Pod Insights The Impact Theory Podcast AI Reset: "Life As We Know It Will Be Gone In 5 Years" - Upcoming Utopia vs Dystopia | Salim Ismail PT 1 (Fan Fave) About this episode Welcome to another power-packed episode of Impact Theory, I’m Tom Bilyeu!
In today’s episode, Salim Ismail and I go deep into the profound changes that AI and other emerging technologies will bring to society.
Salim Ismail is a prominent technology strategist, entrepreneur, and author. His ideas and writings emphasize the importance of scaling businesses and adapting to technological shifts.
In this interview, Salim provides a visionary outlook on the future, characterized by both optimism for technology's potential to solve critical human challenges and a cautious awareness of the disruptions and dystopia it has the ability to cause as well.
We go deep into:
- AI's transformative impact on human history
- Potential severe disruptions by AI
- An outlook on AI's future impact
- Critical nature of early decisions in AI development.
- Unpredictability in AI outcomes
- Quantum Mechanics and AI
- AI's role in moving society to abundance.
- Utopia or Dystopia - Deciding between a prosperous or bleak future
- The shift from centralized to decentralized systems
- Structural changes in societal organization
- Challenges in adopting new technologies
- How AI will affect various aspects of life
- The increasing value of data over money
- AI's potential to revolutionize healthcare access and effectiveness
Salim also discusses his initiative with OpenExO, a platform and community that aims to support organizations, governments, and individuals in adapting to and thriving in an environment of rapid technological change. He believes that in order to survive, businesses must focus on innovation and growth strategies in the era of exponential technology.
And this is just Part 1 of our conversation, so make sure you don’t miss Part 2 of this convo for even more wisdom from Salim Ismail.
Follow Salim Ismail:
Website: https://salimismail.com/
Get AI ready: https://web.openexo.com/impacttheory/
Connect in the OpenExO Community: https://openexo.com/community/salimismail
Follow Me, Tom Bilyeu:
Website: https://impacttheoryuniversity.com/
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Transcript 21,055 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:07 Speaker 01 We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max future or a Star Trek future.
1:12 Tom Bilyeu? Do you think that as we transition over to AI, that it will take us through a valley of despair? Or is this going to be a straight line to utopia?
1:20 Speaker 01 Oh, no, big valleys of chaotic despair.
1:23 Tom Bilyeu? AI is going to be a million times smarter than you.
1:26 Speaker 01 This is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen.
1:28 Tom Bilyeu? How do they create the next billion dollar company with three people if that's the way to play it?
1:33 Speaker 01 This is what needs to happen.
1:35 Tom Bilyeu? Describe the most likely sequencing over the next 30 years.
1:40 Speaker 01 I think we, for me, the AI transition is typewriter to word processor. It's just an uplifting and enabling of all sorts of capabilities across multiple, multiple sectors and industries. And it transforms how we do things pretty fundamentally from creativity to rank and file work, to blue collar work, et cetera. I think the robotic stuff is further down the line than most people think. Peter's very excited about it. We have all the human art robots, but robotics is. Really, really hard and will take much longer, in my opinion. But the AI stuff will actually allow us to uplift ourselves very quickly. And you know, we talk about scarcity to abundance. I think AI gets us to abundance very, very fast.
2:23 Speaker 01 And I think that's for me, the most exciting and optimistic side of things. We have two futures in our world today. Either a Mad Max future, which you can see playing out in Gaza or Ukraine, or a Star Trek future where we have abundance and we're operating on a on a much more highly conscious basis, et cetera. And so which future do we pick as a human species is the choice that's in front of us right now.
2:45 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, so you believe that there's a branching path before us. And we get to choose which path we go down.
2:52 Speaker 01 It's a little, we're actually heading down the Mad Max path. So if you look at our politics, you look at what's happening, you look at the political rhetoric here in the US, there's a huge transitional shift happening. And you could, my favorite sensible way of dealing with they were talking about that is a centralized to decentralized shift. Right? We run the world today on very centralized systems. Governments and corporations and the military industrial complex, et cetera. We're moving to much more decentralized and bottom up peer to peer systems. And you could call that a male archetype versus a female archetype, if you want to go there. But when you get to abundance, you want a female archetype to be running the world.
3:35 Speaker 01 Cause the female archetype shares resources around naturally. So for example, the male archetype, when it meets abundance relates to it as power and tries to hoard it. Middle East oil, Wall Street money, et cetera. Female archetype meets abundance and shares it around. So you really need a sharing decentralized model as we move the world to abundance. And that's the tension that I think I see in the world more than anything is that centralized to decentralized architecture. And we've started to see the rise of this of the last few decades, the Burning Man philosophy, open source movements, DIY movements, the maker movement, et cetera. Democracy itself is a bottom up movement. As a reaction to feudal systems and top down empire.
4:20 Speaker 01 And we're moving in that direction. It's just slow and painful and centralized systems don't like to relinquish power. And we know that very clearly. So that's the tension that I see that's playing out, that's underpinning all the other, how it's showing up. So for example, when I think about Trump or Brexit, it wasn't left versus right. It was actually urban versus rural. Brexit was a hundred percent London versus the rest of the country.
4:44 Tom Bilyeu? Why would that be the breakpoint?
4:46 Speaker 01 Because there's a tension in cities and how do we allocate resources to cities versus the countryside? Where people, because the metabolism of a city is much faster, innovation happens very fast in a city. And so therefore that that's the environment in which we're doing most of our of our innovation work and technological development today. And if you're left behind, you get very unhappy with that. And so this is the tension that I think we're seeing around the world.
5:11 Tom Bilyeu? So we have this fundamental tension between things could go well, things could go poorly. Splitting between the different archetypes, male, female, how we respond to abundance, power or sharing the resources, urban and rural. I'm starting to get a sense of where you're going. Do you think that as we transition over to AI, that it will take us through a valley of despair? Or is this going to be a straight line to utopia?
5:40 Speaker 01 Oh, no. Big values of chaotic despair. These types of transitions, I think this is the biggest transformation in the history of civilization, maybe the history of species on on earth. It's that big and that transition is going to be very painful. They never are clean, right? Like dinosaur asteroid hits and the dinosaurs get wiped out. And now you have a Cambrian explosion types. I think that's the kind of transition we're seeing here.
6:07 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, that that is arguably the most devastating thing to ever happen to life on this earth.
6:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. Wait, I don't I don't believe AI gets us there. But it's
6:19 Tom Bilyeu? Meaning AI will not have that kind of cataclysmic
6:21 Speaker 01 That's right.
6:22 Tom Bilyeu? Knock on effect.
6:22 Speaker 01 That's right. I actually am hugely optimistic about the future. So just that's a really important framing point. But there's no question in civilization, at least this is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. And I think the next 30 years just defines the next 300 years.
6:41 Tom Bilyeu? Why will the next 30 years define it? What, what does that look, is that the period of transition?
6:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a transition period and this is chaos theory, right? The initial conditions are really critical. And how you navigate those initial conditions with as much experienced guidance and a lot of luck will then guide the rest of the future. If you know chaos theory, the idea is that if you drop a pebble down the top of a mountain, it doesn't matter how many times you drop the pebble is always going to take a different path. Because some micro change in the initial atmosphere or the pressure when you released it or the first bounce of the density of the first thing it hit or the change in humidity along the way will have it go down a different route. So you never know what's going to happen, but it just knows we're just in the really big transition. And it's super exciting, but it's very, very chaotic.
7:29 Tom Bilyeu? I have heard you that this is going to be very difficult to predict. However, one of the most interesting descriptions of quantum mechanics I heard is that yes, while all things are simply probabilistic, the world that you see is the most likely. And I thought that was a really great explanation. So assuming that, knowing that no matter how many times you drop the pebble will be different, but there's, there's a most likely sort of cluster of effects.
7:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, think of it as a, a stock market chart, right? You never have a clear, straight line. It's always a choppy and then it stabilizes, then it has a breakthrough moment and then it's choppy again. It's kind of like that. I think that's the pattern that we see.
8:08 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, what causes that? Like I can actually explain economically what's going on in terms of human greed, fear, and the way that cultural energy will move through a medium. That can be an economic medium. So you can actually see cultural energy move through a stock market. If anybody paying attention to Bitcoin, I would just tell you right now that is simply a cultural idea that is spreading through the medium of cryptocurrency. I won't derail the conversation on that, but like with that in mind, that to me, my base assumption about those jagged lines is that is human. The human brain responding in a somewhat predictable way. And you can watch that idea ripple through, including sort of bounding it.
8:51 Tom Bilyeu? So it's only going to go up so high and it's only going to go down so low. And so you see this sort of bounding fluctuation. And you can look back through history and you see that same sort of bounded fluctuation. Now, those bounded fluctuations to me are terrifying. And if you read history, because like I said, the long arc is bending towards prosperity for all. And if you zoom out long enough on human time scales, it's unbelievable. The protagonist made, oh, my God. But that that does not help. The guy whose family all gets rolled up in rugs by the Mongols and trampled to death.
9:23 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:24 Tom Bilyeu? Like, that's just no consolation. And so I'm saying, we're all that guy, right? We all live one life.
9:30 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:30 Tom Bilyeu? We are bounded from a time perspective so far. And so it matters to me a lot where I am on these jagged lines. So going back to AI, what are these jagged lines? Do you buy into my thesis or do you have a different one?
9:45 Speaker 01 Oh, I agree with you, but with some caveats. So for example, the economic outcomes of AI, I think, are pretty clear in terms of what's going to happen. I think we're going to see massive productivity gains across the board. The challenge we have is the underlying system is flawed in terms of economic development and economic growth. Right? Our entire system, global system is, money is the main mode of discourse in the world today. And it's good because if you think of money as a form of energy, we freed money, energy from religious structures and feudal systems. And then the power of ideas came along and the power of technology came along. And now it flows very nicely, very quickly to new ideas and good ideas.
10:27 Speaker 01 Via venture capital, via private equity, Bitcoin, new ideas can pop up and money will flow where the best ideas are. So that's fantastic one level. But we're moving from money as a main mode of discourse in the world to information as a main mode of discourse in the world. So for example, any startup would much rather gather data about things rather than getting money early because they can monetize the data much more and they're fungible today. You can convert money into information and vice versa. Over time, information becomes the higher order bit. Right? Because take your health, you're much more interested in the different biomarkers you can track than how much it'll cost you to fix things, et cetera, because the information
11:08 Speaker 01 is more valuable. So I think as a, at a very metaphysical level, we're shifting from the quest for money and the quest for greed, et cetera, and energy that way and shifting it into information. When we move that transition, now things become really powerful. I think this is the massive insight that Ray Kurzweil had when he started tracking Moore's Law, that as we digitize, we turn things into information, that information can then be manipulated into back into matter, back into money, and vice versa. And you have this amazing cyclical pattern that can take place. And little by little, we're moving more and more into that. Over time, money will become less important on this scale. If you went
11:50 Speaker 01 back a thousand years ago, we were all working eighteen hours a day in the fields to put three meals on the table.
11:56 Tom Bilyeu? Some of us still are, Slime.
11:58 Speaker 01 And some of us still are. But we, but you didn't have a choice then. You pretty much had to do that. Only a very small percentage of the population could not do that, right? Today, that number, that population that can, doesn't have to do that is much, much, much bigger. And little by little, as we do better vertical farming and solar energy into all sorts of remote parts in the world, and satellite internet and water extraction out of the atmosphere, pretty much we'll be able to have an amazing life anywhere on the planet at, for every level of humanity. That's why Peter gets so excited. That's why we get so excited about the technological progress. The problem is our social systems and all our infrastructure and all our institutions are not geared for smooth progress in this
12:41 Speaker 01 thing. I think for, to summarize those lines that you were talking about, I would quote E.O. Wilson, the famous biologist, who said, "Our, the problem with humanity is that our emotions are paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, and our technologies godlike", right? Pretty much all the problems in the world come from the gaps in those layers. And I think the pressure is so intense today that we'll, any leader today will spend the next twenty years of our lives, basically dealing with the gaps in those, in those layers.
