AI Is Coming for Your Job—Elon Musk, OpenAI & The AI Arms Race | Ben Horowitz PT 2

Welcome back to part two of this captivating episode of "Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu," as Tom continues his conversation with the brilliant Ben Horowitz. In this segment, they delve deeper into the intricacies of AI, discussing its finite capabilities compared to human intelligence and what it means for future job markets. They explore the roles of intelligence in leadership, the societal impact of enhanced automation, and the potential of blockchain technology to counteract AI's challenges. As Ben highlights the significance of maintaining a world-class stance in crypto for societal stability in the age of AI, this half of the episode promises to challenge preconceived notions and introduce groundbreaking concepts about the future of technology and humanity. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on how we can coexist and thrive alongside these digital advancements. SHOWNOTES: 13:36 - AI's Limitations Compared to Human Intelligence 17:59 - The Role of Intelligence in Leadership 22:41 - Societal Impact of Automation 27:32 - Blockchain's Role in the Age of AI 33:23 - Maintaining a World-Class Crypto Presence 40:41 - Predictions and Controversial Views on Future Tech FOLLOW BEN HOROWITZ: Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Range Rover: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://rangerover.com/us/sport Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Thrive Market: ​​Go to https:thrivemarket.com/impact http://thrivemarket.com/impact for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift! Tax Network: Stop looking over your shoulder and put your IRS troubles behind you. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://tnusa.com/impact ITU: Ready to breakthrough your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE American Alternative Assets: If you're ready to explore gold as part of your investment strategy, call 1-888-615-8047 or go to https://TomGetsGold.com https://tomgetsgold.com Mint Mobile: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at https://mintmobile.com/impact. https://mintmobile.com/impact DISCLAIMER: Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5 gigabyte plan required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details.  ********************************************************************** 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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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:28Tom Bilyeu?

  We were talking before we started rolling that you guys have an office in DC. And part of what you do is advise on that. Like what, what does the infrastructure changes? What do they need to look like? What are a small handful of things that you guys are really pushing to see the government adopt to modernize the way that the whole bureaucracy works?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's, there's a few things, you know? And one of the things is because of, you know, blockchain technology involves money. We do need, it's not like we don't need any regulation. We do need regulation. And there are kind of very specific things that, that we're working with the administration to make sure are done in a way that kind of creates a great environment for everybody.

• 2:14Tom Bilyeu?

  What are you guys hoping will get blocked out? For instance, is that what you're about to cover?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so like one of the first thing you need is, you know, we do need electronic money, you know, in the form of stablecoin, so actual currency. And but we need that to not like it's very bad if one of those collapses, because then like the whole trust and the system breaks down and so forth. Well, why do we need this kind of money, this this kind of internet native money? Well, I'll give you an example. So we have a company called Daylight Energy. And what they do is, so we're running, we're going to run into a big energy problem with AI that I think most people probably listening to this know

• 3:01Speaker 01

  about where AI consumes a massive amount of energy, you know, much more than Bitcoin ever did, by the way, which everybody was all up in arms about. And, you know, so much so that like, you can't really even get it out of the power grid. And I think Trump has been smart about this, saying, hey, you probably need to build a kind of power next to your data center, because we can't be giving it to you from the central thing. But beyond that, I think that, you know, kind of individuals, you know, now have Tesla kind of solar panels and power walls and these kinds of things. And when you have one of those, you sometimes have more energy than you need, and sometimes have less. And wouldn't it be great if you could, you know, if there was a nice system

• 3:45Speaker 01

  that figured out who needed energy, and who had energy, and you could just trade, and there was some kind of contract that said, okay, this is what you pay during peak, this is what you pay at different periods. And that contract probably best done in the form of a smart contract. But a power wall is not a human, so it doesn't have a credit card, it can't get a credit card, doesn't have a bank account, doesn't have a social security number. But it can trade crypto, it can trade stablecoins.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  And so we need that kind of currency to kind of facilitate all these kind of automated agreements and automated transfer of of of kind of wealth between entities in order to kind of solve these big problems that we have like energy. And so we need a stablecoin bill that kind of says, okay, look, we need these currencies to be backed one for one with US dollars or whatever it is, so that, you know, we can have a system that works and is trusted. Now, there's this really interesting side benefit to that, which is,

• 4:54Speaker 01

  if you look at treasury auctions lately, the demand for dollars is not good. You know, and a lot of that is, you know, the two biggest kind of lenders to the US have been China and Japan. And, you know, China's backed off a lot.

