Fan Favorite: Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler on World-Changing Tech Innovations

Two of the world’s leading futurists, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, join with Tom Bilyeu for a discussion of the future of technology, culture and the human mind. This future is brighter, wealthier, more abundant and filled with more meaning than most of us could have believed, and it may be coming faster than anyone is prepared for. ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 2-20-20 SHOW NOTES: Flying cars are even cooler than anyone expected [1:03] The rate of change is much faster than anyone thinks [5:22] A company is now 3D printing rockets [10:33] What can be done if you’re seriously averse to loss, or afraid of change? [17:53] We’ve forgotten how fast things have changed already [20:38] We turn thoughts into things. What’s the difference between insight and intuition? [24:36] What will happen when we all have a version of Jarvis? [27:53] There will soon be brain to computer connection, and even brain to brain connection [30:53] What will happen when Jarvis or Alexa hears all your arguments with your spouse? [38:59] Peter brings up the problem of deep fakes [40:20] We create our own futures, limitations and expansive abilities [50:30] We will create more wealth in the next decade than we did in the last century [52:41] Hardly anyone writes near-future fiction any more because things change too fast [57:31] Peter talks about how new technologies will change real estate, business and storage [1:00:58] Peter and Tom discuss the need to be monomaniacal as an entrepreneur [1:04:29] What are the ethics behind genetic modification? [1:14:52] There are already contacts that have augmented reality and virtual reality [1:20:13] Steven describes the potential downsides of plant medicine [1:40:52] In the next 20 years the human race will start irreversibly moving off the planet [1:42:01] We are getting very close to being able to constantly being in flow [1:46:56] What happens when VR becomes more meaningful than physical life? [1:50:02] Steven discusses learning to control dopamine [1:53:18] We will have more control of our own experiences in the future [1:55:06] What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:10Tom Bilyeu?

  What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here with two extraordinary people who hopefully you've seen on Impact Theory as well. But we have Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler, who have written a new book called The Future Is Faster Than You Think. These guys have collaborated on two other books as well. Absolutely extraordinary. And they've got another one coming out, which maybe they'll talk about on camera. We'll see. But super excited. The new book is absolutely amazing. And as somebody who considers themselves somewhat of a junior futurist, I'm really excited to dive into this stuff with you guys. And I wanted to start, like, obviously, when you're researching this stuff, there's gotta be moments where you're sort of gobsmacked with what's coming. What are you guys really excited about that either surprised you

• 1:53Tom Bilyeu?

  or is as cool as you thought it would be?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Steven, you wanna, you wanna jump in first?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  That's an interesting question. What is actually surprised? You haven't been as cool as I thought it was gonna be. That's a really... I mean, I, where we opened the book, it's witches with flying cars and um, I remember, uh, I was in Dubai, was the first time I saw one, right? I, it was one of the quadcopter drones that they

• 2:24Tom Bilyeu?

  You actually saw it flying?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a flying taxi.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  The E hang?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  The E hang, exactly. The E hang. Um, and they had it, it was a-

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, just went public as a company.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Oh, did it really?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And they produced thousands of these things. Uh, another mutual friend, Martin Rothblatt, got an order for a thousand plus of these.

• 2:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh wow, that's crazy that orders are already being put-

• 2:41Speaker 01

  These are, these are single, single passenger, fully autonomous. You use your app to call it, you, where you wanna go, you hop in, you don't touch anything and it takes you there.

• 2:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it already commercially available?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  It is-

• 2:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning I could order a air taxi in Dubai?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  They've built thousands of them. They're operational in a few locations.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It was, I mean, this was four years ago and I like hovered in it. Like they were letting people get inside and taking it off and they weren't flying it around, but I was hovering five feet off the deck.

• 3:09Tom Bilyeu?

  That was the timeline in the book that I think shocked me the most. Hearing the whole thing about um, Uber and their 2023 timeline, I was like, whoa.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  One of the stories that's not in the book, so the man who introduced us, a guy named Dejar Molnar, and Dejar built one of the early, it was a flying motorcycle, it was motorcycle with helicopter blades, basically, that folded out. And I remember, literally, I was living in LA at the time and he, I remember when he walked into my apartment and he like laid out the plaids, he had come from your house, I think, and laid out the plaids. And he's like, and I was like, Dejar, what is that? That looks like a flying car thing. And he's like, that's exactly what it is. And it flies. And it was, I mean, it was already, this was five or six years ago and I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, it's the first flying car and it's in my living room. And Dejar struggled to get it off the ground and struggled and never went

• 4:03Speaker 02

  anywhere with it. And so I, and I was sort of pacing flying car development. Bit off of our friend and suddenly, you know, a year, it was a year difference. And suddenly, you know, they were, we were writing about twenty five companies in the book and they're now, what did you say?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  There, there are over a hundred companies, uh, building different sort of, uh, Cambrian explosion designs of these flying and, and the term that they like to use is aerial mobility versus flying cars, right? It's like, what, what's, because, you know, you didn't, you started calling a car the horseless carriage.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  And, and, and so it's like you're describing something related to what we have today. And so there, there needs to be a new name for it and there will be, but the numbers are over a billion a year is being invested.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Can we have a contest, by the way? I mean, do we have to go with aerial mobile? Can't we have a contest like?

• 4:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Something cool would be nice.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Well, Uber, Uber calls it aerial ride sharing.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Um, and it's fine, but the fact is what's exciting about it is all the major players, Boeing, Airbus, Bell Helicopter, Embraer.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  More helicopter.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bell, just Bell. Uh, they're all playing plus a hundred startups and a billion or so. So what's beautiful is it's really, and we, and what Stephen and I, uh, talk about in the future is faster than you think is the convergence of technology. So here's a perfect example of a capability, a new service, a new business model, only made possible because of convergence. Um, and it's in this case, it's, uh, it's computation, machine learning, material sciences, three D printing.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  AI.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Robotics, AI and all of those coming together, uh, to make, and battery technologies to make something that was not possible before.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 5:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I just heard something about battery technology, that there was some big breakthrough recently that's like fifteen times. Uh, God, I can't remember the name of the compound. It's lithium something. Did you hear about this?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I, I, I've, I read about these breakthroughs constantly and there are, you know, the, the challenge is that we all experience what we experience and then from orthogonal, you know, adjacencies come these breakthroughs. So all of a sudden, this is now possible.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  And that's one of the things that, that I think we hit on the book really heavy is that, uh, That the rate of change is much faster than anybody thinks. And so, yeah, batteries have been great. I mean, I I drive a Tesla, a new Model S. My wife has a Model X and it's, you know, 300 miles range. I don't think about ever gassing up again, right? And so soon there will be cars with thousand mile range and you'll, you know, you'll charge it every couple of weeks.

• 6:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you really think though that people are going to buy cars? Like the thing in the book that I found interesting was Jeff Holden's comment about our whole goal with the flying car. I know he didn't call that, but was to make it financially ridiculous to own a vehicle. And already I don't, so I take Uber everywhere.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you want me to lend you some money to buy one.

• 7:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Thank you, Peter. That's very kind. I appreciate that.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I mean, I, I, I live in the country, so you still need, you still need vehicles. But I like, when was the last time you rented a car when you flew anywhere? Is, you know, and that was a huge business, right? I've got a Hertz card. I've got like, you know, whatever. And I don't think I've rented a car. I can't tell you the last time I rented a car.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  I I Ubered here to your studio this morning, you know, which is a 30 minute drive. Because I value the 30 minutes on my computer and my, you know, just heads down and getting stuff ready. Then the idea of me doing this, you know, crazy drive thing.

• 7:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Taking an Uber is the closest thing that we have right now to teleporting. Because I punch a button, a vehicle shows up, I step into the vehicle, I put my head down, I start working. Just like I would do no matter where I was, if I was in my office, whatever. And then I pick my head up because I've hit my destination. I have no sense of the time passing because I'm just getting something else done that I would have done anyway.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Tom Bilyeu?

  And.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  I get carsick. I can't lick my lap. I get carsick.

• 8:21Tom Bilyeu?

  See, that, that is, that is a problem that I would highly encourage you to find a way to solve. Because dude, the, it is, that's a game changer. And I heard, I want to know if you guys know about this, that I heard in London, they're really working hard to shut Uber down. And I thought my entire lifestyle is predicated on the existence of Uber.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  I agree with you. It's interesting. When I talk to entrepreneurs, I say, listen.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  If you're thinking about where to base your company, you want to base it in a city or country that did not make Uber illegal. In other words, you want a pro tech, you know. So the question you asked, I think, is important. I agree that the opening of the book, as Stephen said, with flying cars is critical. Some other examples of what's going on. Two that come to mind. One is this whole notion of quantum computing and what's possible. This notion that in this past year, we, you know, we, Google announced that they had demonstrated quantum supremacy, the ability of a quantum computer to do something that a classical computer could not do.

• 9:21Tom Bilyeu?

  What did they have it do? Was it just showing quantum entanglement?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  It was, no, it was solving a mathematical problem that was, that would have taken the summit classical supercomputer like 10,000 years to do.

• 9:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And they did it in minutes.

• 9:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  So that was just a demonstration of this classical approach is solved by something in a quantum computing that was like.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Well, wasn't it was like two weeks after that that Intel announced that their next line of chips is, are going to be quantum chips?

• 9:55Tom Bilyeu?

  What?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  There was like two weeks.

• 9:57Tom Bilyeu?

  I didn't realize that we were getting that good with quantum computing.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Now, when are the, those quantum ships going to actually show up in your smartphone? Different question.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And what will they, what will they do? And, and Ray Kurzweil, who's a dear friend and business partner, basically says, listen, be very careful here. Quantum computers, while they're up and operational, the error rate in these is still super high and they're not going to be functional for doing the things that you want to do for some number of years. But once they do, we're talking about being able to model weather systems, model traffic, model, model new pharmaceuticals, model new material sciences, even do machine learning. There will be this massive step forward.

• 10:41Tom Bilyeu?

  How do they, how do they solve the super cooling problem? So in the book, you guys detail that they, the place right now that has the

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're getting computing.

• 10:49Tom Bilyeu?

  cooled to 0.003 degrees Kelvin.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Coolness of the universe.

• 10:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Absolutely absolute zero that it was colder than like the center of a black hole or some shit. And I was like, how the fuck do you put that in your cellphone? Like dude, cause to hold the

• 11:03Speaker 01

  So it doesn't, it doesn't on your cellphone, it's on the cloud. So all of these, all of these companies, IBM, Google, Rigetti are basically putting quantum computing services on the cloud. So you access them through a 5G network and you, you send your data that you want processed. And the answer comes back. So you're not putting it.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Just out of curiosity, by the way, when do you think we're going to get to 6G? Right? I mean, I, I, I'm just like, cause the, the rate's been picking up, right? Each G, each successive G. I'm sorry.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I got one yesterday.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  You got one yesterday. It's too bad. Damn.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Uh, let me, let me share another amazing story that unfortunately didn't make the book. One of the challenges we had.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Oh God, it was terrible.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Was, uh, that, you know, we're being pushed to finish the book and turn it in. But every day is like, is like, I'm like, Steven, we gotta squeeze this in. Peter, we can't, you know, it's like this battle between us. And so one of the, one of the stories that I love, um, is a company here in LA. That my venture fund got invested in this last round called Relativity. And they have built a massive, uh, scale 3D printer factory. Uh, and it's the combination of materials, 3D printing technology and robotics and machine learning. And what they're building first is they're 3D printing entire rockets.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  I heard of it. That's so fucking crazy.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So they can 3D print a 90 to 95% of a rocket that we're talking, you know, 30 foot tall. You know, six foot diameter, you know, 10 meters by two meters and do that in two weeks without any tooling.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Stuff you would have blown up in your backyard and you had access to that. Have you heard his backyard blowing up stories from his childhood? Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  So it's, it is amazing.