13:10 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, let's name that the human problem.
13:13 Speaker 01 The human problem.
13:14 Tom Bilyeu? So my thing is the human problem is not going anywhere. So for instance, you were just talking about, um, right now people are seeking money. That becomes the game, but now the information is going to become the higher order bit. People are going to start pursuing that. But what I will ask is why? And the answer to me seems self-evidently, it's more powerful. So you still have humans playing a game of power, which is why I'm still very concerned about these valleys of despair. Because unless something changes in our biology that makes us pursue different things, we will simply derange AI. We will simply derange the pursuit of information. And while you and I share a very optimistic vision of the long-term future because of that long arc,
14:00 Tom Bilyeu? what way do you see us? So going back to your branching choice between Mad Max or Utopia, how do we nudge humanity to not go down Mad Max, which you're saying we're doing currently? And instead go to Utopia? What, how do you solve the human problem?
14:18 Speaker 01 I think you open up as fast as possible and decentralize as fast as possible. Okay, so the number two to Zelensky in the Ukraine is one of our community members. So we've got our global Open EXO community that are building for the 21st century, building companies and transforming governments, et cetera. And I chat, I was chatting with him and he was asking some advice. Turns out they've been using my book a bit in, in their dealing with the, what's happening there. And one of the comments I made is, look, this is, how is it that you've become so resilient? As in terms of the, in the face of the aggression? And he said, we decentralize the country.
15:04 Speaker 01 We decentralize the country. So there's no single point of attack for energy or for infrastructure or for electricity, et cetera. And we've been doing that for 10 years because we could see this could be a likely possibility. So I think what happens is when you decentralize, things become much, much more resilient. Just take energy, for example, if we decentralize, we can have solar energy powering lots of small and communities, then there's no need for security at the central power grid because there isn't one. And anybody can generate solar energy at a very local level. And the efficiency means we'll get better and better at storing it and better and better at generating it. And now you have amazing resource capability anywhere and a wonderful level. Most of our wars over the last hundred years have been over energy, oil specifically, right?
15:48 Speaker 01 So when we free ourselves from that, hopefully you should get to a peaceful nature. Now, I was under the impression for a while that, huh, when we get to abundance, that we won't be fighting anymore. And I got disillusioned from that by a couple of the deep thinkers who said, no, we'll still have lots of human conflict because humans are really geared towards conflict. In X Prize, we try and push people towards healthy competition and let's work things out that way. We've got all sorts of really great ways of dealing with the natural conflict that we bring up in human beings. For example, sports teams, the Olympics, et cetera. And that allows us to vent a lot of kind of aggression that might otherwise come out in other ways. But we still have to deal with the fundamental human nature problem.
16:33 Speaker 01 And I'm, I'm, hopefully, the, the abundance side gets there faster than some lone small team of people trying to use AI to design a virus that will attack all middle-aged Indian bald guys. Right? That would be the, the hope.
16:49 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, uh, so decentralization. I am one of the few people that is beyond obsessed with cryptocurrencies, Web 3, and believes that decentralization is just deeply problematic. So the reason I think that decentralization is deeply problematic is that you cannot galvanize the energy of humans well. And so while some things will respond to decentralization very well, so take the very nature of the blockchain, the fact that it is distributed, that they all run as nodes, is brilliant. I'm here for that. I love it the most.
17:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:26 Tom Bilyeu? However, I am doing battle with Coinbase, for instance, which keeps wanting to verify my identity, keeps asking me where I got my money. I'm like, bro, I'm about as public as you get. I don't know what else you want me to show you, uh, but. I want them to be centralized because I don't want to have to like do a bunch of crazy stuff to make sure that I'm getting my crypto exchange in a safe way, all that stuff. So I'm, I'm making a willing trade for simplicity, for security. I know all the memes, but nonetheless, and I think that more people are like me. Okay. So people want centralization and you have a hard time aiming everybody's energy
18:09 Tom Bilyeu? in the same direction when all the decision-making is completely distributed.
18:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:13 Tom Bilyeu? You also have what our founding fathers were trying to protect against, which is the tyranny of the majority.
18:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:18 Tom Bilyeu? And so there are reasons, I think, to be skeptical that decentralization is a magical solution. So let's use Ukraine, since you brought them up as an example. There's a guy named John Mearsheimer, brilliant political thinker, military, I don't know if he's officially a strategist, but anyway, seems to deeply understand that. And he just keeps saying, Ukraine is going to lose. It is inevitable and they're going to end up a dysfunctional rump state. And when I hear that rhetoric, I'm like, okay, one, let me just be very clear. I have not, I'm not close enough to the problem or to just that thing in general to know if
19:00 Tom Bilyeu? he's right, but there's so much internal logic to the way that he approaches it. So I'm looking at your argument. They've decentralized a bunch of things, so it becomes harder to attack. But that also makes it feel like each region is going to be easier to overtake. And so if I'm Russia, I'm just going to go zone by zone by zone, being like, I don't have to worry about the whole collective because you guys are decentralized.
19:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:21 Tom Bilyeu? So I'm just going to eat this node and then eat this node.
19:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. However, the problem with eating these nodes is keeping that node is non-trivial. Okay. So for example, they installed a bunch of Russian mayors in some of the initial towns that they, and they just put car bombs on them and started blowing them up. So now, who wants to go be a Russian mayor of a local Ukrainian town? When your lifespan is going to be very short. So the resistance is going to be strong just because they don't have a choice. Right? This is their, this is existential for them. And this is the same thing why it's difficult to take over Afghanistan or take over a kind. It may become a rump state, that's possible. But if that's the case, it was going to become that anyway.
20:07 Speaker 01 And you might as well fight it, which is what they're doing right now. The question is, can they win? And I think they can't win without, obviously, a huge amount of Western aid. But I think they could win in that, in that situation.
20:18 Tom Bilyeu? What do you think becomes the galvanizing force? So you mentioned Afghanistan. I have a feeling without a sense of cultural identity and possibly religion, it would be easy to disrupt. But there's a galvanizing force that allows the distributed nature of all of that to work, that they still have this thing that sits over them, that unites them.
20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this is a great question. Is what is that binding force? Because it used to be religion, right? We started, actually, it used to be tribal structures. Because we would cooperate on nomadic tribes and the tribes and then fight. And over a time, period of time, we, as technology became better, the tribes would get bigger and bigger and formed countries and empires, right? The Mongols that you mentioned earlier. My, my favorite thing about the Mongols is an old, from an old BBC documentary that said, they destroyed anything they got angry at. And they got angry at anything they didn't understand. So they came around from the steppes down to Han China, found a million Chinese farmers doing agriculture, didn't understand it, got angry at it, and literally wiped out a million farmers.
21:26 Speaker 01 Just because, because of that cascading logic, right? Now, if you grow an empire to a certain level, can you keep it or not keep it as one area? The ones that worked best are the ones that decentralized the administration and navigated local preferences in a powerful way. Akbar in, in India, the Mongols did it pretty powerfully, pretty well. Alexander, the great, managed it pretty well. The Roman Empire did pretty well. There's that whole idea of the fourth turning and all of the cyclical aspects. I, I look at all these folks, Piketty, Ray Dalio, Yuval Harari, et cetera. And I think they're incredibly insightful about the past. I find they're not that useful about the future.
22:09 Speaker 01 Why? Because I think this inflection point, and I know this is a tired kind of meme of this time is different, but I think this time is really different. The combination of energetic abundance and lifespan that we're about to break, life extension plus AI makes it a completely different cocktail than we've ever seen before in the history of humanity. And so I think this is a complete step change. And this is why it's so exciting to be around today.
22:38 Tom Bilyeu? For the audience that doesn't know you, you have a business framework that I think is going to be really useful to help us think through because I keep finding you drift to the, well, once we're on the other side of this, there's energy abundance and it solves all these medical problems. And those are the things that I think calms everybody down in the long run. But they do not help us in the next, call it from now to seven years is sort of the time window where I think things are going to get really weird. So really fast, walk people through
23:10 Tom Bilyeu? your thinking around
23:14 Tom Bilyeu? how in business we can use some of these strategies to become an exponential organization.
23:21 Speaker 01 Sure. So, you know, if you went back to the 20th century, the most successful organizations were the biggest top-down hierarchical command and control structures, pyramid structured with a CEO at the top, designed for two things, designed for efficiency and designed for predictability. Right? If you're, if you're Pampers, you're trying to deliver the same box of Pampers in a million locations around the world, or McDonald's, or healthcare services, or whatever. Today, you need to be architected for agility, flexibility, adaptability and speed. Okay. And we found in the last episode we did with you that the top 10 of the Fortune 100 that are the most flexible and agile compared to the bottom 10, in our opinion, that are the least EXO-friendly, had delivered 40 times better shareholder returns over a seven-year period than the one.
24:06 Speaker 01 So there's a clear economic thesis here that as the world becomes more volatile, your ability to adapt will drive market value and drive, have a better organization. So how do you build that? And we call these exponential organizations where Have a massive purpose like cure cancer Elon has three take us to space solve transportation solve the climate. And then you build an organization with a set of externalities like leveraging community like Ted does. Leveraging assets that you don't own like Airbnb, not hiring your own staff like Uber. And then a set of internal mechanisms. Like the lean startup thinking ideas and decentralize org structures because you can push decision making to the edge. We found that the more of these characteristics you use, the better.
24:51 Speaker 01 And we're clear now over the next decade that every government department, impact project, nonprofit, for profit will. Tend towards these structures because we now have enough evidence to show that that's better. So for example, when we talk to CEOs today, they are not AI ready at all. Because their old 20th century organization structures is absolutely not set up for what's coming with AI. Right? They're not AI ready. And so they're all asking us, can you please give us a workshop? Set us up with some help on how do we navigate AI? And I see two problems that are paramount today with companies implementing AI. The first is they jump in very quickly and they can't see the rocks before they dive in. And they get into trouble either by accidentally putting all their data into chat GPT or.
25:38 Speaker 01 Putting the wrong models into place. And the second issue, which is the bigger issue, is the immune system problem. So I first came across this problem at Yahoo. And I was running their incubator. And the more disruptive an idea we came up with in the incubator, the less the company can handle it. Right? I was like, wait, you hired me to do disruptive stuff and I bring you something and you guys can't cope. Right? You can't integrate it. Why? Because of that that efficiency and agility problem.
26:06 Speaker 01 That really stuck in my head and going through seven years of building singularity. And noticing that we have 20 Gutenberg moments hitting us, AI is hitting us right now, but we have biotech, we have. Blockchain is a Gutenberg moment, solar energy is a Gutenberg moment, life extension is a Gutenberg moment. We will not be able to manage the future with our current existing. Organization structures or current government structures or institution structures. So we architected this model. We now can see that it will work. And we the two, we have to solve two things. One is,
26:45 Speaker 01 what's the thoughtful way in which you apply technology to derive great value from it? Secondly, how do you navigate that immune system response? And so we're coaching companies and so on, how to do this, because if you push AI into a company, all the people go, whoa, Nelly, and they freak out and the antibodies attack you and nothing moves. This analogy was first given to me by the CTO of Autodesk. I was chatting with him and I was complaining about, he was like, oh, you've got an immune system response. And I went ding, it's the best articulated framing. You try anything disruptive in a big company and it's worse in the public sector because we have taxis fighting Uber, we have bankers fighting Bitcoin. We're not progressing society along enough, quickly enough, because when there's new technological breakthroughs,
27:29 Speaker 01 all the antibodies freak out and we get, so we have to solve that problem at a cultural level. Because companies have their immune systems, but and governments have their, but institutions have really bad immune system. Education, God help you if you try and update academia. Religion has probably the worst immune system because they'll kill you in, in, literally in those cases, right?
27:50 Speaker 01 So I remember having a conversation with Salman Rushdie a few years ago. And he was talking about the fatwa and I asked him, how was that like for you? And he said, you know, I grew up in the sixties. And he had this really tired tone in his voice. He goes, I grew up in the sixties. We thought we nailed religion. We thought it was done. And then in the eighties, it comes roaring back and boom, immune system problem.