• 5:11Tom Bilyeu?

  A lot.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And Japan has backed off somewhat. And so the demand for dollars has gone down. We've done things to also dampen demand like, you know, when we sanctioned Russia and we seized the assets of the Russian Central Bank, you know, there were other countries that had, you know, other entities that had money there, and their money got frozen and they couldn't access it. And so that makes people more wary of holding everything in dollars. So we've done a lot to dampen that, which of course is, you know, fueled inflation in the same way that increasing supply fuels inflation, killing demand fuels inflation. So here we would have this new major source of demand for dollars. And then the dollars would be much more useful because you can use them online as well. And machines

• 5:56Speaker 01

  can use them and so forth. So we really.

• 5:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And sorry, really fast, for people that are trying to track that, the reason that that would increase the demand for dollars is that they would, the stablecoin would be backed one for one with debt? Is that the idea?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, with, where you would basically have, you would have to have a dollar right at. For for every You hold treasuries. Stablecoin, yeah, you basically hold treasury so that if somebody wanted to redeem their stablecoins, they could. And then that way, you know, it kind of the equivalent of the gold standard in the old days, you know, when dollars were trying to get credible, you know, we would need like dollars to be the gold standard for the stablecoin. You know, and then probably we should never back off of that. Maybe we should never backed off of gold, but you know, it's easier with dollars because we did kind of start to run out of gold a bit.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so that's, you know, one thing. Then, secondly, there's a bill that went through the House known as the Market Structure Bill. It was technically called FIT21. That's a very important, you know, whether it's exactly that or some form of that. Because, you know, when you talk about tokens, which are the this kind of instrument, that's very, very important in blockchain world because it's the way that this amazing kind of network of computers gets paid for. So, you know, who who pays the people for running the the computers? Well, that's paid in the form of these tokens. But these tokens,

• 7:36Speaker 01

  which can be created on blockchain,

• 7:40Speaker 01

  have that they can be many things. So you can create a token that's a collectible, you know, you can create a token that is a digital property, right? You know, that links to, you know, some piece of real estate or a piece of art or so forth. A token can be a, you know, Pokemon card. A token could be a coupon. A token could be a security that represents a stock. It could be, you know, a dollar. So which one is it? Is a very kind of important set of rules that doesn't exist. And this is one of the the most insidious thing that the Biden administration did was basically say, well, everything is a security, everything's a stock.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Or, you know, like something with asymmetric information, which kind of basically undermines the whole power of the technology. And so it was basically a scheme for them to

• 8:41Speaker 01

  kind of get rid of the industry. But it was very, very dark.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  A cynical way of of of legislating things and then they would make these, you know, fake claims about scams and so forth. But the market structure bill is is very, very important in that way. And by the way, also, you know, another thing that was in the original market structure bill, which is important is, look, there are also scams. And there are, you know, and we call it the casino. But, you know, like, I can create some coin like the Haktua girl did, right? Like, and she creates a coin. She kind of lies about, you know, her holdings and says she's going to hold them, but then sells them, you know, after people buy it in a short time frame and so forth. And there's no, you know, part

• 9:33Speaker 01

  of the problem is there's no kind of rules around that. But in the kind of bill that passed the House, it said, like, you can create a token, but if you hold it, you can't trade it for four years. That kind of takes a lot of the ability to scam out of it and kind of forces people to do things that are their real utilities, or if it's a collectible, you know, if it is the Haktua collectible, you know, it's got to be a real collectible where you don't just, you know, rug the users of it right away. And so that, you know, that that's

• 10:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Right away.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:09Tom Bilyeu?

  It's okay to do it later, but

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Well, but, you know, like, in four years, it is what it is, right?