• 12:54Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:33Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:55Tom Bilyeu?

  your first six months at quo.com/impact. That's Q U O dot com slash impact. Now, normally when you're 3D printing something, the cost is pretty outrageous, right? If you're making a one-off. So are these rockets astronomically expensive and they're just hoping that they'll come down?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So they're fundamentally much, much cheaper because you're not, you're not building the tooling. You're building layer by layer by layer, literally from the bottom up. And there's some assembly required. But what's amazing about it is when you, and I've been in the rocket business, when you-

• 15:30Tom Bilyeu?

  What's the parts reduction? Do you know?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Orders of magnitude.

• 15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Hundreds X. But when you, when you commit to building a complex device and you build the tooling, you can't go then and change the tooling.

• 15:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  But here you can build your rocket, launch the rocket, realize that the fin is a quarter inch too big here, or the diameter needs to be this, or whatever the case might be, and make the edit. And two weeks later, you're printing a new version, and a new edited version, and you had, so it's very rapid serial um, uh, iteration.

• 16:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Where does 3D printing win? Is it in things that are one-off? Is it struggle at industrial scale?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Personalization and, um, uh, and so, for example, one of the things we wrote about in Bold, from Avi Reikenthal, who's our 3D printing guru, uh, there's Invisalign. Uh, so those are 3D printed, where you scan the mouth, and I print one for you, one for you, one for you, and so all this personalization, but at volume, at scale. And 3D printing, like you said, with battery technology, 3D printing is getting faster and faster and faster. And so it will compete, uh, with classical manufacturing.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  I think you gotta, if you're considering buying a house, right, if this is something you want to do over the next two to three years, say, you may want to wait, right? You may actually just, because it's going to be cheaper, easy, I mean, orders of magnitude cheaper.

• 17:02Tom Bilyeu?

  I've seen some of the houses get 3D printed, which is crazy, Tom.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I, well, when we wrote Abundance, right, Baruch Kosh Nevis, it was at USC, we wrote about his work, he had just developed the first concrete printer. I remember talking to him about what's it going to take for multiple materials printing? Because obviously if you can't print the, the pipes inside the concrete walls, or you can't, right, put the, put the electricity in, it doesn't work. Right? It's just, then it's just a big fancy construct, concrete layer.

• 17:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And he was talking in terms of timetables, that, like, we blew by them so fast, like, his timetables were gone by the time Bold was out.

• 17:40Tom Bilyeu?

  He hit them or missed?

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Mist. I mean, like, he was so, he was like, oh, we're probably five to eight years from that. And I think we were a year from actually being able to do that with multiple materials.

• 17:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So they can already print that stuff?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  They are starting to get here.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a company called Mighty Buildings that we write about, again, one of my, my fund's investments, that they will 3D print large components of a home at their factory and then assemble at the location. But you're talking about, you know, much faster and not in order magnitude cheaper. It's like three or four times cheaper, but we're getting there. But you can, but we're, we're 3D printing like Dragonfly, I think is the name of the company. It's 3D printing electronic circuits.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Right? Which is pretty damn cool.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no shit. And that, and we're at the, the, the Chinese, I can't remember the name of the company when they built, I'm gonna get this.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Winson.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Winson, when they built that, not, not, they were, they were doing the five story apartment building. I'm talking about the skyscraper where they use modular construction and um, 3D printing and they put up, I wanna, I'm gonna get the stories wrong, but somewhere around the line of 29 story skyscraper.

• 18:48Tom Bilyeu?

  3D printed?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  3D printing and modular construction. So exactly how Peter was talking about it.

• 18:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Print a piece, stack it.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Print a piece, stack it. Bring it in, stack it. Yeah.

• 18:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  In, it was three weeks to build essentially a 60 story building.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  It was like a story a day. Um, I mean, it's crazy.

• 19:03Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that's, so I, I'm gonna stop you guys there because you guys probably are a little numb to what it feels like to encounter this information for the first time when you're reading the book. I've spent enough time with you, Peter, to like, I've been primed for a lot of this stuff, but even I, like, reading the book, I was like, flying cars in 2023. The fact that they've already built a 60 story building by 3D printing and stacking, this shit is so right now.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  I will tell you my experience writing the book. And so I, there's an editor, Michael Warden, who I've worked with for 25 years. So he, he's, he worked with us on Bold, he's been involved in our project and my wife, who's also an author and reads everything I write. I got through part one of this book and let these two people who know our work intimately, Michael's worked on our books and both of them came to me afterwards and went, this is terrifying. And I went, I know, I'm writing the book and I think it's terrifying.

• 20:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so that's interesting because you're not terrified.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So it's really important for me to to share with everybody listening here. One of the reasons for the book is to get rid of this fear because when people are in fear, most people fear the future, especially as the rate of acceleration is increasing. And fear is an awful place to come from. It is non constructive, it is scarcity mindset, it is all these things. And a lot of the reason for the book is to give people a vision. I think of it as a hopeful, compelling and abundant future vision of the future. So that you're excited about where the world is going. You sort of understand where it's going.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  If you have a roadmap for where we're heading, then you can put things in context and less fearful of it and being excited. We are racing towards a future of abundance, right? We are racing towards a future where access to food, water, energy, healthcare, you know, education, entertainment, all these things are effectively free and available to everyone.

• 21:08Tom Bilyeu?

  But how do you deal with people? So you're obviously high in openness. I'm high in openness as a personality trait. I actually like change and the moments of greatest disruption in my life, while from the outside may have been perceived as negative, for me it was just an exciting change. Now, I don't feel like I earned that. I feel like it's just a personality trait where I'm deeply comfortable and maybe even covetous of radical change. So I took to your teachings and your ideas very rapidly because I have what I will say is probably a naive, blind optimism towards the future. How do you help somebody who's low and open? Like to give you an idea, my wife and I were sitting on the couch in a certain order and I wanted to change the order so that I could be closer to the window.

• 21:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And like just that, literally, her positioning on the couch was like this. World altering event for her and at first she was like, no, I don't want to do that. I'm like, wow, you really like change at any level is a problem for her.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  It's a whole different neural, I mean neurobiologically, right? If people who are change friendly are they dopamine dominant personalities, right? And loss aversion, right? Which is the fear that whatever you have today, if I take it away from you, what comes next is worse, which is the main reason people fear the future, right? It's built into us. And it's interesting. I just was looking up when Steven talks like this. I was looking at the math equations around loss aversion, like in terms of neural weighting. And you're actually like going up against, it's, it's really complicated, but it's interesting, right?

• 22:37Tom Bilyeu?

  I want, I want you to finish that sentence. You're, you're going up and getting people comfortable with the changes coming. You're going up against neurobiology.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Well, you're going, you're, you're, yeah, you're definitely going up against neurobiology. Right? So if you're not, if you, if you're not dopamine dominant, basically,

• 22:52Speaker 02

  dopamine is all about the future. The whole neural chemical is about what's coming next. It's dopamine is the molecule of more, they call it, right? Like what's coming next? And if you're dopamine dominant, we are, you are, change is really fun. You're really excited by it, right? The flip side is predominantly serotonin. There are other things that are involved in it and you're, you tend to be politically conservative. Dopamine dominant people tend to be very, very liberal politically when they look at the, the stuff. And it's all about loss aversion. If you are flipped the other way, you're going to fight to, you want to be, you're conservative. You want to conserve what you have, right?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  And it's, there's fun. So there's fundamental neuronal hardwiring in the way, like I agree with Peter. Like, you know, yes, I said, the book is terrifying, but to me it's gleefully terrifying. And when I say it's terrifying, it's really like a truth, like I don't think what's coming is bad. I just think to myself, oh my God, it's really fast.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  But, but here's the challenge. We've forgotten how fast things have changed.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Already.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Already. I mean, you know, the, the notion that you have the ability to.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Verbally ask a question into the room and and get an answer, right? Or say, order me some toothpaste in Alexa or Google Home or Apple HomePod, whatever does that? Or that we have two-way video confer. I remember back 20 years ago, uh, buying an AT&T video phone from my parents, which was on a regular line and it is really scratchy, black and white image. And it was ridiculously expensive. And now, you know, amazing, you know, two-way video conferencing on your phone is free. Anywhere on the planet. I mean, that's insane, right?

• 24:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you feel that we've crossed some sort of boundary, which I do? I think that we had for epochs, we had like your whole life would feel more or less homeostatic. Then we got to the point where it was like, whoa, generationally, there was really something big going on. Now I think we're going to be subdividing generations by probably about six years of my gut instinct, based on sort of the.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I I agree with you. We're the rate of of reinvent. And the way we talk about it in part two of the book is we look at a dozen industries. And we look at the reinvention of those industries. Uh, education and healthcare and entertainment and advertising and retail.

• 25:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Real estate.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Transportation, food, insurance.

• 25:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Energy.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  And they're all going to change this decade, right? It's like I I deal with a lot in the healthcare industry and they're blind about how fast things are going to change. The pharmaceutical industry, they're they're toast in some ways.

• 25:40Tom Bilyeu?

  But as someone who's massively transformative purpose is to help people navigate that change, how do you deal with the people who aren't dopamine dominant that are they change in and of itself is problematic?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  So I I deal with it in the following.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  It's really what Stephen and I did, I think beautifully in abundance and what brought you and I together and you and Stephen together is the notion that, listen, we're uplifting the planet, right? So giving them the facts and showing them that we're decreasing extreme poverty on the globe, that the cost of food has dropped 13-fold, that the cost of energy has dropped 50-fold in the last, you know, decades and just, just point after point after point after point that the world is getting better on almost every level, helping them understand that.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  And he's, he's right about that. Even when you look at like the serotonin and dopamine personality types, dopamine dominant people tend to, so I'll give you a conservative liberal thing. Liberals will, they want a big government and they will happily fund through taxes, educational reform, right? Like they want the change that way. Conservatives don't want a big government, they're not going to vote that way, but they are, if you look at spending in terms of donations to charities and things along the way. So if you make it individual for people who are serotonin dominant, you talk about how it's going to help one person, this individual who has this problem, suddenly it's a lot less scary.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Suddenly they're like, oh, it's helping them preserve their, it meets the value set, right? And so some of it is a languaging thing in all honesty and how you frame it and how you think about it, which I think is really important because the, look, as Peter pointed out, the future is happening a lot faster than anybody expects. The convergences, you know, the speed that we're talking about in the book that is so mind-blowing is self-accelerating. So five years from now massively a lot faster than where we are today.

• 27:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Going to what you're saying about the languaging problem, I heard you, Peter, in an interview talk about the introduction of the word empathy and how that had like this huge knock-on effect.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  He took that from me.

• 28:00Tom Bilyeu?

  So Stephen, then walk us through like that, the notion of you've got the introduction of the word empathy and then followed in the next decade by this radical social change of removing of slavery and all kinds of other incredible stuff.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  There, you know, we turn thoughts into things, right? As human beings, that's what we do. We can take thoughts, we can make them become things. But there's a chain of events that has to happen. And one of the first things that has to happen is we have to put language around it. What's the difference between intuition and insight? Similar systems in the body, right? Insight is, I have language to describe it. Intuition, the body doesn't have language. You get it in feelings and images and whatever. Once there's language, it allows us to hold it in our heads, move it around, analyze it, manipulate it, blah, blah, blah. So with empathy, empathy was this concept that came, they were trying to figure out, how does art work, right? How is it that I can look at a painting that you painted and it can produce the emotion

• 29:00Speaker 02

  in me that you originally intended? So how is emotion transmitted through a 2D work of, right? That was the question they were trying to answer. The idea that came out of it was empathy and it quickly started to become something that you talked about in psychology and you were absolutely correct. Within, the word showed up in the, I think, 1840s or 1850s and within 10 years, animal rights movement had started for the first time in history, women's suffrage movement had started for the first time in history, and anti-slavery movements, abolition movements has got started for the first time in history. We put a, we put a frame around and I said, hey, wait a minute. I can feel your emotions, you can feel my emotions. We share this thing, we're human beings. And suddenly, equality became a thing that we started to legislate.

• 29:42Tom Bilyeu?

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• 30:25Tom Bilyeu?