28:12 Tom Bilyeu? Did you talk to him before or after? Cause he got attacked?
28:15 Speaker 01 He got attacked, he lost an eye. Yeah, yeah, that was just recently. I haven't talked to him.
28:19 Tom Bilyeu? For decades, they laid in wait.
28:21 Speaker 01 They were not so late in wait, but the problem is that when you have deep seated institutional or political beliefs, they don't go away. They're wired into your limbic system. So all religions work in the following way. Okay. You take a young child below the age of 10, you give them an absolute truth, an assumptive truth, like Virgin Mary, Muhammad is the last prophet, Jesus is the son of God, whatever. And then you bind it into them with ritual repetition and a lot of sweets, a lot of sugar. And all religious functions operate on this. And then when the when the neocortex forms in the from the 10 to 13 year old age, the kid's brain is already deeply wired with these absolute assumptive
29:03 Speaker 01 truths. And you can't, if you if you stress it, that that point, you evoke a fight or flight response. This is why the Jesuits say, give me the boy until the age of seven, I'll give you the mat. Right? Because you can wire a young child. So all religions operate that way. We have to undo some of that damage that we're doing to kids with religion around this. But the problem that you pointed out that's really important is what's the binding coagulant that holds society together in the absence of that model? And that's the big challenge we have to figure out. Storytelling is one aspect of it. We have modern myths like Star Wars and Star Trek and others that are popping up, but they're not, they're not connective enough as tissue to hold us together.
29:45 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, agreed. Also, I think that even though I've dedicated my life to that form of storytelling, it it does not touch the realm of religion, which is why I'm utterly fascinated with what's going on right now. What I think of is the the radicalization of society. So we are going to be radicalized in the direction of the traditional. I think we're the next three years is really going to be marked by that. And I think because of AI, it's just going to massively fuel those flames. But before we get lost on that. The the idea of the immune system, which I think is incredibly important, as you were talking, this is so hilarious to how my mind works. I was like, he's setting his own
30:23 Tom Bilyeu? trap. Okay, so keep in mind, what I really want people to understand is, I think, and I think you'll agree with this, the world is going to be fundamentally different three to five years from now.
30:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
30:35 Tom Bilyeu? And to a point, you start stretching that out far enough, and it it becomes absolutely unrecognizable. If you have a kid that's in kindergarten now, by the time they reach high school, the world will look nothing like it does now. This is a very near term concern.
30:52 Tom Bilyeu? What you're calling the immune system, which to me is a reflection of what I'm calling the human problem, which is humans long for power, humans have pursuit dialed to 11, so they want to get better, they want to accrue more power.
31:04 Speaker 01 We all, we also have this massive quest for control, to make sense of the world, to control the world, right? Because, you know, if you go back to our evolutionary roots, it was a survive or die. Either you manage the world around you, or it manages you, and you're out, you're done pretty quickly. So you have to gain control of your environment as fast as possible and as aggressively as possible. In that model, we are now controlling most of the species on the planet, whether we like it or not. We're controlling the atmosphere, whether we like it or not, accidentally, badly. Now we're trying to manage this future of technology. And this is where regulatory comes in, right? We try and put in guardrails
31:47 Speaker 01 for how we manage technology going forward. And, you know, over the centuries, we've done a pretty good job of it. The big challenge with regulatory is how do you extract the promise of technology without the peril? Like, I can use fire to heat my house, and I can use it to burn down your house. How do we navigate that? I tend to be really optimistic about this because of the old eBay study that I think we talked about last time.
32:11 Tom Bilyeu? Say it again?
32:13 Speaker 01 When Craigslist and eBay merged, for the first time, you could study human nature at scale. And because I can on Craigslist very easily put up a fake picture of a MacBook, you send me $1,000 and I'm off to Fiji, right? And I can mask my email address pretty quickly. Same thing with Craigslist. So sociologists and anthropologists got pretty interested in this at all. We can actually study human nature. I can equally do good or bad. What's the actual ratio? So they started studying these systems, Kijiji in Canada, Craigslist here, eBay, et cetera. And it turns out very consistently across these systems where a human being can do a positive or fraudulent transaction, the actual ratio turns out to
32:53 Speaker 01 be something like 8,000 to 1, consistently, which is really surreal and incredibly exciting, actually, because that means if you opened up drones and said, anybody do whatever they want with drones, you'll get 8,000 positive use cases to the one bad guy. Okay, which make, which is fantastic for society, except our current model is drones come out, the regulatory goes, oh, my God, somebody might load up a C4 on a drone and fly it into the White House. This can't ban all drones. And then slowly open that tap and over a 20 year period, we get the benefits of that technology. So we have a ton of problems with prisons today with drones flying cell phones and cameras and money over the prison walls and dropping them into the prisoners. And the wardens are going crazy. So hello, let's
33:38 Speaker 01 deal with this in a different way. So now there's technologies to solve the drone interference problem. We'll get there. But this is a technological arbitrage problem. And so the challenge is how do we make sure we're doing good things with technology, not the bad things with technology. And over the years, I think we're doing a pretty good job of it in general. But I think that with the democratization of technology and the easy access to anybody that has access to AI or can home build a drone, this becomes harder and harder. So we have to lift human nature and get to abundance and give everybody what they want materially as fast as we can. So they don't go down the dark path is is one path that that was an obvious one.
34:19 Tom Bilyeu? I think even if I were to accept the ratio of good actors to bad actors, the thing that's missing is the level to which a bad actor will exploit.
34:28 Speaker 01 Yes, important point. The amplitude of that negative is growing, right? So the amount of damage one person can do is growing exponentially. And so our ability to control one person is dropping exponentially. That's not a great equation. We have Mark Goodman as one of our community members. He's a, he was a futurist for the FBI. So if you can get him drunk, he has awesome stories about how criminals and terrorists use bad, use technology in a negative way. And it's actually fascinating to see how creative they are around some of this. But the, the big challenge is the amplitude is actually growing back to the Middle East, Indian, Bal Guy virus.
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37:14 Tom Bilyeu? Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com/impact. Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Yeah, which hopefully they never make. Hopefully they never make. Salima, that would be very sad. Even though most people are going to do good things, you're going to have these moments of exploitation. People will take advantage of that. The amplitude of that is growing. You also have the immune system response that is just trying to stop change from happening, which can be good or bad. But ultimately, I think it is, to your point, you have a creature that is born of evolution,
37:56 Tom Bilyeu? that had to learn to control its environment, that had to have pursuit dialed to 11, so it would try to go out and try to control its environment and do better things for the group and all that stuff and acquire power and all that. So I am still at this moment of, before us is a fork in the road. And you have really done a great job of laying out what humans are like, but I still don't see the thing other than AI finally begins delivering on some of the promises. And then we all go, okay, yeah, cool. Like, I'm gonna embrace this. But I still think we have to go through Mad Max. I don't see any way around that equation. So if you feel like there's an argument left that will convince me, if not, please detail for us.
38:41 Tom Bilyeu? What are those amazing things that AI is going to deliver us that will make, having gone through this valley of despair, well worth unleashing AI upon the world?
38:51 Speaker 01 Okay, so important to note that we don't have a choice about unleashing AI into the world. Kevin Kelly wrote this book, What Technology Wants, and basically showed in very clear thing that technology is moving at its own pace and our only hope is to really keep up with it. Because it's taken on a life of its own in a sense, because if we try and regulate AI, then other people go run amok with it. And so it ends up being an arms race and you end up having to do it anyway. So now, let me give you the, some use cases where AI can radically change things in a short period of time for the radically better. I'll channel Imad Mustak here, the head of Stabu is the head of stability. And one of the projects he's working on is, can we take all the healthcare data in a country
39:37 Speaker 01 and load it up into an L L M and all the legal legislative, the law books and put that into an L L M and all the software code base globally and put that in there. And you give every child three or four links, a doctor, a lawyer, a software programmer and a general AI helper. Okay, now if you give every kid in Africa a link with a doctor and there's a medical problem at home, they will just start using it and transforming their healthcare locally for free. And this will completely change the world. Same thing with education. As we load up all the educational content into an AI, it's going to do a way better job of teaching kids and kids can self learn in a much more effective way than our current systems can do
40:21 Speaker 01 it. So you do those two things and healthcare and education suddenly become free and adapted and personalized to every child in the world. That's an unbelievable future. So the whole ecosystem and the methodology we've been building is how do you enable those people to build as fast as possible and build that optimistic future as fast as possible. And that's what exponential organizations, so EXO, as we use it as a metaphor, is the, is the thing at the edge, exoskeleton, exoplanet, exothermic reaction. So we want to find EXO builders and EXO heroes. That's the collection we're launching on finding people that are building things at the edge because we need to build that edge very fast and let that
41:03 Speaker 01 become the new gravity center very fast because the current system is imploding.
41:07 Tom Bilyeu? Think like a sci fi writer for me for a second.
41:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
41:10 Tom Bilyeu? So a sci fi writer's job is not to imagine the automobile, it's to predict the traffic jam. So what are the, if we're giving people access to all this information around healthcare, they have a private doctor, a private lawyer, they're educated, it's hyper tailored to them. We're going to unlock as much of their intelligence and their creativity as is going to be possible. What are the things that are born of that?
41:37 Speaker 01 Well, I think there will be some negatives. You'll may have accidents, people will misinterpret the data, people do source the wrong information from their bodies and put it into the AI and will get the wrong diagnosis. Lots of issues can come along, but the general outcome was the benefits will so outweigh the negatives that I think it's absolutely worth doing. Okay, there's no question in my mind that giving kids the ability to learn at their own pace, on their own, and then socializing as they need to in different ways, is going to transform the education system in a much more powerful way from a push system to a pull system. Right? Can I just delve into education just for a second?
42:15 Tom Bilyeu? Please.
42:16 Speaker 01 Okay, so we've been doing education for a couple of hundred years on what I call, John Hegel used to call the push system. You get a bunch of kids into a classroom and you try and cram algebra into them. Right? Mostly they're thinking about lunch. Little by little, we move to a pull basis where I pull, I take a new job or a new role or a new gig and I pull down the knowledge I need to do that job. Right? That's great. Now we're moving, and the whole education system for the last few hundred years has been supply side. Go become an accountant, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, and sell that in the job marketplace. Acquire a set of skills, which is what universities do. They give you that job schooling, which is all that universities do today. And then you go to the job market, the demand side, and you try and sell those skills in the demand side.
42:59 Speaker 01 I think what we're going to see happen is we're going to go from push based education to pull based learning, but demand driven. So for example, if you take Elon, he's like, I'm going to build an electric car and let me go find the technologies, the skills, the capabilities I need. No experience or capability of doing it at the time, but he'll pull them towards him and solve that problem. So what we see kids doing, this is what's encapsulated in the massive transformative purpose in the in the EXO model. Pick a huge purpose, cure cancer. Okay. And then go find the technologies and skills and capabilities and pull those to you as you need to to solve those problems. That I think is going to be the future of education. Getting there from the existing system is impossible.
43:39 Speaker 01 So you need technology to help you bridge that gap between A and B, and you need it to be permissionless. So one of the most exciting vectors of human development that I'm seeing today, something I call PDI, permissionless disruptive innovation. Okay. If you want to do disruptive innovation throughout history, you had to get a sponsor, an investor, a government to bless you. Somebody had to give you permission to go do that, or give you the resources to go do that. Look at Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin, middle-class kid out of Toronto, gets together with eight friends, boom, they go create Ethereum for no money, with no cash, no resources, and boom, it's now a $400 billion ecosystem. Right?
