How We Really Get to Mars: Space Travel, Human Survival, and the Next 100 Years of Society | Andy Weir PT 1

Tom Bilyeu is joined by Andy Weir, celebrated science fiction author best known for his bestsellers “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” Andy brings his trademark grounded, analytical perspective as he and Tom grapple with one of the most pressing and fascinating subjects of our time: the future of artificial intelligence. In Part 1, Andy breaks down the near- and mid-term landscape of AI’s impact—from industry disruptions and the transformation of art to the coming upheaval in entertainment and personal storytelling. The conversation dives into economic inevitabilities, how AI art upends creative professions, and the paradigm shift awaiting writers, artists, and audiences alike. Andy also unpacks the deeper consequences: Are we heading toward a world without shared cultural narratives? What do ultra-personalized stories mean for society, politics, and how we connect? SHOWNOTES 00:00 Introduction: Andy Weir on grounded sci-fi and AI’s future 04:34 How AI will revolutionize storytelling and end “event entertainment” 06:06 Personalized narrative: When every film is custom-made for you 12:07 What shared values mean in a fractured, AI-personalized world 13:50 Roots of national cohesion before mass media, and the role of religion 15:53 Core documents, slow narrative, and the dangers of centralized change 17:35 Social change, the “woke era,” and decentralized storytelling 18:57 Summing up: Will control of narrative actually break down meaningfully? 21:15 How personal entertainment will always sidestep challenges to belief 22:08 Setting up what’s next: The technological future, material science, and medicine FOLLOW ANDY WEIR: Twitter/X: @andyweirauthor https://twitter.com/andyweirauthor Facebook: Andy Weir https://www.facebook.com/andyweirauthor CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to https://ButcherBox.com/impact https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box! Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Netsuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at https://NetSuite.com/THEORY https://netsuite.com/THEORY iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu 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. ********************************************************************** 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?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. I'm Tom Bilyeu, and this is Impact Theory. We're living in a time when the line between science fiction and science fact is collapsing fast. AI is getting smarter, space travel is getting cheaper, and entire economies are being reshaped by people who understand how to think from first principles and invent the future from scratch. So how do you train your brain to think like that?

• 1:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's exactly why I'm so excited about today's guest. He's not just a novelist, he's a systems thinker, a world builder, and a guy whose work has literally shaped the modern space movement. His books have inspired an entire generation of engineers, astronauts, and entrepreneurs to think differently about what's possible. He's the author of The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and Artemis, and he's got one of the most precise, curious, and inventive minds I've ever encountered. If you've ever wanted to reverse engineer genius, this episode is your chance. So lean in, get ready. This is Andy Weir. As a grounded sci fi writer, how do you think that AI is going to change society in the next five years, 25 years, and 100 years?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  In the next five years, I think we're looking at some disruptions in certain industries. Like, for instance, right now, they're still kind of working out how AI and AI art is going to be perceived. Like, a lot of people say, oh, AI art is bad because it samples, you know, from millions of pieces of art that it sees online, and those creators don't get any credit, they don't get any royalties, they don't get any money. And so there's a big moral issue related to that. And so there'll be that kind of fight. But I think in the end, like, the technology solution that is easier and cheaper for everyone is the one that always wins. So I think, over the next five years, people will argue

• 2:55Speaker 01

  about whether or not it's okay to train AI on human-made stuff, and hey, what about me? Do I get credit for that? And then, probably within, probably within the next five years even, five to 10 years, that argument is just going to go away. I think people are going to just accept that, okay, AI is, AI can train on human art in the same way that humans train on human art. I mean, every artist out there, there's nobody who, like, learned how to do their craft in a vacuum. They looked at other artists' stuff. So, your brain is a neural network, why do you get to do this, but an artificial neural network doesn't? Eventually, it's going to go away, and it's going to be extremely disruptive

• 3:35Speaker 01

  to the graphic arts industry. Because now, I don't need to hire an artist to draw something for me, as long as it's not something precision, or, you know, with legal ramifications. If I just want an image of a crowd cheering for my product, or something like that, I can have a computer make that, and then I can own that image. And that's it. And so, as a company, if I was trying to make advertisements or something like that, it sounds a lot better to get those results in one second and pay, you know, $10 a month than it is to get those results in, you know, two months and pay $5,000. There's just no-

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Um. One thing I'm sure that you know as much as anyone else or probably more is that like it something that makes things cheaper for businesses always ends up taking over. It always ends up being the way things go and protectionism never works. I mean, now we're getting into like economic theories and I'm a sci fi writer, so maybe I shouldn't get too deep into that, but I feel like uh I I think of economics as like a type of physics. And you can imagine money flow as being kind of like energy. It always tries to go to the lowest energy state. So one way or another, the economically wise thing ends up being the socially acceptable thing. And that's that's been true throughout all history.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  So even though a lot of artists will get kind of screwed in the short term. I think that that's eventually people are going to stop talking about it. And that that issue is going to go away. And then the artists will be, some of them will do human made art for the purpose of being artistic. And others, the now artists will be the people who use the AIs to refine and make better looking images than a layman can. Um, that's what I always say is like for any disruptive technology that puts jobs and careers out of business. It also creates jobs and careers. So, you know, for, you know, artists might lose their jobs, but then they will be the ones who are