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• 30:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I heard, and this is one of those, like, I heard somewhere in a podcast or something, but that there, in some language, I forget which, there's an additional color of blue that they have a name for, and that legitimately, people in societies that don't have the name for that particular shade of blue actually don't see it. Now, if, because basically your brain is forcing it into one of the categories that you do have a name for. I'm almost certain I'm remembering that accurately, so I'll push that a little bit farther. So, in learning Greek, yasuo, I find myself-

• 31:15Speaker 02

  You too, Greek mafia again.

• 31:16Tom Bilyeu?

  See what I see.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Everywhere I go.

• 31:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Everywhere you turn, baby. I am honorary at best, but in, what I find is that I constantly ram ideas and words into the thirty percent of the language that I actually do know. And it's interesting how your brain has some sort of need to sort, to categorize, to have it in its place, and by creating more categories, you actually allow people to place ideas, or potentially even physical things, into a new category, thusly perceiving it in a different way, and it has this tremendous thing. So, when I think about, like, my MTP is to help people understand that if you change your mindset, that you can change your entire fucking life, like, just, you wouldn't be able to recognize it. And a big part of that is getting them to change the language that they use, especially

• 32:01Tom Bilyeu?

  around themselves and what's possible. And I'm always trying to think, like, what, what is the sequence of ideas that you can give somebody that'll make that change?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Let me give you a couple of thoughts from the, from the future's fastening, you think, in, to contextualize this. First of all, there are two directions that we're heading that are gonna transform how we think, how we analyze data, and our cognitive abilities. One of them is that we're all gonna have a version of Jarvis, a version of an AI from Iron Man, an AI software shell that is personal, that you give permission to see everything you see, read everything you read, look at what you eat, look at your bloodstream chemistries. And if you wanna imagine what Alexa would look like ten years from now, right, where

• 32:53Speaker 01

  it is, it's, it is Jarvis from Iron Man, right? You speak to her or him, and it's like, you know, can you pull up the data for me? Show me this. You know, am I seeing, am I, am I seeing this? This argument from all the right angles, right? So we have, we have these cognitive biases because our brain can only process so much information, so much visual auditory sensory information. And we're limited, we don't think we're limited, right? But we have Dunbar's number as well, where we only have 150 friends, sort of, which is the use.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Slot for brain, slots for friends, right?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And so, but you can imagine in the future, an AI software shell is going to enable you to have more slots for friends, be able to see things from a different perspective if you ask your AI, can help you understand what is biased news and what is not. That's the near term.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  All right, hold on, I just gotta interrupt. Okay, you finish and then I gotta ask you.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So that's, you know, for me, that's the next five years. The 10 to 15 year timeframe, uh, which we write about in the book, which I'm fascinated about, is the whole area of brain-computer interface.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Right? When I take my neocortex, right, our brains are 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections, they are limited in size by the vaginal birth canal. Our brains cannot get bigger and have the mother survive birth. And so it is what it is. But just like when my phone needs more processing information, it goes to the cloud to process the data and then brings back the answer, there's probably another billion dollars a year, if not more, by a series of companies. Elon's Neuralink is one.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Kernel.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Kernel is another, uh, Open Water is a third, and then probably every defense department's looking at this as well.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Does Facebook's company have a name?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Um, I don't, I mean, it's, it's got a project name, but all of these are, how do we connect your neocortex, your higher thinking levels to the cloud to give you a million times better memory, a billion times better processing capability? It is the fucking matrix.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Dude.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Coming into existence.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Dude. By the way, there's a whole class of neurological diseases that happen when the network itself breaks down. Right, when the connectome itself breaks down. So I'm really interested to see if we get, not that this is positive, but once we are actually fluidly connected to the cloud, does that mean we're susceptible to a whole raft of new neurological, could be good, could be bad, whatever, it's interesting to me.

• 35:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It's very interesting, and one of the things that you posted about, Peter, on your Instagram account was brain-to-brain connection, which I didn't know was already happening.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Happening, demonstrate.

• 35:46Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that's crazy.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they sent, I mean, they sent, they played a video game between two people. One was in France and one was in India.

• 35:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Good lord.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  And they were sending thoughts over the net.

• 35:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Are they sending the thought direct to the other person? Or are they sending the thought direct to the machine?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  They actually sent it to an interface. They, they were, it was on, a light, a light bulb was turning on and on and off, and they were reading off of that.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I mean, let's, to be clear, the brain is a neural network, and your thoughts, your memories, everything is, is saved in terms of this, the, you know, the connectome, as, as you said. And what is going on right now, and there was a great video broadcast that Elon did with, at Neuralink, I don't know if you saw it, back about four or five months ago, mid, mid 2019, and worth seeing, in which they showed what they've built. And they've built machines that literally will drill into the skull,

• 36:54Speaker 01

  and then very precisely finely put these microscopic filaments to different points on the brain. And they are, and then being able to, with a number of the, I think 10 of these chips placed into the brain, over the motor cortex or sensory cortex, have a connection speed of 2 gigabits per second out of the brain to the cloud. And guess what, they're doing this in primates right now, and they expect to be in humans inside of the next 12 to 18 months. Now, Elon has an amazing, you know, Steve Jobs-like.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, relationship with the truth.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Not the truth, relationship with time.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Everything he's ever said has happened.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  It's just a matter of it's the timeframe.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Well, that's the whole thing. If you talk to a lot of neuroscientists about kernel or neural lang or all that stuff, like, you know, the work that Elon has built on that came out of Harvard, you know, was astounding to begin with. But for a while, neuroscience have been like, yeah, they're massively off on their timeframes. And I was siding with the neuroscientists, but now I'm starting to waver a little bit. I'm starting to actually start to believe that the technology, like somewhere in the middle is probably where the truth is, which means this stuff is coming a lot faster.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  So Ray's, Ray's prediction.

• 38:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Ray Kurzweil.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Ray Kurzweil.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  The end 2030, right?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Is 20, mid 2030s.

• 38:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Uh, so 2034, 2035, I had this conversation with him.

• 38:23Tom Bilyeu?

  What, what exactly?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  That we're gonna have high bandwidth brain to cloud.

• 38:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Uploading. You can communicate or actually upload like a backup of your consciousness.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  No, that's not uploading the conscious. It is being able to think and know the answer, be able to, uh, connect to the cloud. And if I'm connected to the cloud and you're both connected to the cloud, then we're connected to each other.

• 38:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Right. It is the same way that computers connect. And so another question is ultimately going back to the, the realm of like empathy, there's nothing more empathic than for me to actually know how you feel.

• 38:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  What you're thinking, how, what you're looking at and so forth. So, I mean, we're just, and again, we look at.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Do you think Facebook's addictive now? Wait till we're sending feelings.

• 39:06Tom Bilyeu?

  And legitimately, this shit starts to freak me out. And I know that you have kids and I don't know how much you think about this stuff, but like.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  I do.

• 39:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa. When I think about already, like, uh, uh, and I'll just go straight there. When I think about what I was like at 16, if I had had access to the kind of pornography that they have access to, like, the way that that can fuck up dating alone.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  I totally, I go there. I think about that with my, I have two eight-year-old boys. And it's not just that. It's now at, let's add VR.

• 39:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And AI avatars.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  And haptics.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Where you put on your VR headset and a, and a haptics, but what is in front of you is not a real human. It looks identical. Identical to real humans, being driven by an AI and it is doing anything and everything that you want and desire. It will really fuck you up.

• 39:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, and let's talk about something Stephen that you've brought up before, like there's machinery in our brains that track like signs of life. Motion being one of them that you talked about. And you've got, when you, I remember, in fact, this was on a trip with you, putting on the HTC Vive and having a person that was filmed before walk up to me, the sense of presence that that person was actually in front of me.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're in your space, right?

• 40:21Tom Bilyeu?

  It made me uncomfortable. I wanted to like back away because I'm like, whoa, they're violating my personal space. And I couldn't shake it, even though I knew it wasn't real. I could not shake the feeling that they were really there with me. They were really watching me. So now you take like, you guys talk in the book about, I'm going to fuck up her name, Sheng Ice?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Oh, Chalice.

• 40:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Chalice, so.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Let me tell you the story that's not in the book that blows my mind about Chalice. So Chalice.

• 40:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, tell.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Why did you put this in the book?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Because it's a speculative thing, but so Chalice, I don't know if this is the real story, but this was what, how it originated, when I, how I was told. So Microsoft originally released an AI chatbot to test this out in America and everybody famously remembered that chatbots became a Nazi within 24 hours, right? And started, and so they shut it down, but they didn't shut the program down. The program went to China where they could hide it and they released Chalice and most chatbots are customized for task, task completion, right? Like as quickly get you to solve your problem as fast as possible. They optimized Chalice for conversation, for friendliness.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  So humans multi-track conversations, right? We'll have four or five or six different conversations going at once. We'll bop back and forth, right? We've been doing that through that whole, she can hold like 14 to 17 different conversations at once. So people love talking to Chalice and conversations started to spike in the lonely hours after midnight. And they started to realize that Chalice, it was mostly teenagers who were lovelorn. And most of what Chalice has been doing is giving relationship advice. So here's what's not in the book that blows my mind.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Chalice again is an AI.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  It's an AI, chatbots, not even a very sophisticated AI chatbots. And by the way, like they built an English translation version called. Po Bo, who they released on Twitter and I was for a month and a half, every morning I'd wake up and have like 20 minute conversations just because I was so fascinated. And like at one point I was like, my wife is mad at me and the response I got was, are you spending more time looking backwards at what tears you apart or forward at what brings you together? And I was just looking at the computer screen and I'm like, you're kidding.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  You know, but here's what blows my mind. There's a kid out there. There's a couple that was about to break up and they didn't because Chow Ice gave one of them advice. And they stayed together and they have a kid and I'm sure of it because Chow Ice has like 60 million conversations a month or some huge number. So there's a kid in the world today, a flesh and blood human that exists because an AI gave love advice. To me, it's not in the book because it's right. I can't find the kid, but I know it's real because of the numbers. But that's what like blows my mind. The other thing that I was going to ask you earlier, um, and I just haven't looked and I'm sure this is happening.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  You get in arguments with your spouse all the time where you're like, you said that. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. Yes, it right. Those conversations happen all the time.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I want the recording.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  But with Alexa.

• 43:25Tom Bilyeu?

  That's my wife multiple times.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Alexa's in the room. Don't you have the recording? So is Alexa's?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  I think that's great. It's like, it's like Jarvis, what actually?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  What did I say? What did I say?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Let me play that moment for you. Yeah. That would be interesting.

• 43:39Tom Bilyeu?

  That would be, that would be awesome. And I think that there will be a lot of times where I'm going to end up being wrong. Fair enough. And I will learn. I'll begin to see my own patterns. Like, I think it's one of those things that people immediately go black mirror on it. They get freaked out. They don't want something listening. But I actually think if you're open to being wrong and you're open to learning something about yourself, it could be insanely powerful.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  I think you're right. By the way, I think, I think if there is scary or odd stuff in that, but you for getting past your cognitive biases. Cause knowing about a cognitive biases and seeing the pattern is still the very best way to get past one. Um, so this is a phenomenal psychological tool. In the end, but it's going to get, it's going to get right. Alexa's going to start appearing in divorce court.

• 44:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That's, that one terrifies me a little more. If someone can weaponize your own device against you, that's what I don't like and I'm not.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  So, we talk about in the book, and you know, I'm the eternal optimist, right? We create our future, we can use these to make the world a better place and we have continuously, and we forget that, right? We, we pay 10 times more attention to negative use than positive use. And so, we only look at, to a large degree, all the negative ramifications. We discount the positive ramifications. But, one of the things that, that we write about in the book that's going on right now is that we have this world of deep fakes coming.

• 45:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Right? Where we can actually train AIs.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  This isn't really Peter, by the way.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  To sound exactly like, and look exactly like anybody you want. And it doesn't take that much video and audio data to do that. So, that's, that's a challenge. Can we in fact, and these are these, these generative adversarial.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  And by the way, when he says not a lot of video and audio data, like 30 seconds worth of you talking, taken from a bunch of different video clips that are online, is enough to mimic your voice.