44:22 Speaker 01 Take, my favorite example is this, is a car that's called the Vega. It's, it looks like a Lamborghini. It's the third fastest car in the world. 900 horsepower, this thing. It's being designed and engineered and built in Sri Lanka, which is an island of fishermen and farmers with no investors, ecosystem, experience, education, or track record. I'm going to suggest that if you can do Ethereum, or if you can build the third fastest car in the world on an island, I love showing it to German car executives, their brains literally melt when they see this, right? I'm going to suggest you can do anything, anywhere. So now we can give people the tools to build radical new solutions in vertical farming
45:05 Speaker 01 and a new battery technology all over the world, and just let them go, and they'll figure it out. And that's why we're trying to, that's why the decentralized world is so important. We need to decentralize innovation as fast as possible, and that vector might pull us out as faster than the Mad Max vector. So that's my hope.
45:24 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, it might pull us faster than the Mad Max vector. Okay, so that's
45:28 Speaker 01 Well, it might get us to a secure place faster than Mad Max will destroy us.
45:35 Tom Bilyeu? Got it. So we're, we are going into Mad Max territory, but hopefully before that can completely destroy everybody.
45:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, for example, we're mostly in the Middle East fighting for the last hundred years because of oil. If we have solar energy delivering an energy abundance, which will happen in the next four doublings, about eight to 10 years, then you don't need oil. And therefore, what are you fighting over? So that's the hope. Now, will we find other things to fight about? Absolutely, because we're human beings. But, but it'll be less existential, I hope. If you look at the number of people dying in wars today is actually incredibly small compared to 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500. So the data is very clear. The trend is very good. But we need to get out of our current structures because our current structures will take us back.
46:22 Speaker 01 My, my biggest observation I've ever had about human beings is that human beings would much rather be comfortable than happy.
46:30 Tom Bilyeu? Can you give me more detail on that, please?
46:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I may not embrace healthcare technologies that may deliver longevity because I'm so stuck in a Judeo-Christian religious framework of the world that heaven is a good thing and I want to get to heaven as fast as possible.
46:46 Tom Bilyeu? That feels like either familiarity and fitting in with a tribe.
46:52 Speaker 01 Comfortable.
46:54 Tom Bilyeu? Comfortable. I think of comfortable as I'm warm, I'm safe, I'm relaxed. And both may be equally true.
47:02 Speaker 01 Emotionally, emotionally secure. Let's use that as an easy moniker for comfortable, right? So you could put something amazing in front of somebody. Can I tell you a story about the, the Trump election? So I'm Canadian and my Canadian passport, I'm like Golem with the precious, like hold on to that thing as the US goes into all sorts of chaos. About three months after Trump is elected in 2016, I was in a, in an Uber going to a conference and the health, the driver is looking very unhealthy. And I said, are you okay? How much do you drive? And he goes, oh, I drive 18 hours a day. I said, 18 hours a day? Um, uh, uh, hopefully you're not at the end of your shift because that's not great for me as a passenger.
47:46 Speaker 01 And then he tells me this amazing story. He was the CEO of a 300 person construction firm. And they voted as a company, should they get rid of corporate healthcare or not? And they vote as a company, he lobbies for it because less admin for the company, bit more expensive for the people, but more choice. So he votes lobbies and they get rid of, they vote and they get rid of corporate healthcare. Three weeks later, he's not feeling well, goes to the doctor and finds out he's got multiple stage three cancers riddling his body. And now he's got a major problem because they got rid of the healthcare. He can't get covered because of the pre-existing conditions problem. And so one of those pops at stage four and he's a dead man. So he literally starts planning his funeral, gives away the company, plans his end times like, like really right there.
48:29 Speaker 01 I'm like, that's incredible, but you said that happened a few years ago. You're here now. What happened? He goes Obamacare passed. I'm like, okay, he goes, then I could get the insurance. I got the treatment. I saved my life. I'm like, wow, what a journey to go through. You think you're going to die and then this thing happens and it saves your life. We pull into the hotel, I'm getting out of the car and it kind of is a joke. I said, I guess in this last election, you must have voted for Hillary Clinton. And he goes, no, I voted for Trump. And I was gobsmacked and I said, but, but you just said Obamacare saved your life. He goes, yeah, it did completely. A hundred percent Obamacare saved my life. I said, but then you voted for the guy that said he was going to get rid of it on his first day. He goes, yeah, and he's getting rid of it. And now I'm back to planning my funeral.
49:13 Speaker 01 I've never been able to square that circle.
49:15 Tom Bilyeu? You didn't ask him the follow up question?
49:17 Speaker 01 I was so, if you could go back and do it again, what would you do? What was, what would be the follow up question you would ask?
49:23 Tom Bilyeu? I, I would have asked, um, did you know that was going to be the outcome? And if so, did you, there's, it, that leads me to believe you have a base assumption that something trumps your own personal safety.
49:35 Speaker 01 I, I, I've never, I've never, I've, I've sat with that like anecdote for years now. I've never been able to figure that out where people will literally vote against their self-interest.
49:45 Tom Bilyeu? I don't think anyone votes against their self-interest. I think there are things that they care. About that they may not be aware of yet. So he may have a philosophical underpinning that he's not even aware of. A value system that drives him.
49:57 Speaker 01 This was.
49:58 Tom Bilyeu? Cause he, the very thing, and look, I don't know this guy, who knows? But just hearing what I've heard, that what I would say drives him is freedom over everything. So, hey, we have a healthcare plan, but I can make it better by giving people choice. Oh shit, that bit me in the ass, but my value system is still there. Trump, in his mind, stands for more freedoms and so I'm gonna vote for more freedoms. Even though it brings me, now, obviously, I'd wanna push him and like really understand if that's what he's saying. But I find most people are driven by a value system that they don't understand. But they are driven by it. Every choice they make is an echo of a value system they don't understand.
50:33 Speaker 01 Can I say something out of a little bit of anger?
50:36 Tom Bilyeu? At all times.
50:37 Speaker 01 I've lived in eight countries around the world for more than a year each. So I've seen a lot of different systems, healthcare, governance, et cetera, Canada, Europe, India, you name it. This whole vector of freedom drives me fucking crazy because it's a complete, it's complete horseshit. I feel less free in the US than most other countries in the world.
50:58 Tom Bilyeu? Why are you here?
50:59 Speaker 01 Oh, great place to do business.
51:01 Tom Bilyeu? Fascinating.
51:02 Speaker 01 It's a great place to do business. But I feel like, I'll give you, I'll give you, because here in the US, the reason the US is successful is there's a latent entrepreneurship that is unbelievably powerful. And it epitomizes in Silicon Valley where if you build a business and you fail, we call it experience. Anywhere else in the business, in the world, you build a business and it fails, you're a bad guy. Right? And this is true around the world.
51:26 Tom Bilyeu? So we have one freedom, the freedom to fail.
51:28 Speaker 01 Freedom to fail is a huge one and it's institutionalized in bankruptcy laws. It's, it's, you can fairly elegantly shut down a company here compared to other places. I built a subsidiary for one of my businesses to do software development in India. And the mothership failed and it orphaned the subsidiary, right? It took me seven years to shut down that subsidiary in India. Because all the political, the regulatory blah, blah, blah crap, just the thing. Am I likely to ever do another business in India? Again, never, because who wants to go through that hell, right? Whereas in the US, if something fails. So we just merged, by the way, OpenXO into a public company a couple of weeks ago, okay, called Genius Group.
52:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we're super thrilled because it's a global platform for teaching entrepreneurship. And that's the constituency that we're most excited about. So we're very excited about the the future there. The unbelievable potential of the in Delaware, when you are doing a merger or whatever. There's this incredible legal framework called the reparations act or something. Whereas if you haven't done your corporate paperwork that you far got about, they give you one chance to kind of fix it all and come clean. Before you do a major transaction, it's fantastic, right? Never is that happening anywhere else in the world. Because if you do something in Paris and under French law and whatever later.
52:53 Speaker 01 I'll tell another quick story. I had a French girlfriend when I was living in Paris for a few years. And she was trying to get her identity card because the French government said everybody has to get an identity. So she goes to the government and says, here's my identity. I want to apply. And they're like looking all the paperwork and they go, oh, problem. She's like, what's wrong? She says, well, you were born in France, you have a French passport. Your father was born in France, but your mother was not born in France. That's a problem. And she's like, but my mother was a French citizen and the reason she wasn't born in France was her. Her parents were the commanding forces for the French forces in Vietnam. She was a military kid. So she got born in Vietnam, but she's a French citizen, her parent. And they're like, problem.
53:32 Speaker 01 So she's like, okay, what do I do? So they we need affidavits from all four of your grandparents saying that was actually our daughter, da, da, da, da, da. So she goes through all of this hell to get that. And she shows it to them and they then she puts it all together and they go, problem. She's like, what is it now? They said your birth certificate has expired. Because in France, it turns out a birth certificate only is valid for three months. And then when you want one for some reason, you have to apply to get a birth certificate. So this is the bureaucracy that most of the world deals with. That the US has cleaned up a lot of Canada is even better, by the way, because that's a newer country. Okay, so that lack of that less bureaucracy makes it easy to build a business and do interesting new things. And that's why I live here.
54:17 Speaker 01 I think, by the way, I'm going to say it also for the record. I think the US Constitution is the most important document ever written.
54:24 Tom Bilyeu? But doesn't have anything to do with freedom. We'll get to that in a minute.
54:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:29 Tom Bilyeu? In what country did you feel the most free?
54:31 Speaker 01 Most European countries at an individual level, I felt very free. Businesses nightmare because the regulatory and chaos and bureaucracy nightmare. But I can drive without ever getting a speeding ticket in Europe. Cannot drive here without getting a speeding ticket.
54:44 Tom Bilyeu? Is that the parameter for freedom?
54:47 Speaker 01 I don't know. I'm just telling you.
54:49 Tom Bilyeu? Paint, paint a picture for me.
54:50 Speaker 01 Okay, let me give you another example. If I'm anywhere in the world, I never ever see a police car. Whereas here in the US, I just see police cars all the time, every day.
55:00 Tom Bilyeu? People get arrested in the UK, a place where both of us have lived.
55:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:04 Tom Bilyeu? People get arrested in the UK for a tweet.
55:07 Speaker 01 Oh.
55:08 Tom Bilyeu? That's someone.
55:09 Speaker 01 Separate issues, different.
55:10 Tom Bilyeu? I'm trying to pin you down on freedom because I really want to understand this.
55:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, so, uh, look, in India, if I railed against the government, I would be in big trouble right now. So, so freedom of expression is a big problem around the world. And I think freedom of expression is more powerful here. And I do, there's definitely freedom here for freedom of expression more than anywhere else in the world. Okay, but this whole vector of the being more like the, if you vote Republican, because you want more freedom rather than less, is I think bullshit. Just my personal view, having lived.
55:43 Tom Bilyeu? Um, well, so that to me, I interpret very differently. So that just sounds like I don't think Republicans are the party of freedom. Okay.
55:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:50 Tom Bilyeu? But you said that you don't feel as free in America as you did in European countries.
55:56 Speaker 01 I feel, yeah, when I, it's, it's, and there's good and bad to this. So I'll give you an example on both sides. Okay. So I came into the US once and my name is Salima Smell. I look a little dodgy, right? Um, and they go, sir, we have a problem. Uh, your name matches the name of an Afghan warlord wanted in Kabul for poppy trading. He's wanted by the FBI.
56:18 Tom Bilyeu? Who's super likely to use his real name.
56:19 Speaker 01 And I'm like, okay, he goes, you're a vice president of Yahoo. You're clearly not a, an Afghan warlord. Um, I've got good news and bad news. And I'm like, what's the good news? So the good news is I'm pretty clear. You're speaking at conferences. We've looked you up. You're not an Afghan. So that's great. What's the problem? What's the bad news? He goes, I'm not allowed to make that decision. I have to check with Washington. It's like your Coinbase thing. I have to check with Washington. It'll take about four hours. You're going to miss your flight. Have a seat. No, so you're kidding. And literally I got to the, I was coming across the border enough times that I got to the point where the border guys were like, hey, Mr. Smell, how are you? Please come aside for this security check because we have to check with Washington again. So that's the bad side, right? Because you can get stopped for all sorts of bizarre things. I've never seen that anywhere else in the world.