• 5:45Speaker 01

  who already have the built in skill set to understand what looks good. And say like, no, no, I'm going to tell the AI do this instead. No, no, okay, I'm going to give you these little tweaks. They'll become, you know, the kind of super users, the people who know how to use an AI to to do this stuff. I mean, kind of like in the same in the same vein of like, I you could do all sorts of amazing things with Photoshop, but you have to have skills. You have to know how to do them. So I think that's what we're going to see in the next five years of the transition. From those things out in the next 25 years, I think we're going to see a big tumultuous changes in the entire entertainment industry.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Um, my prediction is that um, the concept of event-based entertainment is gonna not go away, but it's gonna kind of go the way of horsemanship. It'll be, it'll go from something everybody did to something that's kind of a niche interest. Cause the notion of like, oh, Avengers Endgame is coming out uh, on such and such a date. We're all gonna see it. It's gonna make billions in dollars and everybody's gonna love it. Everybody's gonna be talking about it. Everybody's gonna be like, oh, what'd you think about this scene? That scene, that scene, it's like an event that happens that affects millions of people, not like a tumultuous event, just an entertainment event. But I think those days are gonna go away.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  I think what's gonna happen is eventually you're gonna have, you know, we're talking in the 25-year timeframe now, we're gonna have AIs that can write stories as well as people can. I think that's pretty straightforward. An AI can read a billion books and say like, okay, I know, I understand how stories get put together and I can write a story that does this or that or the other thing. Then you're also gonna get AIs that learn what you are all about. Like, so you'll have on your computer an AI assistant or something like that, just in the same way that your, that your search engine knows like what products you're interested in. This AI will know what you like and don't like in entertainment, what you, what you

• 7:50Speaker 01

  think, what your opinions are, political, ideological, personal, what things you think are cool and interesting, what things you think are lame and boring, based on your view and activity history. Then you will have on your system, um, it will be able to write a story that you personally will think is awesome. Maybe the guy sitting next to you would think it's lame. Maybe everyone in the world would say, this is a dumb story. I don't understand why anybody would like this, but it doesn't matter. This thing makes a story for you. And then it can also create it as a film. You know, it can create all the imagery, it can create the animation, it can do everything. And so imagine if whatever your favorite movie in the world is, imagine that, and

• 8:30Speaker 01

  imagine you tell your AI, you know, like, I wanna see um, a sequel to that movie. You know, and, and maybe your favorite movie in the world is one that was AI-generated. It's, you know, about purple bunnies on the planet Zorbak, whatever. And like, everybody says, like, why do you even like that? And it's like, I don't know. I just, I think it's cool, the way the taller purple bunny is like manipulating the, whatever, you know? And so eventually, I think entertainment will become a, a very personalized experience. Like, you will be, you will be watching a movie that was made for you and for no other consumer.

• 9:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think there'll be societal consequences to having a lack of shared narrative?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Well, people will still communicate about, you know, the real world. But lack of shared narrative, I think what it'll do is it'll actually remove narrative control out of the hands of, of a few. Like, so right now, the people who make the movies, the people, you know, who create the entertainment and kind of guy, attempt to guide your worldview. And I think we're seeing a lot of that right now. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I, I try never to do that, but

• 9:42Speaker 01

  ideology and messaging put into storytelling. And it seems like that, I think, I think it's kind of an issue in the industry lately, is that messaging is taking a front seat ahead of entertainment and plot development and stuff like that. I try never to have any political messaging in my stuff. But regardless of that, it is definitely there. And what this means that you have a small cloistered group of people who live in their own kind of political bubble. And they get to determine the messaging that's happening across the board in both television and film industry. Just in every way, but that's going to go away when it becomes completely democratized, right?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And we've seen that to a smaller extent with like, for instance, news media. How there used to be just three news networks. You could watch ABC, CBS or NBC. That's when I was a kid, you know? That's it. Those, those, that was, that was all the news you could watch. But now there are specialist news channels that can cater to the far right, far left, middle right, middle left, whatever. And so everybody gravitates toward those news channels that, that keep them in their own bubble.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  This is not the case with entertainment. You still have one kind of monolithic entity, mostly Hollywood, where people tend to be fairly like-minded. There's a little bit of disagreement, but they tend to skew left. It happens to be left, but in the 50s, it was they skewed very far to the right. So it's like whatever Hollywood feels is what you see in all the entertainment that gets created and validated. And that'll just go away. There won't be an arbiter of messaging in entertainment anymore.