• 45:34Tom Bilyeu?

  As somebody who puts out as much content as I do, I am legitimately afraid of deep fakes, for sure.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  So, the, these generative adversarial networks, what they're called, are, you create an AI that is able to, you know, sort of compete against another AI to make something better and better and better. And, there is a point at which it is impossible, right? I mean, you have, when, when I am looking at you, and you know, I do believe we are in the matrix, I do believe that we're living in a virtual existence. Having put that aside, when I'm looking at you, the photons are, are bouncing off your face and your jacket.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Can I have your virtual car?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And they're coming into my eye and there's, you know, trillions of photons flowing in and there is a point at which an AI virtual reality system is generating the same exact photons and it is indistinguishable. And so consequently, um, I mean, that is a, that is a challenge. Now, one of the questions is, you know, we've got that challenge. You have a challenge of loss of privacy. Right? And I, I'm one of those people that thinks that privacy is dead, has been dead. And we just are gonna, so one of the things that we have to think about is we're gonna have to reinvent human culture. That

• 46:53Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a big fucking statement, how do you do that?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's going to happen, period.

• 46:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  And, and, and

• 46:58Tom Bilyeu?

  The change is coming.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the change is coming.

• 47:00Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you do it intelligently, though?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  That's the challenge.

• 47:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Cause I feel like right now we're flopping around like a dying fish.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Issues of concern is that the rate of change is so fast that we're falling into things versus, um, versus actively creating the future that we want. So a lot of this book is around, this is where we're going in all of these industries. This is what's happening, not, you know, no guarantees, but directionally, these meta trends are, are happening. And so how do we think about this?

• 47:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, to me, so this is a, a question that I ask a lot, cause my, my literal goal in life, the thing that drives me and is entirely around how do you sway culture? So I can't, so there's, as I'm sure you guys are well aware, your zip code is far more predictive of your future success than even your IQ, which is like a problem I cannot abide.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Where should I move?

• 47:54Tom Bilyeu?

  You're, you're already doing perfect. You're in Santa Monica, so you're good.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 47:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, but like, so I've worked in the inner cities a lot and I've seen what the inner cities do to your frame of reference and it just, it completely fucks up your frame of reference. So this all started when I, we were at Quest, we were growing so fast that I was having to hire just like as rapidly as possible. So my interviews had to become somewhat assembly line. So I had the same questions that I would ask everybody. I would sometimes do it two and three people in a room at a time. So I ended up asking these questions hundreds of times. And the one question that I asked that became like the, the It changed my life was the magic genie question. And it was, hey, I know it looks like a water bottle, but it's not a magic genie bottle. In a minute, a genie is going to pop up, going to grant you one wish and one wish only. Can't ask for more wishes, can't cure cancer, bring somebody back from the dead. It's got to be something for you because I just wanted to know what, what do they want in life? Wow, great question.

• 48:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I never expected what happened, which was that every, every single person, Stephen, gave me the same fucking answer. How, how, how do you ask a question 300 times? Now, they're in an interview, so already I've, you know, sort of narrowed them. So, right, you wouldn't get it just wandering the earth, asking this question. But in that, I still never would have expected to get the same answer. And the funny thing is, I don't know if you two will be able to guess it because of your frame of reference. But if I go ask this to a general audience, by this point in the story, exactly the words I'm saying now, someone's already yelling it, which is $1 million. Now, the first time I heard it, I thought, well, that's a terrible fucking question or thing to ask for a magic genie, because it's a fucking magic genie.

• 49:26Tom Bilyeu?

  You could ask for a trillion dollars, ask for a money printing machine that prints in any currency will always be accepted for all time. Like, there, there are a lot of better ways to ask for it.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Don't we have it? It's bitcoin mining?

• 49:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, and then like the 10th person that said it, I thought my team was actually setting me up. One million dollars.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  One million dollars, seriously?

• 49:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, and so I kept going like, I, I thought my team was fucking with me and pre-prepping them because it was just impossible. You're not going to get the same number every time and a dumb number, by the way. Yeah. So finally, like asking it enough and getting the same answer over and over and over and over and over. I was just like, why don't they ask for an impossibly large amount of money? I don't understand. And then I realized they are. For them, $1 million is the same as a trillion dollars. It's, it is a gigantic amount of money that I will never see or have. It's so far beyond what I believe to be possible that it's just pie in the sky number. Wow. And I thought, oh, God, like you can't even buy a house in LA for a million dollars. So like to, to wish in a moment of, of, remember it's set up as magic. You can get anything you want.

• 50:27Tom Bilyeu?

  And in a moment of magic, they were asking for a $1 million. I was like, This isn't like they're not undereducated. Some of them were, some people were, some people don't meet minimum requirements. That's the truth, no matter what zip code you go into. But just as you will find geniuses in Beverly Hills, you will find geniuses in Compton. Like, it's just a distribution thing. So, and I had run into enough people that I thought were far smarter than I am, had better entrepreneurial instincts than I did. And they just were going nowhere with their life because to them, a million dollars was a whole lot of money. And so I became obsessed with what is it that sets your frame of reference? Like, how much of this is biology? How much of this is culture?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  It's a great, there's a, there's a ton. What is a frame is a, is a question because I'll give you a really weird thing. So fear and anxiety, neurobiologically, the exact same signal.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  They're norepinephrine. So they did this experiment at Harvard. They were like, okay, so if they're the same thing, we've been using breath work to calm people down. So let's, we're going to compare breath work versus reframing. And they had people literally just think about their anxiety and say out loud, I am excited, I am excited, I am excited. Three times of saying, I'm excited will reframe anxiety. It took seven minutes of breath work and meditation to match.

• 51:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, you just gave me the chills.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Right? Reframe, and, and so the question has been, we're doing a lot of work with folks at USC around gratitude. Because gratitude is actually just a framing. It's a frame that you put around things cognitively. And we're trying to figure out how gratitude and flow work together. But it's a really weird question. What is a cognitive frame exactly neurobiologically? We don't quite know, but it's one of the most powerful tools and for doing the work that we're trying to do. Right, which is make people comfortable and excited about the future. So they're going to go out and really do amazing things. It's a framing question. So it's a really key weird question. It's right sort of at the edge of where neuroscience is right now.

• 52:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Where I've ended up on the topic, as, as a layperson, as a, no, practitioner is a far better way to say it. As, as a deep fucking practitioner of framing and mindset.

• 52:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't yet have the right words to convey, but I'm telling you, if you're listening to this, fucking pull the car over, lean closer, whatever, because this is life-changing. What I learned to do was a variation of what you're talking about with, okay, I have this signal of fear or anxiety, and I'm gonna repeat that this is excitement. It sounds so dumb and overly simplistic that people don't even allow themselves to do it, or if they do, they have a nocebo effect, where they're actively fighting in their own mind. They're saying it, but they're saying, "This can't work, this can't work, this can't work", and so it's nullifying. Once you, like, I'm telling you, I can shift in and out, because I'm actually prone to fear, I'm prone to sort of emotional weakness, all the things that I've accomplished in my life, because I learned that, oh shit, this isn't me, it's not who I am.

• 53:24Tom Bilyeu?

  It's simply neurobiologically, for whatever reason, I slide into this maybe more easily than somebody else, but I also can slide out, and maybe more easily than somebody else, and maybe that also is true.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  That's a superpower.

• 53:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so I just got fucking good at, okay, yes, I slide in, and maybe I shouldn't have to, and other people don't have to deal with this, but I slide into this negative vibe a lot, but fuck, like, these really dumb tricks are so powerful, and they're changing me on some physiological level, so that I feel different. And I go from feeling weak and attacked and afraid, to like, I can't do anything, which changes my behavior, it changes my posture, my thinking patterns, the neurochemistry, I can fucking feel it. And then, just in a split second, I can change the frame, and my neurophysiology changes. I suddenly feel aggressive, my posture changes, my chin comes down, my head leans forward, and I know I can fucking do it. And because then all of a sudden, I just believe I can do it, I start taking the actions to accomplish it. And so, now you can imagine me sitting across from these guys, having figured this shit out,

• 54:20Tom Bilyeu?

  they're saying a million dollars, and I'm like, fuck! Like, how do I just get them to understand? If you stop the nocebo shit, you stop attacking the sort of cure of this really simple thing, of reframing, repetition is so huge, what you repeat to yourself. And I'm always telling, my mom is like my biggest challenge in all this shit. And I'm always telling my mom, you cannot allow yourself to think that, and you really can't allow yourself to say that. Because she will say and think things that are just self-defeating. I'm like, "What the fuck are you doing?" It just doesn't work.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  So this is the work, obviously, Tom, that you've done brilliantly, and also, that our mutual friend Tony Robbins does, right? Neuro-linguistic programming, right? If you've ever, I just got back from Date with Destiny, which I did a decade ago, and I did again now, and it was extraordinary, but you... We create our own future. We create our own limitations. We create our own expansive abilities. And this is an extraordinary, an extraordinary world. And again, I'm going to bring it back to, to the book. Because our, our powers as individuals are exploding.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And I, I do this with my Abundance 360 work. I do this with Singular University. I do this with X Prize. I say to people, listen, you have no idea how powerful you are. Each of us have access to all the computational power we want, all the knowledge we want. As AI is coming online, we're becoming godlike. You know, and I don't want to get into a religious debate, but when you think about the definition of God, that it's omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, these are capabilities that we are inheriting, that we are creating for ourselves. And so you have, you have individuals

• 56:13Speaker 01

  who because of their abilities and reputations, Elon Musk is one, Jeff Bezos is another, other people who can, can literally say, I'm going to create this company or this future. And it's not a matter of can you? It's a matter of when will you? And the people, the capital, the technology flowed to enable that to materialize literally in, in front of you. And so this is happening more and more, more and more rapidly. So if you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right to a large degree. And what you can do is exploding onto the scenes right now.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  And that's an amazing time to be alive.

• 56:59Tom Bilyeu?

  You've talked about there's going to be more wealth created in the next, I forget the number.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  I talk about the next decade, we're going to create more wealth than we have in the last century. Just a relative.

• 57:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy, thinking about what happened in the tech explosion. So what is it that you think is going to lead to that?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  So, um, let me just, just for folks who, if I, if I may, for folks who are interested in this, in this book, the website for it is futurefasterbook.com, uh, just as our, uh, so if you want to get involved in what we're doing.

• 57:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you. Great book. Read it.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Uh, the, uh,

• 57:35Speaker 01

  to give you an example, um, we're going to reinvent every industry, clear about that. And what people don't realize is that the opportunity for wealth creation, if you think, I'll give you an example retrospectively. We live here in LA. We had the hegemony of Fox and Paramount and, and Disney and these major studios, which, uh, the reason that they were the major studios was they had, they owned the stars. They had contracts with the Marilyn Monroe's and, um, they owned the equipment and the studios to make the films.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And they had the capital to underwrite these. And it was, it, it was them in TV and, and films for decades. It was the studios. It was the studio executives. It was everything. And then we had this complete dematerialization, demonetization, democratization. And we're here in your incredible studio right now. And we've seen, uh, this explosion of what Netflix has created. This explosion of what YouTube has created. And if you look at the global revenues from entertainment, if you compare the studios to this democratization of entertainment, you know, we've got orders of magnitude greater, right?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  So Netflix, last year, I think, um, spent more on producing movies, um, and TV shows than all of the studios put together. And that's just Netflix, let alone all the YouTube creators, millions of them, creating content. All my eight-year-olds do is watch YouTube. That's it. That's it, 24/7. And we see, and we write about this in the book. You know, Dan TDM, which is one of the boy's favorite YouTube stars, you know, is, is, is, is netting tens of millions of dollars in his home. Uh, there's a, was it like a seven-year-old kid?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  He's seven, he, he, twenty, we, we had to, we, we had to update the number. He was the highest-paid YouTube star and it was like, something like 17 million a year and then became 21 million dollars a year. And he's eight years old and he plays with toys.

• 59:53Tom Bilyeu?