57:05 Speaker 01 Okay. Here's, I'll give you the good side. Um, I had a very surreal incident in, at nine 11, where one of my family members who's psychic calls me up in the last two weeks of August and says, what are you doing the first two weeks of September, uh, 2001? I said, well, I'm working, I'm doing stuff. And she said, I want you to leave. I want you out of New York City. And I kind of learned enough to kind of pay attention to this, that I took a vacation and I was in Switzerland. And nine 11 happens and I found out later, looked up later, I had canceled a meeting in the World Trade Towers that Tuesday morning to go on this trip.
57:41 Speaker 01 And just by accident with that. So now I have to get back because the company I'm the COO of is in big trouble. And I'm on the first plane that lands into JFK, uh, after nine 11, the first flight, the first plane that landed, lands back in New York City. Um, and you know, Salima Smell, I look a bit Middle Eastern, my Canadian, my US visa for Canadian visa to the US was expiring the next day.
58:08 Speaker 01 So I'm in deep trouble and I got to the border guards and they could not have been more constructive and helpful and sensible and common sense in that environment that I would ever have seen anywhere else in the world. Unbelievable. So at a very deep political level, there's lots of unbelievable freedoms, which is why I think this country is very powerful. However, day to day, I feel less free.
58:33 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm. Okay. So here would be my take on that. Let me know what you think.
58:38 Speaker 01 Sure.
58:39 Tom Bilyeu? It sounds like you have had run ins that sound more racist to me than they sound anti-freedom, but I get how if somebody's stopping you every time you turn around because of your name, because of your nationality, whatever, that would leave a horrific taste in my mouth. Now, Canada froze people's bank accounts.
59:05 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
59:06 Tom Bilyeu? Because they donated money.
59:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
59:08 Tom Bilyeu? To a rebellion protest. I don't even know what to call it.
59:13 Speaker 01 The truckers.
59:13 Tom Bilyeu? The trucker convoy. That was ultra terrifying. They have bills that compel speech. So not just you can't say this, you must say this.
59:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
59:24 Tom Bilyeu? That's insane from a freedom perspective. If people vote for it, they should get what they want.
59:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:30 Tom Bilyeu? But that certainly does not feel free. So.
59:34 Speaker 01 Agreed.
59:34 Tom Bilyeu? When I think about what freedoms matter for me, what you're calling freedom of expression, what I will call free speech is, is quite literally the ability to think. And any country, and that would be every country but America, as far as I know, does not have freedom of speech, at which point they are 1984 style compelling the breakdown of your own ability to think properly.
1:00:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then your stifled innovation. You look at China as the extreme where they're shutting down the CEOs of the tech sector, right? They're gonna just kill innovation completely.
1:00:08 Tom Bilyeu? Shutting down. They are literally absconding with them, taking them somewhere.
1:00:12 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:00:13 Tom Bilyeu? Doing something that makes their expressions very different when they come out.
1:00:17 Speaker 01 And you don't, you know, this is an important point and I will totally grant you on this one. Okay. Um, the ability to buck against the status quo is bigger here than anywhere else in the world. And therefore you get disruptive innovation and that fundamental innovation is what steers the US forward in a very powerful way. This is the whole root of American exceptionalism is you see a problem, you fix it. And I think that's a magical, magical thing. And I think that's why I said, go back to my point of I choose to, I could live anywhere in the world. I choose to live here. It's a really amazing place. However, there's lots of like, I was in a, an Uber going from San Francisco to Marin.
1:00:58 Speaker 01 Once the driver was African American and we pull into Marin and there's a police check at the side of the road. And he literally starts freaking out like he's shaking, he's completely, completely spazzed out. I'm like, dude, what's wrong? He goes, you have no idea what I go through when police see me behind the whip. And I was like, wow. And it's just something I'm, you know, just sits with me. Uh, I don't, I don't have that.
1:01:24 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah. You unfortunately to me, I'm glad you don't have that problem, but you're, what you were saying about uh, immigration, giving you a hard time. You're not the first person to talk about that. Where I thought you were going with nine 11 was since then, like things have really just uh, gone downhill. That I've heard that from many people that have.
1:01:42 Speaker 01 Downhill in what sense of the, you mean as an immigrant experience?
1:01:46 Tom Bilyeu? Feeling wanted is probably how I would have framed it. You framed it as freedom, which makes you think maybe I'm not mapping your mind quite correctly. So anyway, that, that part I certainly understand and has always rubbed me the wrong way.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01:59 Tom Bilyeu? Uh, I tweeted something out today. Around something that America does, this was actually Canadian, though. I become unhinged when banks act like my money is their money.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 I I'm with you.
1:02:12 Tom Bilyeu? Bro.
1:02:12 Speaker 01 And and by the way, Canadians shutting down the bank house was a very bad black stain. And I don't think they're going to get out from under that for a long time.
1:02:20 Tom Bilyeu? Outrageous.
1:02:21 Speaker 01 Right? Because if I've got a lot of money, am I going to go to the Canada and trust my money there? I I need to be able to get to my money. And this, I think, is an important part of maybe the most powerful aspect of Web three. Why we're so excited about it is that you can have full custodial of your money and your value. And nobody can take it away from you. I think that's a really powerful place.
1:02:42 Tom Bilyeu? Okay. Tell me how I'm wrong. The government can and will take your Web three holdings. People always talk about the wrench attack. I can imagine no bigger wrench than the US government. They will kneecap you. They will imprison you. They will do whatever they have to. I don't understand people who think crypto makes you immune from the government. It, the following thing is true. You can abscond at night, get on a boat and go to a country, let's say Estonia.
1:03:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:12 Tom Bilyeu? That does not have negative stance on crypto. And because you can memorize your seed phrase, you can escape with your money much easier. So if I'm a German, uh, sorry, if I'm a Jew in Germany and it's like 1939. Hey, I'm very grateful.
1:03:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:29 Tom Bilyeu? For cryptocurrency because now I can just bail and I can take my wealth with me. So do not get me wrong. I love crypto the most.
1:03:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:36 Tom Bilyeu? It's fucking amazing. I have so much invested in crypto. I'm a believer. But when people act like governments can't come in and take that from you, that's crazy town. You can escape easier, but who? The vast majority of people, should the government ever decide to? They will seize the shit out of it.
1:03:55 Speaker 01 Give me, so if I, if my seed phrase is sitting in England and I don't know it, and I don't have my sticks with me or anything like that, what's the government gonna do?
1:04:06 Tom Bilyeu? Put you in jail.
1:04:07 Speaker 01 Oh, that's fine. They can take my freedom more.
1:04:09 Tom Bilyeu? Well, that's not.
1:04:09 Speaker 01 But they will never get my Bitcoin.
1:04:11 Tom Bilyeu? Man, this is like your, your Wallace moment where you're being tortured to death.
1:04:15 Speaker 01 I think, I think.
1:04:16 Tom Bilyeu? You can take my life, but you'll never take my crypto.
1:04:19 Speaker 01 This was the same argument I use against guns, where people go, I need guns because I need to be able to fight against a government that comes after me.
1:04:25 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:04:26 Speaker 01 And I'm like, they can just, they have bigger guns.
1:04:28 Tom Bilyeu? They do, but you were the ones, you talked about the Afghans. I'm telling you.
1:04:32 Speaker 01 I got it.
1:04:33 Tom Bilyeu? A distributed nation with a reason to fight and their own weapons. And I have not thought a lot about the Second Amendment. I'll be the first to tell you. But I'm like, oh, hey, when I look at the, the reason they said they gave us the first, the Second Amendment, I'm like, yeah, word. You need to be able to protect yourself from the tyranny of just bureaucracy. Like, don't even make it a fancy word like government.
1:04:53 Speaker 01 I'm totally good with that. Can I just give you my B from the Second Amendment? Cause I've gone pretty deep on this. I, and, and I appreciate the US enough that I've gone pretty deep on all the different structures, et cetera. The US, the, the Second Amendment says, you shall not ban the right to bear arms in a well-regulated militia. Not that every podunk guy should have a gun. It should be in a well-regulated militia. You, Congress cannot pass a law that will stop a well-regulated militia from over, if Congress oversteps. That is the Second Amendment, which is good.
1:05:26 Tom Bilyeu? Hit, hit us with the Second Amendment. I need to see that. It's bringing home that I've actually never read.
1:05:31 Speaker 01 It's the, people forget, people, there you go. A well-regulated militia, that, that, that shall not be infringed. That's the Second Amendment.
1:05:40 Tom Bilyeu? It doesn't say that. It says, a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
1:05:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:50 Tom Bilyeu? Now, I read that as saying, hey, the people may need to build up a well-regulated militia. Therefore, I'm not going to stop people from having guns. So what I hear is guns come first, militia comes second. So I could very easily say, people saying, look, I hope I don't need to become a well-regulated militia, but I need the guns now.
1:06:09 Speaker 01 Oh, I see. You frame it that way. Okay.
1:06:11 Tom Bilyeu? I think that's how it's actually framed.
1:06:13 Speaker 01 This is where we need clarity, right? Can we?
1:06:15 Tom Bilyeu? Is that really? That can't be the whole thing. No way.
1:06:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:18 Tom Bilyeu? That's the entire Second Amendment?
1:06:20 Speaker 01 That is it.
1:06:20 Tom Bilyeu? Is a single sentence?
1:06:21 Speaker 01 It's a single sentence.
1:06:22 Tom Bilyeu? Is that really true?
1:06:23 Speaker 01 It really is.
1:06:23 Tom Bilyeu? We're watching my ignorance unfold in real time. The amendments are this short? I thought these were like whole documents.
1:06:31 Speaker 01 They get longer as you go down the list.
1:06:33 Tom Bilyeu? Scroll, let me see. These are scandalously short. If you guys all knew this and never like tweeted about it. Wow, I can't believe I didn't know this. Okay, yeah, these are a little bit longer.
1:06:43 Speaker 01 So this is an interpretation.
1:06:44 Tom Bilyeu? It's still really short. Wow.
1:06:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:46 Tom Bilyeu? These are verbatim. This is the whole thing.
1:06:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:49 Tom Bilyeu? It's the comment section is gonna be clowning on me.
1:06:52 Speaker 01 It's unbelievably beautiful. I'm gonna say it again. The US Constitution Bill of Rights, the most beautiful documents ever created in
1:06:59 Tom Bilyeu? Crazy.
1:07:00 Speaker 01 in the world, right?
1:07:02 Tom Bilyeu? I always thought when people gave these bits, they were just quoting from a much larger document.
1:07:06 Speaker 01 No.
1:07:07 Tom Bilyeu? That is hilarious.
1:07:08 Speaker 01 I can't wait to see the Twitter comments, as you say. But so, so this is an interpretation thing. Because it's a clause. It's not saying anybody can have rights. And by the way, duh, it says a well-regulated militia by the people shall not be infringed. So the people can have arms in a well-regulated militia.
1:07:27 Tom Bilyeu? You and I read this so differently. This is utterly fascinating. For everybody listening that is not familiar with this, I want to read this one more time. Pay attention to the sequencing of these words. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. Meaning you do not have a free state if you cannot protect yourself presumably from the tyranny of
1:07:49 Speaker 01 of the state.
1:07:49 Tom Bilyeu? Exactly. So the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That's really interesting. That to me, you and I read something super differently.
1:07:59 Speaker 01 If you had a period there, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, that would be fine. But it's not that. It's a well-regulated militia, comma.
1:08:09 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 So for if you're if.
1:08:12 Tom Bilyeu? I mean, I will say this feels like an admonition that we should have well-regulated militias standing, which I don't love that.
1:08:20 Speaker 01 Well, that's, that's okay. That's, that's, I'm, I'm good with that. But guns should be operating inside a well-regulated militia, not everybody and their grandmother and free conceal and all that stupidity.
1:08:32 Tom Bilyeu? If you think about technology and you're able to predict a traffic jam, it's like, whoa, that's pretty insightful. You may get the car wrong, but you get the idea of mass transit and people will bump into each other and it will slow things down. Anyway, so here the, the beautiful things that I think will AI will bring. And if you could let me know just yes or no.