• 10:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I'm just giving you a hard time. I just know how that's going to sound to people.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, thank you. But, you know, so these kinds of things, I think, are are going to be really important to to making the whole industry work. And so we're working, you know, on that, you know, trying to make it safe for everybody. But, as I said, it's just such a critical technology in an AI world, you know, where if we don't have it,

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yes, it's just gonna be like a very kind of problematic. You know, it's gonna be, it's cyberpunk. It's a, it's a, it's a not a, you know, it's a high technology, uh, difficult society.

• 10:58Tom Bilyeu?

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• 11:43Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:27Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:12Tom Bilyeu?

  That's Q U O dot com slash impact.

• 13:18Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. It was shocking to me, the level of backlash that the blockchain web three community got. What do you think drives that? Is it just the perception that it was only scams and there's nothing real? Like, what was that all about?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  So there was multiple factors. So the first one is the one that hits all new technology where,

• 13:43Speaker 01

  oh, it's a toy. It doesn't do anything new, like the old way of doing things is better.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, we saw that with social networking. We actually saw that with the internet. And I mean, I think Paul Krugman famously said, you know, never have more economic impact than a fax machine and so forth. So that's just kind of a normal thing that happens with new technologies as they start out looking not that important. And with crypto in particular, you know, one way to think about crypto blockchain is it's a new kind of computer. And if you think about new kinds of computers, they're always kind of worse in every way, but maybe one than the old computer. And so, you know, if you look at even like the iPhone, it was a bad phone. It had a horrible keyboard. You know, if you compared it to anything, it wasn't very powerful.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  It had a little itty bitty screen. But it had a feature that was pretty awesome, which you could put in your pocket. And it had like a GPS in it and a camera in it. And so now you could build Instagram, you could build Uber, which you could not build with a PC and you still can't build with a PC. And so that was, you know, enough. And then eventually like it started to add the other features and it's an awfully powerful computer these days. If you look at blockchain. It's slower, it's more complicated to program, like there's a lot of issues with it, but it's got a new feature, uh, which is trust, like it can make promises. You can

• 15:17Speaker 01

  trust, like when that code, you know, says there's only 21 million Bitcoin, you can absolutely count on that, uh, in a way that like you can't trust Google, you can't trust, you know, Facebook to say like, oh, these are our privacy rules. Like you can't trust that at all. Uh, you can't trust the US government to say they're not going to print any more money, like that's for sure. And so, you know, here's a computer that can make promises, um, that you can absolutely count on. And you don't have to trust a company. You don't have to trust a country. You don't have to trust a lawyer. You just have to trust the game theoretic mathematical properties of the blockchain. Um, and that's amazing. So

• 16:01Speaker 01

  now you can, you know, program property rights and money and law and all these kinds of things that you could never do before. Um, and so I think that was, that's hard for normal people to understand, uh, who, who aren't deep into technology. And so they get confused and they say, ah, it's nothing, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and then, um, you know, I think the next wave was you had, look, you know, it was a very odd thing, um, with the Biden administration because he wasn't really, I think it's come out now, he wasn't really the president. He wasn't really making any decisions. Um, you couldn't even get a meeting with him if you were in his cabinet. And in terms of domestic policy, that was

• 16:44Speaker 01

  run by Elizabeth Warren. And then the second confusing thing is Elizabeth Warren is always calling like people fascist. Her whole push with fintech and crypto was to make sure that she could kick people out of the banking system who are political enemies. And so in order to do that, you have to outlaw new forms of financial technology because those would be kind of back doors or side doors or, or parallels to the G-sibs and the banking system, which she comprehensively, and I think this is coming out now, could kick people out of. And so when you use, when, when it's a full top down hierarchy and you can use

• 17:26Speaker 01

  private companies to enforce your will, that is, that is the way fascism works. And then the way she does it is she sells this fake story about, you know, it's funding terror. And it turns out like the USAID was funding the terrorist groups, but that's a different story. But, you know, it's, it's doing all these nefarious things, which, you know, was just a very unfair portrayal. And so then the whole industry got this reputation to scam me and this and that and the other. And then, of course, we had Sam Bankman Freed, who didn't do us any favors by,

• 17:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  You know, and, and this is another kind of though issue with what Elizabeth Warren did is she blocked all legislation. And so the criminals were running free and the people doing things that should have been legal were getting terrorized by the government. And when they should have been looking, they should have been looking at FTX, they were looking at Coinbase, which was totally compliant, public company, you know,

• 18:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Begging for feedback. Tell us what you want us to do.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  etc. Exactly.