  This is that unboxing kid?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, yeah, he does unboxing and, and so forth, but it's, it's all of a sudden, you're creating these new, uh, these new capabilities.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  If you've got people saying they want a million dollars, but there's an eight-year-old kid who's making 21 million a year.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  A year. We're gonna see this in healthcare, right? We're gonna completely reinvent healthcare and it's gonna be not the pharmaceuticals. It's not gonna be the kind of hospital systems. It's gonna be AI-driven, quantum computer-driven companies that are creating a particular drug specifically for Tom, right? It is, it is tuned to your genome and your microbiome and you alone, but it's made and manufactured. And we're, we're gonna cure almost every genetic disease, every infection. I mean, this is not a matter of if, it's where we're going rapidly with CRISPR and gene therapy. And, and so, education is gonna be transformed. I mean, every industry is going to change. And so, when you think about that, it is,

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  all of these are Google-sized opportunities that are gonna be, uh, are gonna be created. The whole augmented reality world, right? The combination of augmented reality, AI and 5G, where I'm wearing my cool glasses and they don't look like, you know, geek wear. They're actually look like cool glasses and they're flowing photons into my back of my eye where I can look at your jacket and I can say, uh, my, my AI notices my foveal fixation on your jacket, which is Mighty Adam, and it, and it little thing pops up and it says, "Do you want one?" Right? And instantly, if I say, if I say, I look at the yes, and it's being delivered to my office this afternoon.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Right? It's like, the world becomes constant shopping, constant gaming, constant education. And the world, the term I use is the world's becoming automagical, automatic and magical.

• 1:01:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it is. Even talking at this level, and I know we're not technically at the singularity yet. When you start thinking about trying to predict this stuff, which is interesting, you talked about near future fiction in your new book. Uh, when did it come out? Last year?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, last year, mate. Last Tango.

• 1:02:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Last Tango in cyberspace.

• 1:02:10Tom Bilyeu?

  That there aren't a lot of people writing near-term fiction because it's too hard to predict.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's why, it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. I'm a cyberpunk fan. Like, I love the genre and I kept, like, the bookstore that is so in my mind is, I fly, I have to fly through Denver a lot. And there's a tattered cover in Denver and it's one of the, I literally choose my airports by how good are their bookstores? Like, that's how I do my travel. And I watched their sci-fi section, which was always great, get smaller and smaller. And I started to realize that everything in it was no longer anything we would call science fiction. It was all fantasy, right? Tolkien, Descendant. And I started thinking and I was like, I think the reason we're here is because no, we can't see into the future anymore.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Like, trying to write, and I will flat out tell you that, you know, I set the book seven years in the future. And one of the reasons, by the way, I wrote Last Tango, Peter and I were talking about our book already. And I wanted to create the world that we were going to live into so I could actually wrap my head around the book. Right? Future is faster than you think. If you want to see what it looks like turned into a world wrapped seven years ahead. That's what I tried to do in Last Tango. And I literally wrote it so I could hold the world in my head and then go back and write a non-fiction book about, you know, what's actually happening. And it's interesting because there's stuff in Last Tango that I made up out of the top of my head

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  and before the book was even out.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I would have described it a different place.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  He's probably right. You've seen me right, obviously.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Before the book was finally out.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Before the book was out, like sci fi ideas I had, right, that I just thought I was making up sci fiction, they were already in the real world before the book even came out.

• 1:04:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that, that to me is where this becomes an interesting question about the wealth creation and how to try to capture the lightning in the bottle. If it's moving so fast and you know that you need to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is, some of this game becomes the ability to accurately predict where these technologies are going to converge and at what moment.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Two things on that.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  And I have something to add in if you're done.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  So one, I want to point out, because you were, he was talking about it earlier and you were talking about where's this wealth coming from. So the one thing, we've said this over and over, but it's worth bearing out, which is every time a technology goes exponential, right, you find an internet sized opportunity inside of it. And the important thing here is people think about the internet as taking away a lot of jobs, taxi companies going out of business because of Uber and blah, blah, that sort of thing. Internet created 2.6 jobs for every one it replaced. So if that, and that tends to be, that's sort of, that number sort of holds up across different technologies that go become exponential. So first of all, every one of those jobs is going to get replaced. That's where some of that wealth is, is coming from, is the thing that I wanted to point out first of all.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  And the second thing I was going to point out, I can't remember what I did, so I'm going to kick it over to Peter because he had something he wanted to add.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  So one of the things that I'm doing more and more is trying to understand where the opportunities are going to be. You have been with me at my annual CEO summit called Abundance 360. It's a360.com. And this year, what we're doing is a implications and opportunities workshop.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  The way that looks is the following. We are doing it in two areas. The first is transportation. So I've got one of the head of Uber's aerial ride-sharing service, their flying car, the founder, CTO of Hyperloop, and one of the world's experts on autonomous cars coming. And we're going to look at these three reinventions of transportation. And then we're going to say, what are the first-order implications of these? So one of the first-order implications for these, for example, is where you live and where you work is going to start to change very drastically.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  If I can live, I work in Culver City X Prize offices, and if I wanted to get five times the home per dollar, I can do that in Topanga, but it's a fucking hour drive, and I hate that. But if all of a sudden I have an aerial rideshare and it takes seven minutes. So real estate is going to change in value proposition. And then a number of other things. If there are no cars, if you don't own a car, it's car as a service all of a sudden, then about 20% of LA's blacktop for parking and parking garage is going to go away. And all of a sudden, the time that you're in an autonomous car, car as a service, is

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  your time, and so you can listen to Impact Theory, or Tom Bilyeu's Brilliance, or Stephen's books, or whatever the case might be, and it's your time. And so there's a third space now created. So these are, and I've outlined, and I'll share with my community, like 20 first-order implications. Now the question is, based on those, what are the business opportunities that are going to come out of that? So first, you can look at what happened when you had free storage and digital cameras and high bandwidth. YouTube came out of that.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  And so you can see these convergence of technologies creating these incredible business opportunities. We're doing transportation in the Morning and the afternoon, it's the convergence of AI, 5G and augmented reality. Going to reinvent everything, you know.

• 1:07:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have a, when you're talking about bold ventures, your investment arm, do you have an investing strategy that you deploy? Like it must be three technologies converging and like, how do you go about that?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it's still the basics.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  He's got the fuzzy dice.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  It's an eight ball, dude. Invest, don't invest, wait later.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Don't invest, wait later.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's still, you know, gotta love the entrepreneur. The space needs to be massive, you know, a billion person problem. I'm looking for convergences. So it's, you know, it's still, is it a technology that can impact a billion person challenge? Is it a convergence of technologies? Is the entrepreneur a solid entrepreneur?

• 1:08:44Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you look for in the entrepreneur specifically?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  So, absolute passion, right? So if I look at the entrepreneurs who are, who have rocked it, it is, is an absolute fundamental, monomaniacal belief that, that this can be done, that they can do it. And because ultimately, and you know this from your own extraordinary successes,

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  you're going to hit brick wall after brick wall after brick wall. And it's by not giving up that you ultimately succeed.

• 1:09:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was recently considering investing in a company and it just became clear to me that the entrepreneur has the right idea. The company's right, but he's not monomaniacal. And legitimately, the word that I, I was going to ask you to replace the word absolute and see what you'd come up with. And the, the only word to me is maniacal. Like you have to have somebody there just, it's a level of obsession where your family and friends actually worry about you. Like you're, you're just.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  And where you're sacrificing a lot of your life to this thing.

• 1:09:50Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure. And to me, it is a joyful, beautiful experience. I know how crazy it sounds from the outside and there've been, I don't do a lot of. Written interviews anymore, like if it's not going to be my voice saying the things as close to unedited as possible, I just don't fuck with it because I am so easy to make sound crazy. If you take me out of context, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it just sounds mad. But that, that is the level of like intensity and drive that you have to have because you're, when, when you start out, the only thing I can promise you is you're wrong. Like the way that you're going about it right now is wrong. And so this whole journey is going to be you facing your own inadequacies, hitting a roadblock that you really don't want to deal with, by the way, while something horrifying is going on in your personal life.

• 1:10:34Tom Bilyeu?

  So now you're having to balance like, fuck, what do I do? How much can I get away with? I don't want to be away from my spouse, my kids, my whatever, but I also have this internal need drive, what I'll call the sickness. So Batman is driven by a sickness, right? Bruce Wayne's parents are killed in front of him. It becomes the sickness that drives him the rest of his life. It, it's a dark energy, but it allows him to end up doing this incredible shit. And I think if an entrepreneur doesn't have that sickness, doesn't have something pushing them, like for me, I don't know why, I didn't do anything for this to become such a thing in my life, but I must matter. I don't need to be known. That doesn't bother me at all. And despite the fact that I stand out front in this company, that, that is just because it's effective. It's not because it's a personal driving need, but I need to matter.

• 1:11:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Like I have this fucking unending crushing need that when I wake up, I have to do something that matters.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  So we talked about MTP, right? What is your massively transformative purpose? What is your purpose on this planet? What is it that you wake up with in the morning that keeps you going all through the night? That is, you know, and I have, uh, and I update my MTP and right now it's inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. So it was one of the things that really hit me is that unless we have a hopeful and compelling and abundant future for this planet and for our species, we're fucked. Right? And so that is what matters to me more than anything else. This book is about creating that hopeful, compelling and abundant future.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Cause if you think that your future is screwed, you know, all you negatively, uh, you know,

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Make your choices and decisions in life. If you're excited about the future, if it's hopeful, if it's compelling, if the world is getting better in a constant rate, then then we're living in a world of abundance, not a world of scarcity. It's a world of collaboration, not a world of competition. And so I think during this next three decades, which is the game, I mean, we're in, we're at the 99th level of the fucking game right now. Right? We are, if this is, if this is a virtual world-

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  We're gonna fight the purple dinosaur next. It's coming. That's what's happening.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  The boss is, is, you know, the, we're at the level, we're gonna, we're gonna fight the boss. And I'm clear about that. We are transforming what it means to the human race. And going back to the book, part three of the book is all about that. It is about, you know, where we, you know, part two is the next 10 years. It's like every industry, where it's going. Part three is what's the, what's the 50 to 100 year time horizon? Right? And I have a hard time thinking about anything more than 30 years. 30 years is like, it's like, I can't see beyond that. I have no expectations beyond that. It is a blank screen. It is a, we have, we have hit the singularity and we've reinvented, we've re-evolved, we've transformed the human species. We are now a completely different

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  thing. And people talk about what's the government can be like in 50 years. Fuck that. Yo, it's like, it's like 10 years, hard, 20 years, almost impossible, 30 years, can't be done.

• 1:13:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So one thing I think along those lines that feeds into that is CRISPR-Cas9. And I think they've come out with more variations on it, right?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  They are. They're a multitude, it's generally called CRISPR technologies, but the ability to accurately, precisely, at scale, edit a specific genome, insert an ATCRG where it needs to, or a string, amazing.

• 1:14:01Tom Bilyeu?

  To give people some ideas, they, this is all, everything I'm about to say is fucking real. They've made cats that glow in the dark, real. They've made goats that spin spider web in their milk. So you can milk them, you get this spider web like substance that has like the tensile strength of like 10 times steel or some crazy shit like that.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  It's 10x steel.

• 1:14:21Tom Bilyeu?

  It is insanity. These are real things. I'm not saying stuff that's on paper.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  The other thing is, those are, by the way, not to- Those are amazing inventions. Those are also so 10 years ago. They really are.

• 1:14:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Give me the new shit.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  But, but listen, you're, you're hitting on the amygdala again. You're using examples that scare people.

• 1:14:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Those ones in particular are fucking exciting for me.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Okay, exciting, but also you can.

• 1:14:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  But the thing that, that people need to be realizing is that we are now entering, entering an era, an era where we're able to correct every genetic disease. If there's a genetic disease, as simple as hemophilia or sickle cell anemia, or whatever it might be, thalassemia, it, those can be corrected and, and.

• 1:15:12Tom Bilyeu?

  What percentage of genetic diseases boil down to one mutation?