1:08:50 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:08:51 Tom Bilyeu? Life extension.
1:08:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:52 Tom Bilyeu? We will live longer. Okay. I think while it probably might, will take a while that AI will discover new physics.
1:08:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:00 Tom Bilyeu? Okay. New physics, I think, will have as big of an impact on our lives as.
1:09:05 Speaker 01 Somebody please solve the grand unification theory and the wave particle duality of light. I have a physics degree.
1:09:10 Tom Bilyeu? Well, just talk to your boy Eric Weinstein. He thinks, he thinks he's got it. Uh, new governmental structures.
1:09:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:09:17 Tom Bilyeu? New and better.
1:09:17 Speaker 01 Better.
1:09:18 Tom Bilyeu? Okay.
1:09:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. Policy making should be done with an AI.
1:09:22 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm.
1:09:22 Speaker 01 For example, if you want to drop inflation by 2%.
1:09:25 Tom Bilyeu? Do you think it should be done by AI or should it be?
1:09:27 Speaker 01 Heavily, heavily, heavily guided by, for example, if you say, hey, we want to drop inflation by 2%. A human being trying to make policy, looking at all the data has no hope in making sense of any. And AI could go, oh, do these three things. And the human being can sense check it and goes that reasonable or not. And then off you go. I think we're going to end up with the chess outcome where the best chess players are an AI and a human being. And that combination will be unbeatable because there's still a sense of.
1:09:55 Tom Bilyeu? Don't we already have the answer to that and that it's just AI? Can a human add anything to the greatest?
1:10:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Common sense.
1:10:02 Tom Bilyeu? Are you sure?
1:10:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:10:04 Tom Bilyeu? Can we look that up? We need to look that up. I don't buy for a second that a human can contribute anything to a chess.
1:10:09 Speaker 01 The best chess player, a, a human being and a chess AI will always beat an AI.
1:10:13 Tom Bilyeu? Magnus Carlsen.
1:10:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:15 Tom Bilyeu? When teamed with chess AI beats chess AI by itself.
1:10:19 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
1:10:20 Tom Bilyeu? Okay. That's a noble thing. We're looking that up. In the meantime, uh. Do you think that we will get free or nearly free energy?
1:10:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:10:28 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, go deep on that one. What does nearly free energy look like? Why will that matter?
1:10:34 Speaker 01 Okay, let me go, let me give you a graph that I use in my presentations, which is if you went back 500 years ago, the cost of lighting up a building or a room was unbelievably high. Whale blubber, you had to go kill whales and get the blubber back and light up a candle. Game of Thrones technology. Then we found paraffin and we could create candles. Then we invented electricity and the price of electricity. So can I step back one second? This is, there's two really important things about technologies are important here that people should understand as we get into this. Number one, for the first time in human history, we have a dozen technologies all operating on an exponential doubling pattern. Solar energy every 22 months, drones are doubling every nine months in their price performance, gene sequencing every six months, et cetera.
1:11:17 Speaker 01 The resolution at which we can image the human brain is doubling every year, for example. We've never seen this many technologies all move at an accelerated pace at the same time. So that's one. The second thing that I think is more profound that leads to that PDI comment I made earlier, or disruptive innovation, permissionless disruptive innovation, is that throughout human history, advanced technologies always cost a lot. And only a government lab or a big corporate lab could do R and D, launch new products and services. Today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are cheap. AI is cheap, sensors are cheap, solar energy is cheap, the blockchain is open source. Anybody can now do disruptive innovation.
1:12:00 Speaker 01 So that, if you couple that with the idea that technology is a major driver of progress in the world. It might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen in the world. Now you have a dozen of them that cost very little. There's going to be a Cameron explosion of 20 Gutenberg moments all coming down the pipe. So if we believe that technology is a force enabler for good and delivers that, then we're in an unbelievable heavenly space for the future of innovation and all the things we're going to come seeing out of it. How quickly we implement that is the big challenge. And that's the problem. Now, we've been fighting over oil for the last 200 years, big wars, et cetera, because that was the cheapest form of energy.
1:12:43 Speaker 01 We are moving now to solar energy being the cheapest form of energy. And the big challenge is what covers the baseload. And I think small nuclear will do it as well as thorium reactors, which are now safe nuclear reactors. And over time, we'll find solve fusion, but that's going to be a while, always away.
1:13:01 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm.
1:13:02 Speaker 01 So that gives us free energy.
1:13:04 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:13:04 Speaker 01 Free energy means you can desalinate freely. And that means if you have clean water, you take out half of all the infectious diseases in the world. So the ripple effects are profound. So energy in the next five to seven years will go to nearly free.
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1:14:00 Tom Bilyeu? 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. Okay, so the desalinization is a great example. I'm going to say, and it's possible I'm missing something huge here, but I don't think so. If energy costs drop to effectively zero, the cost of everything else will drop dramatically.
1:14:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:14:36 Tom Bilyeu? Because it takes energy to extract minerals from the ground. Most of the things you want in your life are about consuming energy. So when you're going to a restaurant and buying food, you're paying so much of that is the energy cost for transportation to get the meat from the farm to the actual restaurant or the cost of the energy to freeze the food. It's like. The number of things that come down to energy, there's a guy named Arthur Hayes. I don't know if you know who he is. Arthur Hayes, amazing guy. I've been on the show a couple of times. Amazing, amazing. And he said, everybody should think of their lives in terms of how much energy, how many kilowatts essentially can you purchase with your salary? Everything else is going to fluctuate, but that's the one that's going to matter.
1:15:20 Speaker 01 I love that metric, yeah.
1:15:21 Tom Bilyeu? Super brilliant. And so he doesn't look at how much am I making? He's only looking at how much does that buy me? And he said, it reduces a lot of the illusion of, oh, my wages are going up. Sure. But if your wages don't match the rise in the cost of energy, you could actually be making more dollars technically, but losing purchasing power in energy, which matters more than people understand. Energy touches every little corner of your life. The cost of your shampoo is tied. The cost of your water is tied. Just energy, energy, everywhere, energy. The modern world brought to you by oil.
1:15:54 Speaker 01 So the best metaphor I've seen for this whole transition comes from Lawrence Bloom, one of my mentors. He said to me, you must have paid a lot of money in another dimension to be living this life. And I was like, damn, I think you're right. So this is his metaphor. He, he looks at, at humanity as different stages of a rocket lifting off earth. Okay? So when you first have a rocket lifting off earth, you need a really big fat booster rocket to get you the enough energy to get you out of the gravity well. And so that's the, that's oil. That's capitalism. Fossil fuel capitalism has been an unbelievable enabler to lift the world out of poverty, deliver all sorts of unbelievable innovation to us, products and services, et cetera, et cetera. However, when you have a rocket and it's
1:16:37 Speaker 01 taking off at a certain altitude, you have to jettison that booster rocket. Because that will, if you don't let it go, it's going to pull you back down. If then you jettison it, you take on a much more lighter craft that takes you to the next level. So the question is, we are in that transition point where we need to jettison fossil fuel and jettison capitalism, as would put it another way, and find that lighter craft. And what is that lighter craft is now the interesting question for me going forward. But it's a really important metaphor because it doesn't deny the benefits we've gotten from cheap oil over the last few hundred years, absolutely delivering unbelievable benefits into the world.
1:17:16 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, very well said. Okay, so that is a very much tip of the iceberg in terms of all the amazing things that I think AI will help us race to timelines. We will inevitably get wrong. I like to give timelines, though, as a way of anchoring people around my thinking as of today, with full knowledge that I know whatever timeline I give is is going to be broken.
1:17:39 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:17:39 Tom Bilyeu? But I'll I'll walk you through a very quick breakdown of the phases that I see over the next 10 years. And let me know what you think about this. So over the next three years, it'll be marked by things are getting easier. So cost of energy is going down. You can do more with less. Some amount of your work, if you're a graphic designer, will be done by AI. Like, some of the things that Adobe is doing is just unbelievable. And so that's going to be happening all over in law, in healthcare, and just things will get easier. Existential dread is going to set in for the young because of what I call the famous quote from Gretzky, don't skate to where the puck is skate to where the puck is going to be. That used to be tremendously good advice. Hey, you're going to graduate in year 2030.
1:18:23 Tom Bilyeu? So don't don't think about what's happening today. Think about 2030. But now that puck is teleporting.
1:18:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:28 Tom Bilyeu? So it's very hard to predict where that's actually going to be when you graduate. I think that's really going to cause a high rate of anxiety and depression among the young. I think what I call the pure human movement is going to start. So there'll be this sense of like, oh, we reject any brain computer interface. We reject anything where AIs, you're already seeing this in the art movement. So as much as I literally as the words Adobe is doing amazing things is coming out of my mouth. I know a portion of my audience is going to attack me because they are absolutely livid at the way that Adobe has trained their things, and they feel like they've just been stolen from. So the pure human movement is going to begin. So this this creation brought to you by only
1:19:10 Tom Bilyeu? humans, no AI touches whatsoever. There's going to be a softening of the job market, because, I mean, I'll just speak for myself. I have definitively hired less people because we've been deploying AI as much as we can.
1:19:22 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:19:22 Tom Bilyeu? All right. So that's three years. Nothing insane. You're going to have like chat GPT moments where it was like huge for a minute, seemed like it was going to revolutionize everything. But then you kind of like, did it? Five years, the riots begin, but they're going to be minor. It's going to be people like I. The Waymo car that got vandalized. That's right. So Waymo self-driving car, there's no driver. And it's crazy when you see them in real life. One, they smashed its windows, lit it on fire. Maybe not because it was self-driving, maybe not because of what it represents, or maybe precisely because of what it represents. I think you're going to start seeing more of that, and that's already happening. Deaths of despair are going to go up. We're already seeing that in the US. You have, there's a breakdown of the countries
1:20:06 Tom Bilyeu? listed in order of the number of suicides per thousand. Yeah, it's bad. It's, it's pretty crazy that it does not map to affluence. Yeah. So you have some really poverty-stricken countries not doing well, and you have really affluent countries not doing well. So money's not going to solve the problem. So AI unleashes, everything is getting cheaper. It's not going to solve the problem because of meaning and purpose, which we will certainly get more into. Yeah. I think the pure human movement starts actually breaking machines. So whether they're Waymos, whether they're those little robots that wander. Yep, they're, they're going to go after those. There's going to be a massive job transition happening. So you're going to get a ton of graduates going into the world like, hey, there's no jobs. You're going to see people shift into more trades.
1:20:51 Tom Bilyeu? So being a plumber and things, it's going to be harder, at least for now, before robots hit. Regulation is going to start to escalate. So the masses begin to panic. They begin voting people into power on this issue. Will you stop or at least dramatically slow AI? I think that's going to really ramp up in the five-year timeframe. And then in the seven-year timeframe, AI is going to be better at most things than humans. I think we're going to see a horrifying spike in either. It will either, in fact, it'll be both. You'll see a tremendous spike in deaths of despair because people, AI will just be better than you at everything. And that will be really damaging for the young who try to look out and say, well, if I got really good at this thing, it will matter to humanity. And I think they'll come up empty.
1:21:34 Tom Bilyeu? And unfortunately, even though we probably will give UBI of some kind, it's just not going to solve the problem because I think humans need meaningful pursuit. And if they don't need to win at a thing to win money, I think they'll actually have a problem. And hey, look at the homelessness crisis. When you give people money and you don't regulate them, some portion, not most, nowhere near.
1:21:58 Tom Bilyeu? But some people just go, cool, I'm just gonna do drugs all day. The pro-human thing is gonna riot at scale. You hit 10 years, you get a real bifurcation in humanity. Some break, it's just pure human, and some are like, I'm all cyborg all the time. Which, if people don't know, right now, today, as we're recording this, the first person to get a Neuralink, brain-computer interface, has already happened. It's already happened. This guy beat his dad, that's his dad, but beat his dad at the game Mario Kart with his mind. He did not touch a controller. He can't even move his arms.