• 11:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you think about that, do you have any anxiety over the fact that there won't be this top-down coordinated, this is our value system, everybody. And if you're not on board with this, there's a problem. Do you see any downside to that breaking down?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  No, not at all. I think it's great. I'm sort of an evangelist for this, but I feel like, or just the way I write and the way I consume entertainment is I just want to be entertained. I don't want to be preached at. I don't want to be told what my morals should be. I don't want to, I don't want to be made to think about anything unless that's the sort of thing that I'm trying, going out of my way to watch. I just want to, I watch entertainment to have fun, to enjoy myself, you know? And if I want the entertainment equivalent of like fast food, then that's what I want. And, you know, I don't want someone, if I go to McDonald's, I don't want them to say like, here's your Big Mac and

• 12:23Speaker 01

  here's your broccoli. And I'm like, well, I didn't want broccoli. It's like, well, we went ahead and mixed the broccoli in with your Big Mac because it's better for you. I'm like, I don't want what's better for me. I want what I'm going to enjoy. Okay? Stop trying to make things better for me. I came here with a purpose and I want to eat a Big Mac. You know, so I think it's great. I think entertainment should be, in my opinion, about being entertained. I mean, in the end, it's like, this is a leisure time activity that you're doing for fun. Watching video, watching a movie, reading a book, whatever. And you should get to be the one who decides how much, if any messaging

• 13:03Speaker 01

  there is. If you really want it, you can ask your AI, oh, I want an action movie, but I want it to have social overtones about wealth divide. Please, please include that. Then it will.

• 13:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:39Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. So when I look at that, one of the things that I think a lot about is there's a guy named James Burnham, who wrote this book called The Machiavellians. And in the book, he puts a lot of things forward, but one of the most important is that the only way to get a large group of people to work together in a flexible manner is to have a shared narrative, so that everybody understands,

• 16:03Tom Bilyeu?

  what do we as a tribe believe, where are we pointed? And that there's something in the architecture of the human mind that they want to follow somebody. And so when I think through, what does the world look like? Because I think you're right, that this is all going to be individualized, that everybody's going to be engaging with everything at the level of, this is how I want it, this is how I want my news. I want my news to skew left, or I want my news to skew right. I want to see the things that I already believed to be echoed back to me. And now what you end up with is this massive spectrum. Rather than people falling into these easy camps, you have people all across the spectrum. And so I can't help but go, huh. If for all of human history, we have looked up to the leaders, the leaders through story, through political maneuvering,

• 16:48Tom Bilyeu?

  they always gave us a direction to move in. And when we wanted opposition, it was like very controlled opposition. It's, you know, the left versus the right. It's a very simplified notion. That there's an inevitable sort of scattering of humans, because I think they will still want to tribe up. And as the tribes become increasingly niche, then how do we move forward effectively? And I think that there's going to be an element of chaos that will come from people not having a shared narrative. Now, I'm with you, I don't want it to be forced, but I do see an inevitable cultural fractionating happening

• 17:29Tom Bilyeu?

  due to the way the AI will be so singular in its message delivery.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Interesting. I kind of disagree with you a little bit on that because I think that, or rather, I don't disagree with you. I guess I disagree with that book a bit. If you go back to the era before mass communication, we have always had nations. We've always had countries. I mean, we had World War I. We were this vast country. We were the United States, 3,000 miles across. And the fastest form of communication was the letter being delivered by train, right? And we still were a cohesive nation that had core ideologies that we held together. It didn't need a daily reinforcement of narrative control from a centralized source. There wasn't one.

• 18:19Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. I would say that would make it easier because now whatever becomes the dominant story that's being passed on, which was traditionally via religion. Religion gave you the oversimplified story that everybody could get behind. So we are around these parts. We are Christian. We're Catholic. We're Muslim, whatever. But you had a sort of the ultimate self-help book that gave you an instruction manual for life, and it got passed on through the churches. And there was nobody that could fight for your opinion. Like, the odds that you even heard about an alternative way to view life or an alternative value stack was next to impossible for the reasons that you laid out. So, yeah, I think that, again, both of us are obviously just prognosticating,

• 19:01Tom Bilyeu?

  but I feel like, knowing what I know about the way the human mind works, it seems inevitable that there will be some sort of second and third order consequence to there not being these really tight shared narratives, which all tie to this moment. Part of why people say we live in this post-truth moment is that it is extremely hard to define what is, once you get outside of physics, what is objectively true. Most of it's just human interpretation. And so if most of life is human interpretation, and now that human interpretation of what life is, what it means, what one ought to pursue becomes so individualized, feels like something weird, or at a minimum, something unexpected is going to happen from that.

• 19:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Again, just breaking apart into these individual narratives.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can see what you're saying, but I still have to go back and say that we've, we've, we've lived in that world before. And yes, it's true. There's the overarching ideology and belief system of like Christianity was prevalent all throughout the United States in the 1800s and early 1900s. But people in, you know, people in Maine didn't have a lot of interaction with people in California, right? They didn't, they didn't, you know, react on, they didn't interact on a daily basis or on an hourly basis like we do now. So basically, those were two completely isolated societies that had like nothing

• 20:30Speaker 01

  to do with each other. Now, when you become, I think part of being a nation back then was a smaller list of core ideologies. And for the United States, they're all codified in the Constitution. So that's like the one thing we, we say, okay, so that document there, that's, that's how we do things here in this whole big country. So you're right, there's that central thing, but it's static. It's not constantly shifting. When you have a group of people in charge of a narrative and those people can change it any way they like, that's when I think the concept of a central narrative control becomes disruptive