• 18:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that, that whole thing was crazy. So given that AI is putting us on a collision course with, I don't know who's real. I don't know what's fake. Do you think that blockchain is about to have its day like in the next 12 to 24 months? Or is this still something that it's so embedded deep in the infrastructure, it's going to take a long time to really have its I told you so moment?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I think it's, I think it's within 24 months for sure. I mean, I think that there is enough, you know, there were like actual, like, if you like a kind of last wave of a blockchain, there, there were real technological limitations that made it, you know, I, I think we're slowing it down from getting broader adoption. So, you know, very obvious usability challenges. The fees were really high. The blockchains were slow. So there were just a lot of use cases that you just couldn't do on them. I think that's changing very, very fast. Things are, you know, the, the chains are much faster. The layer two stuff makes them, you know, very fast and cheap.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  You know, people are doing a lot on usability, you know, for wallets and these kinds of things. So I think we're getting pretty close. And then I think the needs are very high. So if you think of something like,

• 19:51Speaker 01

  World coin, you know, to me, the difference between that thing being very broadly adopted and where it is now, where it's, I think, half the people in Buenos Aires use it daily. So like, it's very widely adopted where it's been legal. I think that, you know, if they are able to get integrated into some of the big social platforms, then, you know, like, everybody needs proof of human. And, you know, like, it would make the experience online so much better if you knew who was human and who was not. And right now, like, you can't tell at all. And so, and that problem is going to get worse. And then the solution is really here.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  So, so I think it's going to start to take off. And you only need one or two big use cases to start getting the whole infrastructure deployed. And, you know, once the infrastructure is deployed, you know, I think we'll certainly rely on it.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And if you look at actually the curve of people who have active wallets and the curve of like internet adoption, they're pretty similar.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  You know, it's about, I think blockchain is growing a little faster than the internet did initially. And so I think, you know, we'll get to a place where it's certainly everybody in the US will be on it. Which, by the way, could be great from a government standpoint, you know, Elon has talked about putting, okay, all the government payments on the blockchain, which I think would be really, really good for transparency.

• 21:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  We'd never get into this weird situation now where like, half the country wants to tear down all the government services and half of them wants to keep it because nobody knows what the hell the spending is. But that would be great. But, you know, beyond that, like, if you think about, well, why is there so much waste and fraud? Well, part of it is, you know, like, you know, I get taxed, I give my money to the IRS, the IRS gives it to Congress, they, you know, do whatever they do with it and so forth. And Well, how does it get to the people who need it? You know, that's a very lossy process, you know, and we don't even know who they are. And it's very, you know, one of the things we found out during COVID, the government's not very good at sending people money.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  It's good at taking money. It's not good at sending them money, right? We lost like $400 billion trying to give people stimulus.

• 22:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Ridiculous.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, crazy.

• 22:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Ridiculous.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, like if everybody in the US had an address on the blockchain, you could just tell me, okay, here's 10,000 people who need money. Please send them, you know, $5,000 each. Well, probably that's too much money for me, but you know, something like that. You know, whatever my tax bill is, or whatever that portion of wealth redistribution is, that would be 100% zero loss. By the way, I'd feel a lot better about it because I know I'd be helping people. And, you know, look, maybe even somebody would go, hey, this is great. Thank you. And we're like, maybe we would bring us, we wouldn't have this crazy class warfare because everybody would know, hey, we're all integrated, you know, like I'm helping you, you're helping me.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  And then like if you had that, then you'd fix the whole kind of democracy integrity problem because everybody could vote off that address. And by the way, everybody would have an address because everybody would want the money. So what bigger incentive to register to vote than you, in order to get money, you have to have an address which registers you to vote. And so that kind of thing, I think, could get us to just like a much higher trust in our own institutions.

• 23:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. Yeah, so wow, speaking of that, I wanted to absolutely scream into the abyss when I heard that people couldn't retire from the government faster than the elevator would lower their records down into a mine. I was like, what is happening? What do you take away from, why does Elon want to do this? Why is he sleeping in hallways?