1:22:33 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:22:33 Tom Bilyeu? And it is insane when you see him play, because they show you this. One of these is being played by somebody using their arms, and the other is being played by somebody just with their mind. You can't tell the difference. It is unbelievable. So anyway, you can aim the shells and everything. Oh, God, it was, blew me away. So you're gonna get, 10 years from now, you're gonna have people that were quadriplegics that are now moving about with an exoskeleton, or maybe even able to bypass the break and just literally control their own limbs again. It's going to be pure insanity. You're now gonna be hitting where energy is just ridiculously low. Healthcare is gonna be unbelievable. You're gonna have magic AI doctors, but you're also gonna have sex bots.
1:23:18 Tom Bilyeu? You're gonna have just an absolute cratering of traditional human relationships.
1:23:23 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:23:24 Tom Bilyeu? And this is where the radicalization will really be important, because otherwise people are just gonna stop having kids. Because you're having sex with your sex bot, who knows you perfectly, and can morph into whatever you want that day. Oh, God, it's gonna get so weird. All right, what did I get wrong?
1:23:39 Speaker 01 Oh, so I think it's entirely plausible as a scenario, right? And if you're a futurist, you're always looking at scenario plannings. And as a vector, that's completely accurate. I disagree with a couple of things. I think I disagree with the kids will be upset about this. I think the kids, in our framing, the kids will be upset about this. But kids natively grow up in the model, the world that they're in, and they just take it as normal.
1:24:08 Tom Bilyeu? How do we break them so much with social media?
1:24:10 Speaker 01 Ah, that's a different problem that's fixable, and I think we'll be fixing that pretty soon. I think you you get them off social media is the problem. It's too much of an addictive sugar drug type model for what for the utility that it's delivering. And that's a regulatory problem. The governments have been incredibly lax, I think, in in navigating that.
1:24:32 Tom Bilyeu? I see the AIs being used by the social media companies as proof of what AI does in practice. That feels like an AI problem to me.
1:24:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:24:45 Tom Bilyeu? TikTok will suck you into a vortex. It's
1:24:47 Speaker 01 But you know, my my twelve year old comes to me and he goes, Dad,
1:24:53 Speaker 01 I haven't had a chance this week to play Fortnite because I've been just not a basketball term right here and we rent there. He goes, I feel a lot better. My my my friends are up playing, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to try. He goes, how do you, you know, what do you want me to do with this? I like it's so weird. I said, you know what? Give it another day without it and another day and just take it one day at a time and see how you feel. And it's incredibly inspiring to hear him reflect on it and do that now. Not that everybody's doing that or can or will or whatever, but I think we'll figure that out. We've always had this problem. Okay. When we were growing up.
1:25:29 Tom Bilyeu? Find this problem.
1:25:30 Speaker 01 Okay. The parentals not understanding what their kids are going through and trying to fix the kids. When I was growing up, there was like, they were like, get off the phone. What the hell are you doing? You don't need to be on the phone for hours with your friends, et cetera, et cetera. Right? There's lots of constructive ways in which you can use technology and some of what's coming in a very powerful way. I'll give you an example of a friend who has four kids, four girls. And when he was growing, bringing them up, he at an early age from like five, six, seven years, he started watching reality TV shows with them. Survivor and all the weird ones. I'm like, you watch those with your kids?
1:26:11 Speaker 01 He goes, yeah, I sit down with them because when they go to the playground, they've got one instance of a bullying or something or some. When I sit with them day after day and they watch this, they're getting a lesson on human nature. I sit with them so that we could talk about what's going on. We start predicting and all those four girls have become unbelievable leaders in their own right over the over the years. They're now about twenty years old each. Because he had the foresight to go be with them and bring them along that journey and they'll learn faster because they'll assemble the knowledge faster. Douglas Adams, who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think, said this the best. He said, anything in the world when you're born, that's normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's a career.
1:26:54 Speaker 01 And anything invented after you're 35 years old is just bad, just bad for the world. And I think that's a great framing for what's happening today. We freak out about what the younger kids, because we don't understand it. We don't know how they're going to adapt to it. And I think we just have to trust them that they will figure it out. We figured it out. You know, our parents were freaked out about us going to movies and playing video games and whatever, and we figured it out. And I think the kids today will figure it out. Again, take me with my optimism bias, because I have a deep optimism bias around some of this stuff.
1:27:26 Tom Bilyeu? I want people to take me with my optimism bias as well, because I am entirely swung that way. And yet, even with that bias, I'm going to ask the following question. Do you think there is such a thing as a rate of change so rapid that children cannot adapt?
1:27:43 Speaker 01 That children cannot adapt? That's a great question.
1:27:51 Speaker 01 Yes. And that would be what we would call the singularity. Right? So we are hitting that right now in AI. Does your audience know what the singularity is?
1:28:01 Tom Bilyeu? You should give it to them. And you should also tell me what year you think we hit that.
1:28:06 Speaker 01 Okay. I don't believe in it, by the way. So.
1:28:09 Tom Bilyeu? Heard you talk on this, so, but give it to us all, the whole shebang.
1:28:12 Speaker 01 So Werner Vingi coined this phrase, the technological singularity. And he basically said, the minute machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence, then we take on a technological evolutionary path, not a biological evolutionary path. And the minute that happens, we are complete, the world is completely different. And Ray Kurzweil popularized that as the singularity and wrote this book called The Singularity is Near in 1999, positing that in 2045, we would get to that point where machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Okay. I disagree with this for two levels. Okay. First, and I've had lots of conversations about it with Ray on this. The first is that we don't know what intelligence is.
1:28:54 Speaker 01 The IQ test measures two aspects of intelligence. The speed of thought processing and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. But we have many dimensions, about a dozen other facets of intelligence, like linguistic intelligence, spatial intelligence, emotional intelligence. This concept of spiritual awareness or the concept of presence, the eastern concept of being present. None of that is reflected in an IQ test. And that whole sum of the parts is what we call intelligence. So my first issue with it is what the hell do you mean by intelligence? Right? And the second issue I have is what do you mean by overtaking? Because the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, an AI robot is going to do much better than me anyway. And so let them do it.
1:29:39 Speaker 01 And therefore it frees me to be much more creative and so on. And I think what we're doing is we're merging with technology. And this is where Ray and I definitely do agree. Where you're merging with technology such that the human experience is augmented and amplified. The fact that I have a smartphone, I would, I would argue, makes me more human than less human. Because of my memories in there freeing up lots of neurons to do other work. I can communicate with my son for free around the world, which is unbelievable. I can project empathy around the world, which is incredible. So I have, I'm more human with my device than without it. And I think that's a powerful commentary for where intelligence goes. Most people worry about AIs, oh my God, it'll come, take, come on, take over the world and we'll destroy us.
1:30:22 Speaker 01 And if we're lucky, we're pets and if we're unlucky, we're food. It's kind of like, pretty much always goes that way. Skynet, Terminator, The Matrix. But we actually see as we're augmenting the human experience with technology at an amazing level. And I think that's very, very inspiring. We're more human now. So let's, let's look at education, for example. Over the last, or jobs, over the last 200 years, we roboticized our employees. So that's your job function, do that one job. You're an audit accountant, you do audits and you do it repetitively. And we're going to measure you by how quickly and how effectively and how fast and, and mistake free are your audits and that your bonus is based on that. So we turn people into robots. People on the assembly line stamping out widgets.
1:31:06 Speaker 01 Now with the advent of AI and robotics and so on, people are becoming much more human again. The most valuable employees or colleagues you have in any company are the people that learn the fastest. And that's a magical thing to be. Now, as AI comes along, the big challenge is, and I would argue that in the concept of the, what you would call the singularity in AI, we've hit the singularity. The pace of change in AI is now so fast, you can't absorb it. By the time you've, you've made an investment, your, your investment is out of date. And so this is a huge structural challenge with this. It's, it's, I'll give you an analog in the, in the education world. If you're doing a master's degree in neuroscience today, by the time you finish your master's degree, you're out of date.
1:31:49 Speaker 01 Because computational neuroscience is overtaking the field so fast that it's, it's making the old ways irrelevant very quickly. So our, our, the structural issue we have in education is we can't update our educational frameworks quickly enough to deal with all the new changes. And AI, I think, is, is the epitome of that right now. Um, and this is where I made the comment. Elon tweeted this little video completely last weekend, saying, there's no mechanism that we can see by which you can regulate AI at all, at all. You'd have to regulate every line of code written. And I just don't see that happening. That's when you really have issues with freedom.
1:32:25 Tom Bilyeu? By 10 years from now, you're now in 2034. Uh, Elon made a quip that in the 2032 election, it won't be a question of what human will win, it will be a question of what AI. Now, assuming that he's kidding, ha, ha, ha, but that he's directionally indicating it. Um, I think that Ray is going to be right by 2029, which is well under my 10 year timeframe here. Uh, you've got, AI is just smarter than any single human. So that means AI is going to be better than every human at anything. Then it becomes a question of, did before we get there, did they start having existential
1:33:08 Tom Bilyeu? dread based on the rate at which things are changing?
1:33:11 Speaker 01 Who's they, the kids?
1:33:12 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, kids. I, I think this impacts everybody, but kids will be the most paralyzed because they don't have the world experience to know, oh, I can navigate this way.
1:33:21 Speaker 01 I deeply disagree with this whole smarter than human beings thing.
1:33:26 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, so we're
1:33:27 Speaker 01 Again, going back to the definition of intelligence, we don't have a clear definition of intelligence. Okay, so, because now you have
1:33:34 Tom Bilyeu? You said if something can be defined, I forget the exact word you use, but if it can, if a task can be defined
1:33:40 Speaker 01 Prescriptively, the minute I can prescriptively describe a task.
1:33:44 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
1:33:44 Speaker 01 And AI will
1:33:45 Tom Bilyeu? Name a thing
1:33:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:46 Tom Bilyeu? That you think humans will continue to be better than AI at in 10 years.
1:33:51 Speaker 01 Um, empathy, creativity, humor. Um, there's lots of domain spiritual awareness.
1:33:58 Tom Bilyeu? The only one of those I'm going to give you is humor. Maybe, and they probably get thrashed.
1:34:03 Speaker 01 They'll get way better at jokes.
1:34:05 Tom Bilyeu? Sure. Than what's left. What do you mean?
1:34:07 Speaker 01 Well, but the, but now you see what I say, look, let me, let me describe what I'm, we need to get clear on what we're talking about intelligence.
1:34:14 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
1:34:14 Speaker 01 So we have this concept of intelligence and we think some things will be smarter than us. But in what way is it faster? Is it better? Is it more complete? That's one challenge, right? Because there's all these other facets of intelligence that make us human beings that are different, common sense, for example, etc. Then you bleed into AGI, you have narrow AI, which always is going to be better than a human being. Because it's anti-lock breaking systems, credit card fraud detection. We use narrow AI to run the world today. If you took that out, the world would just grind to a halt very quickly. Then we get to AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, the ability to match concepts across frameworks. And that's what people talk about, I think, when people talk about intelligence today, that AIs, once they achieve AGI,
1:34:58 Speaker 01 will be able to do tasks better than human beings. Okay? Now, actually, look at this as an optimistic thing, because there's a lot of human white collar drudgery that AIs will take over. Okay, I'll give you a small example. I'm a booking agent for Club Med Resorts. And a family calls and they go, we want, we have three families, we want two adjoining rooms and the kids have to be on the same floor. And I have to do a lot of crappy work to figure out how I'm going to manage that permutation. And there's a ton of stupid shit that goes into figuring that out. It takes a ton of my time. That's where I think AIs will shine a lot, but it'll allow me to then focus my time on real problem solving or areas where they're less good.
1:35:39 Speaker 01 And yes, over time, we don't need that human air booking agent because the AI will do a lot of it anyway. Okay, but that's been a steady vector forever. The mini of a concrete truck, it replaces 100 concrete workers shoveling concrete.