• 21:11Speaker 01

  for society. Because you have a core group of people that can kind of suddenly change morality. Like, we saw this a lot with, I mean, I don't know what people are going to call this era in entertainment. Some people use the word woke a lot. Some people hate it if you say the word woke. But it's going to have some kind of name, like the woke era, or something like that. And people are going to study it in the future because it's like similar to McCarthyism. Things suddenly changed, to the point where something that you said 10 years ago, wouldn't have upset or had any effect on anybody. And now if you say that exact same sentence, your entire career will be over and your life

• 21:52Speaker 01

  will be ruined. So, social change at that pace only happens when you have a core, small group of people controlling the narrative, I believe. And when those people either suddenly changed their mind, or those people suddenly changed, like they're new people now, um, that that can't happen when you democratize ideology across everybody, you know, each individual computer, you know, if it's your computer is no longer, YouTube or the movie industry or something like that is no longer feeding you a narrative. Instead, it's just like, okay, you wanted, you wanted a movie that was at least 50% car chases. There you go.

• 22:34Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So let me break down, make sure that I understand what you're saying. Tom, the problem historically has been that people can control the narrative and having that kind of top down control is deeply problematic. You can sway morality. And the fact that people were not aware of what's going on over here or over here, there was a, they fell into a bit of a trap in that once somebody gets a hold of that narrative, it's all they know. And so they're going to succumb to that. Now, what we're seeing is sort of the end of that as AI is coming on board, people are going to be unshackled from the top down

• 23:13Tom Bilyeu?

  narrative control. People are going to be able to, I guess, have freedom of choice in terms of how they begin to structure the narrative under which they live. And you're not seeing any negative second and third order consequences that come from that.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say I'm not seeing any negatives. I'm just saying that that's, I think, so far, I think that that is, as far as I've taken it in my mind right this second, is that I don't see that it's bad to have the central narrative structure toppled. If you want to talk about second and third order effects, it's like, well, we already have with the democratization of communication, thanks to the internet, we have people able to self sort into niches of ideology and belief. Whereas it used to be if you didn't believe the moon landing happened, you'd be the only guy in, you know, for 10 city

• 24:10Speaker 01

  blocks that had that opinion. And people would say, you're crazy. But now you can find all the other people who think that way, and you can all hang out together and talk to each other and reinforce your belief system. And you could not do that any other time earlier in history. You could never, uh, the, you know, the, the town lunatics couldn't form a town lunatics chat group, you know, with one lunatic per town. It didn't work that way. So now they can. So there's the, all the downsides, the democratization of information means that people can form a bubble where it turns out their core assumptions are wrong, like objectively wrong, but can't tell them otherwise. Um.

• 24:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think AI speeds that up or slows that down?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I think it would speed it up because people are never going to tell a subordinate to challenge their beliefs, right? Nobody ever, or it's very rare for when somebody has like something, you know, like, like for instance, people watch movies. If, if you know that a movie is like pressing an ideology that you disagree with, you're probably not going to watch it at all. Um, you, people don't deliberately choose to have their ideology challenged. So if you can tell your computer, hey, I want to watch a movie. It's an action movie. I want there to be gunfights and good guys and bad guys. And maybe, maybe, maybe somebody goes to space, you know, whatever. You're not going to have it say, oh, by the

• 25:38Speaker 01

  way, I'm pro-choice and I want this movie to have a strong pro-life message. You're, you're not going to do that.

• 25:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it is going to exacerbate that. I think it's, um, the thing that I have a hard time wrapping my head around is just how far does that go? How fragmented do we become? How many tribes do we break into? Um, but so, all right, staying in the 25 year range, I would love as, as an author who has done an absolutely profound job, and for people that have not read your books, uh, I am screaming from the rooftops, please, for the love of God, if you like sci-fi, read Andy Weir's books. It is some of my all time favorite sci-fi. Uh, but talk to me, you're very good at grounding things and what is real. What do you see happening in, say, material science over the next, um, 25 years? And if you can encapsulate that in what your base assumptions are about

• 26:30Tom Bilyeu?

  what AI will be able to achieve, um, I think that would be really helpful.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  The better that AI gets at, um, making physical models.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  The better we're all gonna be because eventually, you know, they're already using, they've already got, what is it, AlphaFold?

• 26:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it used to be they they only knew how a few proteins folded. Now they know like 200 million of them because it can just solve it. And because it's it's AI that's made specifically for figuring out how a protein is gonna fold. Eventually, here here's some ideas I have for things that we might see in the next 25 years that AI will do. First off, AI will be able to say like, you're like, okay, here's a new virus that's going around. You know, it would be, you know,