• 24:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Why? Why is he doing this? Is it just to get government contracts and it's nefarious in the way that so many people think it is? Or is there something positive there? What's the, what's the game?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I think there's a couple of different things. So one is, the, the strong thing is he, he truly believes that America's the best country in the world, you know, he is an immigrant.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And that it's not guaranteed to stay that way. And And we have been in danger of losing it. And, you know, and so the most important thing for him to do in order for his companies to be relevant, in order for going to Mars to be relevant, in order for anything he wants to do in life to be relevant is we've got to stabilize the US government. I think that's the main thing driving him, you know. So then you say, well, how did he get to that conclusion that, you know, the whole country is in jeopardy? And it really like, it's a pretty, it was a pretty interesting thing to watch, because right in 2021, I think he was a Democrat, and he was certainly pretty apolitical. And

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I was actually in a chat group with him when he got the idea or posed the question, should he buy Twitter?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And a lot of it stemmed from, you know, it started with the US government just harassing him, which was a very odd thing, right? Like, here's your, I mean, I think you could very well argue he was our most productive citizen. He was our entire space program. He advanced the state of electric cars by 20 years. He's still like 95% of, or something like that, percent of the electric cars sold in the US. Jesus. You know, he's, you know, done the things with Neuralink to, you know, help people like use their arms and legs who have been paralyzed and this kind of thing. So, you

• 25:59Speaker 01

  know, you've got, you know, he's a really kind of remarkable person to want to pick on, but what happened was because he got like this PR for being very wealthy, the Biden administration targeted him, you know, and again, they're fascist. So it's really a power struggle always with the fascist and anybody who looks like they're becoming powerful. And, you know, some of the things they did, and, you know, one of the ones that's talked about a lot was they sued him, the Biden Department of Justice sued him for

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Discriminating against refugees. But he had a contract with the US Department of Defense that required him to only hire US citizens. So he was breaking the law either way. And they they never dropped the lawsuit, even after it was pointed out, even after, you know, it was pointed out by Congress. So it was clear harassment. And I think that his conclusion from that was, you know, this, we are like ironically, I think his conclusion was we're losing the democracy. You know, we're going into this very, very strange world where the incentives are all upside down.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, the way Elon thinks is it's up to him to save it. And so he got like extremely involved. And then I think the more involved he got, the more he both realized like a lot of the things really were dangerous. And then secondly, that he personally would be somebody who would know how to fix it. And you go like, well, why the hell would Elon Musk know how to fix the government and all this? And, you know, this is the thing that everybody's saying now. And it's funny, because I told this to Andreessen years ago, was because I'm a big fan of Isaac Newton.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, like, we always talked about, like, who is Elon like? You know, like, what entrepreneur comes to mind? You know, and it really wasn't, you know, maybe Thomas Edison, but not really. But Isaac Newton Whoa. was really the one that I always thought he was most like. You know, because it's like, OK, who can build like rockets and cars and this and that and the other? But the reason I thought he was like Isaac Newton was at the end of Isaac Newton's life, when I think he was, he was in his late 60s, maybe like 67, 68. And this is, you know, for those of you don't know, Isaac Newton, like, he figured out how the entire world works and wrote it down in a book, you know, called Principia Mathematica,

• 28:41Speaker 01

  which is probably the most amazing work in the history of science. And he did it like entirely by himself. Like he didn't even talk to anybody at this, you know, at the, at the time he wrote it. I think he was trying to figure out what God was or something like that.

• 28:57Tom Bilyeu?

  As you do.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  But so he gets to be, you know, like in his late sixties and the Bank of England has a crisis, which is causing a huge crisis for the whole country, um, which is, uh, there's a giant counterfeiting problem. So the currency is going to be undermined and, uh, England's going to basically go bankrupt. And so they had no idea what to do about it. Um, so they call Isaac Newton because he's the smartest man in the world. Of course you're going to call him. So Isaac Newton, sixty seven year old, like, uh, hermit physicist goes in and he says, okay, I can help with the problem. Make me CEO of the mint. So they make him CEO of the mint, you know, kind of head of Doge,

• 29:39Speaker 01

  whatever. Uh, and he reorganizes the mint in like a week and then fixes the technology in a month and completely makes it impossible to counterfeit. Then he becomes a private eye, uh, and goes into all the pubs where the counterfeiters are, arrests all of them. Then he learns the law and becomes the prosecutor and prosecutes all the counterfeiters and has a hundred percent conviction record. And that, by, by the way, that's Elon. So if you

• 30:12Tom Bilyeu?