1:35:54 Speaker 01 You you free them up to do more higher order things and and so on. So the question is, what work will there be there to do? And I think this is the really big question that we don't have a clue. That's where I think the the interesting question is. The rest of it, I think, is is fear mongering to some extent. And by the way, I've see AGI, just like the intelligence kind of. We had the Turing test that kept shifting the goalpost. And then all of a sudden, we passed it a long time ago. And we're like, oh, not a big deal. I think AGI will be like that. We'll we'll have AGI and everyone will go, oh, my God, we have AGI. And then it'll become, oh, this is OK, and it'll be normal. And I think AGI is bleeding into what we would call consciousness. And there again, you have a big definition problem and a test problem.
1:36:39 Speaker 01 We don't have a definition for consciousness. We don't have a test for consciousness, right? A subset of consciousness is self awareness. And you look like you're self aware. So I attribute self consciousness or self awareness to you. I feel like I'm I'm self aware, but my wife disagrees. So it's really hard to even have the conversation because we don't have a clear definition of this. And so and and when you bleed into those areas where I think things get really, really interesting.
1:37:06 Speaker 01 Quick anecdote, I remember we had a robotics expert. One of the NASA astronauts was used to build robots when we were doing singularity. And I asked him a question. I said, look, is there a system in the world that has the inputs and outputs and enough processing power that it might generate self awareness? And it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a system, right? And he's like, huh, let me think about that. So he goes off a couple of days. He comes back and he goes, I think I have an answer. I'm like, OK. He goes, traffic systems. That's really, he goes, yeah, he goes, in my opinion, I've thought about this for a couple of days. Traffic systems have enough inputs and outputs and processing capability that one day it might generate self awareness and might go, oh, I'm a traffic system. Right? And the question, two questions emerged at that point.
1:37:51 Speaker 01 What would it do? And how would we know? And the problem is, we wouldn't know. So I think when we hit AGI, we won't know when an AI hits that point. We won't know when an AI hits consciousness because we're now a test, a test for it.
1:38:07 Speaker 01 And as like, and and just to some help this whole thing. Like Ray Kurzweil put it most brilliantly. He was asked once about consciousness and he goes, language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts as complex as that.
1:38:20 Tom Bilyeu? Ray's brilliant. I love Ray the most. He was the very first audiobook I ever read. So I will forever have a debt of gratitude. I've interviewed him. I've had the good fortune of dining with him. But that is a cheap excuse not to think about a very hard problem.
1:38:35 Speaker 01 It is. It is. But it's a valid observation. We struggle a great deal with language. So I think what ends up, you have to really, you have to really think back when you talk all about all this stuff, intelligence, conscious. You have to go back to what is a human being. And this is where I've become really fascinated. I've been fascinated for a long time in metaphysics. And I've been fascinated by what is the human condition. And I have actually a diagram that that I think summarizes this nicely.
1:39:01 Tom Bilyeu? I want to wrap this point first. That is 100% an area that we will touch on before we go. So I think you have really unique insights there.
1:39:09 Tom Bilyeu? But first, I want to say, I think consciousness is a red herring.
1:39:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:12 Tom Bilyeu? And I want to reorient people. What we're talking about is are, are we all going to struggle as AI gets better than us at everything? I think kids will be the canary in the coal mine. You think kids will be the far more resilient. Your argumentation, and please, if I say this in a way that you don't recognize or think is uncharitable, let me know. But that we don't even understand what intelligence is. These systems might become conscious, but we'll never know because there's no way for us to engage with that. Kids are going to get it. They're going to use AI in the way that they use it. And they'll step away from it when like your son with Fortnite. When it stops being useful in his life, he's going to step back. People need to understand my base assumption.
1:39:53 Tom Bilyeu? That I think the brain developed so that humans could move. Why did humans need to move? So they could take control of their environment. Why do they need to take control of their environment? So they could survive.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:40:04 Tom Bilyeu? So then the game from an evolutionary algorithm standpoint becomes to keep this thing alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And the, the granddaddy of all the algorithms that it planted in our brains is the desire for meaningful pursuit. Both of those words are important. Meaningful means. I can draw a straight line between going out and killing this thing and the survival of the people that I love. So yo, like this really mattered. It was a whole thing. And so when we do it, we're celebrating and we feel all the neurochemistry that we want to feel this is awesome. That is meaningful pursuit. This is why when you have a job that feels like a dead end and it's not going anywhere and all it does is let you pay your rent, it's not interesting.
1:40:44 Tom Bilyeu? Now, once AI becomes, it crosses the uncanny valley and it's no longer like ChatGPT giving you the lamest dad jokes ever, and it is Blade Runner, motherfucker. And I, without doing a special test where I put a thing up against your iris, I can't tell if you're real or not. And in fact, you don't even know if you're real or not. Now, again, consciousness is a red herring. Who cares? It is just like hanging out with your friend, except for one really brutal fact. They're better than you at everything possible. And so now it's like, well, this really sucks because meaningful pursuit would be that I need to go do a thing to help me and mine.
1:41:27 Tom Bilyeu? But energy costs have dropped to zero because these things are so damn good at everything that now, why would I go do that? Because we can just get an AI to do it way better than me. Yes. That kid, when he's or adult, when they're interfacing with an entity that is better than them at everything, they're going to be like, huh, how do I have meaningful, meaningful pursuit? And the answer will be, you get meaningful pursuit in the next life, and I just need you to do these things and you're going to have meaning today, even though we don't need you to go capture an animal because all that's taken care of, but I'm going to give you this path to meaning through this ancient book, through this tribe and all of that. And bro, it's gonna get weird. And I lay all these pieces out on the table for one reason and
1:42:12 Tom Bilyeu? one reason only, because again, I'm wearing a shirt, this is Neon Future, because I believe technology is going to make our lives better. But one of the earliest things we talked about is those spikes on a graph. That is human nature. That is an idea set moving through the medium of the human mind and the way humans act as a collective. And if we plant- Wise ideas now, if we warn people about this stuff, if we talk about, hey, here's how you branch to Mad Max, here's how you branch to Utopia, let's make sure that we're all hyper aware of how the human mind breaks bad and how it can break good. Then there's one last thing that I have to say, because I find very smart people like yourself are not facing a very ugly truth. And that very ugly truth is, this is, this is a paraphrase, but it's going to get really damn close.
1:42:59 Tom Bilyeu? You said that people will be able to step into a higher order of existence, engagement with the world as all the sort of menial stuff is taken away. Now, the reason that feels true to you is you are very smart. The bad news is that human intellect is on a gigantic scale. And Einstein, who's only like a 165 IQ, and I say only on purpose because the smartest person living, I think, is a 220. So, uh, moron, and I mean that literally, in the, the actual Webster's dictionary definition is like somebody with an 83 IQ, I think. So the difference between that person and Einstein, if I remember, is like 2.6 or something like that, in terms of the difference in IQ.
1:43:42 Tom Bilyeu? And it's almost that again, between Einstein and the smartest person. Okay, an AI by, according to Ray Kurzweil, is going to be a million times smarter than you. So it's like, bro, if the difference between Einstein and a moron is 2.6, and we're talking about something that is a million times smarter than you, I will hypothesize that we have officially hit the point at which the rate of change will be so rapid that you, you can't absorb it. And so now, your only answer is, and again, you need only look at Elon Musk, who's doing all of this stuff in plain view. You have to merge with technology. Yeah. To keep up, to have meaningful, for meaningful pursuit, you have to be able to keep up with them from just a raw horsepower perspective.
1:44:26 Tom Bilyeu? But again, society will break along those lines, people that will and people that won't. And if that does not strike people, as to quote you from the beginning, the most dramatic seismic shift in human existence ever, then I, I, I'm at a loss to help them understand change.
1:44:46 Speaker 01 Wonderful articulation. I think that was a really great and very tight concise articulation of a future. And there's absolutely valid points that you make all the way up and down. I have a couple of point issues. One is when you say kids will be despairing because they won't be able to do things as good as an AI, I disagree with that because I don't think they'll despair. They'll go, that thing's better. I'll do this. I'll go do something else or I'll figure something else out. So that's, I don't think they'll go to despair.
1:45:17 Tom Bilyeu? They will innovate their way out of the problem.
1:45:19 Speaker 01 Innovate all they just adapt. Kids are adaptive. They just figure it out and they just
1:45:23 Tom Bilyeu? I come back. So explain to me how they've adapted to social media.
1:45:27 Speaker 01 Well, badly because it's, it's, it's sucked up their minds, but that's true for the whole of humanity.
1:45:31 Tom Bilyeu? Adapt poorly to social media, but wonderfully to this really brutally intelligent AI.
1:45:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. So now that becomes how do you guide them and how do you manage them and how do you parent them, et cetera? And we're many cases are doing a very bad job because we're leaving them to the social media and that's just fucking up their brains. Okay. However, there's some really interesting vectors coming out of that. There's a woman out of Chicago called Nicole Dreisky, who looked at this device, an addiction problem and social media addiction problem. And said, you know, the problem is not the fact, not that we're looking at the wrong problem here. The problem is their higher order thinking is not triggered. They're passively consuming. They're just viewing a screen and they're not really there. So how do we trigger that? If we can, then it doesn't matter what they watch. So she created a program called Screen
1:46:18 Speaker 01 Smart, where they take kids through a little program. And you can literally, it boils down to if you as a parent sit with your child twice a week for 15 minutes and ask them a set of leading questions. For example, you're watching a movie. Why do you think the characters are doing what they're doing? What do you think the director was trying to achieve with this plot? What would you do differently if you were the director? If you do that twice a week for 15 minutes, it turns out that even when they're on their own, their higher order thinking starts buzzing and they're now actively engaging with the content. They've not taken like a few tens of thousands of kids through this program. It's unbelievable. The outcomes they're seeing from this. They've broken the addiction problem. Their vocabularies are increased like 86% or
1:47:02 Speaker 01 something crazy like this. It's just, so I, it's one of those where I think we'll figure it out. Just like we figured out how. Once we realize that the addiction patterns of social media, we need to regulate it and say, like, not that it's a great example, but in China, they're saying you can't have social media until you're a certain age because your brain has to be more fully formed, et cetera. I think we'll figure that part out. It's just there's an arms race problem always in this stuff where something happens and then we figured out the consequences and then we fix it, et cetera. The reason I tend to be optimistic is when you bring more intelligence into the world, the world just becomes better. Now, we do have definitely the paperclip problem,
1:47:45 Speaker 01 which is the extension of your AI, talking about training and education, et cetera. The, you know, the paperclip problem, right? You say, do a name, make all the paperclips and it sucks all the energy out of human beings because it wants to.
1:48:01 Tom Bilyeu? It gets lost in.
1:48:03 Speaker 01 And it gets lost in the.
1:48:04 Tom Bilyeu? Letter of its objective.
1:48:05 Speaker 01 That's right. And then I think that's a huge danger. Okay. Because the two inflection points came out when we allowed AIs to code and gave them access to the code base. And the second one was when they got access to the internet. And those two put together mean that AI can program pretty much whatever it wants. And there's no question, there's going to be bad agents out there trying to do these things in a particular way. I still tend to be optimistic because as the cost drops, the reasons to fight drop, et cetera, et cetera. I don't see the Terminator, Matrix scenarios, which are always a Hollywood thing. I do agree, we need to blend with technology and we need to merge with AI because it'll just make all of our bodily functions better.
1:48:49 Speaker 01 And AI deeply embedded into my body would be fantastic because I'd reach for a donut and it would say, whoa, I'm still metabolizing your coffee. Please wait 10 minutes and for God's sakes, don't have the donut, have something else, right? By the way, it's amazing what you and Lisa are doing across the board with nutrition and all the wellness stuff and the women's empowerment. It's just one of the most important vectors that we could pursue in terms of helping human beings get more better and more human and more real about the world. Side thing, but in terms of AI specifically, I think we'll end up merging with it in that particular way because what's going to happen is an AI is and you saw this in Star Trek: Next Generation. What did Data want more than anything else? He wanted to be human. He wanted
1:49:34 Speaker 01 to experience what it meant like to be human. And I think that's where it'll go.
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