• 27:19Speaker 01

  COVID, you know, 32 or whatever, right? And he's like, here, here, here's a new virus that's going around. We've sequenced the RNA genome. Okay, AI, what do we do about this? And the AI is like, well, first off, I know the shape the virus is gonna be because he told me the sequence. So now that's how it goes together. Okay, now I can model it working on human cells and see how it's interacting with human cells. And then I can say like, oh, here is, here is the antigen that would take care of that problem that your body would make over time anyway. Here's how to manufacture it. Here, here's the answer. Like, and it'd be like, it'd be ridiculous. It'd be like, oh, here's a new disease. And then like an hour later, the computer is like, here's the vaccine.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Just put this sequence of genomes together, throw it in some E. coli so that it'll like math produce it for you. And then then there you go. Let me know if you need anything else. And I also think we might see 25 years might be a little optimistic for this, but be in the middle of that 25, somewhere between 25 and 100. We get like, where they say like, okay, AI, Bob here has cancer. And it's an aggressive form, a small cell carcinoma that's from his lungs. And we've taken one of the cancer cells and sequenced the entire DNA genome of that cell, of that one cell by, you know, with lab equipment. And the, you know, the, the AI goes like, okay, here's the cancer cell.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Here's how it's working. What would disrupt it? How does it differ from healthy lung tissue? And, okay, I've designed a variant of the influenza virus that attacked lungs, tissue cells that only attack the cancer version. Here you go. Inject this in the patient, depress its immune system so that it doesn't kill it. And then this virus will go kill all the cancer cells only. Like, I mean, this is the sort of stuff that you can expect AI to be able to do because AI is really good at, if there's a cloud of seemingly infinite possible solutions, AI is very, very good at narrowing that down to tangible, real solution.

• 29:28Tom Bilyeu?

  More with Andy Weir after the break. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies

• 30:13Tom Bilyeu?

  already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 30:35Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Yeah, yeah, now you're you're getting into stuff that gets me super excited. One, you talked about AI being able to build physical models. Do you think that there is a rate limiter on the amount of intelligence that AI can gain? And if not, do you believe that AI will ever be able to understand physics to the point where it can make novel breakthroughs in physics?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I think it absolutely can. I mean, will be able to. Yeah. You got to remember, it's like people think that human brains are somehow magical and handed to us by the Lord. But you're just a neural network. So anything that you can do is something that a neural network can do by definition. Right? So the real question I think you're getting at is at what point do, you know, at what point will we have AIs that are comparable in complexity and intellect to a human brain? Well, a human brain has about 80 billion neurons. So.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And a few billion years of evolution, figuring out exactly how to connect them for an optimal, well. I mean, the vast majority of your brain is, you know, figuring out how to not be eaten by wolves and and stuff like that. But an AI doesn't have to worry about that as much. But the point is, there is nothing that a human brain can do that that AI won't be able to eventually do. Because the human brain is just a neural network, literally. That's it. And so is AI.

• 32:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that we will just need to continue to scale the clusters plus increase efficiency and will hit artificial superintelligence? Or?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  We don't have the technology to do that right now, but I think AI will help us make that technology. It'll say, you know, it'll start off with like we're at our kind of alpha levels of AI. And we'll start off with humans trying to figure out, okay, you know, it would be cool is if we could make the smaller, use less energy, more efficient, stuff like that. And here are like 100 billion possible ways it might work. You were talking about material science. That's a big part of it. And then use AI to narrow it down and AI you end up figuring out, oh, I bet you I could make a better AI this way. Then you make that better AI. And then for that better AI, you could say like, hey, start working on making an even better AI. It's like, okay, I'm on it, you know?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And so it it can bootstrap itself up, which is something unique. It's not something that happened in nature. Or did it? Or did it? Because our brains are neural networks and we're sitting around trying to figure out how to make better neural networks.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  So you could say that we're already like the singularity began a few million years ago when human minds started to become vastly superior to all the other animals on the planet. You could say that was the beginning of the singularity. Took us a little while to get to this next step. Where this neural network is working on new neural networks that are better than it, but you know, it's kind of like, uh, what do you like the

• 33:47Speaker 01

  life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago, but it was only like two billion years ago or something that we had anything more complicated than a single cell. You know, there's a little dead period for a while sometime before you get that exponential spike. I see all sorts of like big benefits coming in a hundred year span. Is that where you were going next? Sorry.

• 34:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, first, before we get to that, but yes, I very much want to hear your take on that. What is the rate limiter that you see right now? That you think AI is going to have to help us overcome because you said, I don't know that we have the technology to do it now. We're going to need AI for that. Do are you already aware of like where we're going to hit a ceiling?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it'll it'll have to do with computational power, like the ability to run massive parallel neural networks. So the next thing they'll be doing now is because AI is still very fresh. You know how when they first invented graphics? You know, you know, really high resolution graphics, really good stuff on your monitor. They did everything algorithmically. Then they figured out how to make graphics cards. And then they figured out how to make graphics cards like wildly parallel because they figured out how to make it so that, oh, graphic every, every pixel is basically its own little computer, like doing this pixel shader algorithms. And then people started to use graphics cards to do all sorts of weird things unrelated to graphics, like trying to mine Bitcoin or whatever, because of the massive parallel nature of graphics cards.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  I think the next thing that's going to happen is they're going to start inventing hardware that is optimized for running neural networks. I mean, we already have some of that, but it's always very specially made in labs and stuff like that. But I think eventually we're going to have the graphics card equivalent of neural networks. And I'll be like, okay, here's, here's your neural network card or your AI card that's just got the hardware necessary to, to really, really quickly and efficiently run massive numbers of parallel nodes of AI. I think that that's kind of one of the limiters we have right now. So you can think of us as being kind of like video games before we had graphics cards. You know, like we're in our Duke Nukem 3D phase where absolutely every pixel had to be

• 35:53Speaker 01

  calculated by the CPU instead of a graphics card.