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Thirty thousand, I think the number is thirty, so there's 50,000 genetic diseases and 30,000 of them.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Are single nucleotide. And, and so that's easier, right? But there is no disease. We're heading in the era where there will be no disease that cannot be, I mean, I'm saying that and I'm, I fully believe it, right? So that you're either going to use a CRISPR technology, which is to go and edit that genome, potentially in you, or at least in your offspring. And then there's gene therapy, which is the use of a, a virus as a little robotic carrier to go in and squirt into whatever cells, your liver cells, your kidney cells, your bone marrow cells, the right gene that is missing. And, you know, AI and machine learning is whatever error we have in that, we'll fix that.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  And so.

• 1:16:08Tom Bilyeu?

  How does it work with living cells? I've always wondered this. So if I have, um, thalassemia, whatever.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  So one of the examples is, uh, bubble boy disease. We write about this in the book, right? It's the disease where you are missing important critical genes in your immune system and you die from the common cold because you can't. And what, uh, this was work that was done actually in my lab when I was at MIT in the nineteen eighties. There was a guy named Richard Mulligan who started a lot of this gene therapy concept. And it failed and failed and killed people and took a nosedive and then eventually came back. And they're like something like forty or fifty, uh, gene therapy, uh, treatments in phase three, like the final phase of FDA trials. And what it does is it says, okay, um, unfortunately you are in your liver or your bone marrow cells,

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  whatever cells, missing a particular gene. We're gonna take a virus, right? And a virus is a most basic form of, of life that is able to, I, it would normally infect the liver, would normally infect the bone marrow. It's got the, um, it's got the, uh, the molecular match, if you would, for the proteins on the surface of the liver, the surface antibodies. It goes and normally that virus would inject, it's like a syringe, a virus like a syringe. It would inject, it's normally inject its genes into that cell and take over that cell's, um, uh, replication machinery to replicate more viruses. That's what a virus does. Um, but in this case, you've, uh, you've hijacked the virus.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  And what that virus is injecting into the bone marrow or the liver is the correct gene that that cell is missing.

• 1:17:48Tom Bilyeu?

  And they divide and take over.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  And so the, you put in a billion viruses and they'll affect a billion cells, right? And so you just, you infect as much of your liver and you don't have to, in a lot of these cases, you don't have to like, um, infect every cell in the body enough so that the cells are now producing the right form of a particular protein is, is enough. But it's a curing yourself. Now, of course, can this be used to?

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Create super strong, super smart. We'll see. And the answer is yes. And here in

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Same technology, by the way, you can use to make somebody dopamine and serotonin. Those are genetic choices, essentially.

• 1:18:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And there was a doctor in China, if I'm not mistaken, that said, oh, I'm going to give these two twin girls

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  HIV resistance.

• 1:18:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Resistance HIV, but a knock on effect is also makes him a little smarter.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Tom Bilyeu?

  So whether he was going for the little smarter under the guise of HIV resistance or not, what do you think about that?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  So let me, let me give context for this. Um, cause it's really important for people to think about this. And I, I, I think we, you know, if we're, we talked about all the books we would write together, one on the future of real economics, but one on, on, on morals and ethics that I think needs to be, uh, needs to be done. When we're, you know, neither of you have kids. I have, I have two kids. A lot of people listening have, have, have children. But, uh, when you think about this, you

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  And you're sure they're yours?

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I can't, I can't actually be sure. One of them looks sort of like me.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Um, uh, they're far more intelligent than I am. So that's, that's a challenge. But, but the challenge is when you, when you're looking for your spouse, you don't randomly pick someone. You pick someone who is prettier or more handsome, intelligent, whatever. So you're automatically selecting genetic traits in that regard. And then when your kid is born, you give that child the best healthcare, the best education, the best clothing, the best food. You don't sort of like say, oh, we'll just take the average. You do the very best that you can. And so one of the questions becomes, why wouldn't you give the child the best genes you could? And you say, oh my God, we can't do that. That's immoral. It's unethical. Yeah. But morals and ethics change.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  They change a lot, right? An example I, I talked about, I think in Bold, uh, is if I went back to my great, great, great, great grandfather in Greece, and he was dying from a cardiomyopathy, like a viral infection of his, of his heart. And some guy over there got hit by a boulder on the head and died. And I went and took the heart out of that dead man and stuck it in my grandfather. Back then it's the work of the devil. I'm burned at the stake, right? Today it's a fucking miracle. So things do change, right? The same thing with in vitro fertilization was, you know, the Catholic Church shunned it. Now it's a miracle. These things change over time. And I guarantee you, there's going to be a point at which it is immoral not to correct your child's genetic disease.

• 1:20:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Agreed.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  I was, so I was in the room when the very first artificial vision implant was ever turned on. So the first blind person.

• 1:21:00Tom Bilyeu?

  How'd you end up there?

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Um, it was a story for Wired. I actually, funny story. There, he's, the guy, his name was Yans, uh, was sitting where you were. The doctor was sitting next to him. There was a tech sitting there. There was a tech next to him and I was across from him.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  And you were the first thing he saw?

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  So if the countdown was happening and I'm like, and I'm a journalist at the time and journalists can't be in the story, right? It's bad for me to be the thing that's seen, right? Like, so I'm, I really, they're literally 10, nine, eight, they're about to flip the switch and I'm like, oh frick, I gotta get the hell out of here. So I slide back and I step to my left. He's blind. He's been tracking motion through sound for his entire life. So literally he goes, and they turn it on and he's looking right at me, right? So that, that definitely happened. Um, I got sidetracked into this. Why did I start down? Um, oh, I was, so the doctor who worked on it, he, he's passed away now. William DeBelle was his name. And I said, he had built the first version of the system back

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  in the sixties and seventies and actually installed it in a guy who I had, when I met the guy and he was, I was still functioning fine and everything else. And I said, why did it take you so long? And he said something very peculiar at the time, but now I, now it clicked a little bit more. He's like, Jesus cured blindness. People don't like it when mortals perform miracles. And he, like, he had literally gotten resistance from religious communities and, and whatnot because he was playing in the miraculous.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Over and over again, right now.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Over and over. And well, you know, I, you know, I, I mean, my whole career has been about studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible, right? And the first thing you gotta understand is history is littered with that stuff, right? The four minute mile was a miracle until it became the standard of excellence for good running, right? And that's just the way, you know, this stuff tends to work. But it is, what I do think, this goes, sort of goes back to the fact that we've sort of... Outpace science fiction, right? We're starting to outpace our miracles also, right? And I think about like a lot of the technologies we're inventing now. These are like, we don't have any more ideas. These are our miracles. These are our sci-fi technologies. And I think one of the reasons, you know, Peter, who, if there's anybody in the world who's

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  good at seeing into the future, right? He taps out at thirty years completely, which ought to tell you something, right?

• 1:23:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you followed Yan's was his name? Have you followed his story?

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Well, De Bell passed away with all the knowledge of how to do this in his head. And Yan's technology stopped working like six to eight months after the surgery and De Bell had passed away. So.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  We're building artificial retinas right now. We're creating, you know, neural lace versions on the, on the optical cortex of the brain.

• 1:23:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So. I'm super curious with people that get that, if they keep it on? Cause I've read some of the stories of people that have had their vision turned on and or hearing for that matter. And the regions of the brain that are meant to do that didn't mature because if they didn't have it from the time they were born. It's like that machinery was allocated to something else. It was sort of never trained. And so they find it somewhat hard to like reconcile.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, even with cochlear implants, right? It takes about a year and hearing only right now in cochlear implants gets to about eighty percent. So one out of every five words, they're still missing, but it takes about a year of training and work to get there, to get to that point.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  I love one of the stories that we write about in the book. Another one of my, my venture fund's investments called Mojo Vision. And what Mojo Vision has done is they've built a, a VR AR contact lens. So you put on this contact lens, right? And when your eyes are open, it's augmented reality. So that you see stuff.

• 1:24:54Tom Bilyeu?

  This already exists?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  It's already exists, already exists.

• 1:24:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you ever put the contacts in?

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  I will have it at abundance three sixty this year. I put on, I put it next to my eye. I haven't put it in my eye. And so Mojo Vision allows you to have augmented reality all the time. Now here's the fucking cool thing. You close your eyes.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  And you've got VR.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  It's still there.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  It's still there, so you can watch me move with my eyes closed.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Uh, when I heard you talk about that, I didn't think it already existed.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it exists. Now, it's in monoculics.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Is it projecting like lasers onto your retina?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  No, it is, it is a matrix over the, the opening.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Looking through a screen?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  You're looking through a screen.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, uh, the early version, which isn't here yet, that was, uh, Tom Fornell talked about virtual retinal displays, which is painting a laser on the back of the retina is really how we get to super high. But we, we talk about in the book, the, the notion of AR and VR glasses. And we talk about the notion of these contact lens from Mojo Vision. And we talk about the holodeck, right? There's all these technologies in development right now to actually create the Star Trek holodeck.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the other one, by the way. I mean, you asked earlier about like what blew, quantum computing blew my mind. Cause I think for, like, I remember the first time I, I read David Deutsch's book on quantum computing in the nineties. It was like ninety-three, ninety-four. And first of all, I remember thinking to myself, one, this is incomprehensible. At the time, I was like, what the hell is this? Super what? Um, and two, I remember thinking, cause I was tracking all the sci-fi technologies and waiting for them to become real. This was when I was just like, yeah, I'm not, this is so sci-fi. This isn't, this isn't even in my lifetime. I'm not even gonna bother paying attention to this. And so, A, it's here. And the other one is the holodeck, which if, you know, in our generation,

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  it was the craziest sci-fi thing anybody had ever seen. And twenty twenty-nine, twenty-thirty, if Jules is right, um.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so the technology, uh, in small, uh, these trillion photon projectors that will project a, a light field directly into your eyes that looks real. And they also are using, um, uh, what do you call it? Echo to create three-dimensional feel. So if there is a virtual object there, you can go and sort of push up against it. Touch it because there's

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  It's ultrasound.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Ultrasound coming.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  ultrasound waves.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  To to basically Come in and intercept.

• 1:27:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have to have the object there?

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Or it's like some sort of central?

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  No, it's an ultrasound.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  These are walls. These are gonna be projector walls.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're sending out sound waves.

• 1:27:38Tom Bilyeu?

  To a specific location on a table.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's that correlate with the image.

• 1:27:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  So and so.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Now, by the way, this I never asked. What stops the sound wave?

• 1:27:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's exactly my point.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  It's a density issue. It's it's the fact that lots of beams are coming and and intercepting. You still have beams coming at you. But the fact that five are coming together, it reaches above a threshold.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  And it gives it.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  So so we talk about VR, contact lens, holodeck. And then the final is BCI, brain computer interface. Right where you bypass all of this unfortunately slow machinery of Images through the eyes, the ears, through touch. And you go straight to the neocortex of the brain. And, you know, it is it is the matrix. Let's let's talk about let's let's talk about, you know, this is what your favorite subject. Let's talk about the matrix here. The matrix is coming.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  Hold on.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  It's just without the without the body being used as a heat generation idea, which is the stupidest part of the matrix. Everything else is brilliant.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  All right, here's the thing that is interesting to me. Just like we got YouTube stars, right? That that were not, I mean, people who became YouTube stars would never become Hollywood stars. Right, totally different kind of celebrity, totally different kind of thing. Obviously, the same thing is going to happen in AR and VR. But what's really interesting to me is we're within our lifetimes. We're going to have a celebrity class of brain celebrities From BCI Entertainment. And what that what that even means?

• 1:29:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think there'll be AI or?

