definitely didn't know anything when they first started. They just understood that it was possible. They didn't have these

limiting beliefs that were sort of given over to them by all these well-meaning people in their life. They understood that a life way beyond what anybody who influenced them had ever known was possible. And then they pursue that thing. Then they have this delusional self-belief that they will be able to figure it out. So it's not just like, one idea. It's removing limiting beliefs. It's reframing what's possible. And it's also believing that you can actually go after it and get it done. And when that all aligns and you not only have the mindset dialed in, but then you go after the thing for an unreasonable amount of time, 10, 15 plus years, that's when you see the success story like the guy I'm referring to is Mark

Randolph, who was one of the co-founder of Netflix. So it's the mindset plus it's the time in the game equals the result.