  I didn't know that part of his story.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's an amazing thing. Um, and if you look at Elon and Doge, like the, to me, the most remarkable thing about Doge is how he's done it. So if you or I were to say, okay, let's go in and kind of get the waste and fraud out of the government. What do we do? We would like audit the departments or this and that, the other and so forth. No, no, no, no, like not, that's how he thinks. He's like, well, the first thing, like, how do the checks go out?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Like, how is the system designed? Like, when does the money leave the building? And then, oh, it all comes out of one system. Let me have access to that system and I'll look at all the payments. I'm not asking anybody what they're spending. I'm looking at what they're spending. Like, I'm getting to ground truth and then I'm gonna work my way backwards from there. And he's probably, and, you know, so not only is he not unqualified, he's maybe the only person qualified to figure out like, how we're spending $7 trillion. And so, you know, so I, so, you know, he's just a very unique individual. He's also a troll.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  He also likes upsetting people. I get all that. But what he brings to the table is pretty interesting, I would say.

• 31:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I would say very extraordinary. Stay locked in because after the break, we're talking about why the next industrial revolution might be a lot closer than you think.

• 31:55Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. You have also written about another extraordinary historical figure from the Haitian Revolution, a guy named Toussaint.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Toussaint Laverter, yeah.

• 32:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Tell us about him because there's something about this moment, about being a master strategist, about using what you have, being creative, that feels like it's very apropos to this moment.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:25Tom Bilyeu?

  What made his story special?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Toussaint was another one of these characters in history, like, there are certain, I call them like, once in every 400 year type people, where you just don't see them that often. But, so it turns out, like, in the history of humanity, there's been one kind of successful slave revolt that, like, entered in an independent state, which, you know, if you think about...

• 32:54Speaker 01

  The history of slavery, which goes back thousands of years, really kind of from the beginning of written history, like we've had slavery. So it's like a pretty old time construct. And, you know, there's a lot of motivation to have a revolt if you're a slave. But why only one successful one? And it turns out it's it's really hard.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  You know, for to generate an effective revolt if you're slaves, because slave culture is difficult because you don't own, right? If you don't have

• 33:32Speaker 01

  any sense of, you know, owning anything, you don't own your own will, right? Like you are at the kind of pleasure of who's ever running things. So long term thinking doesn't make sense. And what it because like, why plan for next week? It doesn't matter what you plan, like it's not yours. So everything's going to be very short term and short termism is difficult in a military context, because

• 34:02Speaker 01

  in order to have an effective military, there needs to be a trust, right? Like a trust. You know, you have to be able to trust people to execute the order. Like I give an order. It's kind of like the Byzantine generals problem to go back to crypto. Where like, I have to trust that you're going to do the order, or you have to trust that I'm giving the correct order. But trust is a long term idea because it comes from, okay, I'm going to do something for you today because I trust that down the line you'll do something for me. That doesn't really exist in slave culture because there is no long term. So there is no tomorrow.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  And so like, how do you go from that to like running a successful revolution? And then if you look at Haiti at the time?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  You know, you had the French army, the British army, and the Spanish army all in there, kind of fighting for it. So like really well-developed, you know, kind of the strongest militaries of the era, all in that region, all very interested in the sugar, you know, which was quite valuable at the time. So like, how in the world would you ever get out of that? And it turned out, you know, he ended, he was probably the great cultural genius of the last, you know, maybe in history, but certainly the last, you know, several hundred years. And he was able, you know, because he was a person who, although he was born a slave,

• 35:34Speaker 01

  was very, very integrated into European culture because he was so smart. And so the, the person who ran the plantation, kind of took him to all the diplomatic meetings around and so forth. And he got very involved and kind of mastered, you know, European culture, so to speak, and the different subtleties around it. And he started adopting those things and applying them to his leadership. And then, you know, furthermore incorporated Europeans into the slave army. So he would capture, you know, he, he would defeat the Spanish, capture some guys rather than kill them. He'd incorporate, you know, the best leaders into his army.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And he built this very like advanced hybrid fighting system where they used a lot of the guerrilla tech, you know, techniques that he had brought over from Africa. And then he had, you know, combined that with, you know, some of the, the kind of more regimented, kind of disciplined strategies of, of the Europeans. And in building all that, you know, he, he ended up building this massive army and, you know, defeated Napoleon and, and everyone else. And it was like just quite a remarkable story about how he just kind of figured everything out from his principles. And in a way, yeah, that was, you know, kind of very much like Elon in that sense.