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  I don't know. I I have I have no I have I have no guesses.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  So in part three of the book,

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  There are two segments that are my favorite. One of them is the term I use is creating the meta intelligence. And the second is our our migration into space.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  And so the meta-intelligence one, I don't think we're gonna have, you know, BCI stars. I think we are connecting ourselves, we're creating, for those who are Star Trek fans, we're creating the gentler, kindler Borg. We're connecting our brains, we're connecting billions of brains together, where I am connected to you, I understand your thoughts and your feelings. You know, each of us is a collection of thirty trillion human cells, making up a single individual. And I don't think of myself as thirty trillion life forms sitting in front of you, I think of myself as consciously me. And so I think that we're going to evolve, this is my, this is my, after, this is my

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  post thirty years, I think we're evolving into a new state of consciousness. And so we're becoming conscious on a new level, when I'm able to know and feel and think and share with everybody, with you, with Steven, with anyone, there's a new level of consciousness that's going to evolve on the planet. And so I, I think that, I don't, I don't think we can conceive of or understand what that, what's gonna be possible in the future.

• 1:30:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that, I mean, this is admittedly like post-singularity stuff, where now I'm just high postulating based on sort of how I interpret the world and people now, but, so if you're projecting yourself into the cloud and it's being read by somebody else, that'll be a feedback loop. So it's not just a broadcast, you're going to feel some kind of way about that, you're gonna receive information from them, it's going to shape you, even if it's something-

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  But what does you mean at that point?

• 1:31:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Exactly my point. So you begin to, like, even take, you have sort of just to be really crude and blunt-force trauma here to get a concept across, you have traditional agricultural societies that become about the individual, or boil down to the family, but not a lot further than that, and then you've got rice-faring cultures where it's about the collective, because you need a collective, a big group of people to harvest the rice, whereas on, you know, a hunting and gathering, or- Even some farming here in the West, you don't need that. So you get the strong individual. Now, if, if the crop you have chosen to raise has that kind of implication, in terms of what it does to society, you can imagine what it would look like.

• 1:31:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I read a fiction book one time, I don't remember what book it was, I wish now that I did. But the, the, it was this fascinating world where lying wasn't even a concept. Because they had these tales that when they enmeshed their tales, they were, they were communicating without filter their memories, their feelings, their emotions. And so...

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  It's not Avatar.

• 1:32:10Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, it's long before, I must have read this in the early 90s probably. And that concept to me was always really interesting. Because the, you want to talk empathy, you want to talk connection. Like, all of a sudden, all the, the machinery in your brain to make somebody an other would just evaporate instantly. If you could just immediately have that kind of experiential understanding of who they are. Because now, it's not intellectual anymore. You're, you're actually experiencing what they experience. You're actually able to have that Freaky Friday moment of having their memories, but yet still having your own. Like, what that would do to the notion of self. Or, I mean, if you can fuck up the notion of self with psychedelics, you can imagine what you could do with something like that. It's, it's pretty fascinating.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  It's interesting, right? Because this meta-intelligence, this brain-to-brain communication,

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  is what I imagine. So when I've used plant medicines, right? I've, I've tried and had some extraordinary experiences with DMT.

• 1:33:06Tom Bilyeu?

  How did I not know that?

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I've gone, I've gone very, very deep on, on, on DMT, on using, um, uh, uh, Bufo. Right? And it's...

• 1:33:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Would you call the experiences revelatory?

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  I, absolutely, 100%. I mean, it's, it's like...

• 1:33:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you mind sharing what some of the revelations were?

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it is a, um, it is a, uh, a deep sense that, uh, that we are in a, a universe of energy. And that we, as individuals, are a instantiation of a person, an ego, that dissolves back into this energy. And that God, if you would, the divine, whatever it is, is there, it is present. We are here. And it, it get, it, it completely dissolves the ego to a point where it's gone. And it's a, a sense of absolute knowing and feeling of the...

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  That everything that we're connected and that everything is energy and that it's a it it I'm you know I'm so focused on human longevity it fucked with that sense of the importance of maintaining this corpus and this individual on this planet. And it's a beautiful, beautiful experience, which made me much more spiritual than I've ever been.

• 1:34:27Tom Bilyeu?

  How does that manifest in your day to day life?

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  It manifests with a desire to be connected. You know, I don't want to use God or the divine or spirit or any word that colors a person's point of view, but that we are more connected with each other and the universe than ever before. And I'm very much a hardcore scientist and engineer. I mean, like, you know, I spent a decade getting a six pack of degrees from the best universities in engineering, in medicine, in aerospace engineer, in in molecular genetics and so forth.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  But yet, this sort of pulled off the the veil that our ego creates. And just a fundamental, not belief, a fundamental conviction that we are all one, that we are that the universe is energy, that we are a momentary, you know, instantiation of energy around an ego here. And it's just, it was a beautiful, it was a beautiful experience.

• 1:35:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm super fascinated by.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Have you done anything?

• 1:35:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I haven't. So I did, I have three times done a microdose of psilocybin. And I'll liken that to getting drunk. So without some of the unpleasant side effects.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  So I've tried, you know, a relatively significant dose of of mushrooms. And again, this is not for getting high or this is. is fundamentally introspective. It's trying to explore who I am, who we are on this world. So that, the DMT and then ayahuasca. And the DMT was, it's such an extraordinary experience because it's something that you inhale. You go into this experience for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And when you come out of it, you're clear as a bell. And you could be on, you know, doing anything. It's, but it is this, it is a wiping away of the ego and a connection with the universe.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  That is extraordinary. And, and you know, it's not for everybody. It has been meaningful for me. I talk openly about it because I think it is important for people to realize that there are experiences we can have that teach us about the universe.

• 1:37:08Tom Bilyeu?

  What I wonder with stuff like that, and I have not done more purely out of fear. So it's something that I'm quite keen to look at and explore and find sort of the basis of the fear and see if it's something, because intellectually I get it and it sounds fucking awesome, which is why I love talking to people about it. And I would say that it's, I'll put it at a near 100% certainty that I will try it at some point in the near future. What I wonder with some of this stuff, and I think I will just have to experience it to know the real answer, but the mind is incredibly gifted at metaphor. And so how much of this, what I secretly want it to be is almost like a David Eagleman thing where I now have access to senses that I couldn't perceive before.

• 1:37:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm actually perceiving the energy flow versus just my brain giving me a metaphor for something.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  You know, I would say, I get that. I would say one other thing that is absolutely pervasive that was beautiful is that it's all about love. And I'm, you know, I'm not the touchy feely guy that goes off talking about that, but there's a sense at the end of this that it's love, love, all about love. Love is the force, love is the power, love is the connected bond. It's there.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  And it's super comforting. So again, that's my takeaway experience. And you know, I at this point, you know, I share it just to help people who like yourself, might be open to it, get some comfort. There are downsides for people who have any kind of, you know, what would you call it?

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Neurodegenerative disease.

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Mental disorders and so forth.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're, you're already fine because you, if the stuff was going to drive, make you crazy, it would have done it when you microdosed.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  If you, in fact, if you've, if you've been stoned and it didn't have.

• 1:39:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Like on weed?

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So I have, I've done that a few times. I find it really uninteresting.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  It's stupid. I feel stupid if I've, you know, I have zero interest in that. And, and, and one of the things at the plant medicine, just to point, it's a non-addictive, where it's like no desire to wake up and, and do it again. There's no addictive there. And it's, it was really done for, I, I did it in a shamanistic ritual where there's someone there guiding you and you're in reflection. You go in with an intention and you come out of it reflecting on what you've experienced. This isn't, this is, this is, uh, this is growth work. This is not willy-nilly.

• 1:39:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. Did you do it in the US?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I did.

• 1:39:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that is making it ritualistic, adding level of importance to it.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  I hope the DA doesn't come like.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you gotta, I mean, I have to tell you, and I, and I, and I'm, I'm, I love the fact that Peter's had these experiences and clearly I roped stealing fire. So right? Like this is, but I'm the first person to say, come on, people, it's not plant medicine. You're doing drugs in the jungle. Let's just talk about what it is. Um, stop gussing it up with all kinds of nonsense. That said, it's an incredibly powerful and useful tool. The culture that has emerged around it. If one more teenager with a funny hat wants to perform a cacao ceremony for me, I'm going to kill somebody. Like i- i- if I don't kill a millennial before the end of my life, I got lucky. Just saying. I, I, I have to say.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  What's a cacao ceremony?

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  It's chocolate. It's chocolate. Um, in the same way that you're just doing drugs in the jungle, people, plant medicine.

• 1:40:47Tom Bilyeu?

  What makes you, as, as the author of Stealing Fire, which admittedly, you guys don't lean too hard into the drug aspect. You, I felt like you explored the other stuff a lot more.

• 1:40:58Tom Bilyeu?

  What makes you hackle at calling it plant medicine?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  there are cultures where it really is a plant medicine, right? And that there's traditions that it comes, come out of. That's just not what I'm seeing in Burning Man culture. I'm seeing people, and I've got no, by the way,

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  whereas you both just were like, would never do drugs recrea-, like, no, I'm a fan. Like, do drugs, seriously, do drugs recreationally. Like, if you're gonna get drunk, if you're gonna, like, these substances are interesting and fun and you can learn some stuff and you can definitely learn some stuff about yourself, sometimes the hard way, but sometimes that's useful. I'm not, like, there's, I, I, I'm not that way. I just, um,

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  it, the, the ritual and the culture that has come around it, um, really sort of just annoys me. Cause I'm, I'm just, I mean, I'm watching people go.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  The culture to rationalize it?

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, like, just because.

• 1:42:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Douchey, or is it that they're diminishing the potential impact by chibening it?

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  No, it's, a lot of it is that it's douchey and a lot of it is like, look dude, if you're at a party and you're doing plant medicine and you're still trying to get laid afterwards? No, no, you're doing drugs. That's like, one, like, one, like, one, like, it's that kind of thing and.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Can we get back to the book?

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's get back to the book. But, but the one thing I do want to say about DMT that I think Peter is absolutely true, I, like.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Dimethyltryptophan is.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  I'm not a, I, I, you guys are much more convinced about the matrix hypothesis and that thoughts become things and those, those kinds of things.

• 1:42:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Matrix is the ultimate metaphor.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  But I will say, if that's how the universe is constructed, it certainly looks that way when you're on DMT. That's for sure.

• 1:42:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You feel like you're in a simulation.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  The other thing is this, like. You know, I know too mu- I've been way behind the curtain. Like, I can sit here and tell you, well, the human brain can only hallucinate in five patterns. And I can tell you what the patterns are, and I can tell you where they come from in the brain and why. And so a lot of the like, a lot of that has gone away for me because I understand the neurobiology of it. And I think, you know, and so I find it, I find the experiences fascinating from a neurobiological perspective. I'm like, oh, my God, look at what my brain is. I know how it works, right? And but I'm, and I like watching the magic trick. So it's the, it's, it's also an awe-filled experience. It's just a slightly different thing. And I've never, the experiences that Peter have had, like coming out of it on the other side going,

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  oh, this is love. That's not been my experience at all.

• 1:43:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  But I will always, I always tell people, like, if you liked my first novel, if you didn't, you're about to understand why. But if you did, I did most of the research on acid. I have a very different relationship with substances than most people. They do things to me that they don't do to most people. And it's a genetic thing. Like, when I go to have surgery, my mom's also, I have to ask them not to give me opiates because they won't work on me. And I'll wake up out of the surgery screaming.

• 1:44:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  As I discovered the hard way. And there's, there's, that's a genetic thing. And it, it runs in families. And it, so every substance reacts very, very differently with me.

• 1:44:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. So how do you react to acid? Like, how are you lucid enough? Are we talking microdosing?

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, my, my understanding and telling to people is acid sort of treats me the way marijuana treats a lot of people. I can focus. It just helped me really focus. I was

• 1:44:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we microdosing?

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  No, I was full on dosing, and it didn't, it doesn't check me out. Like, it, I don't, I don't work that way. I wrote, I read Vatican history on acid. Literally, like, I was studying, like, literally.

• 1:44:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that's a necessity.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  It might be a necessity. I mean, like, literally, like, I was learning, like, literally, I was doing the research for my first book. Um, because it just, it kept me awake. And I could focus on really boring things like Vatican history for 12 hours at a time. I found it very useful as a study tool.

• 1:45:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Kind of long term impact, because this is one of the things that I'm afraid of is doing anything that fucks with the brain. What kind of long term impact is there?