• 35:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. So it's going to take more tailored technology to run this stuff more efficiency efficiently. Um, okay, that's a fair assumption. Now, admittedly, I am not close enough to the technology to know if what I'm about to say is pure delusion. But when I look at like the recent demonstration that Elon put together with their supercluster, where people thought, I don't know if it's going to be easy to keep making these bigger. And if you're going to get any benefit out of making them bigger. And then he effectively doubled the size and is now doubling it again and showing that you really can continue to daisy chain these. So supposedly big breakthroughs coming there just on the things we already understand. Then on top of that, you've got DeepSeek coming in and saying, you guys are playing

• 36:41Tom Bilyeu?

  the wrong game. This is a game about compression and efficiency. And look what we've been able to do just by improving the compression. And literally just a couple of days ago. So they came out like January 16th or something, blew everybody away. Everybody was freaked out at how inexpensive certainly the final leg of their training was. And said, okay, game of efficiency, they're playing it better than we're playing it in the US. But now they just came out with another one and like re-up the level of efficiency that they're able to get. And they're able to, according to certain benchmarks, hit ChatGPT 4.0 levels on a 1.5 billion parameter model, which is crazy, given the size of the big models, like 70 billion plus parameters.

• 37:26Tom Bilyeu?

  So to be able to. On a benchmark, which again is different, but on a benchmark to still be able to match the performance of something so many times bigger, do you think we'll continue to pull down the level of computation that's necessary by developing more efficient algorithms?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yes, but not at the absurd rate we're seeing right now. We are at the very, very beginning of this new technology. And right at the beginning of any new technology, you see this tremendous spike in efficiency, cost effectiveness, all these things like that. I want you to consider how much the aviation industry changed between 1935 and 1965. In 1935, you had propeller driven planes, very, very small amounts of like commercial air travel, just not a lot going on. And by 1965, you had jets that could take you from New York to London. And it was like routine and even boring. Like, in the early days of the aviation industry, we had just wildly tremendous advances that

• 38:29Speaker 01

  you might think, holy crap, this is moving so fast. I mean, we went from figuring out how to do powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years.

• 38:38Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Right. But then, since then, it hasn't changed that much because what happened was we got all the low hanging fruit. It's like, wow, here's all the things you can do. Okay, yeah, we figured all that out. Now it's all about like, okay, how can we use like carbon fiber to make the holes a little lighter? How do we make, you know, the engines more fuel efficient? How do you know, it's like they're figuring, there, there, there's some asymptote that represents solving air travel. And there, we're always approaching it now. But man, right at the beginning, it's crazy. AI, I think, like any technology is going to be the same. We're right at the beginning. So we're going to see these, oh yeah, mine's twice as better, twice as strong as yours. Oh yeah, well, mine's twice as strong as that one. Oh, mine's twice as strong as that one. Eventually, it's gonna be like,

• 39:19Speaker 01

  oh, okay, now we're just fighting over minor scraps. But I think that's good. We're, we're rapidly.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Rapidly getting rid of all the low hanging fruit we can do before we get to the more difficult aspects of AI stuff. Earlier, you mentioned something, we flew by it and didn't talk about it again, but the idea of how AI can affect materials technology. I'm pretty excited by that because I think materials technology is the solution to a lot of issues. Most notably, for my favorite thing, space travel. The most efficient possible spacecraft fuel is just hydrogen and oxygen. The simplest possible thing. It has a tremendous amount of specific impulse. It has a huge amount of heat and force generated just by burning hydrogen and oxygen. One of the simplest reactions there are, and we have a lot of that. All you have to do is use electricity

• 40:12Speaker 01

  on water and you get hydrogen and oxygen. Then you let the rocket put it back together really, really fast and hard, right? So it gives us a method by which we can spend energy that we create however we really we like on Earth and ultimately turn that into propulsion on a rocket. Okay, it's great. So why aren't we doing that? Well, we are, for the most part, we are. They're always like a variant of the hydrogen oxygen reaction. But hydrogen oxygen, if you just let it go with no limiter, it burns so hot that it'll melt any engine. Like, it'll melt whatever it's in. It just gets so damn hot. They have to deliberately kind of calm it down, put other things in there, maybe things that it can kick out the back to add a little more kick of propulsion,

• 40:56Speaker 01

  but they don't let it go wild, right? Because if you did, they can't dissipate the heat away. They just can't get rid of it fast enough. They can't cool the engine enough at the beginning to make it, it's just, it'll melt everything that we have. Now imagine if you, imagine if you developed a material that was hard, that could put up, that could stand up to a lot of force, could stand up to a lot of shock, and wouldn't melt, or at least not at those temperatures. Then, commercial space travel is just like invented that day. Like, literally, if you invent that material, you will have, like, within two or three years, you will have, you know, tickets to low Earth orbit for middle-class person. I strongly believe that.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so materials technology is so many things just come down to materials technology.