• 37:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, one of the things I heard you talk about. Yeah, wildly. But one of the things I heard you talk about that I thought was so ingenious was he would basically use song and sound as like encrypted language. It's really, really.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was, that was, that was like a very cool thing. So, right, remember that this is in the days before telephony or the internet or any of these things, you know, it's pre Alexander Graham Bell and all that kind of thing.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And so, you know, they, they were literally, you know, the Europeans were on like, you know, notes, carrier pigeons, guys running, you know, back and forth and so forth. And so as a result, you know, you kind of needed the army together in one place, just so you could communicate the order. Toussaint, uh, basically, you know, had these, um, drummers in these songs, um, which he could put on top of like, uh, the hill, who could be very, very loud. And then he would separate his army, you know, into like six or seven groups.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  But in the song would be embedded, uh, the order of when to attack and, you know, when to retreat and all these kinds of things. So he had this like super advanced, you know, wide area of communication system that nobody else had. And that, you know, that was a big, uh, big advantage for him.

• 38:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that to me, the reason that that comes up for me now is we have all these new technologies that are coming online. And the person that's going to be able to get outside that box and see something new and fresh is going to be able to use this in, in totally different ways. And while in the final analysis, I think you and I see it very differently in terms of AI's ability to ultimately gobble up, um, what humans can do. But right now, AI is this incredible tool that as an entrepreneur, for me, it has been, ridiculously exciting to, one, see how much farther each of my employees can push their own abilities by using AI. And then it does not take much to prognosticate out, you know, 12, 18 months

• 39:09Tom Bilyeu?

  to understand where the tools are going to be and how much more they're going to let you do. Cause we're largely an entertainment company. So for us to look at that and, uh, just the revolutionary changes, but you can't be trapped inside the old way of thinking. You've got to, like you said, build up from first principles.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a new creative canvas. I think that's like a really great way of thinking about it and that, um, It's like, well, is your creativity going to be used on, you know, kind of frame by frame editing of like a video? Or will it be thinking of like incredible new things you can do in a video ad? That you could never do before and have AI do that for you, you know, like, and so it's a little bit of a readjustment of where you put your creative energy into and the things that are possible and so forth. And I think that's, you know, we're really seeing that across the board. Like in our firm, we're applying a lot of AI and you'd be like, oh, well, is this going to mean,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  you know, like you don't have human investors anymore. And it's actually been like totally the opposite. Like instead of this like painstakingly collecting, you know, all the data needed to put the investment memo together like, yeah, it just does that for you. And then you're just thinking about like, okay, what are the like, the really compelling things about this? Or rather than, you know, trying to track every entrepreneur and like great engineer in our database, the AI is just tracking all those people and letting you know, hey, that guy just updated his LinkedIn profile. Or that guy just put out like a interesting tweet. Maybe you should call him and that kind of thing, which is just like a much more kind of fun part of the game.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  And, and so, you know, like I would say the, the best predictor of kind of how things are going to go or, or more like what's happening now than like the most dystopian view of it that we can possibly think of, which I, I think is where a lot of people go to. And like I said, I think some of that's a name, you know, artificial intelligence. It just sounds, we hate everything artificial, so why do we name it artificial?

• 41:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's too true. Ben, I've enjoyed every minute of this. Where can people keep up with you?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I am B Horowitz on X and you know, that's probably the best thing, we're a16z.com. And I hope you enjoyed it and it was great fun, good fun catching up.

• 41:50Tom Bilyeu?

  It was indeed. And then you also have multiple books that people can read that are extraordinarily well-respected in the field. So also thank you for those.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 42:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, brother. I appreciate it. All right, everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods,

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