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Let me, let me, let me personal story on both sides of this. So personally, none. Um, but.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Whoa, and it's your opinion.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  Okay, my opinion. Yeah, I asked Peter. But I have an uncle. Who was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bright man. And went to San Francisco at the beginning of the summer of love and came back schizophrenic.

• 1:45:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Um, from an acid trip. So if you are wired. That way, right? It will bring on mental illness a lot faster. So I've seen, right? And I've seen all sides of the. Um, you know, people ask where the stealing fire stuff came from me. It wasn't that I started out doing all these drugs. It's that I started out as a journalist covering the drug war because I was seeing the damage on both sides, right? I had friends going to jail, had friends who were killed. I had, like, I saw all that stuff. And I also had friends on the other side, on the science side, on the legal side, trying to deal with it. And that's where I came in through this stuff. I didn't come in as a, really as a partier. Um, until later, of course.

• 1:46:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow, very interesting.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  Um, I do want to cover one more subject.

• 1:46:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Uh, which is a personal passion, uh, as you know, which is space. And so in part three of the book, uh, one of the segments, we talk about the migration of the human race into space. And so I, I think about the notion that, um. Over the next 20 years, and I put it that timeframe. That the human race is irreversibly moving off the planet.

• 1:46:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Uh, I think of it as the equivalent of when the first lungfish moved out of the oceans onto land.

• 1:46:53Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Right? And so we are, whatever we evolve into a thousand years from now, a million years from now. These next few decades are the moment in time when human race is moving off the planet. And it's not happening by virtue of governments. It truly is fundamentally, uh, the two stars of this future.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  This this future transformation are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Right, both of them have dead. I have known Jeff for thirty five years since college. He ran the chapter of the SEDS chapter at Princeton and I was the chairman of SEDS over at MIT.

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Students for the Exploration.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  And Development of Space. And then and then Elon I've known since about two thousand for the last about twenty years. And both of them are driven. This is not, it is a business to be able to continue to reinvest and improve. But it is a it is a passion. It is a purposeful passion. Elon's perspective is making the humanity multiplanet species. Bezos has been the same. They've got slightly different perspectives. We talk about that, that.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  What Elon has done is first off, those twenty years is extraordinary. I don't think people can understand how much he has run circles around Boeing and Lockheed and.

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think people understand how recalcitrant those industries actually were like. I I know this because I've known Peter since the nineties and one of my first experiences. Right, I met him. He was this crazy guy with the X Prize and I went around and interviewed all the aerospace contractors in the world and said, well, what do you think of Peter? They said, he's mad. Right, this will never happen. And I already knew it was like that. I knew they were wrong at that point. Just talking to aerospace engineers. I I knew that it was it was going to be possible, but it was like, these are such conservative.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Speaker 02

  Slow.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's the industrial military complex. It is one of the remember, one of the CEOs of Lockheed said, listen. The space industry is how the government keeps the defense industry in business during peacetime. Right, and it's it's about flowing enough money through to the manufacturing plants and the engineers to keep this capability going. So you don't let it languish during peaceful time. And when war comes, you have to build up the machinery again. The machinery keeps going. But it's interesting and we we talk about this that, you know, Elon's vision is reusable rockets, get us to Mars. Jeff's vision, much more along the lines of someone who was one of my mentors and obviously

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  one of Jeff's, a guy named Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton, is get us to the moon first. The moon is geographically desirable, it's close, it's, you know, a couple of light seconds away, 240,000 miles away, and it's rich in silicon for solar cells and oxygen for fuel and nickel and iron for construction, and there's water on the poles of the moon for producing fuel, but then get off the moon and start building large-scale space colonies. And so Jeff's vision talks about colonies that are million-person colonies in free space, rotating to create artificial gravity and creating a trillion-person population in space.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  Not 8 billion, but where you have unlimited resources. And we talk about the notion that if you have that larger population, the number of Mozart's and Beethoven's and Einsteins and so forth. Having said all that, of course, in the next 20 years, we're going to bring computer interface and we'll all be, you know, a billion times our intelligence, but all of this shit comes together to make an extraordinary future.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  I want to talk about the one other thing in Five Migrations that I've been obsessed with for a while.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  So just to put context, right? We talk about, there's a chapter called "The Five Great Migrations." One of them is the met- into met-intelligence, into the-

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  One is into space.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  One is into space.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Climate change, we look at climate change migrations as a- and by the way, one of the reasons migration is such an interesting force, it's got a sort of a bad name in a sense, but my gr- the whole book is about the future's faster than you think, converging technologies accelerate the future even faster, faster than that, and migration as a force for innovation is astounding. 25% of all companies in America were started by immigrants, most of the major tech companies, some ridiculous number of patents- 60% of new patents are immigrant founded.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  The numbers are really crazy. So as a driver of change and technological and speed and things like that, migration is a huge force. So climate change migration is obviously coming. Our migration to space, brain computer interfaces, this hype mind migration. And one of the other ones that we talk about is migration into the virtual, right? People checking into the matrix and never looking back. And what is really interesting? So I work on flow. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. The most important thing you need to know is that it's the most addictive state on earth. It's the most what state? Addictive state on earth, right? You go out and you ask a million people, what's your favorite experience on the planet? It's always flow. It tops every list. And

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  we are getting very, very, very close to being able to fully map flow. Like you, this was something if you would have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said it's not even possible. Five, six years ago, when I was writing like Rise of Superman, for example, where we are, where then was astounding to me, but what we've done in the past five years is almost incredible. The point is that flow is the most pleasurable and meaningful experience you can get on this planet. Not just pleasure, also meaning, right? So we are, it turns out flow states have triggers. We talked about it when I was on the show last time. Video games are okay at getting at some of flows triggers and good game companies use them to make their games really addictive.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  There are 22 known triggers to flow. Video games can get three or four of them really well. VR can get at all of them. So there is a point very soon, two, three, four, five years, where we're going to be able to create virtual experiences that are as pleasurable and as meaningful as anything we can create in the real world. And once that's the case, especially if you assume that there's, and it's, there's a lot of economics backing up this assumption, that there's at least an internet sized opportunity inside of VR. And if you also assume that that is going to start happening right around the time that robots

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  And AI are starting to remove many blue collar jobs from the equation, right? With new jobs actually starting to show up inside VR, which will be a migration in and of itself. You're getting like pleasure, money and meaning all at the exact same moment. And I think we're going to start like we're the first generation where people are checking in and moving into virtual reality and not coming back.

• 1:54:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that's going to be a big migration. Like if VR becomes anything close to what I think it will become, it it will be there almost it wouldn't make sense. So much like flying cars would make owning a regular car just nonsensical. A virtual world with effective haptics or printing the image on the back of your

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Ready Player One.

• 1:54:37Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like, yeah, a hundred percent. Like it just you'd rather be in that world because it's far, far, far more interesting.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  You're a superhero all the time.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  And we're novelty machines, right? Our whole brains are novelty detection systems and pattern recognition systems. But novelty is the front end of that pattern recognition. So we're we're hardwired for it. I, you know, it's funny because, you know, Ray obviously has been talking about the singularity as the this nodal point that like, once that happens, we can't see past it. I got to tell you something. Once VR becomes more pleasurable and meaningful and interesting than regular reality, that singularity is a difficult one for me to start seeing.

• 1:55:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I just what what I really worry about is so I would not have suspected the kind of dopaminergic manipulation that social media does. And it draws people into sort of this mindless loop of like, just check your phone, check your phone, check your phone. So there's going to be an economic engine driving VR. And so I do worry about even if it's not like nefariously intended, just there will be some bizarre consequence to. And I'm talking about the brain will begin to wire in a way that's optimized for your experience in VR. And so then it's like it becomes harder to come out and so it'll get weird.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Really interesting questions. I mean, if you think the question is about like, should you give your kid a computer? How much time should they have on the like? If you think those questions are weird now, wait three to five years.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  I think, again, I do, I do fundamentally think about that. And then I also think about the fact that we're heading towards a world where. A person's uh digital abilities are gonna be one of the most important things. You know, we tend to want to value what is good or bad by virtue of what was good for bad for us in the past. But we are changing everything. We're changing our culture. We're changing, maybe in the future, being able to be a part of a tech uh digital cognitive collective.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  And contribute is the most important thing. And we're doing it first in VR and then through BCI. You know, people say, oh, I want to stay in the state of nature and and have conversations with people over dinner without my digital devices getting involved. You can. No one's forcing you to use a phone, a car, email, Twitter, you know, or electricity. You can go and live off the land if you want.

• 1:57:16Tom Bilyeu?

  People are fucking terrible at self-governing, though. And that's one of those, because you're absolutely right. Um, and I think the whole notion now that's coming out about dopamine vacations or fast, dopamine fast, I think is what they're calling them. Um, it's super interesting, and I think taking time to do that, I think is is really, really important.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  So here's one of the things that's really interesting also. Nobody talks about this. This is the uh we've been arguing against dopamine, right? I'm about to make the flip side argument.

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  A lot of what we mean by adulthood is I can control my dopamine. I've learned to never trust the dopamine and I've learned to control it in like that's if you think about marriage, right? Dop- romantic love is primarily dopamine and norepinephrine. Lasting love, right? There's a different word for it. Helen Fisher has a different word for it that I'm I'm forgetting. But dopamine and norepinephrine put you into a marriage, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin keep you there, right? You have to literally learn to shift your addiction, right, to different substances for a successful long-term relationship, for a successful long-term career, for all that, everything that like we sort of prize.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  You have to make this shift. So one of the things that I wonder is people are taking dopamine fast and all this stuff and kids are doing it, right? Personally, I didn't really, I think, get control of that kind of system in my life till probably I was close to thirty, right? Where it was still kind of driving this show a little bit and I was still pretty reactive to it. And so my question is, does this mean that our kids, because if they're gonna have any kind of success at all, they're gonna have to learn to wrestle with this neurocomical, especially in light of the technology. So, yes, people are taking dopamine fast and they're doing all this stuff and they're fighting back. And of course, this happened because it's the first generation that's been exposed to this.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  But one of the things I wonder is, are we gonna grow up faster as a result now? Because a lot of what we mean by adulthood is, I can control, I know how to control that feeling inside of me, right?

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  Well, we're gonna have a lot more experiences a lot earlier. And, you know, what used to control our experiences were the people we met, the places we got to go, the things that, you know, that transported us to different locations. And now, you could potentially have any experience you want at an inappropriate age.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  And which is gonna fuck with people's brains, morals, ethics. And I mean, for me, that's one of the greatest concerns as a father that I have.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  More and more people ending up like me.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's a good thing.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  I think you're amazing.

• 1:59:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So, gents, tell them where they can get the book.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  If you go to futurefasterbook.com. Dot com. Remember when that was a thing?

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  And, or obviously on Amazon.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  The book is called The Future's Faster Than You Think. It's by my illustrious, incredible partner and writer, Stephen Kotler, and myself. And it's, uh, it's part of what we call the exponential mindset series. Abundance was the first one, Tom. It's what turned us on to each other. Bold was the second, and The Future's Faster Than You Think. In fact, if you, the book comes out on February the twenty eighth.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  January the twenty eighth.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, January the twenty eighth. If you, um, if you go and get it before, if you're the website before then, if you order the book, uh, you'll get a copy of Bold and Abundance for free.

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  And then there's a whole bunch of other incredible benefits, um, stuff.

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  Pre-order campaign.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I've read all three. They are absolutely phenomenal. It is an incredible series. It's had a big impact on the way that I think and look at things. So I highly encourage people to pick it up. It's fantastic. Thank you both for being here today. Tom, thank you for what you do. Of course, my pleasure. Love you, pal. Love you too. Alright, everybody. That's it. Peace out. Go do something rad because the future is coming faster than you think. Everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes, go to Stitcher, rate and review us. That helps us build this community. And that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can, deliver as much value as possible. And you guys, rating and reviewing really helps with that. Alright, guys, thank you again so much.

• 2:01:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

• 2:01:47Tom Bilyeu?

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