• 41:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. Yeah, no doubt. Okay, so I assume you're watching SpaceX. Do you, are they talking about that kind of thing? Because they've said, look, we've built all this without AI. Now imagine what we're going to be able to do with AI. Do you know, is that the kind of thing that they're pursuing or this isn't really on?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I don't know if they're pursuing it, but I imagine this sort of materials technology wouldn't be invented by a purpose driven company. It would be invented in a lab somewhere. It would be invented by material scientists who then use AI to figure out, okay, well, let's see. I remember I saw a, I went to JPL, yeah, JPL and I did a tour and a bunch of Caltech labs as well. I was there during the height of the Martian when people cared who I was. And like, I went and saw the thing, there was one group, I wish I could name the doctors involved and all this. But I can't remember even the name of the group, but what they were doing was they were trying to find better superconductors. Right. They're trying, or better conductors in general.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And they were just doing it with this kind of brute force approach where they're just, okay, we're going to try all these combinations of these four elements in different proportions and stuff like that. And we're going to check the conductivity and stuff like that. And then like, but that takes a long time to mix these things together and do all this. I mean, we want to do millions of different variations and check them out. And what they've done is they'd repurpose this old school printer from like the 1970s that had this really robust inkjet thing and they changed it such that it's shooting the powder of these metals down. And so they're printing little dots onto, onto like a ceramic sheet or something like that of different proportions of these metals.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And they bake it so it mixes together. So all these little dots of metal that they're basically printing. And then they have like a thing, a sample of thing go and test the conductivity of each one of those dots. And you see, how's it doing? Did we, oh, this one's interesting. Okay, now I keep going. I just thought that was amazing, but imagine if you could virtualize that. Imagine if you could figure out atomic interactions, although, you know, how, you know, what's going on inside of metals that are coming together to become better conductors and all these alloys and stuff. What if you could simulate that with AI? And then you could say, tell the AI, okay, spend, I don't know, the next year trying

• 44:07Speaker 01

  these billion possible variations and in your modeling, tell me which one has the best connectivity.

• 44:15Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that to me is very interesting. Um, when we were talking about protein folding, one of the things we didn't touch on is that AlphaFold can actually predict novel proteins. And say, oh, make a protein that moves like this. Uh, and given what proteins do in the body, that is pretty phenomenal because now you can get novel things to happen inside of a cell based on creating these novel proteins. Seeing them do the same thing, uh, like you said, in a simulation so that they can move really fast. Test a lot of these things. Uh, would be very interesting to see what that outputs. Now, when you think about this for space travel, okay, that's one thing. When you start thinking about this inside of a biological system.

• 44:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, does that raise any ethical concerns for you? Like if I said, hey, uh, I think in the next 25 years, and I actually do believe this. That you're going to have designer babies or certainly the ability to design a child. Um, do you think at all about that? Do you worry about that? Is that something that you'd want to see? Um, some tight restraint put on, or is that an exciting part of the future for you?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  I think that's exciting. I think because the first quote unquote designer babies will be like, hey, me and my, me and my wife both carry the recessive Tay-Sachs gene. We'd like it if our baby didn't have that. Because that means you die by age 10 or whatever. My wife and I both carry the sickle cell anemia gene and we'd like our child not to hit that one in four chance of sickle cell anemia death, you know? So those are going to be the first designer things, correcting invariably fatal genetic flaws. And nobody's really going to argue about that, right? Nobody's going to say, no, no, no, you must make a baby that will suffer for five years and die, right? The question becomes, the only ethical, now, now we're talking morality, right? So there is no objective truth on this, but for me,

• 46:07Speaker 01

  the only real ethical concern is, are you sure you're not going to introduce some other problem into this baby that's going to make, that's going to make their life? Painful or unhappy or unpleasant. Like, it's like, hey, I want my baby to have blue eyes and dark hair and maybe olive complexion skin and I want to be really tall. I want to be like six foot tall when he's an adult. And, uh, you know, da, da, da, da. And they're like, okay, we made all those changes. Unfortunately, he has this, he has Crohn's disease because, yeah, we didn't, yeah, we made some mistakes or whatever. We, you know, we changed these things. Turns out that gives him Crohn's disease. That's the ethical concern that I'm worried about. So that, I mean, a

• 46:50Speaker 01

  lot of people would, would disagree with what I just said. A lot of people would say like, no, if you're changing a human being at all, you're messing with God's domain and you're, you're, you're doing a morally bad thing. My personal opinion is that it's only morally bad if you cause human suffering. So if you, um, as long as you are sure that what you're doing isn't going to end up making a human that has to suffer as a result, that, that would be, I think.

• 47:16Tom Bilyeu?

  If we're able to use AI to create a simulation of human biology, full stop, like it knows it top to bottom, all the different interactions, how protein folding works, how novel proteins work, all of that can read DNA perfectly, understands, um, the epigenetics of it all as well, just really, really has a full blown picture of how this is going to work. And we could begin to optimize, not, not the sick, but we could actually optimize, uh, a child for whether it's higher intelligence, which, um, there was a big kerfuffle with a, um, Chinese doctor that did gene editing, who he claimed it was about reducing the likelihood of HIV, but people were like, huh, but it's also likely to make them more intelligent.

• 48:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Would you, is that something you would want to see?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I want to know what the mistakes are. When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash, right? So I want to know what, I, I would, I would be very cautious with any sort of human related experimentation because I believe the most valuable thing on earth is the human experience, right? And so I think that whatever you're going to do with your design your baby, as long as you're not causing human suffering. I'm probably okay with it, but I really want you to be sure that you're not going to cause that child to suffer, either as a baby or as an adult. Right.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, and then you start getting into all these, you know, moral or ethical things of like, well, how much right does a parent have over their child's body and so on? And, you know, someone might be like, you know, I'm, I'm deaf, my wife is deaf, that's the lifestyle we've chosen, that or that's the lifestyle we have. There are deaf activists, you know, and some people might say, I want our baby to be born deaf. And then you say like, well, hang on, you know, so now you're talking about giving deliberately giving a disability to a child. But those, the deaf activists would say, it's not a disability, it's a lifestyle choice. How is it any different than circumcision? You know?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  And, you know, so that's where you start getting into those morally gray areas. And I'm not interested in arguing about those because I'm, I'm far more interested in the science. But those are the arguments that people will be having. So that's my prediction for the future. A couple of other things when it comes to designer genes, you were talking about novel, novel proteins. Well, imagine, I don't think we're too far away from novel proteins being able to go modify your DNA. Like, let's say you are a 40 year old man and you have, I don't know, some genetic problem, right? And then maybe they could make a novel protein that can literally go in and change the DNA of every cell in

• 50:10Speaker 01

  your body. Like, it just goes in and all this protein does is enter the cell, make that change and then die. You know, like, and what if it could be like, you could, you could, like, you could just no longer have the Tay-Sachs gene, you could no longer have anemia, you could, whatever, whatever, I'm coming up blank on genetic disorders, but you see what I'm saying? What if you could actually solve that? Then we get into things of like, okay, awesome. What about cosmetics? I want to be black. I think it'd be cool. I think black skin is beautiful and I want my skin to be black. So I can put in this, I can inject myself with this novel protein that will go actually change the melanin, the melanin production in my skin and I will become as black as a natural African man.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  A lot of people would really get upset about that. And I'm like, why? This is my body. Who are you to tell me what I can do with it? Who are you to tell me what I can and can't look like? I'm not even making a decision for a child here. This is me making a decision for me. You know, so there's an interesting argument that'll come up someday. Cosmetic ethnicity, I think, is a, an interesting argument that's going to happen in the future. And then we're going to see the concept of identity politics just go away. Because identity politics has no meaning if you can change the identity that you're in. The whole point of identity politics is you're locked into an identity, but you can't change it. That's why we have political ideologies wrapped around identity. But if you can just change your identity, then nobody cares anymore. So that's an interesting one.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Here's another one I thought of that I think is a, probably, this is the one I think would be more disruptive is like, nobody likes to be fat. How would you like it if you could just get a shot and it modifies your DNA or changes your body in some way such that after a certain amount of processed calories, it'll just stop digesting food, just pass it through. So you can eat whatever you want and you will stay at your optimal, like, weight, you know? You'll stay at your healthy weight. Okay, at first this seems like, oh, it's great. I'm going to stay healthy. Everybody who does this is going to stay healthy. But then you're like, okay, but as a society, we would be consuming, like, way more calories than we need to. Is there, there's still starvation in other parts of the world? And we're going out of our way to just deliberately waste, like, food energy?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Like, I think I'll have four cheeseburgers for dinner tonight. I make it five. I'm hungry. You know what I like eating? I'm going to jab myself with something that makes me hungrier.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  And then we're just like, just, you might end up with this incredibly wasteful society of people who are perfectly healthy. Meanwhile, other people are starving while we're eating all the food, you know, so this is a, these are kind of the sorts of things that biomedicine enabled by AI might lead to.

• 52:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That is fascinating. Cosmetic ethnicity, that is one that never made my radar. That is, that's utterly fascinating. And I think that whatever people can do, they will do. So regardless of the ethics, you might be able to postpone it or whatever. But if we can edit genes, people are going to do it on a long enough timeline of that, I assure you. So

• 53:21Speaker 01

  And then it'll get weird. People will be like, oh, we found, we found a sequence of genes that'll make your skin blue. And people are like, oh, I want to be blue. The new thing is being blue, you know?

• 53:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Guaranteed. There are already people injecting essentially dye into their eyes to make like their entire pupil black. There is, or not just the pupil, but the even the whites of their eyes are black. Yep. There are people that are altering the color of their pupils. So you can get like, oh, I want crystal clear blue eyes. You can go get that surgery done right now, today. So that's really going to be interesting. All right, guys, that's it for part one, but trust me, we're just getting warmed up. In part two, Andy breaks down how to solve impossible problems by simulating reality in your mind. How he reverse engineers ideas from scratch and why curiosity might be the most powerful tool we have for building the future. If you're serious about mastering complex thinking, you don't want to miss it.

• 54:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Make sure you follow Impact Theory and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It really does help other people find the show. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. 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.

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